Herald Tribune "Conquest of Gravity" series

Herald Tribune "Conquest of Gravity" series

Newspaper	New York Herald Tribune
Author	Ansel E. Talbert, military and aviation editor
Dates	20, 21 and 22 November 1955
Headlines	"Conquest of Gravity Aim of Top Scientists in U.S."; "Space-Ship Marvel Seen If Gravity Is Outwitted"; "New Air Dream – Planes Flying Outside Gravity"
Named	Convair, Lear, Sikorsky, Sperry-Rand, General Dynamics, Avro Canada, the Glenn L. Martin Company; William Lear, Lawrence Bell, Igor Sikorsky, Clarence Birdseye, George Trimble
Outcome	Research helped revive general relativity; no working anti-gravity technology emerged
Date	20 November 1955
Topics	Beings & bodies (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Government programs (topic)
People	Ansel Talbert, Nick Cook
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 54
Year	1955 in UFO history
Timeline	1955 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	8

On Sunday 20 November 1955 the New York Herald Tribune began a three-part series by its aviation editor, Ansel Talbert, under the front-page headline "Conquest of Gravity Aim of Top Scientists in U.S.".^[1][2] Talbert reported that leading aircraft and electronics companies, and some prominent scientists, were backing research into the nature of gravity in the hope of one day controlling it.^[2][4] The series reflected a real burst of corporate and military funding for gravitational physics in the mid-1950s. That funding helped revive the study of general relativity, but no working anti-gravity technology emerged from it.^[2]

The series

The three articles ran on 20, 21 and 22 November 1955:^[2][4]

• Part one. "Conquest of Gravity Aim of Top Scientists in U.S." ran on pages 1 and 36. It carried photographs of the Convair engineers Charles Dozier and Martin Kaplan conducting an experiment towards the control of gravity.^[1] It also pictured George S. Trimble Jr., the Martin Company's vice-president for advanced design, who was organising a research institute to pursue theoretical work on gravity.
• Part two. "Space-Ship Marvel Seen If Gravity Is Outwitted" ran on 21 November.
• Part three. "New Air Dream – Planes Flying Outside Gravity" ran on 22 November.

Transcriptions of all three are online. The originals are in ProQuest's historical Herald Tribune archive.^[2][6] A transcription on the Thomas Townsend Brown family website now shows only the site's banner. A Drive image of the front page and a related academic paper could not be retrieved.^[1][5][7]

Who was named

Talbert reported interest from Convair, Lear, Sikorsky, Sperry-Rand, General Dynamics and Avro Canada, as well as Martin.^[2] The people he quoted:^[2][4]

• Lawrence Bell of Bell Aircraft believed it was possible "to cancel out gravity instead of fighting it".
• George Trimble thought the job could be done in about the time it took to build the first atomic bomb "if enough trained scientific brainpower" worked on it. He said "the biggest deterrent to scientific progress is a refusal of some people, including scientists, to believe that things which seem amazing can really happen".
• Grover Loening, the Wright brothers' first engineering hire, said he firmly believed man would soon "build an electromagnetic contra-gravity mechanism that works".
• William P. Lear, the Lear electronics chairman and 1950 Collier Trophy winner, said he was convinced it would be possible to create artificial "electro-gravitational fields" whose polarity could be controlled "to cancel out gravity".
• Clarence Birdseye, the frozen-food pioneer, had "become interested in gravitational studies".

Talbert also named Igor Sikorsky, and described the theoretical physicists Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson and John Wheeler as backing gravity research. He stressed that they approached it "only from the standpoint of pure research".^[2]

The second article

The 21 November instalment described visions of "flying vehicles" that would ride Earth's magnetic and gravitational fields, accelerating to thousands of miles an hour without subjecting passengers to G-forces.^[4] It included:^[4]

• A painting. Eugene M. Gluhareff, a California helicopter designer and son of Sikorsky's chief designer, painted a saucer-shaped atomic-electric spaceship propelled by electron beams.
• A stove. An engineer's "electronic stove" floated an aluminium pan two inches above its surface by magnetic repulsion. Talbert noted that no known electromagnet could lift a real aircraft.
• Pascual Jordan. The Hamburg physicist, who believed electromagnetic research might alter the gravitational fields of rotating masses, had just signed a research contract with Martin.
• Sperry. A Sperry guided-missile engineer predicted that ion-electron beam reactors would help conquer space.

The gravity boom

Talbert's reporting reflected a real wave of funding:^[2]

• RIAS. George Bunker, Martin's president, founded the Research Institute for Advanced Studies (RIAS) in Baltimore in 1955.
• Witten. The physicist Louis Witten, whom Trimble recruited, recalled in 2013 that Trimble "had the wonderful idea which was to develop anti-gravity". Witten said he balked, but took the job and did theoretical gravity research there under a contract from Wright Field.
• Wright-Patterson. The Air Force set up a General Physics Laboratory in its Aeronautical Research Laboratories at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Joshua Goldberg led its relativity work from 1956, and it produced papers such as Roy Kerr's work on spinning masses.

Historians credit this funding with helping revive general relativity, sometimes called its "golden age". The German physicist Hubert Goenner argues that the label overstates a broader post-Sputnik trend.^[2]

Interpretations

Writers such as Nick Cook in The Hunt for Zero Point have suggested that the research went classified. Others note that coverage of corporate anti-gravity work faded by the early 1960s as the space race turned to rockets.^[2] The Air Force's gravity research at Wright-Patterson wound down in the early 1970s after the Mansfield Amendments limited military funding of research without a clear military purpose.^[2] A 1972 Air Force study, Advanced Propulsion Concepts – Project Outgrowth, devoted a chapter to "anti-gravity propulsion". It concluded that some of the field-propulsion ideas it examined "lack theoretical and technical merit".^[2]

The series also ran at a time when the government took a strong interest in public opinion and psychological strategy. A Truman Library photograph records Gordon Gray being sworn in as director of the Psychological Strategy Board. Nothing in the sources shows any link between that board and Talbert's articles.^[8]

Ansel Talbert

Ansel Talbert (1912–1987) was an aviation writer and editor for more than 50 years. He interviewed figures such as Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, Howard Hughes and Billy Mitchell before the Second World War.^[3] He was the Herald Tribune's aviation editor from 1953 until the paper folded in 1966. In 1955 he testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee after being named as a Communist by the journalist Winston Burdett.^[3]

Assessment

The series is an accurate record of genuine interest in gravity research among aerospace companies and physicists in 1955, including the founding of a real research institute.^[2][4] Its predictions of anti-gravity vehicles were not fulfilled. The documented results of the research were theoretical work on general relativity, not propulsion.^[2]

People and topics

• Ansel Talbert — Herald Tribune aviation writer who reported on corporate gravity research in 1955.
• Anti-gravity — The idea of cancelling or controlling gravity for propulsion.
• Nick Cook — Jane's Defence Weekly aviation editor and author of The Hunt for Zero Point.
• The Hunt for Zero Point — Nick Cook's 2001 book on secret anti-gravity research.

On the Timeline

• Senator Russell's Soviet sighting (1955) (15 October 1955) — Sen. Richard Russell sees two discs in the Soviet Union; the CIA classifies the case.
• Bernard Schriever and Wright Field technical intelligence (1956) — Gen. Bernard Schriever's testimony describes close work with technical intelligence at Wright Field.

See every 1955 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Ansel Talbert”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.