[logicallee]

I didn't click any of your links, just read your comment with attention, because you have the same perspective I would. I'd like to ask your opinion about one thing in particular.

Why do you think this editor and writer would conceivably mention "claims of seemingly impossible transmutations being conducted by a fringe experimenter in his apartment, using high-voltage electricity"?

While you don't specify what it is, let's take it literally, a transmutation, so, whatever, iron goes in, electricity is applied, aluminum comes out (two different elements). Some non sequitur. That just so happens to be done in his apartment???

What I mean is if this impossible transmutation is done in a field unrelated to aviation, the area of his expertise, why would he even report? I mean if he was very, very sure, he might refer the person via an anonymous letter to a chemistry professor or something, but to report it in his book?

If I (or I would think anyone else) were in his position and literally saw someone transmute aluminum to gold, then short of letting me take the machine (in a faraday cage) whereever I want in any undisclosed city (bringing cash and no electronic devices whatsoever, trying to lose any tails via taxis and hitchiking ) and verify his claim by renting an apartment there for cash, buying aluminum foil in a random corner store (along with reasonable generic stuff that can be used for baking), then transmuting it myself within the faraday cage and selling the resulting gold at some appraiser, repeating this at different local stores and different baskets of goods, until I had more gold than the total weight of the machine involved... then I would wait for the electricity bill at the apartment and compare with the value of the gold I generated. Short of all that I literally wouldn't even report literally seeing someone transmute aluminum to gold. I just wouldn't report it. It's absurd. It's totally non-credible. By the way against state actors even the above process would fail, since the machine could generate electricity usage that's very easy for a central location to notice, just spikes at certain times for example (certain tenths of seconds on highly synchronized clocks), even above all of the noise of households. I guess I need a diesel power generator too. You get the idea.

What I'm saying is that the chances of the CIA getting a magician to come to my apartment and trick me is, I would say, oh, a hundred trillion? a quadrillion? times higher than the chances that someone will show me a machine that does an impossible transmutation. I am not exaggerating. A hundred trillion is fourteen orders of magnitude, and a quadrillion is fifteen. (For comparison, a hundred trillion bytes is just 100 terabytes, or thirteen of these - http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Archive-Internal-Hard-Drive/dp... -- yeah we are talking about 1 byte compared to all that storage.) It's absolutely absurd.

It shows a total lack of any grounding or objectivity for someone to report that.

Why would an aviation expert do it? What does he get out of tarnishing his credibility with that kind of gobbledegook, even if he saw it in front of his own eyes? Seeing something with your own eyes is not very convincing when your prior is one in a hundred trillion.

[rl3]

The fringe experimenter I mentioned was John Hutchinson[0][1]. His personal website[2] appears to be a Geocities-esque relic (with ads of course, but still entertaining).

>Why would an aviation expert do it? What does he get out of tarnishing his credibility with that kind of gobbledegook, even if he saw it in front of his own eyes?

That's what puzzled me. While it probably wasn't so obvious that Hutchinson was a crackpot back in 2002 or 2003, it still begs the question why someone like Cook would become involved and write about the guy in his book.

Any explanation I can think of is simply unfortunate. Still, it's a decent book as long as you treat it as mostly fiction.

[0] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_Hutchison

[1] http://skepdic.com/hutchisonhoax.html

[2] http://www.hutchisoneffect.ca/

[logicallee]

thanks, these are interesting. Hutchison is a hoaxer according to your links (i.e. string was found in his videos of levitation), so perhaps his victims can be given a pass - seems he was pretty good at it, and in retrospect very bald-faced. In the interviews on Youtube that I saw, he seems quite calm and not at all like someone faking something. Still, you would think this possibility wouldn't be discounted by someone reporting scientifically outside his field.

(While writing this reply, I just noticed, how odd that one of your links has his name mispelled in the URL - in fact I had read all of the content of your links in my head in the same way you wrote it in your comment - but it's in fact Hutchison without an n, not Hutchinson.)

[rl3]

Part of what made the book at least somewhat compelling at the time was Cook's reliance on his interactions with former or then-current aerospace industry figures.

I decided to go back and take a cursory look at those parts of the book, and it's almost shocking given ten years hindsight.

For example, here's one excerpt from the book where Cook writes about interviewing Boyd Bushman[0] at a Lockheed Martin facility:

That I had learned nothing of value must have shown on my face, for without warning, Bushman leaned forward and put his hand on my shoulder. He asked me what was wrong and I told him. "It's a lonely walk, but a rewarding one," he said, so quietly that I almost missed it. I looked into his eyes, which were quite blue but for that superficial milkiness that sometimes denotes the onset of old age. He smiled at me. "Keep traveling the road and you might just find what you're looking for." "What do you mean?" I asked cautiously. "In all my years with this company, no one has asked me the questions you came here with today." He paused a moment, then said: "Here, I want to show you something."

What Bushman later showed Cook was videos of Hutchison's experiments. The reason this is notable is because at the time that was written, Bushman hadn't yet completely and obviously appeared to have gone off the rails (as a quick Google confirms).

Another excerpt, this time of Cook relating sentiment from a personal interaction with a far more prominent aerospace industry veteran:

Ben Rich and I had sparred on a number of occasions on the stealth question—most recently at an air show where he'd turned up, desperately ill with cancer, to promote his book. I'd respected him utterly and liked him hugely, sensing in his presence the grit and wisdom of a generation of postwar aviation pioneers that wouldn't be around us for much longer. It was Rich who'd once told me of a place—a virtual warehouse—where ideas that were too dangerous to transpose into hardware were locked away forever, like the Ark of the Covenant in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It had almost happened to stealth.

Rich was a former director[1] of Lockheed Skunkworks, and has had many quotes of a similar nature[2] attributed to him (rightly or wrongly).

There's a few more notable excerpts, but they're not worth adding additional weight to this post. There's a copy of the book up on books.google.com that's easy to find, but I didn't cite it since I'm unsure how legitimate it is (I own a hard copy anyways).

My opinion is that neither Bushman nor Rich went off the deep end at all, nor made any truthful near-death confessions. It's far more likely they just had a field day screwing with people in that manner for fun and pleasure. While it could be argued doing so may have had some psyops utility, it was likely miniscule enough not to be their primary motivator.

While normally I'd applaud such behavior, it's kind of sad when it leads to someone as respected as Cook burning their credibility. If there's a moral to this story, I think it's this: never believe a single word black project aerospace engineers say, especially if you're an aviation journalist.

>... but it's in fact Hutchison without an n, not Hutchinson.)

Good catch, completely missed that.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=boyd+bushman

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Rich

[2] http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=5048.0