It's the simple things that defy explanation. The fundamentals of gravity, for instance, still stump modern physicists. With space and time, gravity defines our physical existence. Yet this ever-present phenomenon conceals its nature, somehow woven into the mystery of life. Gravity may be seen as the effect of the planet hurtling through space, pressing us down the same way taking off in a jet glues passengers to their seats. Albert Einstein theorized that gravity bends space, helping to define relativity. Some call it a magnetic force produced by the rotation of the globe. How about a wave structure supported by frequency vibrations from the quantum field? Isaac Newton's theory was easier to understand. Dropping his famous apple, he saw gravity as the attraction between bodies of matter. More recently, Professor John Searl, an English inventor, claims to have reversed that attraction. That's right! Searl claims to have conquered gravity.

John R.R. Searl was born into poverty in Berkshire County, England in 1932. His story has all the makings of a Spielberg movie, from his father's return from India with a shawl used to wrap baby John (out of which John fell causing him to have fits as a child) to his discovery of the Searl Effect Generator. Powered by the SEG, Searl's unmanned levity discs have risen in pink clouds of ionization, we are told, traveled at tremendous speeds and circled the Earth. What's more, Searl claims to have demonstrated his flying machines to scientists at Andrews Air Force Base and to an official in the Canadian government.

One of the discs, according to Professor Searl, flew from Mortimer, England to the Cornwall coast in three minutes, a distance of about one hundred miles. That's two thousand miles per hour, and he says the craft could have flown much, much faster. Brisbane, Australia to London, England, for instance, would take about thirty minutes, hardly enough time for a good nap. Among Searl's other claims: a disc in orbit around the earth for ten years, powering his house with free energy, and startling healing powers resulting from the SEG's ion discharge.

Suspending skepticism for the moment, Searl's childhood seems unlikely for a man who might revolutionize the way we live. After his father disappeared, he grew up in foster homes, his mother having been sent to jail for neglect. While his practical knowledge of electrical engineering is great, his formal education was meager. To fill in the gaps, Searl had recurrent dreams as a child that cryptically revealed his life's work, true to our Spielbergian screenplay. Along with these mysterious dreams, his practical training helped him to become an inventor. While he claims to have inadvertently built his first anti-gravity machine at fourteen, his formal career and training began with electrical and electronic wiring, including the wiring of England's Victor Bombers and the first fully transistorized computer for NATO's large naval guns in Norway, facts that lend to Searl's credibility. He built televisions and radios, too, worked as a mechanical engineer and in radio communications. Searl is also a pilot and has an honorary degree from Oxford University as a Professor of Mathematical Structures of Creation and Energy.

Like Einstein, Searl has tried to prove intuitional knowledge scientifically, which brings us to his childhood dreams. He is playing hopscotch on a set of squares. On square two, with a pebble resting in square three, little John is in the act of hopping onto square four, but his right leg is suspended in the air with his left on the ground. At that instant, the other children have vanished and a giant steamroller looms ominously above him. John has only a short time to save himself from being crushed. From the crucible of this mysterious dream, Searl deduced his Law of the Squares', a new physics, if you will, upon which his SEG is based. Furthermore, Professor Searl perceived an imminent need to perfect his invention before the onset of a catastrophe of global proportions, the hovering steamroller! a pole shift, Searl says.

Searl's life, while resplendent with tales of gravity-defying discs, has been fraught with calamity. His work and records were destroyed or sold for scrap while he was in jail for stealing electricity from his local power company. While there have been articles and photographs in newspapers and magazines dating back to the 1960s, and as the BBC (as of this writing) searches its archives for film footage, none of the flying discs remain intact. The discs were confiscated by the power company or sold for junk while Searl was incarcerated. To make matters worse, the signatures and comments of eyewitnesses to the discs flights were burned by his now estranged wife. Not one scrap of material evidence remains, except some old photographs. Isn't this the stuff movies are made of?

In all, Searl claims to have built forty discs, many of which disappeared into orbit. The disc itself, Searl explains, consists of three rings of spinning, magnetic rollers. The spinning magnets create a gravitational-type force that repels the gravity of the earth, the same way magnets of a like charge repel one another. Searl says the disc creates an inertia-free field with characteristics of a planet, which the laws of physics say is impossible. The disc's rotation does not accelerate, Searl says, rather, unbelievably, it moves instantly to a cruising speed. Gunner Sandberg, chief technician at the electrical department of Sussex University in England, reportedly had a hard time fathoming this concept. In June, Searl spoke at an alternative-energy convention in Denver. He made reference to Sandberg having witnessed a demonstration. Yet Sandberg told us that, in the early 1980s, he had seen nothing more than magnets oscillating for a few seconds. He was unable to verify Searl's claims, although this was years after Searl's hard evidence had been scrapped. Sandberg said that, although he had seen nothing extraordinary, he had reserved judgment. More resources were needed, he said, to prove or disprove Searl's claims.

