When economist Roger Babson was a boy, his oldest sister drowned. His grandson would later die in a similar manner. As an adult, Babson would use the considerable wealth he made predicting the 1929 stock market crash to fund research into defeating what he believed to be the true cause of their deaths once and for all: gravity:
“It seems as if there must be discovered some partial insulator of Gravity which could be used to save millions of lives and prevent accidents,” Babson wrote in “Gravity—Our Enemy Number One,” a 1948 essay that would serve as the founding manifesto for his Gravity Research Foundation.
In the decades since Babson’s moral crusade began, research into anti-gravity — the ability to create a repulsive gravitational force, which is otherwise always attractive — has become inextricably tied up with any number of conspiracy theories, including claims of secret government programs to reverse-engineer flying saucers, as well as the focus of sincere investigations into next-generation propulsion in for-profit commercial enterprise.
So far, the field has skirted the narrow gap between verifiable experimental results and speculative physical theory, but if demonstrated successfully, anti-gravity would revolutionize all of propulsion and spaceflight by producing non-Newtonian propulsion. Newtonian propulsion follows from the law of conservation of momentum, meaning that if you want to push an aircraft or rocket, you need to expel mass in the opposite direction — either the atmosphere, in the case of airplanes, or else oxidizer and fuel, in the case of rockets.
The lifting capacity of rockets is dominated by the tyranny of the rocket equation: to travel farther, you need more fuel, but hauling that extra fuel into space requires even more fuel. Non-Newtonian propulsion would change all this — giving hypothetically unlimited range and lifting capacity for accessing space.
Experiment meets theory
The first person to claim experimental evidence for anti-gravity did so long before Babson set out to combat “that ‘dragon’ Gravity.”
As a teenager in 1921, Thomas Townsend Brown, born to a wealthy construction family in Ohio, was playing around with a high-voltage Coolidge X-ray tube in a laboratory paid for by his parents when he noticed that the tube weighed less than it should have when he placed it upright on a scale.
Brown concluded that high voltages across two asymmetrically shaped conductive plates were producing an “anti-gravitational” effect, either partially shielding Earth’s gravity or else producing a propulsive force directly. Brown named the phenomenon the Biefeld-Brown effect after himself and Paul Alfred Biefeld, a professor of astronomy at Denison University, which Brown had attended for one year.
In reality, what Brown was seeing was thrust produced by the high voltages ionizing surrounding air and then accelerating it with an electric field, which is conventional Newtonian propulsion. His mistake marked the beginning of a long history of confused and difficult-to-reproduce experimental results claiming evidence of anti-gravity and, specifically, a close connection between gravity and electromagnetism, the study of electric and magnetic fields.
As always in advancing physical sciences, experiment goes hand-in-hand with theory, and as chance would have it, in the same year as Brown’s first anti-gravity experiments with high-voltage capacitors, German physicist and mathematician Theodor Kaluza would publish the Kaluza-Klein theory, named after himself and collaborator Oskar Klein, a Swedish theoretical physicist.
The theory attempted to unite gravity and electromagnetism — creating Albert Einstein’s much-sought-after Unified Field Theory — by introducing a fifth dimension. It would also introduce terminology that later became standard table stakes in the world of anti-gravity fringe theories, UFO conspiracies, and CIA disinformation campaigns around secret technology: scalar fields. Scalar fields, in the language of Kaluza-Klein theory, were a new kind of physical field that lived in the fifth dimension. However, in declassified CIA documents, scalar fields were proposed to be a variety of physical fields produced by electromagnetic fields that have canceled each other out.
Einstein himself actively worked on this new Kaluza-Klein theory at Princeton throughout the 1930s, but it never matured into a complete Unified Field Theory. It didn’t explicitly give a recipe for anti-gravity or gravitational repulsive force, either, but subsequent publications suggested ways of getting anti-gravity-like effects from it by introducing additional novelties, like modified black holes.
UFO mania
Although Kaluza-Klein theory wasn’t supported by subsequent developments in experimental physics — it predicted a successive spacing of particle masses not found in collider experiments, for example — the potential link between gravity and electromagnetism surged in the popular imagination during the UFO mania of the 1950s.
Most people think the UFO craze began with the Roswell incident in 1947, but it actually began a few weeks prior, when recreational pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying by Mount Rainier in Washington State and claimed to see nine crescent-shaped objects flying at incredible speeds. He described their motion as like “saucers skipping on water.”
