http://www.forteantimes.com/review/huntzero.shtmlThe Hunt for Zero Point
Nick Cook.
Century, London, 2001
Hb, £17.99, xii + 277pp illus
ISBN 0-7126-6953-1
This book is written in ‘quest’ format, popularised by authors who, in recent years, have failed to find the Holy Grail, the grave of the Virgin Mary, the Head of God, the Ark of the Covenant, Christ’s tomb, Atlantis, the Great Hall of Records and more besides. The typical ‘quest’ author travels around the world, talks to sources, reads old books, recounts rumours, but actually achieves little of lasting value.
The ‘Zero Point’ for which Cook hunts is the point where anti-gravity technology achieves the escape of an object from gravity’s effect: where it flies because there is nothing to prevent it doing so. He finds it, oddly, in the achievements of Nazi scientists during World War II, though they have never been replicated since and Cook – a professional, and award-winning, writer on aerospace matters – never tells us what their technology was, or how it worked.
Any attempt to replicate Cook’s quest is bound to be frustrated. Four of his primary sources are, without explanation, given false names, including one ‘Lawrence Cross’, supposedly a former Janes aerospace journalist, “now a bureau chief for a rival publication in Australia”. ‘Cross’ feeds him a raw, uncritical version of the ‘Nazi UFO’ material I debunked in ‘Phoney Warfare’ in Fortean Studies 7, and apparently says “It’s been around for decades, long enough to have been given a name. In the trade, we call it the Legend.” Most of this material actually comes from former Nazis or later sympathisers, and I’ve never heard it called “the Legend”.
Equally frustrating is Cook’s decision to do without references or an index. There is much waffle here, and the story jumps backwards and forwards. Rumours are presented without noting their likely status, and unless a reader has spent time researching the same material from other sources, it would be impossible to make an objective assessment of his assertions. His style sometimes descends from the merely credulous to the downright odd. Without pursuing the question further, one of Cook’s mysterious sources ends a chapter by saying “They were trying to build a f—king time machine”. More disturbingly, Cook sets out a detailed fantasy of how the (supposed) scientists working on the (supposed) anti-gravity (or time) machine would have been shot and buried by the SS, in line with “a paragraph or two from the execution manual it had drawn up for the Holocaust.” This tasteless passage seems inappropriate, at best.<snip>
I’ll be returning to the peculiar creation of the Schauberger-as-Saucer-Builder myth in detail in a forthcoming issue of FT, but suffice it to say that Cook’s version of the tale probably originates in 1975, in a book by a prominent Holocaust revisionist. Although Cook visits the Schauberger archives, he does not confirm the tale told him by ‘Cross’. And while Cook concludes that “via Schauberger, the Nazis had been deeply involved – no question – in what can only be described as flying saucer technology”, we are not allowed to see any pages of Schauberger’s diaries or letters to support this extraordinary claim.
In the end it is the lack of evidence, and of traceable sources, that renders this book almost valueless as either history or science. Worse, it may unwittingly be delivering political propaganda, glorifying fictional Nazi achievements, of which I am sure neither author nor publisher would approve.
Kevin McClure
No index, no sources, no Point!
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