Among the Fringe

I want to believe flashed across the screen of the dark­ened con­fer­ence hall, the audi­ence broke out in applause, and I real­ized I wasnt in Kansas any­more. Actually I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, attend­ing the F sec­tion of the 2006 Space Technology and Applications International Forum (STAIF). Tucked away in the base­ment of the hotels con­fer­ence facil­i­ties, the F sec­tion is ded­i­cated to fron­tier con­cepts, though the more cyn­i­cally inclined might say fringe.
The leader of the group goes by the cyber­space nom de guerre UFOGuy11, and for the unini­ti­ated in the world of fringe sci­ence he is, in fact, Paul Murad. No, Murad does not invent anti­grav­ity devices in his garage in Roswell, New Mexico, but rather, he works as a sci­en­tist for the Defense Intelligence Agency. In an inter­view with American Antigravity (Okay, need I even explain what this orga­ni­za­tion is?), he explained why he started the F sec­tion: to end dis­crim­i­na­tion against UFO believ­ers.
“In the early nineties, I sub­mit­ted papers on top­ics that focused around UFOs but I never men­tioned the sub­ject in the abstract,” Murad said in the inter­view. “The review­ers accepted the papers on the basis of the abstracts.“
But even­tu­ally, con­fer­ence orga­niz­ers caught on to Murads lit­tle cha­rade and his papers were scanned for hid­den UFO ref­er­ences, and then sum­mar­ily rejected. The F sec­tion of STAIF was thus designed to make the world safe for UFO believ­ers, or at least to teach them how to write abstracts that wouldnt get them tagged as lunatics. On a more seri­ous note, it appears that Murad tries to get sci­en­tists on the fron­tiers of sci­ence (or fringe, if you will) to behave in a sci­en­tific man­ner by pre­sent­ing and defend­ing their the­o­ries and exper­i­ments. And so in the F sec­tion, no idea is rejected out­right as fringe, rather, it is exam­ined and debated. Its a not bad idea, in the­ory.
The F sec­tion, when I attended this February, was cur­rently in its third year. I lis­tened as UFOGuy11 ran through the agenda, fea­tur­ing pre­sen­ta­tions like Eric Daviss Experimental Concepts for Generating Negative Energy in the Laboratory (those not famil­iar with Davis might check out his other work, on tele­por­ta­tion). There was also the usual assort­ment of papers involv­ing grav­ity waves, anti­grav­ity, and of course zero-​​point energy (what fringe con­fer­ence would be com­plete with­out zero point?).
Now, before all the free energy enthu­si­asts, anti­grav­ity sup­port­ers, and UFO buffs attack me as yet another naysayer, let me say some­thing: I really enjoy read­ing UFOGuy11s online dia­logues with the likes of Jack Sarfatti, inven­tor of the God phone. I am intrigued by Sarfattis and Murads debates over worm­holes and warp drive, although I occa­sion­ally find their e-​​mail con­ver­sa­tions, inter­spersed by equa­tions, a lit­tle tedious. I want to under­stand what dri­ves these peo­ple and why they believe strange things. I truly believe the F sec­tion is a good thing, sort of.
My prob­lem with the F group, how­ever, is the very prob­lem pointed out by Murad him­self. Some of the exper­i­ments sup­pos­edly sup­port­ing the outer reaches of sci­ence, like anti­grav­ity, have prob­lems when other researchers try to repli­cate the results. Some of these exper­i­ments are so dif­fi­cult, you cant repli­cate them, Murad said.
Say what? Did he say you cant repli­cate them? Isnt that the gold stan­dard of most sci­ence, just like they taught us in grade school? There were other prob­lems; some­times it was dif­fi­cult to get the sci­en­tists on the fron­tiers to attend even friendly ses­sions like the F sec­tion. Some fron­tier sci­en­tists, it turns out, dont like hav­ing their papers cri­tiqued. Wow, sci­en­tists not want­ing to attend sci­en­tific con­fer­ences and hav­ing their ideas debated? That sounds prob­lem­atic, too.
These are sim­i­lar to the prob­lems that plagued the idea of the hafnium bomb, the notional weapon based on an exper­i­ment that vio­lated the laws of physics. The exper­i­ment allegedly sup­port­ing the hafnium bomb had prob­lems being repli­cated by inde­pen­dent researchers. And when a panel of experts, called the JASONS, tried to ques­tion the lead exper­i­menter about his work, he was nowhere to be found. None of that pre­vented the Pentagon from fund­ing the hafnium bomb, how­ever.
So, lets momen­tar­ily put aside the ques­tion of whether or not we want the Pentagon to fund fron­tier sci­ence (which I dis­cussed yes­ter­day). Lets ask a sim­pler ques­tion: Why do they believe? Thats another ques­tion I ask in my book released this week, Imaginary
Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagons Scientific Underworld, which chron­i­cles the life and near death of the hafnium bomb. I con­tend the very state­ment I want to believe is exactly where the prob­lem lies. Most sci­en­tists dont believe or dis­be­lievethey just look at the data, rely­ing on the tried and true (albeit imper­fect) cri­te­ria of repro­ducibil­ity and peer review.
Why does Murad believe? He says it him­selflike Agent Mulder from the X-​​Files, he believes because he wants to believe. Antigravity, faster-​​than-​​light travel, and tele­por­ta­tion would all be great if they were real. Upstairs in the main sec­tion of the STAIF con­fer­ence, sci­en­tists and engi­neers dis­cussed such mun­dane things as, How the heck are we going to ful­fill the inane drive to Mars with cur­rent tech­nol­ogy? For many in the F sec­tion, thats just way too down-​​to-​​earth.
Theres no evi­dence that Murad, despite his Pentagon posi­tion, has funded any of these wild ideas, so I find the F group an inter­est­ing chal­lenge to main­stream sci­ence, and not a threat to national secu­rity, like the hafnium bomb. Maybe some day, the sci­en­tists of the F sec­tion will even repli­cate a few exper­i­ments, come out of the base­ment, and join the rest of the con­fer­ence. I wish them luck.
– Sharon Weinberger

June 14th, 2006 | Bizarro | 194411 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/06/14/among-the-fringe/Among+the+Fringe2006-06-14+13%3A53%3A34david_axe You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.