The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology

From Barnes & Noble

What if there were a down-to-earth explanation for all those UFO sightings? Aviation editor for Jane's Defence Weekly, the world's leading military affairs journal, Nick Cook has been immersed in the arcana of military aircraft for more than a decade. In this startling work of investigative journalism, Cook presents evidence of secret antigravity research dating back to World War II. He reveals that the ideal shape for a craft using antigravity technology is the same as the classic flying saucer. Maybe, one day, we'll be the ones in the flying saucers buzzing distant planets.

From the Publisher

“An intriguing work of scientific speculation. Technology enthusiasts, aviation buffs, and UFO watchers should find it fascinating.” —Kirkus Reviews

“An extraordinary investigation into aviation’s greatest mystery.” —Mail on Sunday

“Cook relates his investigations in splendid cloak-and-dagger style with low-lit X-files scenes of secret meetings and nervous witnesses.” —Guardian (London)

Publishers Weekly

For the last 15 years, Cook has been an aviation reporter and editor at Jane's Defence Weekly, a defense industry trade journal that one would expect to find Cheney and Rumsfeld discussing on the way to the briefing room. A full-length project from a high-ranking Jane's editor creates a certain confidence in the contents, yet, as Cook makes clear, most of what's in this book won't be found in Jane's, as the evidence for "zero point energy" is less concrete, even if just as scrupulously sourced here. The book begins when Cook jokingly calls the possibility of antigravity drives "the ultimate quantum leap in aircraft design" in one of his Jane's pieces more than 10 years ago. A few years later, someone anonymously slips him an article, dating to the 1950s, that shows officials at Lockheed Martin and other big contractors claiming they were close to exactly that. Intrigued, Cook takes the bait and follows the trail to the wildest territory imaginable: destroyed or pulled reports; disappearing battleships; silent, glowing flying discs; time distortion; Nazi slave labor. To simplify in the extreme: Cook has found evidence that Nazi scientists had tapped into zero point energy the quantum energy that possibly exists within vacuums in amounts that make nuclear energy look like a joke (enough energy in the space of a coffee cup, Cook explains, to boil the world's oceans six times over). When WWII ended, Nazi secrets were plundered by the U.S. Army, which spirited them, along with many of the German scientists themselves, into "black" programs not acknowledged by the government and which may have produced working aerospace technology based on zero point. Through his cover as a Jane's reporter, Cook seeks out the stealthy wonks of this top-secret world, but readers will have to wade through some opaque thumbnail descriptions of the science and arcane WWII history to understand what he and others are getting at. It is well worth it. (On sale Aug. 13) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

When Nazis, flying saucers, and government conspiracies figure in a single narrative, you've got the makings of either a crackpot manifesto or an intriguing work of scientific speculation. Thankfully, the aviation editor for Jane's Defence Weekly delivers the latter. Cook's spirited if sometimes improbable tale turns on the question of whether human beings might be able to harness and thereby defy gravity in order to do such things as travel through time and cross the galaxy at the speed of light. It's theoretically possible, Cook suggests; for at least a couple of generations, some physicists have suspected that the universe conceals a fifth dimension-hyperspace-in which gravity as we understand it no longer applies. Getting to that point, of course, presents plenty of practical problems, but that has not discouraged the efforts of engineers, from the Nazi scientists who gave the world jet fighters and the V2 rocket to some of NASA's best and brightest. Though much of his argument involves questionable evidence and a cool-to-cold trail, Cook examines Nazi efforts to develop "flying discs" (the disc, it appears, is the ideal shape for an antigravity aircraft) and considers the possibility that after WWII, American engineers might have whisked a few Nazi documents (or, for that matter, scientists) off to their labs to continue the experiments. If so, he speculates, then the UFOs that began to pop up in Air Force and police reports in great numbers beginning in the late 1940s might in fact have been antigravitational aircraft making test flights. Cook, who clearly knows his technology, is fully aware that he sometimes treads in the territory of what scientists call "The Legend"; he cautionsthat no single explanation can satisfactorily account for all the UFO sightings on record. Hardheaded rationalists will likely take this with a shakerful of salt, but technology enthusiasts, aviation buffs, and UFO watchers should find it fascinating.