Which Proposals and Claimaints are Credible

Although information on all of the claimants listed on Cox's website is available by searching the Internet, I am compelled for reasons of time and space to limit my comments on the various claimants and evaluate only those to whom I devoted a paragraph above.
First we must eliminate those whose claims are simply incredible. This is easier than it looks. Free energy, zero point, over unity, and perpetual motion are impossible according to well known physical laws, and so are 'health effects' from exposure to such devices. Therefore, reluctantly in some cases, we must eliminate Maxwell, Tesla, Teller, and Einstein. Maxwell, Maxwell, Tesla and Einstein are dead, Teller is not working on antigravity.

Keely and Bearden are (reluctantly) eliminated because of the incredible nature of their claims and, above all, the claimed health benefits. Bielek and Carr have to go for the same or similar reasons as do Lazar and DePalma.

Colonel Corso and Edgar Fouche come across as highly credible at first. However, having studied their claims in some detail, I conclude that they are dissimulating [lying, in other words], and the only motive I can see is the possibility of selling their books and memoirs (a bit late for Corso) to the admittedly gullible"warp drive-UFO-alien-believers" (anyone reading this web page, in other words) who have become increasingly more sophisticated and demanding.

The reason I do not believe them is that Biefeld, Brown, Aspden, Wallace and Laithwaite, among many others, not to mention Tesla could have come up with a levitation system that (once co-opted by the military and classified) would require testing at secret bases such as Area 51. There is no need for back engineered alien technology,so why assume it.

That leaves Wallace, Searl, Biefeld, Brown, possibly Carr, Aspden, Laithwaite, Podkletnov, Bettels, Woodward, Petrus, and of course, Hegland (me).

Most of the devices designed, claimed, or actually built by both the credible and non-credible claimants discussed above share certain features which occur so frequently we almost come to expect them. They are:

1) spin, rotation at high speed, gyroscopic action,
2) superconductivity,
3) magnetism,
4) exotic rare elements, and
5) something called "electrogravity."

In other words, it appears that everyone who has worked seriously on this problem believes that somehow gravity is related to magnetism and that superconductivity coupled with enough spin, possibly at relativistic velocities, will enable one to levitate (defined as rising slowly and controllably, as opposed to blasting off (as in rockets) or taking off (as in airplanes). Unfortunately, relativistic speed, meaning attaining a significant fraction of the velocity of light, is beyond present and any conceivable future technology. Consider, for example, that in the secret aircraft claimed by Fouche with a diameter of 600 feet whose periphery is a mercury plasma acceleration tunnel, the mercury ions when accelerated up to 50,000 rpm are travelling at a speed of only 300 miles per second -- fast but hardly relativistic (185,700 miles per second too slow).

Moreover, the centrifugal force on any object, say a large disk, spinning at even 10,000 rpm would suffice to cause it to disintegrate, above a certain radius. There is no material known that cannot be caused to fly apart if fashioned into a disk or wheel and spun at sufficiently high speeds; the enemy here, called centrifugal force, is actually our old nemesis, inertia. The particles (atoms, crystals etc.) of which the spinning disk is ultimately composed tend to continue the linear path in which they last received acceleration. At high enough angular speeds this suffices to break the bonds between the particles so the disk disintegrates.

Therefore, an antigravity device cannot be simply a huge gyroscope with superconducting magnets. The claim of mercury plasma, in my view, was "borrowed" from the "Mahabharata" which states that the flying machines of the Hindu gods, call 'vimanas' were powered by 'quicksilver.' Therefore, it may be entirely fictional, and the 89% weight reduction claimed for it by Fouche and Corso may be false.

It seems more likely that the various "Aurora" craft are advanced terrestrial designs(think of a 600 foot triangular blimp/or dirigible made of kevlar) propelled by scramjet technology.

Therefore, it seems to my biased eyes, that the tantalizing glimpses which these brave pioneers above have afforded us into levitation and gravity control were doomed to failure a priori, because these men (if I have overlooked any significant contributions by women, I beg their pardon) have accepted without question the conventional definitions of gravity. If gravity is a force of attraction between particles of matter, then reversing or negating it is impossible. If it is the slope of the einsteinian space warp, the only direction is down!! The researchers have also sought to overcome gravity by postulating its negative counterpart, just as magnets have
polarity, positive and negative poles, all we have to do is create or generate gravity of opposite "sign" and we can traverse the universe. This approach, too, is doomed to failure.

WHAT IS GRAVITY?

Besides the two most widely accepted theories of gravitation, the mutually exclusive! newtonian 'attraction between particles of matter' and the einsteinian 'warped spacetime' in the theoretical physics journals we find other definitions based on quantum physical theories written in jargon intelligible only to a select few and for that reason probably of no value and equally probably wrong.
If we are to understand the most important phenomenon of our universe, the factor holding it together, we must be able to express the nature of the phenomenon in words as well as by mathematical formulae and the explanation should be not only brief but also simple and credible because self proving. The explanation of what gravity is should account for the behavior of unsupported bodies near the earth as well as the motion of the various celestial bodies (artificial satellites, meteors, comets, moons, terrestial planets, jovian planets, brown dwarf, white dwarf, main sequence yellow, red giant, blue giant stars, galaxies, clusters, superclusters).

Unfortunately, the existing hypotheses not only provide unconvincing or incredible explanations for the behavior of celestial bodies, they also make conflicting claims, so that the fields of astrophysics and celestial mechanics are broken up into squabbling schools of thought, each dominated by a giant ego (Carl Sagan, Weinberg, and Stephen Hawking come to mind). I have collected some of the anomalies in astrophysical theory over the past several years, which I present below, as a brief digression; this is not an exhaustive listing and the reader can probably think of many more with little effort: