Since one of the postulated characteristics of tachyons was that they could penetrate all kinds of shielding, it occurred to Puthoff that one of the few places that scientists hadn't looked for tachyons was in "organic living systems." He wrote up a proposal that aimed to verify if plants were "tachyonically connected" by linking separated algae cultures with lasers. He sent the proposal to an acquaintance involved in similar work who happened to show it to Ingo Swann, a noted psychic and medium, who in turn approached Puthoff, assuming that he was interested in ESP. Even though he wasn't, Puthoff was sufficiently intrigued to invite Swann to SRI, where he proposed to immerse him in a "shielded quark magnetometer," a "tank" in a vault that was totally cut off from all known emissions and frequencies.
As Swann approached the vault, which he hadn't been forewarned about, he appeared to perturb the operation of the magnetometer. The dials and instruments inside it all flickered into life. He then added insult to injury by remote viewing the interior of the apparatus, "rendering by drawing a reasonable facsimile of its rather complex construction," according to Puthoff, even though details of it had never been published anywhere.
Puthoff wrote up his findings, circulated the report among his colleagues and got on with other work.
A couple of weeks later, the CIA showed up at his door and invited him to set up a classified research program to see if it was technically feasible to use clairvoyance to spy on the Soviet Union. It turned out that the CIA had been tracking Soviet efforts to do the same thing for several years, but didn't believe what it was seeing. It was only when Puthoff wrote up his paper that it put two and two together and thought it'd better set up something of its own. And so the U.S.-controlled remote-viewing program was born, with Puthoff as its director.
For the next decade and a half, U.S. "psychic spies" roamed the Soviet Union, using nothing more than the power of their minds to reconnoiter some of the Russians' most secret R&D establishments. If you believed what you read in published accounts of these people's activities, they were able to roam not merely in three dimensions — up, down, left and right — but in the fourth dimension as welclass="underline" time. They could go back in time to review targets and they could look at them in the future as well.
Puthoff showed me a picture that one of his team of remote viewers had drawn of an "unidentified research center at Semipalatinsk," which had been deeply involved in Soviet nuclear weapons work. He then showed me some declassified artwork of the same installation, presumably drawn from a U.S. spy satellite photograph. The two were damn near identical.
It all seemed a long way from zero-point energy, gravity and inertia, in which Puthoff had been busying himself even before he left the remoteviewing field. Or was it? In a recent paper written by Puthoff, which I had already seen, he'd mentioned that the Russian physicist and Nobel prizewinner Andrei Sakharov had published a paper in 1967 suggesting that gravity and inertia might be linked to what was then still a highly theoretical proposition: vacuum fluctuations of the zero-point energy field. Now that the zero-point energy field had been proven to exist, "there is experimental evidence that vacuum fluctuations can be altered by technological means," Puthoff had written in the paper. "This leads to the corollary that, in principle, gravitational and inertial masses can also be altered."
Puthoff was too smart to use the term — for all the reasons that Podkletnov, Ning Li and the others hadn't — but he was saying that antigravity was indeed possible.
And, so were the Russians. All you had to do — somehow — was perturb the zero-point energy field around an object and, hey presto, it would take off.
I asked him why NASA and the Air Force should be so interested in ZPE when it was obvious that there weren't going to be any practical applications of it for years — maybe centuries.
Puthoff looked at me in a meaningful way. "Unless we find a shortcut." "Is that a possibility?" "Podkletnov could have come across a shortcut." The maverick Russian materials scientist and the idea of pipe smoke hitting a gravity shield had entered the conversation so abruptly that it caught me off guard. Puthoff was saying that anything was possible. And this from a man who had spent most of his professional life plugged into the heart of the classified defense environment.
I probed further, but gently. Were there already forms of aerospace travel out there — in the black world, maybe — whose principles contravened, if not the laws of physics, then at least our understanding of aerodynamics?
He sucked the top of his pen, giving the question a lot of thought before responding. "I've certainly talked to people who claim that something is going on," he said, pausing to add: "I would say the evidence is pretty solid." I felt myself rock back on my chair. I eased back on to the more comfortable subject of the NASA BPP study. "Which of the five methods outlined in Breakthrough Propulsion Physics would you say is the one most likely to have a payoff?" I asked him.
Because of Puthoff's promotion of ZPE, I thought it inevitable that this explanation would have figured in his answer. But it didn't. Without even thinking about it, he said his money was on the third experiment— the one about perturbing space-time; antigravity from time travel.
Given Puthoff's strong connections to the military-intelligence community, it was tempting to dismiss all such talk as a deliberate blind, something to lead me away from a more probable area of breakthrough. But it didn't seem that way at all.
I liked Puthoff. He seemed on the level. Besides, one thing I had learned after years of formal briefings and interviews was how difficult scientists found it to lie when confronted with a direct question on their chosen subject. Spooks could lie at the drop of a hat. It was what they were trained to do. But scientists found it inherently unnatural, since it contravened all their instincts to match a question quid pro quo with data.
Puthoff's answer to the question had been swift and visceral. And there had been something else, too; a look on his face, a willingness to confront my gaze, that in itself conveyed information.
We'd been talking about breakthroughs — events that, at a stroke, had the power to short-circuit the evolutionary development of technology.
The important thing about breakthroughs was that they didn't happen over an extended period of time. They changed things overnight. And they could occur at any moment.
It was only later, when I was back on the freeway, crawling south in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, that I had the feeling he'd been trying to tell me that some kind of payoff from the third experiment had already produced tangible results.
Chapter 11
If antigravity had been discovered in the white world, then some one, somewhere had to be perfecting it — maybe even building real hardware — in the black. The trouble was, I had no idea where to begin looking for it. Contrary to the implicit promise of revelation contained in Dr. Dan Marckus' hints by the estuary, neither Lyles nor Puthoff had taken me any further in so far as hard-and-fast leads were concerned.
On my return, I tried to raise Marckus. I left several messages on his answering machine. In the first of them I foolishly spelled out the fact that I didn't know a whole lot more — beyond strict theory, at least — than I had before my trip to the States.
During subsequent calls, as the answering machine clicked in, I just knew that Marckus was there — listening in, but refusing to pick up. I was beginning to get the measure of this relationship. Marckus gave a little and I had to give something back. He now knew that I had returned from the States with nothing, so he was punishing me for it. Well, I didn't need to play psych games with some spook academic with a warped taste for drama. I had enough on my plate already — a major feature article on stealth technology to deliver. Antigravity, for the time being, was going to have to go on the back burner and Marckus could stew with it.