Into the Black - Black World - Black Projects - Black Budgets - Area 51, Etc.

[Stryder50]

This could a bit of a controversial thread, but one worth delving into I think. It might also belong more in the "Science and Technology" sub-forum, but since it is mostly funded and operated by "the Military", I think it better fits here.

In the case of the USA, we are looking at the realm or World War Two and afterward, where new technologies and weapons are researched and/or developed, usually under very secret conditions. Some eventually revealed and others ....

While there are likely many places where such happens, such is undertaken, the Research & Development (R&D) done, one place that will come readily to mind might be "The Skunk Works" a.k.a. Area 51 ~ Groom Lake. Site where initial testing of the spy/recon U-2 and SR-71 aircraft was done and some would link a more current Project known as "Aurora". Not the only site/place for such doings and we might look to those other sites later.

To get this ball rolling, a few posts excerpted from an Atlantic article on the advanced techs towards the end of WWII and a fascinating book that focuses upon such. (Note that the Atlantic limits your access to "free" articles unless you pay a subscription fee.)

 

[Stryder50]

Into the Black​

Nick Cook, a respected military journalist, describes his foray into a hidden "black world" where powerful technologies of warfare are born

September 2002 Issue
...
To those who spend their time scanning reams of dry defense-spending documents, the black budget is a well-known bit of excitement. It is the discrepancy that's left when all the known weapons procurements, research programs, and technical developments are added up. It's also where groundbreaking technologies, such as stealth, are developed under code names like "Black Light," "Classic Wizard," and "Link Plumeria." These technologies are kept secret during their gestation because to even hint at the ideas behind them would be to reveal too much. This year, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the U.S. military's black budget will rise to levels not seen since the 1980s, from $16.2 billion last year to $20.3 billion.

There is no way to know exactly what that money is being spent on, but Nick Cook has some ideas. For fifteen years Cook has been a defense and aerospace reporter for Jane's Defence Weekly, which some consider the bible of the international defense community. During his career Cook has often brushed up against the "black world" and has even delved into it, both in reporting for Jane's on advances like the B-2 bomber, and in working on a documentary, Billion Dollar Secret, that probed the U.S. military's classified (or black) weapons programs.

This last project was something of a prelude to Cook's new book, The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology, which documents his ten-year search for a mythical technology that all the brightest minds in aerospace were gushing about in the early 1950s. Strangely, just a few years later the aerospace world was suddenly silent on the subject. After about 1956, anyone who mentioned antigravity, or the once-imminent "G-engines," was given a wide berth. It was an odd switch that left Cook with questions: Had there been anything to these rumors and reports? If not, why the hype? If so, what had happened? So he set out to look for answers, and what he found was surprising. Cook traced a long succession of both military and civilian scientists and engineers working to develop a branch of applied physics for which we still have no vocabulary, but which seems to involve manipulating the little-understood quantum-level "zero-point field" to achieve peculiar effects, like shielding objects from gravity. If this were developed and incorporated into flight vehicles, the implications could hardly be understated: antigravity would forever alter the world's economy, make global transport systems obsolete, and, of course, change the face of warfare. Some also felt that the zero-point field could be an enormous source of energy, if only people could learn how to tap it.

Against the advice of his colleagues and friends, and against his own better judgment and career interests, Cook felt he couldn't ignore the leads he uncovered, which drew him through the black labyrinth back to an unexpected place: Nazi territory around the end of World War II. That is where, Cook claims, some of these technologies were first developed and then acquired by American and Russian forces, who raced to pillage the underground facilities around Pilsen in the Czech Republic and around Breslau (now Wroclaw) in Poland. There an SS general named Hans Kammler operated the "wonder weapons" program, which the Nazis were convinced would propel them ahead of the Allies to win the war. At the war's end Kammler disappeared. Though he had been one of the main planners of the death camps, his name was never mentioned at the war-crimes trials in Nuremberg. One conclusion Cook reaches in The Hunt for Zero Point is that some of the "Foo Fighters" that World War II pilots reported seeing over Axis territories may have been German prototypes of new flying machines that used antigravity technology. He also posits that somewhere in the black world, work has likely continued along these lines, and that much of the wackiness surrounding sightings of "UFOs" has been deliberately spun to ward off investigations of new technologies in development.
...

