Anti-Gravity: the real men who stare at Goats!

According to wikipedia, in 1979, Hutchison claims to have discovered a number of unusual phenomena, while trying to duplicate experiments done by Nikola Tesla. He refers to several of these phenomena jointly under the name "the Hutchison effect", including: levitation of heavy objects; fusion of dissimilar materials such as metal and wood, while lacking any displacement; the anomalous heating of metals without burning adjacent material; the spontaneous fracturing of metals; changes in the crystalline structure and physical properties of metals; disappearance of metal samples.

Hutchison has maintained a number of websites over the years, in which he posts videos and pictures of the purported effect, including short low-quality clips of objects flying around or rising from the ground, and metallic objects moving without being touched. He has offered mail-order VHS tapes of the effect for $100 each, though videos are now sold exclusively through Gryphon Productions.

Supporters like Mark Solis, his former webmaster, maintain that none of these effects can be the result of known physical phenomena, such as electromagnetism. Hutchison and his supporters surmise that these phenomena arise from zero-point energy or the Casimir effect.

Researchers at NASA and the Max Planck Institute have attempted to reproduce some of Hutchison's experiments, but that so far none has succeeded. Indeed, NASA's Marc Millis remarks that Hutchison himself appears unable to reproduce his own experiments. Hutchison claims that this is due to the destruction of his lab by the military, or because he has been otherwise prevented legally by the government from repeating his experiments.

Canadian inventor and fringe physicist Mel Winfield says that it was solely through his theories that The Hutchison Effect came into being. He has published evidence including signed contracts, letters, and communications from John Hutchison himself on his website.

Military interest

According to Hutchison and United States Col. John Alexander, military scientists from the United States have been working with him because of the effect's military potential. In the documentary Free Energy: The Race to Zero Point, he states that military scientists were impressed with the effects, but were not able to replicate them on their own without assistance.

Hutchison later accused the military of coercing the Canadian government into seizing his lab so that it could be passed on to Lockheed Martin Skunk Works for research purposes. Journalist and author Nick Cook later wrote that this had been confirmed by a high-ranking friend of his in the Skunk Works. Boyd Bushman, retired Lockheed Martin senior engineer, later confirmed this in an interview in Nick Cook's book The Hunt for Zero Point.

Hutchison claims that "at the end of the cold war" a "military intelligence service" (not otherwise specified) destroyed his lab in Vancouver while he was traveling in Europe. To support this allegation, Hutchison has presented photos of letters allegedly written by various scientific and government organizations, as well as a letter allegedly written by Hans-Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein.