Left: The Lockheed Martin F-117A Stealth Fighter over typical desert terrain.
Below: 50 years of Skunk Works Products — those that the company has owned up to.
Right: Ben Rich and the F-117A. (All images via Lockheed Martin)
Above: Map showing key California-based sites of the Skunk Works in the late 80s/early 90s. (Lockheed Martin Skunk Works)
Right: Jack Gordon, head of the Skunk Works in 1996. (Lockheed Martin Skunk Works)
Below: An artist's rendering of Aurora, the USAF's mythical hypersonic spyplane. (Julian Cook)
Right: The concrete henge structure at the Wenceslas Mine — test-rig or cooling-tower? (M. Banas)
Below: The Wenceslas Mine, Ludwigsdorf, Poland, looking across what was once a covered railway marshalling yard. (Nick Cook)
Above: The Wenceslas Mine. The henge-like structure is situated behind the trees in the distance. (Nick Cook) Right: The entrance to the Mittelwerk at Nordhausen. (I. Witkowski)
Below: SS General Hans Kammler the only known photograph of him in uniform; France, 1944.
Above: A partially lined gallery a the SS-run 'Giant' underground manufacturing complex near Waldenburg, Poland. (M. Banas)
Left: A completed gallery at the 'Giant' underground complex. (M. Banas) Above: Viktor Schauberger and his implosion-based home power generator in 1955, with interior shot.
Left and below: The Schauberger Repulsine with and without coneshaped intake. (All images via Schauberger Archive)
Left: Bob Widmer, chief designer of General Dynamics Convair, in his office in the late 1950s. (Lockheed Martin)
Right Bob Widmer in his Lockheed Martin office at Fort Worth, in 1996. (Nick Cook)
Below: A grainy shot of a wind-tunnel mode of Kingfish, Widmer's Mach 6 spyplane proposal. (Air International)
John Hutchison in his Vancouver apartment, surrounded by equipment integral to the Hutchison Effect. (John Hutchison) Metal ingots 'disrupted' by the Hutchison Effect. (John Hutchison)
Chapter 13
Vegas. Two thumps through the 747 and I was on the ground at McCarran International, an airport, like Miami's, that crackled with illicit activity; you could just feel it. We taxied to the terminal and passed engineering shops filled with propeller planes that looked like they should have been scrapped decades ago; old classics running freight operations now, with radial engines that dripped oil on the ramp and coughed clouds of smoke, their tired but sturdy airframes lined with irregular rows of rivets and bumps.
I raised my eyes and took in the view. Vegas, sprawled there just beyond the perimeter fence under an upturned bowl of blue sky, half a dozen giant new hotels since I'd been here last, half a dozen more going up amidst a thicket of cranes. I loved and loathed this city with equal measure. Down on the Strip, with the sun setting on this city of broken dreams, I took in the glare of the lights from the back of the cab, half listening to the driver's lament over the mob's exodus and its replacement by corporate America.
The slipping sun played over the tops of the mountains that bordered the southern end of the Nellis Air Force Range, a closed-off piece of government land the size of Switzerland where the Air Force tested its latest military hardware and ran air warfare exercises, and the driver's voice still filling my head about the days when people in the city had lived and died by a set of rules everyone understood.
I grunted something neutral as I tracked the Convention Center where tomorrow I'd tramp the hallways, doing what I always did on these occasions: talk to old friends, meet contacts, trawl the stands, hoover up data, collate stories, file copy, hit the town, go to bed late, get up early and then go through it all over again.
The cab pulled into the Sahara, a hotel that exuded the Vegas of Sinatra, Martin and the mob; the mid-'50s, when it had opened.
It had been face-lifted so many times, it seemed like the demolition teams would be here at any moment, but through half-closed eyes you could still see how it once had been, which gave it a strange kind of charm. The Sahara suited me just fine.
Its pile-'em-in, rack-'em and stack-'em ethos, ideal for gamblers passing through, meant it was shunned by most of the show delegates, but it had the enormous advantage of being a stone's throw from the Convention Center.
The following day, I picked up my reporter's pass and filed into the exhibition hall. It was jam-packed with aerospace and defense companies from across America, their stands and booths ranged in rows either side of the carpeted walkways.
From all over the hall, TVs plugged into videos on permanent loop flashed with images of combat aircraft going through their paces or weapons under test, the pictures backed by deadpan monologues and Top Gun-style soundtracks.
I slipped into the routine, walking the course, checking the stands for signs of developments or breakthroughs.
Sometimes stories came from a new aircraft, spacecraft or weapon system depicted in model form or artist's impression, but such copy as this generated was merely the low-hanging fruit — things that the public affairs people wanted you to see. As long as it constituted news, most reporters, myself included, were happy to go through the motions.
More often than not, though, the developments we looked for were more subtle: a missile fitted with a new seeker or an aircraft with a new sensor, denoted by an aerial or antenna window on the display model that hadn't been there last time around.
Such changes, though seemingly inconsequential to an outsider, pointed to performance gains that signaled real news to a defense reporter, news that the industry's primary customers generally didn't want to see in print.
But there was another side to show reporting, a side that I altogether preferred: chewing the fat with people in the business I'd known and liked for years, gathering data that gave hints of longer-term trends; what was really happening to the industry in the face of Cold War budget cuts, where the technology was headed, who was buying, who wasn't.
Three days at an aerospace and defense exhibition gave you informa tion you couldn't get from a month's worth of phone calls. And after the intensity of weeks spent scrutinizing obscure pieces of data for hints of a black world antigravity program, the change was refreshingly good.
On the third day, long after the press conferences had dried up and I'd filed my final piece of copy to the magazine, I hit the Northrop Grumman stand and started talking to a guy who'd worked a whole range of the company's programs, including the B-2 Stealth Bomber.
Careful not to provoke the reaction that usually greeted the antigravity question, I asked him what he made of the stones that the B-2 charged its surface electrostatically. This time, no derogatory smirk, just a straight answer and a half smile. It was impossible, he told me. If you charged the airframe of the B-2, you'd fry its onboard electronics. He went on to describe a secondary problem. All aircraft need to discharge the static electricity they absorb naturally as they move through the air — usually via small wire aerials on the wing tips. Deliberately adding to this static buildup with a man-made electrical charge would be enormously risky, the engineer maintained. Since it would be impossible to discharge the electricity fast enough, it would turn the aircraft into a giant lightning conductor.