Into the Black

Nick Cook, a respected military journalist, describes his foray into a hidden "black world" where powerful technologies of warfare are born

www.theatlantic.com

[End Part One]

 

[Godboy]

This could a bit of a controversial thread, but one worth delving into I think. It might also belong more in the "Science and Technology" sub-forum, but since it is mostly funded and operated by "the Military", I think it better fits here.

In the case of the USA, we are looking at the realm or World War Two and afterward, where new technologies and weapons are researched and/or developed, usually under very secret conditions. Some eventually revealed and others ....

While there are likely many places where such happens, such is undertaken, the Research & Development (R&D) done, one place that will come readily to mind might be "The Skunk Works" a.k.a. Area 51 ~ Groom Lake. Site where initial testing of the spy/recon U-2 and SR-71 aircraft was done and some would link a more current Project known as "Aurora". Not the only site/place for such doings and we might look to those other sites later.

To get this ball rolling, a few posts excerpted from an Atlantic article on the advanced techs towards the end of WWII and a fascinating book that focuses upon such. (Note that the Atlantic limits your access to "free" articles unless you pay a subscription fee.)

Im not understanding what this discussion is supposed to be about. It seems like you just listed some facts about Area 51. Is there a question in there, or perhaps a disagreement about something?

 

[Stryder50]

For his work at Jane's, Nick Cook has received the Royal Aeronautical Society's Aerospace Journalist of the Year Award four times, in the Defence, Business, Technology, and Propulsion categories. He also writes for The Financial Times, The London Times and often comments on defense and security for the BBC and CNN. I spoke to him at his home in London.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
P.J. O'Rourke - Black projects? Nazi weapons programs? Antigravity? UFOs?
Nick Cook - A lot of people are going to read the dust jacket of your book and think you've fallen out of your tree. What's the reception been?

The response to the UK edition has been remarkably good. The really pleasing thing has been the reaction of people within the aerospace business. Everything in this book had to pass muster with me, through a set of criteria that I would apply to any Jane's story. I've read a lot of conspiracy-based books—UFO treatises and heaven knows what—none of which satisfied my professional curiosity. I realized that to go that extra mile, I was going to have to be rigorous in my research. And if what I found didn't match my own criteria, I wasn't going to put it down on the page. Consequently, there's reams of stuff I left out because it didn't match up to the professional standards that I, as a Jane's-trained journalist, had come to expect in other stories.

The subject has been kind of a poison pill in the past, hasn't it?

Yes, I guess so. People were begging me, urging me, not to get involved in this story. But in the end I couldn't ignore the evidence that I was uncovering and that was being presented to me. You can only stare at evidence so long before it starts to pull you in. I was really dragged reluctantly, kicking and screaming, into the story, as you can see from the book.

I found the evidence overwhelming that something—and I stress something—is going on. I don't reach any definitive, Holy Grail conclusions about antigravity beyond the fact that there are people out there who are regularly practicing it. People have asked me, "Well, do you know that the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. military have this squirreled away somewhere and are developing hardware?" No, I don't. And I don't dress up The Hunt for Zero Point in that way. Where I do have evidence I present it. For example, I think the evidence of what the Germans were doing during the Second World War is overwhelming. But I don't make any bold claims for what the U.S. is doing, simply because I don't have the evidence for it. Also, I think my experience in covering aerospace programs has been beneficial, in that I'm able to extrapolate a little. And where I do extrapolate in the book, I make it clear that it is my own extrapolation.