The term “flying saucer” was coined, and later, the US Air Force claimed to recover a “flying disc” at Roswell, only to retract the claim and say it was a weather balloon. Still, sightings of flying saucers and UFOs surged to such an extent across America in the next 10 years that the US Air Force set up a dedicated unit just to keep track of them all.
How would those flying saucers operate? Why, of course, with anti-gravity technology.
In 1956, Young Men magazine would publish the now-internet-famous article “The G-Engines Are Coming,” describing the future of anti-gravity propulsion. The article was intended as a work of science fiction, but some internet audiences have since reinterpreted it as evidence that anti-gravity engines were an active area of technology development and in the public sphere, but have since been covered up by governmental forces.
Thomas Townsend Brown joined the UFO mania when he founded the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), a nonprofit dedicated to investigating and documenting UFO phenomena. Despite the NICAP becoming among the most-respected citizen-led initiatives interested in scientific inquiry into UFOs, Brown’s tenure as its leader only lasted a year, and he left in disgrace.
His crime? Diverting organization funds to support his personal anti-gravity research. Unfortunately for Brown’s legacy, NASA Glenn Research Center conducted a comprehensive review of asymmetrical capacitors for propulsion in 2004 and concluded that there is no thrust unless the capacitors are generating an ionic wind — meaning the effect is traditional Newtonian propulsion and not anti-gravity.
Levitating superconductors
In the 1990s, experimental evidence for anti-gravity once again appeared in the scientific literature, with Russian physicist Yevgeny Podkletnov writing the most prominent paper. It claimed to describe a way to block the force of gravity (gravitational shielding) using superconductors, materials that transmit electricity with no resistance. More precisely, Podkletnov levitated a disc of a superconducting material above a magnet, spun it at several thousand revolutions per minute (rpm), and reported that its weight dropped by 0.3% to 2%.
Chinese-American physicist Ning Li put forward similar claims of gravitational shielding, this time claiming that any material object, like a bowling ball, would remain suspended in place above a high-temperature superconducting disc. In 2001, her company, AC Gravity, received a $450,000 Department of Defense grant to continue its anti-gravity research.
Li vanished from all academic correspondence with collaborators in 2002, moved to China, and passed away in 2021. Podkletnov’s results failed to replicate in other experimental physics laboratories when investigated by researchers at NASA, and so this line of experimental evidence seems to have gone cold.
The question remains: Could spinning superconductors actually provide an anti-gravitational effect?
Ning Li’s proposed mechanism for her observations was using gravitoelectromagnetism, which is a set of equations taken from Einstein’s field equations for General Relativity. The argument here is that if you take these equations in an application where field strengths are quite weak and things are moving slowly (i.e., not close to the speed of light, where things become relativistic), you get a set of linearized equations that are simpler to solve and, more importantly, can be manipulated into a form that looks just like Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism, where instead of moving charges creating magnetic fields, moving masses create gravitomagnetic fields.
The issue, however, is that it would require astronomically large densities of mass moving at incredible speeds to get any appreciable gravitational effect. What makes Ning Li’s proposals impossible to rule out just yet is that her real claim was that the coherent macroscopic quantum states produced in a superconductor might affect gravity in a way that is far beyond what is predicted by normal matter moving around. Currently, we don’t have a theory that accurately explains how quantum-mechanically behaving matter, like superconducting current, interacts with regular gravity. Podkletnov’s results didn’t have a supporting theory proposed, just a claimed experimental result that was not reproducible in other laboratories.
Again, the claim for anti-gravity falls into the valley of doubt between as-yet incomplete physical theories relating quantum mechanics to gravity and experimental techniques that proved impossible to replicate. While Ning Li’s claim was quite strong — being able to suspend a very heavy object like a bowling ball using gravitomagnetism — Podkletnov’s claim was much weaker, a mass reduction of a couple percent.
Dynamic nuclear polarization
There have been attempts at explaining the possibility of anti-gravity that do away with all of Einstein’s General Relativity, however, and approach the subject of gravity from a completely different theoretical basis.
In 1981, while working at Boeing Aerospace, physicist Frederick Alzofon presented a paper claiming anti-gravity could be achieved with then-current technology — an outstanding claim — by making an even more outstanding claim: gravity was not a fundamental force, but rather emerged from statistical alignment of nuclear spins relative to external masses.
An analogy can be made here to more familiar gyroscopes. A gyroscope resists changes to the axis it is spinning around because of angular momentum — it is hard to push sideways, but easy to move up and down along its own axis. If you had a big ball of gyroscopes all pointing in different directions, it would be difficult to move it in any direction because it would require trying to change the axis of some of the gyroscopes. Alzofon hypothesized that the nuclear spin of atomic nuclei acted similarly in materials, producing an inertia-like force by containing a lot of spin-angular momentum. Furthermore, if you aligned all the spins in a single direction, you could effectively reduce the inertia in that direction.
