Nick Cook
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Nick Cook is a British journalist and author and author who served as aviation editor of Jane's Defence Weekly for over twelve years, and is best known for The Hunt for Zero Point (2001/2002), his investigation into the classified history of antigravity research inside the U.S. black-budget aerospace world.
Background and career
Cook joined Jane's Defence Weekly (JDW), the flagship publication of the Jane's Information Group intelligence empire, where his reporting covered stealth, advanced propulsion, and the global defense industry. He also wrote for The Times, the Sunday Times, and the Sunday Telegraph. The role gave Cook routine access to classified U.S. government defense laboratories, the Pentagon, and senior executives at firms including Lockheed Martin and McDonnell Douglas.
The Hunt for Zero Point
Origin: the 1992 Jane's article
Cook traces the investigation to a technology piece he wrote for JDW in the early 1990s that contained a passing reference to antigravity as "the aerospace equivalent of the holy grail: something longed for, dreamed about, but beyond reach." The reference drew ridicule from peers; JDW's motto was "Authoritative, Accurate, Impartial" and the magazine was "about facts." Shortly afterward, an anonymous colleague placed on Cook's desk a 1956 popular-science article headlined "The G-Engines Are Coming!" depicting a wingless hovering aircraft with no visible propulsion, which set the investigation in motion.
The 1956 aerospace antigravity consensus
Cook's research in the JDW library turned up a May 1956 article in Interavia Aerospace Review on "electro-gravitics" research, citing firms including Sperry-Rand, General Electric, and experiments by one "Townsend T. Brown" in which model disc airfoils had been run in a wind tunnel under 150 kilovolts "with results so impressive as to be highly classified." Cook also located the 1956 Electrogravitics Systems report prepared by the Gravity Research Group, Special Weapons Study Unit, a subdivision of Aviation Studies (International) Limited, a British think tank — a document that had been buried for decades in the technical library of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and was the only known surviving copy. The report documented antigravity research commitments from virtually the entire U.S. aerospace industry — Glenn Martin, Bell Aircraft, Convair, Lear Inc., General Electric, Lockheed, and others — all of whom had stopped discussing the subject entirely by the early 1960s. Cook concluded that in the mid-1950s there had been an apparent breakthrough in the field — and that by 1960 "it was like the whole episode never took place."
T. Townsend Brown and Project Winterhaven
A central figure in Cook's investigation is T. Townsend Brown, an Ohio-born inventor who from the 1920s onward developed theories of electrogravitics — the use of high-voltage electrostatic fields to produce thrust — and whose research led him to design disc-shaped vehicles as the most aerodynamically efficient form for electrogravitic lift. Cook obtained a declassified copy of Brown's Project Winterhaven proposal — a blueprint for a Mach 3 manned antigravity fighter shaped as a disc — through the Freedom of Information Act, having tracked it through the Integrity Research Institute and researcher Tom Valone. Winterhaven described disc models that "contain no moving parts and do not necessarily rotate while in flight" and "emit a bluish-red electric coronal glow and a faint hissing sound."
Viktor Schauberger and Austria
Cook's investigation led him to Viktor Schauberger, an Austrian forester and engineer who had developed theories of implosion-based energy generation — the use of naturally-occurring vortex processes as the most efficient conduit for energy transmission. Though initially dismissing the Schauberger lead, Cook eventually visited the family's archive in Bad Ischl, Austria, where Viktor's grandson Joerg Schauberger demonstrated small-scale experiments based on the family's theories and showed Cook machinery that convinced him that Schauberger "wasn't a forester in the strict sense of the word — he was an engineer; and from the look of the machinery around the house an extremely accomplished one."
Ben Rich and the Skunk Works
Cook had a personal relationship with Ben Rich, director of the Lockheed Skunk Works from 1975 to 1991, whom he described as "desperately ill with cancer" at an air show where Rich was promoting his memoir. Rich told Cook of a "virtual warehouse" where technologies judged too dangerous to develop into hardware were locked away permanently — an image Rich compared to the Ark of the Covenant scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Rich died in January 1995; other sources have attributed to him a statement made at a 1993 UCLA alumni gathering — "we now have the technology to take ET home" and a reference to "an error in the equations" as the key to understanding how — though this is documented through other witnesses rather than Cook's own reporting.
Publication
The Hunt for Zero Point was first published in the United Kingdom in 2001 by Century (Random House) and in the United States in 2002 by Broadway Books. Cook described it not as a comprehensive explanation for UFOs but as an investigation into whether the U.S. defense industry had successfully developed antigravity propulsion inside its black budget programs following the apparent industry-wide silence of the early 1960s.
Reception and influence
Jason Jorjani, in a 2025 interview with Jesse Michels, described Cook's book as foundational to his own research into Nazi advanced propulsion: "working from Joseph Farrell and Nick Cook's book, The Hunt for Zero Point, Nick Cook's research and then also his citations of Igor Witkowski's research, Polish researcher who actually went to this site and did some fieldwork there." Michels himself noted that Cook appeared to know more than he published about the Bell project: "Nick Cook... he gets like a little uncomfortable... almost as if he knows something that he like can't really talk about."
In a 2025 interview with Ashton Forbes, Jorjani cited Cook's work alongside Hal Puthoff's testimony, noting that Puthoff had stated in The Hunt for Zero Point that "a coffee cup's worth" of the propulsion medium "would potentially vaporize the oceans of Earth if its energy were to be released in an uncontrollable cascade."
Michels, in a 2025 episode on Henry Kissinger's intelligence background, cited Cook's conclusions directly: "According to historian Nick Cook's great book, The Hunt for Zero Point, CIC agents interrogated Schauberger for nine months, fully aware of his most classified work. They reportedly considered his discoveries more important than Nazi nuclear research itself."