Case file · Government program

The 'gravitator' patent and the Biefeld–Brown effect

British patent GB300311 (accepted 15 November 1928), 'A method of and an apparatus or machine for producing force or motion': charged masses and electrodes said to produce thrust.

1928 CE · 40.07, -82.52 · status: disputed

The account

Brown spent a year at Caltech and a year at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and later said he had worked there with the astronomer Paul Alfred Biefeld, which gave the effect its double name. Denison says it has no record of such experiments or collaboration, though the family archive cites a 1930 affidavit from Biefeld. In a 1929 magazine article Brown imagined that 'multi-impulse gravitators weighing hundreds of tons may propel the ocean liners of the future'. A US patent, 1,974,483 'Electrostatic motor', followed on 25 September 1934.

The sceptical view

The patent describes a force, not its cause. The Biefeld collaboration rests on Brown's and his family's account.

The researched reading

A real force, honestly reported. Ionic wind accounts well for the lifters people build today; whether it accounts for everything Brown reported, above all the force he said remained in vacuum, has never been settled by a repeat of his own experiments.

Explanation	Weight	Why
A known natural phenomenon	38%	Ionic wind (electrohydrodynamic thrust) explains the lightweight “lifters” tested in air: NASA’s 2004 data fitted it, Tajmar found no lifter thrust in vacuum, and MIT flew a plane on it in 2018. Careful vacuum studies, Tajmar’s among them, did not reproduce Brown’s results. But most of the modern work tested light lifters, not Brown’s own gravitators, and his central claim, a force that persists in vacuum, rests on his 1955–56 SNCASO runs, which were never independently repeated as he performed them.
Undetermined	35%	The decisive experiments were never independently repeated. The Army Research Laboratory found that a simple ion-wind model came out orders of magnitude too small to account for the measured force (2003); R. L. Talley’s US Air Force study (1990) found no thrust in vacuum under steady voltage, but did find a force during electrical breakdown, when current flowed; experiments at very low pressure have been reported both to show and not to show a force; and Brown’s SNCASO vacuum results have no surviving independent record. The question is narrowed, not closed.
Genuinely anomalous	20%	Brown’s own reading: a real coupling between high-voltage dielectrics and gravity. Supporters point to the thrust he reported in vacuum for SNCASO and claimed in his 1965 patent, to the 1950s aircraft industry’s interest and the confidential Electrogravitics Systems report, and to how quickly the subject went quiet after 1957. It would be confirmed by thrust in a hard vacuum, scaling with the dielectric’s mass, shown independently.
Secret human technology	4%	Martin, Convair, Bell and others announced gravity research in 1955–56 and then fell silent. Whether anything came of it out of public view is unknown; the B-2 claim has no documentary support, but the silence itself is a fact.
Something known, misidentified	3%	Some early observations, such as the Coolidge tube on a balance, can also come from ordinary measurement effects: electrostatic pull on nearby objects, heat, or cables tugging the scale.

Official position: No official finding on Brown’s own devices. The military showed interest in the 1950s; the Army Research Laboratory and a NASA contractor tested lifters (not Brown’s gravitators) in 2003–04 and found no sign of a gravity effect in them.

Connections in the atlas

Sources

Open it in the living atlas