Last June in Denver, Searl told his story. Lacking any hard evidence, his unpretentious manner is his most convincing attribute. He appears, one would have to say, guileless. His anecdotes regarding his flying discs and his description of the technology hardly sound fabricated. To the contrary, Searl seems sincere and genuine; yet some have complained of inconsistencies in his explanations. Searl appears to be a simple, honest man, gifted with an earnestness and a grasp of science that transcends his presentation! or he has a lot of us fooled. His grammar and speech are poor, his accent thick, Cockney-like. Searl is no glib or polished spokesman which, ironically, adds to his credibility.

While remaining prudently skeptical, given the nature of Searl's claims, let's take a closer look at what he has to say. In 1949 he had a lucky break, we are told, while working for the Midlands Electricity Board. A friend at the MEB gave him permission to use the Board's magnet-pressing equipment. Searl built small experimental generators at the time, not flying discs, which were supposed to produce power but not fly. He did so with the help of his seventy-year old landlady! that's right! and an elderly Welsh backer named George Hines. In 1952 he moved on to a fourteen-foot model. This SEG produced power at an unusually high potential, 10 to the fifth power volts! Overcharging the disc caused the temperature to drop to four Kelvin, approaching absolute zero. At that point, Searl says the laws of physics reversed and the disc lifted. There was crackling and the smell of ozone as the generator unexpectedly rose from the ground, broke a connection with a start-up generator, and levitated fifty feet in a pink glowing cloud resulting from ionization. Collecting energy from the rim of the craft and applying it to electromagnetic pick-ups made the disc speed up when it should have slowed down. The generator accelerated, to Searl's amazement, spinning at a tremendous clip. After causing local radios to flick on and off, the disc soared out of sight, most likely into orbit. Searl says he has since constructed many flying discs, some of which flew off uncontrollably until he and his team invented a control device. He claims to have built models as wide as forty feet, some with nylon hulls, some of fiberglass, several of which the BBC and English TV stations observed and filmed, although the BBC has not as yet been forthcoming with any footage. Both the Canadian and American governments witnessed demo flights, according to Searl, but rejected the possibility of inertia-free flight. The Americans at Andrews Air Force Base, Searl claims, said the G-forces in the craft would kill anyone on board.

The levity disc, though, Searl says, has been tested and found to be inertia-free in the cabin. As the structure lifts, all in its field becomes inertia free, a world of its own, violating accepted physical laws. That means a person flying inside would not feel the effects of the tremendous speed, in the same way we do not feel the speed of the earth as it hurtles through space. The SEG creates a high-density electrical field, negative at the rim and positive at the center, while a magnetic field surrounds the hull and extends beyond it. Perpetual motion (considered an impossibility) occurs when the craft exceeds a certain potential. At that point energy output is more or less limitless as the SEG gathers electrons from space surrounding it. As the threshold potential is achieved, the temperature around the craft drops severely, reminiscent of accounts stating that UFOs leave rings of ice on the ground. The disc becomes a superconductor, Searl says. The revolving magnetic field produces gravitational energy (an unknown) and the two likes, earth and levity disc, repel one another. He says the craft would be easy to control in space, homing in on gravity fields of different planets, and that in space the disc could approach the speed of light.

Anti-gravity, the speed of light, space travel? None of this is easy to believe. Spielberg would have a field day with the professor. Searl seems to be a modern hero, a simple yet brilliant man set against orthodoxy, a man with a singular vision who some consider a lunatic or charlatan. The script is all in place, the conflict, the setbacks, the wife who doesn't understand. So far, only the happy ending is missing. The hero/genius gets thrown into jail for doing what comes naturally, which is building flying saucers from technology gleaned from childhood dreams, seemingly ordained by the gods. His life's work is destroyed by the bad guys, bureaucrats or robber barons whose empires are threatened by Searl's free energy. We're all rooting for the professor, but his inventions are burned or sold for junk. This is the stuff movies are made of.

