AB: Now we race across the country to New York City, the home of Richard C. Hoagland, who has been looking into this Finnish business. Richard, are you there?

RH: Good morning, Art.

AB: Good morning. It's good to have you on again, old friend. I am so curious about what's going on. I've been bombarded by these, all the Internet stuff on Finland, and, by the way, have you seen it in the press otherwise?

RH: No, no I've not. There was one story that appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, I think on the 30th or 31st of August, and then there was an electronic version that was faxed to me from England direct on the first. And there has been zero reference to any of this in any of our esteemed media coast to coast. It's like we're on another planet, Art. It's like the real world doesn't exist for the USA, for CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN.

AB: It's true. It's true. I don't understand it. I mean, anti-gravity. Now Richard, that's a big story. I mean, if somebody has actually reversed the effects, to any degree whatsoever, of gravity, that's a gigantic story.

RH: You're absolutely right, and your nose for news is very accurate, and, as you know, when we talked last week and you were kind of interested to do a show on this, I told you to hold your horses and to wait until we had finished doing our preliminary research because it is so extraordinary a claim, and although I don't hold with Carl Sagan's dictum, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, there are times when you just gotta be a little careful. And in this case, because of the politics and because of the potential for disinformation and the enormous potential for, how should I say, having one planted on us that we really did not want to have planted on us, I felt that prudence was the better part of valor and that we really ought to look into it, and fortunately we have good sources around the world, and we have been able to call upon some of them. Some of them are in our own backyard. I want to give a special nod to Keith tonight because he's done some really neat things to get something up on the web on short notice tonight that we're going to talk about later on. And I have hired a new researcher myself who has done extraordinarily good work in this and has ferreted out secrets all the way from Finland to NASA, which I will be reporting on, and we're now ready to make some statements and to point people in directions of some real work, and the most extraordinary thing I want to start off with is it turns out this is not a new story. This is not a new story. And what is really remarkable is because the claim is so extraordinary, and because we have now found bonafide scientific refereed journal-level work, published in the scientific literature, and then reviewed independently by other researchers at world-class, to use a term out of Texas, world-class scientific institutions, what's fascinating to me is why we're not having this conversation four years ago. Because the first paper we have found, and we have up in the Physics Lab of Enterprise, www.enterprisemission.com on the Web, is from 1992, September of 1992, published by this lead Finish researcher, whose name I am going to murder, over and over again tonight. It's Eugene Podkletnov. Hereafter, we'll refer to him as Dr. P. My Russian, this time of night, is not up to it, and with all do respect, I don't want to mangle his name.

AB: My Russian is never up to it.

RH: He has a co-author named Neiman, who also published on this paper, and it was published in the Holland Journal of Physics, called Physica C, which is one of the world-class scientific journals on this planet, and in fact, if I reach over here, I have a copy of it handy for this evening. This paper is up on the Web. Let me give you the title of it. It's called, "A Possibility of Gravitation Force Shielding by Bulk YBA2CU3O7-V Superconductor."

AB: All right. What does that mean?

RH: All right. That's yttrium barium cupric oxide, copper and oxygen superconductor. It's one of these new discoveries in the last 8 or 9 years, beginning about '87, '88, that you could make a superconductor...and we're going to have to define all these terms, and we will. Don't worry, we will...out of the material that was much more akin to a ceramic than to a metal. And I'm going to get into some of the history of this and how you can do this at home, boys and girls, and that is not an overstatement.

AB: Really?

RH: This is such a stunningly simple experiment, and it is so easily replicated that the question that I want to put before the house tonight, coast to coast in this remarkable country that we're able to talk to this way, is because the paper is in a refereed journal and because none other than the Max Plank Institute of Physics in 1995 published a very detailed and elaborate analysis, and the title of that was, "Theoretical Analysis of a Reported Weak Gravitational Shielding Effect," by a Giovanni Modanese, who was a von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Plank Institute of Physics in Munchen, Germany in '95, what I want to know is why this didn't hit the fan, as they used to say, in '92, '93, '94, or '95?

AB: Can we define a term, now. You said, "a gravity shield." Is that another way, Richard, of saying anti-gravity?

RH: Yes, and both are wrong! And I will explain why I think that the terms themselves are not correct in what we're going to discuss tonight. But, in terms of layman's language, in terms of the basic effect...Let me give you a little story. In the last century, actually from the time that Newton first tried to define gravity, coming off Kepler a century or so before him, people have wondered, scientists have wondered, as the scientific revolution overtook us in the last several hundred years, what was this thing that holds everything down to the surface of the planet. When you open your hand and you have something in it, it falls. You can count on that as much as you can count on the sun to come up tomorrow morning, or taxes, or death. It's one of those immutable things of the universe. Gravity prevails, and if you step off tall buildings, and you're not Superman, watch out.

AB: Splash

RH: So the problem has always been, how, if you want to do anything interesting, how do you counteract this force? What is it, and if you want to fly, or if you want to move through the air, or you want to leave the surface of the earth, how could you counteract it? Well, of course, we have evolved a technology of aerodynamics, which doesn't really counteract gravity. What it does is it manipulates air pressures with airfoils and curved surfaces and wings and propellers and jets and reactive Newton's Third Law kind of stuff.

AB: Rockets, of course.

RH: Or rockets, yeah. But you're not really defying or counteracting or manipulation or changing the fundamental laws of gravity.

AB: No, you're applying greater force.

