At its heart was a technique developed by Brown to wrap a ship in a field of intense electromagnetic energy, produced by powerful electrical generators.
In the mid-1970s, the U.S. Department of Defense was briefed by Lockheed on a new form of technology — essentially, to do with airframe shaping — that reduced the radar cross section of a fighter-sized aircraft to that of a large insect.
In 1976, the company was awarded a contract to develop the Have Blue stealth demonstrator. Two years later, Lockheed was given the goahead to develop the F-l 17A, the world's first "stealth fighter."
A new military science had been born — one that was about to change the defense planning of entire nations.
As a result, the technology was classified to the rooftops. Stealth had become America's biggest military secret since the bomb.
It was then that somebody must have remembered Northrop's research papers into drag-reducing plasmas and dusted them off, recalling, probably, that electrostatics had a highly beneficial spin-off effect: it could reduce — perhaps even cancel altogether — the radar signature of an aircraft.
A picture formed in my mind's eye of an insect-sized image on a radar screen winking out altogether. The B-2, three times the size of the F-l 17, would be 100 percent radar-invisible if it worked as advertised with its plasma cloak activated.
Since the development of big-budget weapon systems is all about risk reduction, the Northrop approach, fundamentally different from Lockheed's, would have appealed to the bright young colonels of Air Force Special Projects.
If one of the methods failed to deliver, you could always rely on the other one to show you the money. It gave the colonels two bites at the problem.
Soon afterward, Northrop won the contract to build the B-2A Stealth Bomber, based on its use of electrostatics to make it ultrastealthy. The technique, first developed by Brown, also improved its aerodynamic efficiency and reduced its drag. It represented a phenomenal breakthrough — a development that would give the U.S. a tenyear lead, maybe more, over the Soviet Union. But herein lay a problem. The whole science of stealth would need to be protected like no other strand of weapons science before — the lessons of the bomb being uppermost in the minds of those charged with securing the Air Force's precious new secret.
A novel protection strategy, one that overcame the flawed security model established to protect the bomb 40 years earlier, needed to be set in place.
Eradication and disinformation, coupled with the secure compart mentalisation of the program, formed the basis ofthat strategy.
From that moment on, past clues or pointers to stealth would have slowly and carefully been excised from officialdom. It was most likely at or around this point that the Northrop paper was pulled from the archives of the AIAA.
But then, in the archive trawl, somebody would have come across the work of T. T. Brown. Brown's stealth work for the U.S. Navy in the early 1940s, coupled with his use of electrostatics in his electrogravitic work, was an unexpected discovery that needed to be handled with great care. The man's work was a dangerous liability. Something needed to be done — something truly innovative.
In 1978, the authors of the Philadelphia Experiment, Berlitz and Moore, were apparently approached by two U.S. Air Force officers who claimed to have knowledge of a fantastic secret. They told how they had had a chance encounter with a man who'd claimed to have been on the \JSSEldndgeinl943.
The man had told the two officers how the warship had vanished from its moorings during a test that sought to make it invisible to radar. In 1979, after further research by Berlitz and Moore, much of it supplied by their elusive and slippery source Carlos Allende, aka Carl Allen, The Philadelphia Experiment appeared in print — and Brown's name became forever linked with the myth of the Eldridge, The story's primary twist was that the ship had been transported into another dimension — kooky stuffand, to any sensibly minded individual, wholly unbelievable.
In the 1980s, the decade when stealth came to be fielded operationally, the technology had acquired its own tailor-made cloak of disinformation.
Tempting as it was to assume that Winterhaven or something like it had been pursued in the black since the 1950s, there was simply no evidence for it.
There was no doubt in my mind that LaViolette's articles on the B-2 were sincere, but they had only helped to muddy the Brown story further. When the B-2 and its antigravity propulsion system appeared in print, Brown — whose work was at the heart of this technology — was already a highly discredited figure. Whichever way you approached the story of his life and work, sooner or later you hit the Philadelphia myth. It blew all hope of dispassionate reporting on the man out of the water.
It turned out that the removal of the AIAA paper wasn't the only example of censorship in this field. Before leaving Vegas, I'd called Tom Valone of the Integrity Research Institute. Valone told me that he had been trying for years to locate a copy of an appraisal of T.T. Brown's experiments conducted in 1952 by the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C., but had been informed that the NRL no longer had it. The T. T. Brown Electrogravity Device: A Comprehensive Evaluation by the Office of Naval Research had disappeared into the ether as well.
To deduce from this that Brown had cracked gravity was too big a leap for me. In his experiments, he had demonstrated to the satisfaction of many that an antigravity effect was possible. But that didn't mean he'd got to the point where the technology could power an aircraft. Project Winterhaven had promised to deliver this, but Winterhaven never got off the ground. Not in the white world, anyhow.
Somewhere between the junction at Barstow and Boron, a tiny mining community on the edge of the Mojave, the sun finally slipped behind the southern tip of the Sierra Nevadas and I knew I'd taken the disinformation angle as far as it would go. There were just two things that wouldn't fall into place. One of them related to the words on that selfpenned note. Brown, electrostatics, stealth and antigravity: all of these elements were bound together in the disinformation story — those who had assembled it operating on the age-old principle that a little truth really does go a long, long way.
Why, then, did they introduce the fifth element? The part about the Eldridge slipping into a parallel dimension? How had such an improbable notion popped into the heads of the disinformation gurus?
Somehow, I had the feeling Marckus knew about all of this, yet hadn't passed the knowledge on. As I hit the freeway and turned west toward Lancaster, night falling as fast as rain, it was this thought more than any other that troubled me most.
The Desert Inn motel, its lobby replete with signed photographs of test pilots, display-case models of their aircraft and other Right Stuff memorabilia, was located on an invisible confluence of routes connecting the various nodes of the Air Force's classified desert kingdom. Twentyfive miles to the north lay Edwards Air Force base, home of the USAF's premier test pilots from the days when Chuck Yeager had broken the sound barrier in the Bell X-l. Proof of a link between Edwards and Area 51, the Nevada test base that didn't officially exist, 250 miles away as the crow flew, had been ascertained in a neat piece of detective work by Glenn Campbell, the leader of an outfit called the Desert Rats, a group of dedicated "stealth watchers" who hung out in the scrubland around Area 51, hoping for a glimpse of some exotic piece of classified hardware. Campbell had come by a procedures manual for security personnel assigned to Area 51 in which they were advised to tell anyone who professed any interest in them that they were attached to a facility called "Pittman Station." Going through local county records, Campbell found papers attesting to the fact that these personnel had been sworn in as local deputies. One of them had listed his mailing address as "Pittman Station, Henderson 89044," but all of them said that they were affiliated to something called "DET AFFTC." Campbell knew that AFFTC stood for the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards.