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

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Imagine the power, economic and military, that would fall into the hands of the person who figured out how to bypass the ordinary laws of physics, defy gravity, and travel near the speed of light.

Though it sometimes seems to fall in the realm of science fiction more than pure science, aviation-technology journalist Nick Cook's intriguing tale involves the long quest to develop antigravity vehicles and the sometimes eccentric characters who have played a part in it: Nazi rocket engineers, backyard inventors, NASA scientists, conspiracy theorists, and UFO watchers among them. The last group figures, Cook explains, because the ideal craft for "electrogravitic reaction" would take the form of a disc, a design consideration seen in the shape of current stealth aircraft. It could just be, the author suggests, that what witnesses have taken to be flying saucers might instead be antigravity-aircraft prototypes, though he cautions that "the subject is too complex ... to conform to a single explanation."

And therein hangs a good part of this always interesting, if admittedly speculative, story, which, regardless of the truth of the matter (or, perhaps, antimatter), will appeal to techies and Trekkies alike. --Gregory McNamee

From 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.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Broadway; 1 edition (August 13, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767906276
• ISBN-13: 978-0767906272
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (87 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #47,059 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This Is How "Black Programs" Really Are, November 21, 2006

By	Terry Sunday (El Paso, Texas United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

When I first came across Nick Cook's "The Hunt for Zero Point" in a bookstore, I scoffed at the subtitle: "Inside the classified world of antigravity technology." As an aerospace engineer, historian and dyed-in-the-wool skeptic, I figured it was probably full of mystical, pseudo-scientific nonsense that would appeal only to those with absolutely no understanding of how the world works. Surely, I thought, it would offer nothing of value to knowledgeable, sophisticated, discriminating readers. In fact, I initially lumped it into the same category as Philip Corso's "The Day After Roswell," which remains possibly the most shamelessly self-serving, manifestly ridiculous and blatantly fabricated "true story" ever concocted.

Then, later, I checked a copy of "The Hunt for Zero Point" out of the library and read it. My opinion is now completely different. I highly recommend it if you are interested in learning about an obscure, previously unknown aspect of aerospace history that, if true, has major implications for the future of nearly every high-technology enterprise on Earth.

Mr. Cook has impressive qualifications. He served for over a decade as the Aviation Editor of the highly respected aerospace journal "Jane's Defence Weekly." His knowledge of the people, companies, hardware, technology and politics of today's "military/industrial complex" is extraordinary. Quite simply, he gets it right. A useful way to gauge the knowledge and attention to detail that an author brings to his work is to check if he defines acronyms correctly. Mr. Cook does. As best I can tell, he also gets right every person, place, date, event and company that he mentions--at least, the ones that I could verify. Finally--and this is most unusual--he even gets the name of one of America's largest aerospace corporations right. The name is "Lockheed Martin," not "Lockheed-Martin." Virtually every author who mentions the company inserts a hyphen in the name that should not be there. "Attention to detail" means getting things like this right, and Mr. Cook does so.

His hunt for "zero point" began in the early 1990s when a copy of a 1956 magazine article mysteriously appeared on his desk in his London office. Entitled "The G-Engines Are Coming," the article stimulated him to seek answers to questions regarding super-secret "black programs" that, before, he had not even thought to ask. He pored through dusty Government archives, had clandestine meetings with secretive characters and saw potential contacts suddenly silenced. His quest took him from the "edge of tomorrow" at the legendary "Skunk Works" in Palmdale, California, to the ruins of the infamous Nazi underground rocket-production factory, the "Mittelwerk," in Germany's Harz Mountains, where he tried to pick up the 50-year-old trail of the elusive SS Obergruppenfuehrer Hans Kammler. Kammler was one of the least-known but most-powerful men in the last days of the Third Reich. He reportedly ran an ultra-secret SS "special projects office" tasked to develop advanced weapons--weapons that could turn the tide of the War, and that were so far ahead of their time that even today they remain the stuff of science fiction.

