The detour through NASA had pointed up five possible pathways to antigravity's application in the black world: manipulating an object's mass and/or inertia; exploitation of the zero-point energy field; perturbations of the space-time continuum; faster-than-light travel; and gravity shielding. Of the five, two (space-time and faster-than-light) were patently out of the question — the B-2 was not a time machine and it could not even muster the speed of sound — and two more (mass/inertia manipulation and zero-point exploitation) were still some way from a practical breakthrough. Only one, the last of the five, seemed to have resulted in any kind of payoff. And Podkletnov had tripped over it by accident because of somebody's pipe smoke, which meant it had been out there, waiting to be discovered, for as long as anyone needed it.
Applied to the B-2, using some of the many billions that had gone into its development, the kind of weight reductions that the Russian had been reporting (anywhere from 2 percent to 5 percent) would have been highly significant. The B-2 had already shown its ability to fly halfway around the world and back — a 37-hour, 29,000-nautical-mile return flight from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, to Guam in the Pacific with several air-to-air refuelings en route. With gravity shielding — if such a thing could be moved from the laboratory to a fully fledged aircraft program— either its range could be extended or the number of midair refuelings cut. Either of these would make the technology a powerful draw.
The biggest argument against the existence of antigravity technology had seemed to me to be the lack of any visible hardware from production programs. Now, I was having to confront the possibility that antigravity played a vital part in the most important technological development since the bomb.
Chapter 12
I'd been aware of rumors about the B-2 for some time, but they were so bizarre as to be quite unbelievable, so I'd ignored them completely. In following the thread that had been dropped by Marckus at the estuary, however, I discovered that it led somewhere that was already familiar. The chief proponent of the idea that the B-2 utilized an exotic propulsion source was my old friend Paul LaViolette, the Ph.D. who had tripped over the reference to antigravity in the Library of Congress.
LaViolette had written an elegant thesis about the B-2 and its anti gravitational properties soon after the publication of a revelatory article in Aviation Week, the "bible" of the U.S. aerospace industry, in which a number of black-world engineers had whistle-blown to the author, the magazine's West Coast editor, Bill Scott, about a host of amazing new technologies supposedly being developed in the deeply classified environment. One of these related to "electrostatic field-generating techniques" in the B-2's wing leading edge with a view to reducing the giant Stealth Bomber's radar cross section.
LaViolette had taken this revelation and coupled it to his own knowledge of Thomas Townsend Brown's work and patents and drawn the conclusion that the B-2 was the embodiment of Project Winterhaven, T.T. Brown's proposal in 1952 to the U.S. military for a Mach 3 saucershaped interceptor powered exclusively by electrogravitics — antigravity.
In an essay entitled "The U.S. Antigravity Squadron," LaViolette outlined the reasoning behind his extraordinarily bold assertion.
The B-2, he held, was simply a scaled-up version of the subscale discs, the little charged saucer-shaped condensers, that had whizzed around Brown's laboratories in front of multiple witnesses from the U.S. Air Force and Navy in the late '40s and early '50s. If true, it explained why superficially the U.S. Air Force had shown such little interest in Winterhaven, while on the inside — I remembered the recovered transcripts of conversations between Air Force generals Bertrandias and Craig following the former's visit to Brown's lab in 1952—those who had seen the tests were going apoplectic with excitement.
While conventional wisdom had it that the B-2's outer skin was composed of a highly classified radar-absorbent material (RAM) that made it invisible to radar, LaViolette plausibly argued that the RAM was in fact a ceramic dielectric material able to store high amounts of electric charge. The material was said to be made from powdered depleted uranium — an incredibly hard substance, commonly used to tip armorpiercing tank shells — with three times the density of the "high-k" ceramics proposed by Brown in the 1950s. This would give the B-2 "three times the electrogravitic pull" of the Mach 3 saucer at the heart of the Winterhaven study.
Another useful bit of synchronicity was the fact that Brown had, for a short period of time, worked for General Electric, the company responsible for the B-2's engines.
But try as I might, I couldn't get LaViolette's theory to fit. For the thesis to be accurate, it hinged on something approximating a switch in the Stealth Bomber's two-man cockpit that would permit the aircraft to transition from normal jet-powered flight — something, according to LaViolette, that it used on takeoff and landing and other occasions where witnesses might be present — to antigravity cruise mode.
If there were such a thing as this switch, I knew, pound to a penny, dollar to a cent, its existence would have leaked.
The B-2 first flew in 1989 and the first operational aircraft arrived at Whiteman Air Force Base in 1993. A total of 20 aircraft had been built at $2 billion a shot and all of them had been delivered by the end of the decade. Dozens of crewmembers had been trained in that time, and many of them had been interviewed. The B-2 had started as a black program (or more accurately, a dark-gray one, since its existence had been confirmed officially from the start, all other details being classified). But now it was in the open, albeit, still, with some highly classified features. Pilots — an inherently talkative breed — would have let it slip somewhere along the line. Rumors would have developed about such a switch. But they never had. Moreover, B-2 pilots and engineers hadn't just denied the antigravity story, they had scoffed at it openly. Intuitively, my colleagues and I were agreed, the B-2 antigravity story was wrong. In fact, the whole notion of it was absurd.
The end result was that "the B-2 as antigravity vehicle" had been consigned to the columns of conspiracy mags and tabloids; the mainstream aerospace press, afraid of an adverse reaction from its conservative readership, had refused to touch it. With one exception. Enter Britain's most eminent aerospace journalist, Bill Gunston, OBE, Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, and an article he'd penned entitled "Military Power."
Gunston, who served as a pilot in the RAF from 1943 to 1948, was scrupulous over his facts — as editor of Jane's yearbook on aero-engine propulsion, he had to be. "Military Power," published in Air International magazine, was a walk-through dissertation on the development of aero-engine technology since the end of the Second World War; good, solid Gunston stuff.
Until the last couple of pages, when, to the uninitiated, it appeared that the aerospace doyen had lost his mind. Gunston not only portrayed the B-2 antigravity drive story as fact, but went on to reveal how he had been well acquainted with the rudiments of T.T. Brown's theories for years, but had "no wish to reside in the Tower [of London], so had refrained from discussing clever aeroplanes with leading edges charged to millions of volts positive and trailing edges to millions of volts negative."
Gunston explained why he felt that there was much more to the B-2 than met the eye, drawing on a lifetime of specialized knowledge. In short, if you applied the laws of aerodynamics and basic math to the known specifications of the B-2, there was a glaring mismatch in its published performance figures.
It was clear, Gunston said, that the thrust of each GE engine was insufficient to lift the 376,500-pound listed gross weight of the aircraft at takeoff.