Imagine the power, economic and military, that would fall into the hands of the person who figured out how to bypass the ordinary laws of physics, defy gravity, and travel near the speed of light. Though it sometimes seems to fall in the realm of science fiction more than pure science, aviation-technology journalist Nick Cook's intriguing tale involves the long quest to develop antigravity vehicles and the sometimes eccentric characters who have played a part in it: Nazi rocket engineers, backyard inventors, NASA scientists, conspiracy theorists, and UFO watchers among them.