"The Hunt for Zero Point" is more of a scientific detective story than a revelation of secret "antigravity" technology. Taken as such, it is an excellent read. Whether Mr. Cook's conclusions are convincing is up to each reader to decide. But he does offer several insights that cannot be disputed. One is that "they" deliberately put forth "disinformation" (i.e., "lies") to impede the chances that researchers into "black programs" will discover the truth about them. Another is that companies sometimes pursue lines of research that, unbeknownst to them, are already active in the "black world." When this happens, they are "brought into" the program and, very effectively, forced to shut up as far as the outside world is concerned. These are two more things that Mr. Cook gets right.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Written by a Jane's aerospace writer..., May 10, 2008

By	KnottyFella (Phoenix, AZ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology (Paperback)

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This book was written by a British aerospace journalist that writes for Jane's. If you are familiar with Jane's then `nuff said. If not, let me put it this way... if Jane's publishes it, you can bet you life on it; and somebody, some where is doing just that as you read this.

Jane's Publications are the gold standard in military technology. End of story.

Let me grossly over simplify, everything in our universe is made from energy in some form...atoms and their components, dark matter... zero point is about tapping into this energy. This book states that this connection has already been made by Nicola Tesla, and that others have done a great deal more in developing this technology.

50 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nazis in the Sky with Diamonds, February 24, 2004

By	Kevin Seeger "DudeSeeg" (Woodland Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Hunt for Zero Point : Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology (Hardcover)

This is an interesting book. The author is a British aerospace journalist, who is up on his cutting edge technology. The subject is his personal quest to uncover, between assignments, the covert science of our government which operates in the "black" beyond public scrutiny. The style is a first person action narrative in which most of the action is a guy researching on the internet and making important phone calls while his plane is boarding. This is where I knock off the 5th star, as a journalist adventure story written by a technician is sometimes not such a page turner.

The titular zero point is the inexhaustable energy that exists in the quantum foam of our universe, which thus far has been proven to be there, but has not yet been harnessed. Obviously, the government who gets at it first will rule the planet for some time.

Cook does some stellar research to make real world sense out of the legends and myths that have arisen from the ashes of WWII. He discovers the truth behind the rumors that the Nazis were building flying saucers towards the end of the war. He also reveals the great genius of the American conquistadors was in their highly efficient absorbtion of German secret technology and scientists at the close of the war.

We all know that the Germans invented (discovered?) quantum mechanics in the early part of the century, and the Nazis had workable technology far in advance of the Allies during the war. We also know that the greatest of the German scientists did work for America upon conclusion of the war, and were the engineers that put us on the moon a couple of decades later. What we don't know is what else they were working on.

The best part of this book for me was the introduction to the little remembered Nazi, Hans Kammler, who was literally the architect of the concentration camps. By the end of the war, Kammler had usurped all of the power that Himmler's SS had usurped from Hitler. Kammler pioneered the state-within-a-state concept with his unregulated think tank in Prague conducting experiments at the very fringe of conventional science. There is compelling evidence that Kammler would have been among the war criminals repatriated to America, and with him came his technology, and frighteningly, his state-within-a-state design, which came to be the modern structure of our military-industrial complex. The good news is that he was by all rights belonging to the Soviets, as they were promised the Czech Republic, but in a good showing of bad faith, Patton went in and got the goods before the Reds arrived.

The final analysis seems to be that anti-gravity is a workable technology, but not one that we yet fully understand. Mass reduction can be achieved in the laboratory, as can levitation and transmutation of metals, but it is unpredictable and more akin to poltergeist activity than science. The science will not go mainstream until there is an easily digestable formula which underpins and predicts consistent results.

Meanwhile, the ongoing experimentation of anti-gravity propulsion takes place at such black locations as Area 51, and most probably accounts for the majority of UFO sightings around the globe. The day does not seem far off when some scientist will successfully sap into the zero point energy, which was predicted by Nikola Tesla a century ago. Let's hope it's the good guys (private sector Americans) that get there first. Unlimited energy = good thing. Controlled by Naziesque government rogues = bad thing.

Another interesting aspect of this cutting edge technology is the odd effect on space-time that can be achieved with high-RPM superconductive magnetrons. Is it possible that in attempting to build a viable flying saucer, the Nazis were actually attempting to build a time machine? It is notable that many alien abduction experiences claim to have seen soldiers in uniform aboard the offending ship. Betty Hill's 1961 account being the first and most famous. Strange days indeed. Mengele escaped to Argentina and Kammler escaped to the 5th dimension, only to torment us with continued genetic experimentation. Most peculiar, Momma. I'd like to presume the Nazis were defeated and not that they now control space-time.