For instance, based on what we know of black program activity in the States, based on what we know the black budget is worth, and based on what I know the U.S. Air Force is capable of in terms of turning vision into reality, I extrapolate that it is not unreasonable to think that they have taken antigravity technology, which has been around for fifty years, and put it to some use.
...

Into the Black

Nick Cook, a respected military journalist, describes his foray into a hidden "black world" where powerful technologies of warfare are born

www.theatlantic.com

[Part Two]

 

[Stryder50]

Im not understanding what this discussion is supposed to be about. It seems like you just listed some facts about Area 51. Is there a question in there, or perhaps a disagreement about something?

It's about what the title suggests, HIGHLY Secret R&D Projects, by the USA Military-DoD, and other nations as well. I'm leading with one example in the first few posts I make here. Others are invited to bring their thoughts, experiences, etc. to this topic if they wish

 

[Stryder50]

The subject has been kind of a poison pill in the past, hasn't it?

Yes, I guess so. People were begging me, urging me, not to get involved in this story. But in the end I couldn't ignore the evidence that I was uncovering and that was being presented to me. You can only stare at evidence so long before it starts to pull you in. I was really dragged reluctantly, kicking and screaming, into the story, as you can see from the book.

I found the evidence overwhelming that something—and I stress something—is going on. I don't reach any definitive, Holy Grail conclusions about antigravity beyond the fact that there are people out there who are regularly practicing it. People have asked me, "Well, do you know that the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. military have this squirreled away somewhere and are developing hardware?" No, I don't. And I don't dress up The Hunt for Zero Point in that way. Where I do have evidence I present it. For example, I think the evidence of what the Germans were doing during the Second World War is overwhelming. But I don't make any bold claims for what the U.S. is doing, simply because I don't have the evidence for it. Also, I think my experience in covering aerospace programs has been beneficial, in that I'm able to extrapolate a little. And where I do extrapolate in the book, I make it clear that it is my own extrapolation.

For instance, based on what we know of black program activity in the States, based on what we know the black budget is worth, and based on what I know the U.S. Air Force is capable of in terms of turning vision into reality, I extrapolate that it is not unreasonable to think that they have taken antigravity technology, which has been around for fifty years, and put it to some use.

Throughout the book, one of the themes seems to be how your world gradually splits into a white world, where everything is open and aboveboard and accessible—the one you report on for Jane's—and a black one that you can just make out the shape of, and that swallows billions of dollars developing experimental technologies, but that slips away whenever you get close. What can you tell us about this black world?
...

Into the Black

Nick Cook, a respected military journalist, describes his foray into a hidden "black world" where powerful technologies of warfare are born

www.theatlantic.com

[Part Three]

 

[Stryder50]

In The Hunt for Zero Point you wrote that, "Like an unsinkable ship, the black world had been built up around multiple, layered compartments, each securely sealed. Some of these compartments, it is now clear, had been designed never to be opened again. Ever." Why ever?

There are some technologies, I think, that are so significant merely in the ideas behind them that to allow those ideas to percolate into the wider world would give other people those same ideas about developing real hardware. And part of the trick behind really advanced technology is sometimes to not even let your enemies know you've got the idea in the first place. Stealth technology is a primary example of that. But if you go back even further and think about the atomic bomb, that was another one.

During the Second World War, when it became clear that an atomic bomb was feasible, the U.S. scientific community voluntarily purged official documentation of all references to the potential of fission. Sometimes, born of radical science, you can get radical weapons systems that most people haven't even thought of.

In your experience, just how black are these programs? Don't they have to be reported to certain U.S. Congress members?

Well, the black world has opened up. There are reporting mechanisms designed to keep Congress, or certain very highly cleared members of Congress, aware of what is happening in the black world. However, having said that, there are degrees of black, and at the blackest, there are undoubtedly programs that are not cleared by Congress, again for the very reasons that I have just discussed.

