Documents / Report
This August 1949 technical report from the US Air Force Air Materiel Command presents Project Grudge's investigation of unidentified flying objects through January 1949. Drawing on consultants including Dr. J. A. Hynek, Rand Corporation, the Air Weather Service and Dr. P. M. Fitts, it explains most of 244 incidents as balloons, aircraft, astronomical phenomena, hoaxes or psychological errors. It concludes the objects pose no direct threat to national security and recommends reducing the investigation in scope.
Thus even if the effect were large enough to use it would still be unreliable and unpredictable.
METHOD II. Support of an Electrically Charged Object by Causing: It to Dove Transverse to the Earth's Magnetic Field.
A positively charged body moving from East to West, or a negatively charged body moving from East to West will experience an upward force due to the Earth's magnetic field.
A sphere 10 meters diameter moving at a speed of one kilometer/second would experience an upward force of one pound at the equator if charged to a potential of $ 5 \times 1 0^{1 2} $ volts. This is obviously ridiculous.
SECTION D. THE 2071 GRAVITY BEHOLD.
it has been proposed, by various writers, perhaps first by H. G. Rolls, that it might be possible to construct a means of shielding a massive body from the influence of gravity. Such an object would then float. Recently there appeared in the press a notice that a prominent economist has offered to support research or such an enterprise.
Obviously, conservation of energy demands that considerable energy be given the supported object in order to place it on the shield. However this amount of energy is in no way prohibitive, and furthermore it can be gotten back when the object lands.
Aside from the fact that we have no suggestions as to how such a device is to be made, the various theories of general relativity all agree in assuming that gravitational forces and force due to acceleration are in distinguishable, and from this assumption the theories predict certain effects which are in fact observed. The assumption therefore is probably correct, and a corollary of it is essentially that only by means of an acceleration can gravity be counteracted. This we can successfully do Report, from the classic collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 413 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.