Actually, according to what I know, it was a result of bad physics and some ill-placed generators. They were experimenting with electromagnetic field generators using information from Maxwell's vector equations, Tesla's experiments in electricity, and Einstein's theories on matter and space to attempt to make the ship completely invisible, a "cloaking device" if you will. The problem is that if you generate too strong an electrostatic field you cause gravitational effects. This IS factually documented, see patent # 2,949,550 filed Aug 16, 1960 and patent 3,022,430 Feb 20, 1962 by Dr. T. Tomsend Brown at the US patent office. It is that gravitational effect that CAN make something invisible, specifically by bending light around an object, and can do a lot of other fun things as well. The problem was that the lines of force from the field generators cut across the vessel amidships, resulting in varying spatial density inside the metal hull. The effect was unintentional but they should have known about this beforehand. They had tested it with animals onboard in cages, and the cages always came back empty. When they tested it with a live crew the crew in the area amidships where the fields cut through went out of phase with the ship, since the ship had gone out of phase with itself. The ship stayed in one piece because although it went out of phase with itself in that region it is made of metal, specifically ferous metal, and was conducting the field, thereby holding the space it sat on together. If the field had shifted radically the ship could have been torn in half, but the field was stable enough to stay put. The crew was organic of course, so they were not so lucky. They were affected by the spatial stresses differently since organic critters are less dense than iron and steel, and gravity, hence spatial density, is a direct function of mass. When one of the operators realized the experiment was going wrong they tried to shut down the generators, but the controls were malfunctioning by this point and they could not shut it down. The crewman smashed the controls, the generators disengaged, and the field collapsed immediately. At that point some of the crew members who were out of phase were occupying the same space as the ship when it snapped back in. The result was the equivalent of beaming halfway into the deck. They were fused with the metal, and horribly burned from the electrostatic discharge that accompanied the collapsed field. Normally the ship would have grounded this out, but being welded into the metal turned the corpses into lightning rods as well. The pages of the captains log regarding the experiment were torn out and have not been recovered.
Is the story fact or fiction? I know the physics behind this quite well, and have provided them in the narration. I have very little doubt of the possibility of this experiment having happened. My question is IF it did, then how much have they advanced with electro-gravity technology since then behind the scenes. Perhaps enough to make some fancy airplanes make some very "impossible" turns that were caught on film at a certain secret installation in Nevada? No space aliens needed, just a little applied physics. But then, who can say. B)
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