An inventor’s dream — Kiwi fruit to London by flying saucer

Press, 9 May 1978, Page 31

An inventor’s dream — Kiwi fruit to London by flying saucer

A Hawke’s Bay fruit distributor has offered to pay the $200,000 bill for the construction in England of a saucer-shaped spaceship which, says its inventor, will travel the 20,000 km to New Zealand in 30 minutes.

There is one main con" dition of the offer: that the levity disc, as the craft is known, should cany consignments of kiwi fruit and tangeloes on its return trips to London for forwarding to the distributor's agents at Covent Garden.

A freight rate of about $1 a tonne and a shipment time of half an hour would ensure that the fruit reached the British market cheaply and in the best possible condition.

The prototype threeseater craft is being built at the request of interested New Zealanders and

$26,000 for preparatory work has already been contributed to the project from New Zealand sources.

If the claims of the levity disc’s designer, John R. Searl, of Morimer, near Basingstoke, are to be believed, some people in New Zealand are already aware of the existence of the craft. In the last 12 months, says Mr Searl, his unmanned, radio-controlled machines have made several sorties to New Zealand and Australia to seek suitable landing places for future manned craft.

They were guided by ham-radio enthusiasts but visited areas well away from population centres. Mr Searl’s semi-detached council house in Stephen’s Close, Mortimer, is

unkempt and ordinary, hardly the sort of place one would expect to harbour a new industrial revolution.

In the living room Is a small model of a levity disc, in a huge filing cabinet are hundreds of documents relating to more

than 30 years of research, on the wall is a map of the world, and on the table are seveal reams of detailed drawings. From a briefcase, Mr Searl takes a bar magnet and two steel rollers. He places the rollers at either end of the magnet. They appear to be attracted to the poles but, when they are pushed gently round the corners of the magnet, they chase each other round and round.

“You have never seen that before,” he says. “That is what I discovered in 1946; how to produce magnetic energy without fuel or any other form of power.

“The crystals in the magnet are changed by putting it in a magneticflux oven and by frequen-

By

JOHN ROSS

cy control. The result is motion of a magnetic field: a completely new source of power. “What powers my levity discs are units based on this principle: the motor and generator built as one fuel-less unit.”

An Australian engineer, Mr A. Park, of Melbourne, who was visiting Mr Searl, said that the demonstration was amazing.

“What he has been able to do is so change the particles in the magnet so that, instead of having south and north poles, it now appears to have south, north, south, north all the way along the magnet. It is remarkable and I see no technical reason why it should not work.”

Mr Searl, aged 47, is a machine setter with a big engineering company in Maidenhead. He works at night so that he can spend his daylight hours on research. Earlier inclinations toward pharmacy and surgery gave way to an inte-

rest in electronic engineering. He says that he ■ carried out contracts on the electronic systems of the Victor bomber and the first rtlO aircraft and gained experience in computer technology while working on a N.A.T.O. contract in Norway. In 1946, he says, he stumbled across the principle of self-generating magnetic power and began to build model levity discs: machines which look remarkably similar to the traditional flying saucer.

He asserts that the amount of energy generated was so great that the discs, after lifting off the ground and hovering, “shot off,” never to be seen again. One of them, he says, was tracked by radio well on its way to the Moon. Several of the craft, he says, have reached speeds of 251,000km/h and there seemed no reason why they could not exceed the speed of light: 300,000km/s.