In revealing their presence to Scott, they acknowledged that they were breaking a "code of silence that rivals the Mafia's." The dangers of their approach were already manifest. Two engineers said that their civil rights had been "blatantly abused" by their black world controllers in a bid to prevent them from leaving the deeply classified environment. "Once you're in, they don't let you go," one of them said. Amidst the revelations that the engineers dangled in front of Scott were a number of technologies for reducing the visible signatures of the B-2.
To people in the business, Northrop's winning of the $40 billion Stealth Bomber competition against Lockheed in 1981 had long been something of a mystery. It was, after all, Lockheed that had made the breakthrough in mathematically computing stealth in 1975. But then, the F-l 17 A, composed of its mass of angled flat panels, was "first-generation stealth."
The B-2, or the Advanced Strategic Penetrating Aircraft, as it was known when it was still deeply gray, was a second-generation aircraft and this, according to Northrop, was manifest in its blended aerodynamic shape. Instead of being rough and angular like the F-l 17A, it was smooth and rounded — a product, Northrop claimed, of five years' worth of improvements in computing technology between the start of the Have Blue program and the ASPA.
Improved software algorithms processing had allowed Northrop to come up with a shape — a refinement of the YB-49 flying wing jet bomber it had first flown in 1947—that allowed the aircraft to look and fly right and to remain invisible on enemy radar screens.
Not only that, but according to LaViolette it had the capability to fly electrogravitically as well.
In my basement, where the noise of the city couldn't intrude upon the sort of silence you needed to sift a decade's worth of documents and files on the arcane properties of stealth, I still wasn't happy about LaViolette's assertion, because of the absence of that all-important switch, the one that kicked in the B-2's antigravity drive system.
There was one other beguiling aspect to Scott's story. His sources said that charging the airframe electrostatically not only helped to make the B-2 stealthy, it also reduced friction heating of the airframe, its sonic footprint and its drag.
This last point was crucial. If it were possible to alter the "drag" or air resistance of an aircraft, you could either make it fly farther or faster or both.
The drag reduction system was supposed to work as follows: By creating an electrostatic field ahead of an aircraft, it ought in theory to repel air molecules in the aircraft's path, allowing the plane, in effect, to slip through the atmosphere like a thin sliver of soap through warm water.
Like antigravity itself, the whole notion of using electricity fields to reduce aircraft drag was heresy — it was, according to traditionalists, just smoke and mirrors. But here, in Scott's article, was a reference to Northrop having conducted high-grade research in 1968 on just such a phenomenon: the creation of "electrical forces to condition the air flowing around an aircraft at supersonic speeds." Furthermore, the California-based aircraft company had supposedly submitted a paper on the subject to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics that same year.
I hit the Net and went into the AIAA website, then did a title search. But the papers on the AIAA site went back only as far as 1992 and I was out of time.
I rubbed my eyes. In two days I was due to attend an aerospace convention in Las Vegas. And I wasn't any closer to solving the puzzle. Or was I? During the Second World War, I remembered Thomas Townsend Brown had been involved in experiments that sought to show how you could make a ship disappear on a radar screen by pumping it with large doses of electricity. Between 1941 and 1943, Brown had supposedly been involved in tests, I saw now, that were identical in principle to the methodology that Northrop seemed to have applied to the B-2 to make it the ultimate word in stealth. Researchers had never taken Brown's wartime experiments seriously because the precise nature of the work had been obscured by the myth of parallel dimensions aboard the USS Eldridge— the ship at the heart of the "Philadelphia Experiment." Brown had also used electrostatics to power his model discs and, by his own testimony and that of witnesses — including a general from the U.S. Air Force— they had flown by defying gravity.
Could it really be that in researching the B-2 I had picked up the threads of T. T. Brown's work again? Work that the U.S. had continued to develop in the black?
I jotted the keywords on a piece of paper, like a crossword player consigning letters to a page in the hope of unraveling an anagram. Brown — electrostatics — stealth — antigravity—and then, against my better judgment—parallel dimension. I studied the words for a long time, but nothing jumped out at me.
Below: Alleged photograph of Rudolph Schriever.
Right: The Legend's rendition of the Schriever/ Habermohl/Miethe disc.
Right:
Richard Miethe.
Below:
Artist's impression of foo-fighters engaging a formation of B-17 bombers. (All images via Bill Rose)
Above: Thomas Townsend Brown.
Right: Patent illustration showing experimental layout of the charged condenser plates Brown demonstrated to the US Air Force and Navy.
Above: Brown holding a disc capacitor prior to charging.
Left: A demonstration of electrogravitic lift at the Bahnson Laboratories in the late 1950s. (All images via the Integrity Research Institute)
Left: John Frost.
Below: A cutaway illustration of the Avro Silverbug showing the radial flow gas-turbine.
Below: John Frost (right) with other members of the Avro SPG team in front of the
Avrocar. (All images via Bill Rose)
Above: A full-scale engineering mock-up of the Project Y Manta at Avro's factory in Malton, Ontario.
Right: General arrangement of the proposed Avro Project 1794, showing arrangement for its six Viper turbojets.
Below: Avro's test-rig for the Mach 4 Project 1794 saucer. (All images via Bill Rose)
Above: British Aerospace's concept of an advanced fighter interceptor, powered by an anti-gravity lift engine.
Below: Another British Aerospace design for a heavy-lift anti-gravity vehicle. (Both images via BAE Systems) Above left: Tom Valone of the Integrity Research Institute. (Tom Valone) Above right Paul LaViolette. (Paul LaViolette Ph.D.)
Below: Dr Evgeny Podkletnov (left) with Dr Ron Evans, Head of BAE Systems' Project Greenglow. (BAE Systems)
Above: The Northrop Grumman B-2 Stealth Bomber. (Northrop Grumman)
Left and below: LaViolette's schematic illustrations of the B-2's electrogravitic drive system, showing positive and negative charge and flow distribution. (Electrogravitic Systems)