RH: That's right. And when you stop applying the force, it's gonna come down! So from the beginnings of the scientific revolution there was this extraordinary interest and preoccupation from Newton on, and actually from Newton back quite a bit, what is this thing that holds us to the earth. You can only, temporarily, very temporarily, seem to defy. From which comes that old clichÈ, "What goes up must come down." Well, in the 1890's, long about there, a very brilliant guy named H.G. Wells wrote a short story where he had his protagonist discover a material that could be put on a sphere and which shielded gravity, and he called it, caverite, and he wrote a remarkable short story, which was then taken into a rather brilliant Disney film, called "First Men to the Moon," where his protagonist, a brilliant professor and an assistant and a young nubile young lady, etc., etc., all climb into this sphere. They close all the shutters, that are made of caverite. They basically cut themselves off. They shield themselves from the gravity field of the earth, and they're flung instantly into space because of the rotation of the earth. And they wind up on the moon, and all kinds of adventures ensue, and they ultimately get back, but the key McGuffin, as Hitchcock would say, was caverite, this substance which had the magical property of shielding, the upper part of it, the top side, from the effects of gravity pulling on it from below.

AB: May I ask a question?

RH: Anything.

AB: What is, roughly, escape velocity for a rocket that leaves the atmosphere altogether?

RH: Seven miles per second, and eleven kilometers per second.

AB: If you had negative gravity, would you actually be able to get into a craft and slowly, if you wished, simply float up and out of the atmosphere? Or would you be required to attain an escape velocity?

RH: No. You would float. There all kinds of thought experiments that this announcement brings to mind, and some of them were treated in the Sunday Telegraph piece in England.

AB: So you could float out?

RH: Yeah. In other words, if you imagine that you have a disk where gravity does not appear on the top of the disk, in other words, the disk somehow shields what's above it from the gravitational field of the earth, then if you were to plate a structure, a spaceship, with this substance, the idea is that is would become weightless and it would them be flung away from the earth, because of the rotation at whatever latitude you are. At the equator it would be flung away at a thousand miles per hour. It would float upward at a thousand miles per hour, and that would be adequate to eventually take you beyond the, well all the way to the moon, or even beyond. It would obviously be shielded from the sun's gravity, as well, so you would just keep going and going. Think of it as the Energizer spacecraft.

AB: All right. I've heard two theories of gravity, so that we're down with the basic gravity stuff here. Most people, I guess, feel it is a pull. Gravity is a pull. I've heard other people say, "Gravity is a push."

RH: There's a third.

AB: There's a third?

RH: That gravity is geometry. This is Einsteinian. This is relativity. That the reason that objects fall toward each other is because mass warps the geometry of the metric of space-time. You can kind of think of a great sheet of plastic? Held between four posts, and you dunk a bowling ball in the middle of the plastic sheet? And you get this huge dimple down. Now, if you fling a marble across the plastic sheet because you got this big bowling sitting there weighing down the plastic in the middle, even if you can't see the plastic, if it's very clear plastic, you will see the effect of the distortion of the plastic sheet by the bowling ball, by the trajectory, by the warped trajectory of the little marble flung across this sheet of supposedly flat plastic. That's the analogy of warping space-time, by means of mass. That's the third theory.

AB: Oh I see. That helped me. Okay. All right, so which one, for the sake of our discussion, do you subscribe to?

RH: None of them.

AB: Aw, Richard

RH: (Laughs) Sorry. This is going to get to be a very interesting evening, and hopefully it won't get too complex. And what we're going to do is we have numbers of people around the country recording, and we're going to have a transcript of this put up on the web, simplified, because later on in the morning we're going to give a recipe, you know, a step-by-step instruction of how high school physics classes and interested laboratories and private industry and any bright aggressive government guys out there, who are listening tonight that want to help build spaceships someday, how they can literally recreate Dr. E. P.'s results, and prove or disprove this thing once and for all, and we will then publish those on the Website, on the Internet, around the world electronically, because it's beginning to look, Art, as if, not only do we have a discovery here, but we have also caught them red-handed in an attempted suppression of the discovery.

AB: Yeah. As you know, I've got some information on that. But, let us stick with the original discovery, Richard. What is it, basically, that the Finish are claiming?

RH: Well, Dr. Podkletnov claims that he has found "caverite." And his caverite is not a paint or a certain material. What it is is one of the so-called "high-temperature superconductors" that were discovered by people at the University of Texas (actually University of Houston), Dr. Chu and several others, IBM scientists working in Zurich in the late '80s, you know, were the first to actually tinker this stuff up and get a Nobel Prize for it, in record time by the way. There was a major industrial push launched by the Reagan administration to try to put a kind of federal program behind making lots of this and looking at all the technological benefits. So what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to go into the basis of superconductivity and define terms before anybody is going to get an idea of how easy this is to test and how revolutionary it can be.

AB: Let me, for the layman, try and help. Superconductivity. Imagine a wire, a copper wire. A copper wire conducts electricity. Electrons flow through this copper wire at a certain rate, and there is in that flow, a loss from point A to point B, the resistance of the wire. In other words, point A's electricity is less that point B's electricity because of the resistance of that wire. Now, as I understand superconductivity, it lowers, almost to the point of non-existence, theoretically, that resistance so that you get almost no loss between point A and point B. Is that a fair description?

RH: Almost, but no cigar. You're awfully close. The only difference is: It is no resistance. It is perfect transmission. It is lossless. That's what's the magic, and that's what is remarkably important and the signature of a physics we're going to talk about called hyperdimensional physics.

AB: Of course. All right, stay right where you are, and we're going to talk a little about superconductivity, so you might understand what's coming.