For the TV program Billion Dollar Secret I interviewed a congressman called Dana Rohrabacher, who was the chair of the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee and of the House Science Committee. Now, he was convinced that the U.S. military had developed an aircraft like the one referred to in the book as Aurora, which is a hypersonic, very fast spy-plane prototype. But he said that his efforts to get any information on that program, if indeed it exists, were constantly frustrated. And he's an influential member of the science panel in Congress.
...

Into the Black

Nick Cook, a respected military journalist, describes his foray into a hidden "black world" where powerful technologies of warfare are born

www.theatlantic.com

[Part Four]

 

[occupied]

I think they stick that money in their back pockets and hang some pie pans on fishing line. Actual anti-gravity would be an impossible secret to keep.

 

[Stryder50]

So the other side of the antigravity coin seems to be "zero-point energy," this energy that exists in the quantum vacuum—a kind of subatomic froth that may even give electrons their charge. Some scientists say the amount of energy we're talking about here is a lot. Some say it's a little. Where do you come down on that?

I'm not a scientist. I have to defer to people I respect in the field, and one of them is definitely Hal Puthoff, a very sober-minded individual who's conducting rigorous experiments into this field. He postulates that there is almost unlimited potential in the energy contained in the zero-point field. But even he doesn't know, and in all the experiments he's done on pieces of equipment that have been brought to him, he has uncovered nothing yet that outputs more energy than it takes in.

Puthoff's theories lead him to the belief that the zero-point field is not simply a vast sea of untapped energy, but that it is also responsible for some of the underpinnings of physics—things like gravity and inertia, for example. Certainly that seems to be borne out by more and more experimentation—and more and more people are coming round to that point of view.
....
One of the most gripping parts of your book is the description of "Operation Paperclip"—the dismantling and retrieval of all known German technology, science, and related expertise at the end of World War II. You write that this "state within a state had been transported four thousand miles to the west"&mdashto the United States. When learning about today's black world, why is it important to go back and study Operation Paperclip?

Two things. First of all, we know the size and scope of Operation Paperclip, which was huge. And we know that the U.S. operates a very deeply secret defense architecture for secret-weapons programs that we know as the black world. It is a highly compartmentalized system and one of the things that's intrigued me over the years is, How did they develop that? What model did they base it on?

It is remarkably similar to the system that was operated by the Germans—specifically the SS—for their top-secret weapons programs during the Second World War. Now, did someone, Hans Kammler or anyone else, provide that model lock, stock, and barrel to the U.S. government at the end of the war? I don't know the answer to that, but given the massive recruitment that went on under Paperclip, and given what we see in the black world, it might not be unreasonable to ask those questions.

For those who haven't read the book, can you say briefly who Hans Kammler is?

He was an SS general who, by the end of the Second World War, was in charge of all of the Nazis' secret-weapons programs. He was an extremely powerful man. He was up to his neck in the Holocaust as well, and amongst his earlier responsibilities he had been one of the main architects of the death camps. Now, at the end of the Second World War, he disappeared. And from what little documentary history he left behind, we know that he was thinking of trading his war crimes for technology, which he wanted to give to the Americans in order to buy himself immunity. But his crimes were so heinous that immunity for someone like Kammler wouldn't be enough. He'd actually have to buy disappearance. So Kammler disappeared, and no one knows where he went.

What is remarkable about Kammler is that so few people know his name. And yet at the end of the Second World War, he was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. He should have been tried in absentia at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials. But his name didn't even surface there, even though others who couldn't be found were tried in absentia.

So it's very strange, but his hold over the high-technology weapons—the wonder weapons, the Germans called them, these weapons that they thought would win them the war right at the last minute—his hold over those weapons at the end of the war was absolute. And in the book, we glimpse some of those weapons. Who knows what else was in his Pandora's box of technologies?

