When gravity falls
01/09/2002 . Source: Stephen Hunt 

What comes up must come down? Not according to the latest Russian research into antigravity. Our own Stephen Hunt investigates, and finds a potpourri of secret science, half-truths and tantalizing rumours of the soviet 'Roswell'.

The chance of the bread falling with the butter side down is directly proportional to the value of the carpet.
Jennings' Corollary to the Law of Selective Gravity

I think it while I was still employed by the science journal Nature, that a team of astronomers working with the Hubble Space telescope announced they’d found evidence that the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate, a rather fast gallop which can only be explained by the existence of anti-gravity (their findings were, annoyingly for, me published in our main rival, the US’s Science).

Well, gravity – it seems - isn’t what it used to be, as scientists at the world's largest aircraft maker, Boeing, made known this month, when they told the press are now using the work of Russian scientist Yevgeny Podkletnov.

The name Podkletnov might not mean much to the average ‘Nest reader, but in the rarefied circles of science, our Yevgeny is something of a legend in his own lunchtime. Not least because he claims to have created a machine that can screen objects from the Earth's gravitational pull – shades of HG Wells’ First Men On The Moon, and James Cavor’s gravity-repelling compound, Cavorite.

In the best traditions of outlandish claims (cold fusion etc), the world’s scientific community regards the Doc with grave misgivings, as they – they includes NASA in this instance - have been completely unable to reproduce any of his results.

Yevgeny Podkletnov is a product of the old Soviet Union scientific elite, literally born to the field, with his father a professor in St Petersburg and his mother a brilliant medical researcher. The Doc, who some of his colleagues have described as an erratic genius on the same level as Einstein, earnt his spurs in the Mendeleyev Institute in Moscow and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Like so many superiorly endowed IQs, the West rapidly snatched Yevgeny up when the iron curtain fell.

Boeing, a corporation not previously known for its flights of fancy, has now engaged the services of Yevgeny’s team for its maximum security Phantom Works in Seattle, the semi-secret arm of the company which handles Boeing's most sensitive defence work.

The Seattle works formed the inspiration for a number of the X-Files’ government complexes. You know the ones; labs run by alien concealing, super solider-breeding, black suit managers, white suit workers and lots of dangerous-looking dudes in kelvar armour.

Anyway, Boeing’s new Yevgeny-inspired anti-gravity programme has been code-named Project Grasp (Gravity Suspension Propulsion).

George Muellner, the controller of the Phantom Works, confirmed with no less than the Jane's Defence Weekly (alias the bible of the wicked military industrial complex) that Boeing had seen enough in their own controlled environment, to convince them to pursue this avenue of research.

Dr Podkletnov first claimed to have experienced the phenomena of anti-gravity in 1992 during an experiment at the Finnish Tampere University of Technology. Most of the details of the experiment have been kept quiet, but the basics of the set-up were that Yevgeny discovered that objects placed above a super-conducting ceramic disc, rotating over powerful electromagnets, lost 2% of their weight.

The highly respected Journal of the British Institute for Physics had accepted an anti-gravity paper from the Doctor for publication in 1996, but when a handful of details from the paper were leaked to the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper – the news provoked the expected howl of ‘Flat Earth’ pain from his colleagues: ‘impossible’, ‘balderdash’, and far less polite phrases. Podkletnov smartly withdrew his paper.

The scientific community, without even getting sight of the results or nature of an experiment that had already been cleared for publication by peer review in a distinguished journal, had immediately placed Podkletnov’s concept on the same level as the ever-elusive perpetual motion machine.

A curious reaction among the supposedly open-minded scientific community, where facts are meant to be given more weight than emotions.

Conspiracy theorists on the web – as usual – have their own take on the affair. They claim that while he was still working for the Russian science establishment, Dr Podkletnov was one of the scientists called to the scene of the coastline around Zaostrovka in September 16, 1989. This was the date when the Russian ‘Roswell’ was alleged to have occurred.

A flight of UFOs had been seen by hundreds of eyewitnesses buzzing over the town, and one of the silvery disks was supposedly shot down by the Russian warship Admiral Golovko ,crash-landing sixty miles outside of Zaostrovka.

Podkletnov, the conspiracy buffs claim, was one of the highly classified recovery team given immediate access to the wreckage before it was spirited off to the Russian version of ‘Area 13’ in Siberia, four days after the crash. The question the ufologists pose … could it be that insights the Doctor picked up from the UFO’s ruined drive system were co-opted into his anti-gravity research, a mere three years later?

The ‘Nest’s take on this bizarre turn of events?

We tend to discount UFO stories a la Roswell. If only for the practical reason that if there’d been a starship crash where reverse engineering of alien technology had occurred, we’d all be living a world where today’s US military would be armed with antimatter grenades and General Motors would be releasing the kind of cars that could give the Spinners from the film Bladerunner a run for their money.

Podkletnov’s research may be the product of untamed genius, or the product of a misguided lapse of judgement (take your pick, depending on which scientific camp you belong to). It’s very likely not to be the product of cast offs left by our cousins from Rigil Kentaurus.

But whatever the truth about whether anything practical will be developed from this line of research, one thing is for sure. Boeing is run by very serious, very boring suits. In fact, as corporations go, it’s the Sven-Goren Eriksson of the commercial world. Their executives do not sit around the boardroom table chuckling over issues of the Fortean Times and Starlog.

Draw your own conclusions.