This flavor of anti-gravity — known as Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP) — stands in stark contrast to the others that suppose some electromagnetic-like phenomenon can be created in gravitational fields. In the early 1990s, descriptions of bench-tests circulated in Electric Spacecraft Journal claimed a temporary weight loss of up to 17% by applying microwaves that could temporarily align nuclear spins in a material. While there haven’t been any well-received and peer-reviewed replications of this experiment — not to mention the theoretical basis for it standing far afield of mainstream physics — there are groups currently investigating DNP, like New Jersey-based startup Falcon Space.
The DoD and disinformation
So far, we have experimental evidence for gravitational repulsion that fails to hold up under the scrutiny of replication experiments and a smattering of theoretical physics to support it that isn’t accepted as mainstream science.
Enter from stage left in the anti-gravity discussion: the Department of Defense and what can most accurately be described as either admission of “Star Trek”-like technological capabilities or a sustained effort at militarized scientific disinformation.
In 2016, the US Patent Office approved an application titled “Craft Using an Inertial Mass Reduction Device.” Filed by the US Department of Navy with Salvatore Pais listed as the inventor, the patent makes the bold implication that anti-gravity technology is fully mature and already embodied in a functional craft. The office denied the application twice for insufficient detail for replication, but decided to approve it after Navy CTO James Sheehy declared that the invention was feasible and cited international competition from China.
The patent claims the craft operates by polarizing the surrounding empty space with high-strength electric fields by reaching what’s known as the Schwinger Limit. At that point, an electric field becomes so strong it starts creating electron-positron pairs of particles — a rare instance demonstrating Einstein’s equation that states the equivalence between energy and mass.
It’s orders of magnitude beyond any engineered limits in many directions at once.
What is contentious about the Pais patent is that it proposes a means of polarizing the vacuum in a manner that seems impossible from an engineering perspective. For starters, the Schwinger limit is theoretical — it has yet to be reached by any published experimental research laboratory. Lasers typically produce electric field strengths orders of magnitude higher than microwaves, and the world’s most powerful lasers are still several orders of magnitude from reaching the Schwinger limit.
Hypothetically, a superconducting resonant cavity could act as a store of energy, letting the electric field grow stronger than the applied field from a microwave. However, there are some serious engineering limitations.
First, the applied microwave power would have to be hundreds of gigawatts, while the strongest microwave gyrotrons in the world, which provide heating for the fusion plasma at ITER, are in the megawatt range. Even if you could apply that much power into such a cavity, the superconducting material would rapidly quench, meaning carry too much current, and fall into normal-conducting mode — at which point it would explode. Even if it didn’t quench, the electrostatic pressure against the cavity walls would be quadrillions times greater than what tempered steel could withstand.
It’s just orders of magnitude beyond any engineered limits in many directions at once. Despite the CTO of the Navy’s insistence that the patent has national security importance, it expired due to non-payment of fees in 2018.
The CIA has declassified documents linking scalar waves to seemingly everything: propulsion, directed energy weapons, magical healing…
So, why would the Department of Defense intentionally publish a bogus technical document claiming “Star Trek”-level technology? The likeliest reason is to intimidate foreign adversaries or send them on a long and impossible-to-debug experimental testing campaign.
A great example of government-produced scientific disinformation is the literature around scalar wave technology. Recalling that scalar fields were originally described in Kaluza-Klein theory, the first physics theory claiming to unite electromagnetism and gravity, the CIA has declassified a number of documents linking scalar waves to seemingly everything: propulsion, directed energy weapons, magical healing, long-range lossless energy transmission, and more. The most recent publication on scalar waves was from 2024 and written by four intelligence officers — it gives a brief historical overview of scalar waves, connecting them to Nikola Tesla, Einstein’s Unified Field Theory, and engineer Hal Puthoff and zero-point energy.
This isn’t to say there’s nothing behind scalar waves, but the majority of publications on the topic are from former military intelligence officers and not experimental physicists.
