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(More customer reviews)When I first came across Nick Cook's "The Hunt for Zero Point" in a bookstore, I scoffed at the subtitle: "Inside the classified world of antigravity technology." As an aerospace engineer, historian and dyed-in-the-wool skeptic, I figured it was probably full of mystical, pseudo-scientific nonsense that would appeal only to those with absolutely no understanding of how the world works. Surely, I thought, it would offer nothing of value to knowledgeable, sophisticated, discriminating readers. In fact, I initially lumped it into the same category as Philip Corso's "The Day After Roswell," which remains possibly the most shamelessly self-serving, manifestly ridiculous and blatantly fabricated "true story" ever concocted.
Then, later, I checked a copy of "The Hunt for Zero Point" out of the library and read it. My opinion is now completely different. I highly recommend it if you are interested in learning about an obscure, previously unknown aspect of aerospace history that, if true, has major implications for the future of nearly every high-technology enterprise on Earth.
Mr. Cook has impressive qualifications. He served for over a decade as the Aviation Editor of the highly respected aerospace journal "Jane's Defence Weekly." His knowledge of the people, companies, hardware, technology and politics of today's "military/industrial complex" is extraordinary. Quite simply, he gets it right. A useful way to gauge the knowledge and attention to detail that an author brings to his work is to check if he defines acronyms correctly. Mr. Cook does. As best I can tell, he also gets right every person, place, date, event and company that he mentions--at least, the ones that I could verify. Finally--and this is most unusual--he even gets the name of one of America's largest aerospace corporations right. The name is "Lockheed Martin," not "Lockheed-Martin." Virtually every author who mentions the company inserts a hyphen in the name that should not be there. "Attention to detail" means getting things like this right, and Mr. Cook does so.
His hunt for "zero point" began in the early 1990s when a copy of a 1956 magazine article mysteriously appeared on his desk in his London office. Entitled "The G-Engines Are Coming," the article stimulated him to seek answers to questions regarding super-secret "black programs" that, before, he had not even thought to ask. He pored through dusty Government archives, had clandestine meetings with secretive characters and saw potential contacts suddenly silenced. His quest took him from the "edge of tomorrow" at the legendary "Skunk Works" in Palmdale, California, to the ruins of the infamous Nazi underground rocket-production factory, the "Mittelwerk," in Germany's Harz Mountains, where he tried to pick up the 50-year-old trail of the elusive SS Obergruppenfuehrer Hans Kammler. Kammler was one of the least-known but most-powerful men in the last days of the Third Reich. He reportedly ran an ultra-secret SS "special projects office" tasked to develop advanced weapons--weapons that could turn the tide of the War, and that were so far ahead of their time that even today they remain the stuff of science fiction.
"The Hunt for Zero Point" is more of a scientific detective story than a revelation of secret "antigravity" technology. Taken as such, it is an excellent read. Whether Mr. Cook's conclusions are convincing is up to each reader to decide. But he does offer several insights that cannot be disputed. One is that "they" deliberately put forth "disinformation" (i.e., "lies") to impede the chances that researchers into "black programs" will discover the truth about them. Another is that companies sometimes pursue lines of research that, unbeknownst to them, are already active in the "black world." When this happens, they are "brought into" the program and, very effectively, forced to shut up as far as the outside world is concerned. These are two more things that Mr. Cook gets right.
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