But that doesn't mean the story isn't true. Nor is Searl alone. He isn't the first to have claimed to conquer gravity or draw free power from an omnipresent force. The inventor Henry Moray is said to have fed a step-down transformer from an alternating current derived from germanium crystals resonating, presumably, in tune with the quantum field. That's science talk for: he drew power from the atmosphere! free energy. Moray transformed this field energy into electricity through harmonic amplification', drawing enough power to supply appliances with 500 kilowatts continuously. And Moray had witnesses. Not unlike Searl, Moray's laboratory and credibility were destroyed after he presented his findings to the United States Government. Nicola Tesla had a similar fate, in that his tower for the wireless transmission of electricity was sabotaged, his financing cut off and his career virtually ended when his technology threatened the established order. There are apocryphal stories of Tesla's other revolutionary experiments, death rays, intrigue. The list of inventors and their sad, or tall, stories (depending on your point of view) goes on. All, save Tesla, lack credible documentation. The claim of persecution from on high is always present, turning our screenplay into a formula instead of the story of a unique and persistent visionary. But let's not become too skeptical. Stories of human beings defying gravity (with no external energy source) have existed for some time, documentation included.

In 1936 the Illustrated London News published a photograph taken in southern India of a levitated yogi named Subbayah Pullavar. The photographer, P.T. Plunkett, concluded that the yogi remained horizontal in the air for about four minutes and that the man had no support whatsoever, except for resting one hand lightly on top of a stick. John Keel, a writer and traveler through India and Tibet in the 1950s, reported a similar event when a Tibetan lama levitated cross-legged before his eyes. This was after Keel had dismissed other miracle workers as expert magicians. If that's all too exotic and faraway for Westerners, in 1852 in Connecticut there was the case of nineteen-year-old Daniel Home who floated involuntarily from the ground in front of many witnesses. The incident was observed and recorded by F.L. Burr, editor of the Hartford Times. Burr reported that Home levitated to the ceiling in the house of Ward Cheney, a silk manufacturer. As strange as this sounds, Home learned to levitate voluntarily and did so over a period of forty years before hundreds of people including Emperor Napoleon III and Mark Twain. Heavy objects such as chairs and even a grand piano rose in his wake. What's more, Home received the endorsement of Sir William Crookes, President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Crookes described the anti-gravitational phenomena in the Quarterly Journal of Science with both certainty and an incredulity betrayed by his very eyes. There are many such accounts involving religious mystics, 230 cases attributed to Catholic saints alone. While patently different from Searl's claim of mechanized levitation, these accounts do serve to support the possibility of levitation without an external energy source. In that they frequently involve mysticism, many draw parallels between levitation and a school of thought arising in the New Physics, where mind and matter are believed to be of the same essence. Was Searl tapping the essence?

Since Searl's claims are often greeted with profound skepticism or even dismissed, Searl does not call his discs flying saucers'! understandable if he wants to gain acceptance. Photographs of Searl's levity discs', however, reveal that that is exactly what they are. For those who believe that extraterrestrial spacecraft exist (the U.S. Air Force has not denied that they exist, by the way, only that they cause a defense threat) there are fundamental similarities between Searl's SEG powered discs and accounts of UFOs. One similarity is that both are inertia-free discs. UFOs are often described as traveling very fast, then stopping, then accelerating instantly. Also, both, according to accounts, produce very low temperatures, disc-shaped ice patches having been found where UFOs have landed and taken off. Another similarity is that Searl's disc and the UFOs magnetize patches of earth, leaving circular rings on the ground. Yet one more similarity is the ionization cloud, the after-effect of a technology that, as far as we know, no government on earth employs.

Coming back to earth, Searl's account is fantastic, the implications staggering. If true, the SEG would change the way we live. Space travel would become routine, as would traveling around the globe quickly. Our dependence on oil for fuel would become obsolete, upsetting the world's financial power structure. Powers that be, the bad guys in our script, would have everything to lose and would almost certainly act to prevent the manufacture of such units or discredit the inventor. But Professor Searl has reportedly engaged companies in Japan, Germany and in the United States. Reportedly, the Germans have developed a prototype but are not willing to display the unit until production, distribution and marketing measures are in place. In the United States, Searl has people working on a small, non-flying demonstration model, but the date of that demonstration came and went. Nothing happened, no SEG. The project is complex and expensive, we are told. They need more time and money. According to John Thomas, Professor Searl's publisher and agent, even a small unit is intricate and costly. He promises a demonstration somewhere down the road, perhaps within a year. Meanwhile the BBC searches its files. Foreign concerns develop prototypes. We watch and wait, on the edge of our seats. Pass the popcorn.