Nick Cook author of 'The hunt for zero point'
· Nick Cook is an award-winning defence and aerospace journalist. For the past 15 years he has been Aviation Editor and Aerospace Consultant of the world-renowned Jane's Defence Weekly - the bible of the international defence industry. His ground-breaking, exclusive stories for Jane's have included reports on Russian secret weapons and a classified operation to rescue US hostages in Iran. Both made headlines all over the world.
· His stories have prompted questions in the House of Commons and have formed the basis of briefing documents for the Prime Minister's Office.
· He is a regular contributor to The Financial Times and articles by him have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, Daily Mail, The Sunday Telegraph and The Scotsman. He is quoted on aerospace and defence matters in news media around the world.
· Cook frequently comments on defence and security issues for BBC News, ITN, Sky News, CNN and the BBC World Service. He has appeared on The Today Programme, The World At One and Newsnight. His analysis was sought by UK, US and other world news media during the 1991 Gulf War and 1999 Kosovo conflict.
· He is a three-time winner of the prestigious Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards in the Defence, Business and Technology categories. In his 18 year career, Cook has visited the world's leading defence establishments and has gained access to numerous top secret military facilities and bases in the US and former Soviet Union.
· Cook's previous books have been published by Macmillan, Penguin and Little Brown in the UK and St Martin's Press in the USA. He has written 2 Sunday Times Top Ten Bestsellers. 'The Hunt for Zero Point', his sixth book, follows a ten-year investigation into an undocumented phenomenon.
· Cook's two hour documentary for the Discovery Channel, 'Billion Dollar Secret', written and presented by him, detailed for the first time the secret inner workings of America's classified weapons establishment.
· Cook, 41, lives in London with his wife and two children. He was educated at Eton and has a degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Exeter University.
Newton's Laws, Upended - S.Adams, 08.12.02
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/0812/128.html
"The Nazis, General Electric and Sperry-Rand all sought to harness antigravity. Next up: Boeing?
Author Nick Cook has all the qualifications of a hard-nosed reporter. For more than a decade he has worked as aviation editor at Jane's Defence Weekly, the respected (if mind-numbingly technical) trade journal for the defense industry. So why has he penned a book on a topic usually confined to pulp sci-fi--antigravity? In The Hunt for Zero Point (Broadway, $26), due out this month, he chronicles his quest to show that Newton's laws have been annulled. It's a dramatic, entertaining tale, with a clear lesson: Corporations, universities and governments never tire of throwing good money at bad science.
His story starts in 1992, when a photocopy of a 1956 news clipping is left mysteriously on his desk at Jane's. "The G-Engines Are Coming!" shouts its headline. There's an illustration of a football-shaped craft hovering above the ground. The text predicts a future of "weightless airliners and spaceships." More intriguing are the enthusiastic predictions from such esteemed figures of the day as George S. Trimble of Martin Aircraft and Lawrence D. Bell, founder of Bell Aircraft, who proclaims, "We're already working on nuclear fuels and equipment to cancel out gravity." Using the Jane's library, Cook learns that big American companies, including Sperry-Rand and General Electric, seriously pursued "electrogravitics [a.k.a. antigravity] research."
He scours the Internet and public archives, phones contacts in the defense industry. He talks to Evgeny Podkletnov, a Russian physicist who claims to have achieved antigravity effects in his lab. Cook even delves into a mystery dating from the last days of World War II, when Allied pilots reported seeing UFOs over Germany.
The Nazi angle takes Cook to Austria, where he visits the family of the late Viktor Schauberger, a forestry engineer and inventor who experimented with a machine called a Repulsine. According to Schauberger's copious notes, the Nazi-funded device generated such a powerful levitational force that it shot upward and smashed into a hangar ceiling. Cook admits he doesn't completely grasp the physics, writing, "The primary levitating force was due to ... a reaction between the air molecules in their newly excited state and the body of the machine itself."
Huh? And why would the normally skeptical Cook believe the unverified notes of a forestry engineer transplanted far beyond his ken? Because, says Cook, "People don't throw money at programs unless they think they work"--blithely ignoring humankind's propensity for taking daft things seriously. Case in point: cold fusion, as well as other screwball free-energy schemes funded by corporations or governments. University of Maryland physicist Robert L. Park has documented such projects in Voodoo Science (Oxford University Press, $15). Park, who read a prepublication copy of Zero Point, chuckles at some of Cook's conclusions. "In my book I discuss something I call a 'belief gene.' This guy Cook's got it. He's simply prepared to believe anything."
What about Cook's reporting? He describes, for example, antigravity projects now under way at NASA and at BAE Systems in the U.K. FORBES' phone calls to these organizations verified Cook's facts, though folks were awfully careful with their language. Ronald Evans, the physicist in charge at BAE, says, "We don't use the word [antigravity]. It would make us look like lunatics." Funding is small--$3.25 million for BAE's and NASA's work combined, over seven years--but the fact that money gets spent at all is testimony to the prevalence of the belief gene. The U.S. Congress keeps dollars flowing. Since 2000 it has allocated an additional $4.8 million for antigravity research. In a July issue of Jane's, Cook reports Boeing conducted experiments involving antigravity as recently as 1999 and remains intensely interested in further research. (Boeing confirms this, but, like BAE, disdains to use the a-word.)
Cook is an engaging writer, and he peppers his high-tech detective story with digressions both rich and entertaining. His book is a fun read. But it lacks a certain ... gravity."
Maybe "Cook" should be spelled, "KOOK". Or maybe he's just a KOOK baiter. :D