Anti-Gravity Machine

Wheels Within Wheels

“Scientists will simply have to accept that I am right and physics is wrong,” according to Scots engineer Sandy Kidd. “Only then can we open up the universe and take man to mars in just a few hours longer than the present flying time between Sydney and London.”

These outlandish — even unearthly — claims would normally be dismissed out of hand; but not when they come from Sandy Kidd. His invention, the Kidd Machine, shouldn’t work — but it does, repeatedly.

Sandy Kidd set out to create an anti-gravity machine in 1980, a device which could one day power flying saucers with energy derived from high-speed gyroscopes. While working as a planning engineer with a North Sea oil company for four years, he spent nearly every spare minute in a makeshift workshop in his garden shed in Dundee, Scotland. Then, at Christmas in 1984, his machine generated its first vertical thrust. “Not much, but it was there and I was over the moon,” he recalls. A few weeks later the device was demonstrated at Imperial College, London, for Professor Eric Laithwaite, a pioneering expert on gyroscopes.

After watching the three kilogram, 45-centimetre unit with a gyroscope at each end of a crossarm rise from the test-bench against a counter-weight, he described Kidd as “ingenious’.

“What we have here is a potential space drive,” Laithwaite said. “Properly developed, this would take you to the outer universe on a spoonful of uranium.”

Two years later, research physicist Dr Bill Ferrier of Dundee university examined the device on campus. “Its potential is mind-boggling,” Ferrier announced. After Sandy Kidd moved to Australia a second prototype was tested in Melbourne for three days under the supervision of specialist engineers. Placed in a sealed wooden box, it was suspended from a cord attached to an overhead beam fitted with sensitive measuring instruments. Powered by a model aircraft engine, the entire device lost weight as the vertical thrust overcame the ‘force’ of gravity.

“It created enough thrust to float a small orange through the middle of a room,” said Kidd. “People in the laboratory were clearly shaken.”

The Kidd Machine produces lift without reacting on air, water or a solid surface and therefore appears to be defying Newton’s Third Law of Motion that states that every action must have an equal and opposite reaction.

“What Kidd has achieved will certainly shake the scientific world to the core when they realize the implications of the results,” announced prematurely optimistic astrophysicist Dr Harold Aspden of Southampton University in the 1980s. “It should now be possible to build a machine big enough to lift itself off the ground with a full payload.”

Mr Kidd was working under contract to BWN, an Australian-based company. BWN refused to divulge laboratory details despite wide mainstream media disclosure, including demonstrations on a number of TV programs. “Full public disclosure would simply encourage others to build similar devices and perhaps overtake us,” said Noel Carrol of BWN. “Industrial espionage is another risk we face.” Work to increase lift and design a commercial prototype “may take several years but we’ll get there,” said Kidd in 1988.