The Hunt for Zero Point

The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology is a 2001 investigative book by Nick Cook, aviation editor at Jane's Defence Weekly for over two decades, tracing military and corporate interest in antigravity propulsion from the 1950s through the end of the Cold War. Originally published in the United Kingdom by Century in 2001 and in the United States by Broadway Books in 2002, the book concludes that a genuine breakthrough in gravity control was made sometime in the 1950s and absorbed into the classified defense-industrial complex.

Background and method

Cook's investigation began when an anonymous article from a 1956 popular science journal — "The G-Engines Are Coming!" — appeared on his desk at Jane's Defence Weekly without explanation, quoting senior executives at Bell Aircraft, Martin Aircraft, and Lear Inc. stating that the conquest of gravity was imminent — "in about the time it took to build the first atom bomb," in the words of Martin vice president George S. Trimble. A companion Interavia Aerospace Review article from the same year described "electro-gravitics" research as having reached a stage where "profound implications for the entire human race are beginning to emerge." When Cook tried to interview Trimble (then retired in Arizona), the elderly engineer abruptly canceled through a Lockheed Martin public-affairs contact who said Trimble "sounded scared." Cook conducted the subsequent investigation covertly over several years through the U.S. National Archives, FOIA, visits to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, and interviews with figures in the Skunk Works community and the academic fringe of zero-point energy research.

Main article:

Nick Cook

Contents

The book's substantive material is treated in the dedicated subject articles linked below:

• Thomas Townsend Brown and electrogravitics — Brown's "Gravitor" device (1920s onward) exhibiting thrust under high voltage; disc-shaped craft proposal; Project Winterhaven (1952) — Brown's pitch to the U.S. Air Force for a Mach 3 saucer-shaped fighter-interceptor powered exclusively by electrogravitics; Maj. Gen. Victor E. Bertrandias's 1952 report comparing the work's potential impact to the early atomic development; the Air Force's September 22, 1952 declassification (interpreted by some as super-classification cover) following an Office of Naval Research dismissal as "ionic wind"; the 1956 Electrogravitics Systems British Gravity Research Group report (found by Cook in the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base technical library) confirming active electrogravitics programs at Bell, Convair, Douglas, General Electric, Loening, Lear Inc., Lockheed, and Sperry-Rand. Main article: Thomas Townsend Brown Main article: Project Winterhaven Main article: Electrogravitics
• The B-2 Spirit connection — Cook's examination of physicist Paul LaViolette's claim that the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber incorporated electrogravitics, based on an Aviation Week disclosure of "electrostatic field-generating techniques" in the wing leading edge; British aerospace journalist Bill Gunston's calculation that the B-2's published engine thrust was insufficient to lift its stated gross weight without an additional weight-reduction mechanism. Main article: B-2 Spirit
• Viktor Schauberger and implosion technology — Cook's visit to the family's PKS institute near Bad Ischl; archival evidence of Schauberger's wartime work under SS supervision at Mauthausen; the implosion theory (inward-spiraling air or water generating "higher order" energetic properties); the alleged early-1945 Leonstein prototype that "rose unexpectedly to the ceiling," trailing "a blue-green and then a silver-colored glow," before being seized by an American intelligence team days after Germany's surrender. Russian physicist Evgeny Podkletnov (whose own experiments showed 2–5 percent weight reduction in objects exposed to a rotating superconductor disk) disclosed to Cook that his father acquired original Schauberger papers from Soviet intelligence agents who had entered Schauberger's Vienna apartment at the end of the war. Main article: Viktor Schauberger
• Avro Canada and Project Silverbug — engineer John Frost's "Special Projects Group" at Avro Canada developing high-performance saucer-shaped aircraft from 1952; Project Y2 purchased outright by the U.S. Air Force and re-coded as "Project Silverbug"; the publicly revealed VZ-9 Avrocar (which flew only feet off the ground) as cover for the classified supersonic versions.
• "The Legend" and the black budget — the composite rumor of genuine wartime German antigravity craft seized into the U.S. black budget; Cook's 1988 estimate of $30 billion annual classified R&D and weapons-acquisition spending — exceeding the entire defense budgets of Britain, France, or Germany — producing "an industry within an industry, multiple layers deep and compartmentalized to death horizontally."

Conclusion

By the book's end Cook states he had become convinced antigravity is real and that classified programs have pursued it since the mid-1950s, drawing on both Brown's electrogravitics and captured German research. The epilogue quotes a 1955 New York Herald Tribune interview with Trimble: "if Washington decides that it is vital to our national survival to go where we want and do what we want without having to worry about gravity, we'd find the answer rapidly."

Reception and influence

The book is regularly cited as the most credentialed journalistic treatment of classified antigravity. Michael Salla has framed zero-point energy and antigravity in secret space programs as tapping "the zero point or the ether" — language that mirrors Cook's framework — and noted that these principles had been suppressed from public science for decades.

Jesse Michels of American Alchemy described Brown's work in 2024 as potentially the foundational breakthrough: "the quote around Townsend Brown's work is it would make a thermonuclear bomb look like a child's firecracker." Independent researcher Dave Rossi told Exopolitics Today in 2022 that he had built a functional antigravity device using approximately $2,000 of off-the-shelf materials, with Salla comparing the case to Otis T. Carr's alleged 1960–61 antigravity craft built from local hardware-store materials before his laboratory was raided — a pattern consistent with Cook's thesis of systematic suppression since the mid-twentieth century.

See also

• Foo fighter
• The Bell (Nazi secret weapon)
• Operation Paperclip

References