Is Anti-Grav Possible?

Imagine flying silently through the sky, without wings, without an engine, without any moving parts whatsoever. Sounds like the stuff of science fiction? Well, there are those conspiracy theorists who would have us believe the government is now and has been working on anti-gravity platforms for decades.

The beginnings of anti-grav flight might be found in a homemade device called "the lifter." It's not new, actually. It was invented more than 70 years ago by Thomas Townsend Brown of Ohio. What he figured out was, if you run enough voltage through a capacitor, it would produce a small propelling force. Eventually, in 1952, Brown was able to prove his concept for military officials by using the method to spin metal disks. No moving parts. No gimmicks. Or, so we're told.

But interest in Brown's work has fallen off since then. The inventor didn't help himself much when he the National Investigations Committee. It was a UFO-sniffing, conspiracy theorizing operation that did absolutely no good for Brown's credibility. Still, the findings of his experiment stand.

Or do they? Debunkers say there's a more rational explanation for why high voltage can be used to levitate and move objects through space. Ion winds. Rainer Weiss is an expert on gravity at MIT. "There is nothing mysterious about this at all," he says in the August edition of Wired Magazine.Might this form of anti-gravity someday have a practical application? NASA seems to think so. It's patented "lifter" technology in hopes the space agency will be able to use the technology as a means of moving satellites through space.

Editor's Note: Special thanks to contributor Dave Bender

FMI: www.nasa.gov