When I started the book I thought all this stuff about the Germans was mythology peddled by cranks and weirdoes and conspiracy nuts. But one of the most satisfying aspects of the research for me was going into modern day Germany, Austria, and the former Czechoslovakia and finding that, contrary to all my expectations, there actually is real, tangible evidence that what the Germans were doing in this field was true. That's not to say it's all true. But in some cases there is real documented evidence, evidence that I was able to look at: diaries I was able to touch and see, plans I was able to look at—original plans—for these devices.
...

Into the Black

Nick Cook, a respected military journalist, describes his foray into a hidden "black world" where powerful technologies of warfare are born

www.theatlantic.com

[Part Five]

(More excerpts later - have errands to run.)

 

[Stryder50]

I think they stick that money in their back pockets and hang some pie pans on fishing line. Actual anti-gravity would be an impossible secret to keep.

Which is what "They" want you, and most others in the public, to think

 

[Godboy]

It's about what the title suggests, HIGHLY Secret R&D Projects, by the USA Military-DoD, and other nations as well. I'm leading with one example in the first few posts I make here. Others are invited to bring their thoughts, experiences, etc. to this topic if they wish

So this thread is for listing R&D projects?

This company has a bunch of R&D projects.

Completed R&D projects

forcetechnology.com

Here is a thing on wikipedia about R&D.

Research and development - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

This is about managing R&D projects.

R&D management - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Here are some R&D agencies.

List of United States federal research and development agencies - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Godboy]

Here is the definition of R&D.

Research and development - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

simple.wikipedia.org

 

[occupied]

Which is what "They" want you, and most others in the public, to think

He said the research has been ongoing for decades? Something that throws Einstein in the trash is not something they could keep a lid on.

 

[Godboy]

Rao's has a 4 cheese spaghetti sauce that they R&D'd.

Rao's Homemade Four Cheese Sauce

Bring home the famous taste of Rao’s Homemade® Four Cheese Sauce. This sauce is a rich blend of Italian tomatoes and four classic, Italian cheeses without onions or garlic.

www.raos.com

 

[Godboy]

Here is an article about R&D tax credits.

What US startup founders need to know about the R&D tax credit | TechCrunch

The Research and Development (R&D) tax credit lets businesses deduct R&D expenses up to $250,000 per year from payroll tax, or an unlimited amount against income tax if your startup qualifies.

techcrunch.com

 

[Godboy]

R&D on music therapy.

Spoke launches music therapy app for Gen Z, raises $1.5M round led by Ada Ventures | TechCrunch

Apps like Calm and Endel are exploring an expanding new universe of what’s becoming known as "functional sound". Calm and others are doing it in the

techcrunch.com

 

[LuckyDuck]

Whether you're talking Lockheed-Martin's Skunk Works, or DARPA, or Area 51 (the experiments there have been moved), it doesn't matter. Nation states have adversaries and the nations militaries need to continually do secret research in an effort to get ahead of those adversaries, thus necessitating taxpayer funds and the public has no business knowing exactly what is going on there, otherwise you might as well just hand your research over to your adversaries.

 

[Stryder50]

He said the research has been ongoing for decades? Something that throws Einstein in the trash is not something they could keep a lid on.

1) Doesn't exactly throw "Einstein" (What ever you vaguely mean with that) into the trash. More likely expands upon.
2) You appear to have no experience with the military and secrecy classifications.

 

[Stryder50]

So this thread is for listing R&D projects?

This company has a bunch of R&D projects.

Completed R&D projects

forcetechnology.com

Here is a thing on wikipedia about R&D.

Research and development - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

This is about managing R&D projects.

R&D management - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Here are some R&D agencies.

List of United States federal research and development agencies - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

NO!

"HIGHLY Secret R&D Projects, by the USA Military-DoD, and other nations as well."

Thanks for your efforts to hijack the thread and topic. (NOT!)

 

[Godboy]

When I was in the military the rule of thumb was, anything we saw that was brand new technology, was actually invented approximately 20 years ago. If we had anti gravity stuff being designed at Area 51 (i.e. the stuff Bob Lazar was talking about), we would be seeing its application by now.