Last month I linked to a report that the US government was funding $2.3 million of research into whether being prayed for can cure illness.
Now comes another report of taxpayer-financed goofy science. According Bob Park, who writes the online newsletter of the American Physical Society:
Making the rounds in Washington this week is a 75-page Air Force Research Laboratory report, Teleportation Physics Study (my spell checker balks on “teleportation,” and well it should). This is not the IBM entangled photon stuff; this is transporting people across space. The subway does that, but it’s not included in the report. Instead it describes “conveyance of persons by psychic means,” and “transport through extra space dimensions or parallel universes.” The contractor for the study was Warp Drive Metrics in Las Vegas, and the author was Eric W. Davis, PhD, FBIS. We couldn’t find Dr. Davis in American Men and Women of Science, so we googled him and Warp Drive Metrics. Warp Drive Metrics has no website. We did find an article by Dr. Davis, Wormhole Induction Propulsion, prepared for the 1997 NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Workshop, which NASA had refused to allow me to attend. His affiliation then was the National Institute for Discovery Science, Las Vegas. The NIDS website displays an Oct 15, 04 notice from its president that the Institute is on an “inactive status.” Desperate for information, we contacted the Project Manager of the study, Dr. Franklin Mead, Senior Scientist of the Advanced Concepts Office. He’s not listed in American Men and Women of Science either, but he has a 1996 Patent (5,590,031) for a system to convert zero point energy to electrical energy. Apparently it’s not available yet. He could not give me the exact cost of the teleportation report, but said the subcontractor, ERC Inc., would know. We called ERC, but teleportation is just one small part of a huge contract. Two weeks ago we learned of the Air Force positron bomb. How many fantasy weapons are taxpayers buying?
Can you beam some common sense to the Air Force officials who approve this stuff, Scotty?