The modern era
A discussion of anti-gravity research wouldn’t be complete without elaborating on Hal Puthoff, who has recently appeared on podcasts, including “The Joe Rogan Experience” and “Ecosystemic Futures,” to describe his past work investigating topics like remote-viewing and the US’s unidentified flying object crash-retrieval program with Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
Puthoff has written several notable papers on the topics of extraterrestrials and UFOs, most significantly 2010’s “Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering,” which lays down the theoretical framework to understand Salvatore Pais’s 2016 patent. In it, Puthoff describes in the most general way how inducing positive spacetime curvature, like around a stellar mass, produces gravitational attraction and time dilation, as well as red-shifting electromagnetic waves, while inducing negative curvature — something speculative — would theoretically produce gravitational repulsion, time expansion, and blue-shifting electromagnetic waves.
Puthoff clearly states that creating negative pressure would require some kind of negative energy density or exotic matter, while the Pais patent claims that an effective negative energy density can be achieved through local vacuum polarization in conjunction with spinning conductive surfaces — the details are somewhat vague. Both methods require energy densities orders of magnitude beyond what any experimental research lab has achieved, though, and there’s no verified means of producing negative energy density.
Puthoff isn’t the only active anti-gravity researcher. The Alternative Propulsion Engineering Conference is an active community of hundreds of engineers and scientists eager to investigate non-Newtonian propulsion, with many of them exploring electrogravitics, or mechanisms that produce gravitational forces through purely electromagnetic means. Puthoff discussed this emerging field of electrogravitics and extended electrodynamics during his appearance on “Ecosystemic Futures.”
As previously mentioned, Falcon Space is currently investigating DNP and superconductors to reproduce past claimed experimental results in anti-gravity. A smattering of other companies are also actively researching anti-gravity propulsion systems, including Australia’s AGES Tech and California-based Hoverr Inc — in 2023, the latter received a $275,000 Small Business Innovation Research Phase I grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to pursue its design.
Perhaps the most novel recent development in the field of anti-gravity research, though, is Exodus Propulsion, a new company founded by Charles Buhler, a NASA engineer and the lead scientist of the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center.
Buhler isn’t your ordinary fringe scientist claiming to have achieved a miracle. He’s NASA’s leading expert on electrostatics and has worked on the Space Shuttle, Hubble Space Telescope, and the International Space Station. His team has been investigating the area of propellantless propulsion for over two decades, and their initial results were tiny, but promising: In 2023, their 40-gram electrostatic propulsion unit experienced one full gravity of acceleration, meaning it overcame the strength of Earth’s own gravity and held itself aloft. This gives it a thrust-to-weight ratio of one, and while that’s nowhere near the thrust-to-weight ratio of one of SpaceX’s Raptor 3 engines — 133 — it would represent genuinely new physics.
Exodus Propulsion has filed a patent application for the key physics claims from its proposed anti-gravity propulsion, and it’s reminiscent of Brown’s original asymmetric capacitors, but different in the details. Though by far the simplest claim for a non-Newtonian propulsion device — and by the most relevantly qualified person to claim it — it involves what looks like high-school level physics along with a couple of errors in physics reasoning in the patent. It may be possible that their experimental results are a valid measurement of some force, but it would seemingly defy elementary-level electrostatics to have the correct physical interpretation of where the thrust is coming from.
Enemy number one
The quest for anti-gravity is more than just an effort to prove theories at the frontiers of physics — or enact revenge for the death of a loved one. If successfully mastered, it would forever change the course of civilization and humanity’s ability to explore the stars.
One of the biggest challenges in space exploration is the need to carry fuel wherever you go to provide the raw mass required by Newtonian propulsion. Take, for instance, the current impossibility of visiting even the Earth’s closest star, Alpha Centauri. The fastest human-made object is NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which, after a close flyby with the sun, reached speeds as fast as 430,000 mph. It would take the Parker Solar Probe 6,800 years to reach Alpha Centauri.
An anti-gravity spacecraft, however, could hypothetically turn megawatts of electrical energy from a nuclear reactor, be it fission or fusion, directly into thrust without needing to carry a great deal of extra dumb mass to be used as propellant. At one gravity of constant acceleration, this ship could reach Alpha Centauri in six years, while passengers would only experience 3.8 years due to time dilation. More than that, such a ship could reach the center of the galaxy, some 26,000 light years away, in only 20 years of shipboard time.
Is such a thing even possible? The Pentagon has released videos documenting what’s known as the Tic Tac incident, involving the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, along with Congressional testimony of former pilots who observed Tic Tac-shaped craft achieving between 50 and 5,000 gravities of acceleration without producing a sonic boom. Such a craft could only be propelled by some currently unknown technology involving gravity manipulation.
At 50 gravities, the center of the galaxy is six months away; at 5,000 gravities, it’s only 2.6 days away. The technological and theoretical barrier between humanity and this “Star Trek” future is, and always will be, gravity, our enemy number one.
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