Fox Mulder, Call Your Office! The new Spielberg marathon mini-series "Taken" begins with allied fighter pilots glimpsing strange lights above Nazi Germany. This actually did happen, and is a reason why, Susan Adams reported last summer in Forbes magazine, the U.S. military has spent $4.8 million over the last two years researching ways to nullify gravity!
Apparently, some within the Air Force are haunted by the statements of allied pilots who swore they saw UFOs above Germany in the closing days of World War II. Since the concept of the UFO did not then exist in popular culture -- the first publicized UFO sighting was in 1947 -- the fact that several fliers independently reported similar-looking airborne craft without wings has long fueled conspiracy theories that the Nazis invented an antigravity device just before the war ended. (The sightings were not of the German Me262 jet, which allied pilots were trained to identify and attack first.) TMQ feels sure that if the Nazis did possess an antigravity device, it would have been sold to some government or used to barter the freedom of various war criminals, as became of all other leftover Third Reich technology. Unless ... the Nazis sold it to the aliens. Scully, are you listening?
An Air Force contractor told Adams, "We don't use the word antigravity, it would make us look like lunatics." The preferred term of art is "electrogravitics." But why apologize for antigravity research? TMQ would like to point out that an antigravity effect almost certainly exists!
During the 1990s, astronomers discovered that cosmic expansion is not slowing down, as the velocity of the Big Bang peters out; rather, the galaxies are racing outward at ever-increasing speed. This has caused current speculation (read a summary here or incredible detail from Cal Tech here) that as much as 70 percent of the power of the universe exists as "dark energy" that repels rather than attracts matters.
Einstein anticipated this decades ago, saying that in order to prevent gravity from collapsing the cosmos back onto itself, there must be a "cosmological constant" that repels mass. Now it's looking like "dark energy" may be the opposite of gravity in every way. Not only repelling rather than attracting; gravity increases as distance declines, whereas "dark energy" seems to increase as distance increases. This may be why cosmic expansion is speeding up -- the galaxies keep receding farther apart, and the farther apart the they get, the stronger "dark energy" becomes.
TMQ loves the dark-energy idea because it means physicists and cosmologists, with their impressive observatories and billion-dollar particle accelerators and multiple PhDs, nevertheless have no idea where 70 percent of the universe is. Modern high-tech physics can't find 70 percent of the universe! Anyway, dark energy sounds like an antigravity phenomenon to TMQ, and our descendants may consider this child's play.
