I kept turning. There, right at the end, I'd written myself a memo to put in a call to a media affairs officer at BAe who would arrange for me to receive photos of the artist's impressions Young had flashed up during his speech.
This, I remembered now, was one of the things Young and I had discussed.
Below the memo were two names: Dr. Ron Evans of "BAe Defense Military Aircraft's Exploratory Studies group" and Dr. Dan Marckus, an eminent scientist attached to the physics department of one of Britain's best-known universities. The department was more than familiar to me. Its work was well known in defense circles for the advice that it gave to the government. Beside Evans' and Marckus' names were their contact phone numbers. I called Dr. Evans first. He turned out to be a nice, soft-spoken mathematician based at BAe's Warton plant, a facility that cranked out jet fighters close to where the bleak mudflats of Lancashire's Ribble Estuary met the Irish Sea.
When I asked if he could brief me, as per the suggestion of Professor Young, Evans said he needed to consult with the company's media managers. He'd never dealt with the press before. I got the impression it was sensitive stuff.
It was, but not for any of the reasons I had guessed or hoped. Britain's biggest aircraft manufacturer, BAe, had an antigravity department. That in itself was key.
But its activities weren't classified. Far from it. The impression I got, more than anything else, was that the management had tucked Evans' tiny department into the farthest-flung corner of the company because it didn't know what else to do with it. That and the fact no one in BAe at that level wanted to wake up to headlines that it was involved in kooky, Buck Rogers science. It would destabilize the share price.
In the end, Evans wasn't allowed formally to brief me on his work, but he was given permission to fill me in on some of the background that had led to the formation of his Exploratory Studies group. That suited me fine. BAe didn't want to break cover — nor did I. For once, we were on the same side of the secrecy divide.
In March 1990, Evans chaired a two-day University-Industry Con ference of Gravitational Research, sitting around a table with a gathering of distinguished academics to identify any emerging "quantum leaps" that might impact on BAe's military aircraft work. Gravity control figured extensively on the agenda.
Imagine it. A technology, popping out of nowhere, that rendered all of its current multibillion-pound work on airliners and jet fighters redundant at a stroke. Now that, I thought, really would do things to the share price.
The company also undertook some practical laboratory work in a bid to investigate the properties of a so-called "inertial-thrust machine" developed by a Scottish inventor called Sandy Kidd.
In 1984, after three years' work building his device — essentially, a pair of gyroscopes at each end of a flexible crossarm — Kidd apparently turned it on and watched, startled, as it proceeded to levitate, then settle three inches above the surface of his workbench.
An ex-RAF radar technician, the Scotsman had become obsessed with the idea of inventing an antigravity machine after he'd removed a stillspinning gyroscope from a Vulcan nuclear bomber. Carrying it backward down the aircraft's ladder, he reached the ground and was promptly flattened by a sledgehammer blow to his back. The force, he realized, had been transmitted from the gyroscope, which had reacted in some inexplicable way as his feet had touched the ground.
In May 1990, BAe began a series of trials to test whether there was anything in Kidd's claims, knowing full well that he wasn't alone in making them.
In the mid-1970s, Eric Laithwaite, Emeritus Professor of Heavy Electrical Engineering at Imperial College London, demonstrated the apparent weight loss of a pair of heavy gyroscopes by lifting the whole whirling contraption with one hand and wheeling it freely around his head. When the twin rotors were not in motion, attempting this feat was impossible. The gyroscopes were the size and weight of dumbbells. But when the rotors turned, they became as light as a feather. Somewhere along the line, the machine had lost weight. The accepted laws of physics said that this was not possible, out of the question — heresy, in fact. But Laithwaite's claims were supported by a top-level study into gyroscopes published by NATO's Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development (AGARD) in March 1990.
The authors of the AGARD report concluded that a "force-generating device" such as Laithwaite's, if integrated into a vehicle of some kind, could, in theory, counteract gravity. "Clearly if such a counteracting force was of sufficient magnitude it would propel the vehicle continuously in a straight line in opposition to said field of force and would constitute an antigravity device."
The report went on to say that there was at least one "gyroscopic propulsive device" that was known to work and that the inventor, E.J.C. Rickman, had taken out a British patent on it. The trouble was, the report concluded, the impulses generated by these machines were so slight they would be useless for all practical applications — except, perhaps, to inch a satellite into a new orbit once it had already been placed in space by a rocket.
It was hardly a quantum technological leap. But that wasn't the point, Dr. Evans told me. What was being talked about here was an apparent contravention of the laws of physics; the negation, at a stroke, of Newton's Third Law, of action-reaction. Which was why the BAesponsored tests on the Kidd machine had a relevance that went way beyond their immediate and apparent value.
If there were ways of generating internal, unidirectional, reactionless forces in a spacecraft, and in time they could be refined, honed and developed, the propulsion possibilities would be limitless.
In May 1990, a trial went ahead under the watchful eyes of two wind tunnel engineers from BAe's Warton aircraft plant. The first series of tests showed no antigravity effects, but to everyone's surprise, during a second series of trials, one result did appear to indicate that the machine had changed weight.
Unfortunately, the engineers failed to repeat the result; and in science and engineering, repeatability is the benchmark of success.
Had it been repeatable, the two percent weight change Kidd claimed for his device would have been scientifically verified, and BAe would have employed the world's first known antigravity device as an orbital maneuvering motor for satellites.
Shortly after the trial, Cold War defense budgets collapsed and BAe's share price went into free fall. As it fought for its survival, there were cutbacks across the company and Dr. Evans' department, with little hope of any short-term returns, was disbanded as quietly as it had come together. That, essentially, was how things were when he and I met. I rang Dr. Marckus a few times, but only ever got an answering machine and so I capped my involvement in the BAe antigravity story with a few low-key articles in Jane 's about the BAe investigation. It was more an excuse than anything else to broadcast a question: Was anyone else out there engaged in similar work?
The U.S. Air Force had recently proclaimed its interest in the field with a document, published in August 1990, called the Electric Propulsion Study. Its objective was to "outline physical methods to test theories of inductive coupling between electromagnetic and gravitational forces to determine the feasibility of such methods as they apply to space propulsion." Stripped of the gobbledygook, it was really asking whether there was any theory out there that might permit the engineering of an antigravity device.
The existence of the Electric Propulsion Study gave me an excuse to slip tailored messages into a couple more stories about futuristic propulsion. It felt a little like pointing a transmitter into deep space and waiting for a response.
I waited, but nothing came back. No emails, no anonymous faxes, no spooky phone calls. Nothing.