The Marcus Device Controversy

By Tim Ventura, April 29th, 2003

This overview of the Marcus device began as an email response to a request for information on the
Marcus device – a device created by inventor Marcus Hollingshead that encountered more than its share
of publicity and controversy between November 2002 and march 2003, before Hollingshead went silent
and withdrew from public scrutiny.

The problem with Marcus has been that he was pressured by way too many people, way too
fast to produce results. I started talking to him in November, and he's always sounded like an
honest, rational man with a good heart. The problem is that once people started to hear his
private claims that he could lift something like 2 tons of weight, things kind of went south.

It's not really anything that one person in particular did -- at least not from what I gather. I talked
to him on the phone several times, and found the man to be intelligent, well-spoken, and
generally altruistic. The problem arose when his daily email jumped to several thousand pieces
per day.

Also, while people in general have been very well-meaning, they are desperate to solve many of
our current energy-problems, and when Marcus appeared with a potential solution it kind of got
out of control. Pretty soon film crews were showing up at his house unannounced, and he was
getting unwanted phone calls from people who'd looked up his number online. While he seemed
to enjoy conversations with the people in his working group online, having lots of unknown
persons call wanting proof about what his device might do can be a scary proposition at best,

People in the Antigravity group started getting itchy because he'd promised proof but hadn't
delivered, and it degenerated from honest speculation in early January 03 to outright name-
calling in late February.

In my opinion, its really a problem of a "social dynamic" at work here -- too many people, with
too much access, all at once. This also correlates to the type of person that different people are.
For instance, I am a very open person, and I really don't value my privacy a heck of a lot --
therefore, when TV crews drop by with 5 minutes notice (and they have), I tend to just let them
in for a demo. However, Marcus, who is much more of a private person, seems to have become
a bit overwhelmed at this proposition.

Also, keep in mind that I had initiated working with the media because I felt that it was time for
the excellent work in the Lifters groups to see the light of day. There was some debate about
this, but the Lifters group as a whole has greatly benefited from being about to tell people about
this new technology.

Marcus hadn't actually "gone public" about his work. He had leaked information about his
research to a few people, and from there it was leaked to several others, who in turn told their
friends about it. Kinda like a chain-letter, except that in this case there was a real person on the
end of it that was affected by all of the publicity.

His inbox overnight went from 10 to 1000 email messages -- he had to take on a second email
address just to remain in contact with the people that he usually talked to from before the
publicity. Unlike the Lifter technology, which has hundreds of people that can talk about how it
works and where it came from, Marcus technology was represented solely by himself. That
means that everything surrounding his device came back ultimately to him alone. Without any
real group ownership of the expertise behind the device

As I said before, Marcus was new to the publicity, and didn't have time to prepare the resources
that the rest of us have had to answer questions, provide demo materials, etc. Naudin and
Saviour have a masterful manner with regard to teaching people about Lifter technology, but
they've had years to prepare this information and perfect a method of presenting it to people.

Most of us in the AG groups tend to proselytize for the technologies that we believe in. I know
that I do, and if you haunt the newsgroups much you'll notice that everybody there believes in
something and can go on for months non-stop telling the world about it (again, I do this).
Marcus, however, doesn't really have this personality -- he's more of a "take it or leave it" type of
person.

For me, this was another indicator that he was the "real deal". You have to understand that I
have never seen working prototype pictures of the Marcus device, and all that I had to go on
was the feeling that I got from interacting with him on the phone and online. The fact that he
didn't try to "sell me" on the idea was a big plus. He told me about the device, and his story was
always consistent. The other people that he talked to also had a consistent story -- I haven't
talked to anybody and heard a different version than I heard from Marcus himself. That's a big
plus from the credibility perspective.

Again, its the social dynamic here that soured Marcus to things. For instance, Nick Cook
indicated that he'd dropped by unannouced to get some footage with Bruce Goodison after
Marcus had cancelled his first public demonstration. Cook had been looking for evidence like
the rest of us had that Marcus had something real, and not just a "vaporware" claim about a
new technology that might not have even existed. Marcus fabricated a cheap story about "the
government confiscating his work" and turned Cook away at the door, which is the point at
which Nick became soured to the idea himself.

I talked to Marcus about this much later on, and he indicated that he'd just made up a story on
the spot to get Nick to leave. It had nothing to do with either Nick or Bruce Goodison -- they're
both excellent journalists with lots of experience, integrity, and a desire to help the world by
spreading news about new technologies. The problem is that at the time when they'd dropped
by, Marcus was getting tons of unsolicited email (much of it literally demanding a demonstration)
as well as unsolicited phone calls from people he'd never even talked to instantly asking him for
both video footage as well as a demonstration of the device in public.

Marcus initial goal (from when I started talking to him in November) was to gradually ease into
working with the public to tell them about the technologies he was working on. Unfortunately, I
probably aggravated the issue a great deal, because his early descriptions of the technology
might have gone unnoticed if it hadn't been for some of the things he'd mentioned about his
research.

When I read Marcus' firsts posts on the device, my very first thought about his claims was that
they were bogus. Judging from the reaction of the Antigravity newsgroup, I gathered that a few
other people also had that same initial reaction. The reason might be a little selfish -- after you
hear claims but don't see results for a long enough period of time, you tend to protect yourself
emotionally by becoming skeptical to the idea that somebody can be lifting hundreds of pounds
of weight using a completely new and revolutionary technology.
Nonetheless, something that Marcus had said resonated with me. I remember that he was
talking about his results being based on a study of the Earth's fields, which is something that I'd
read about myself during the college years. Telsa had done a lot of work involving the Earth's
electrical and magnetic-fields, and I'd always felt that this research might come in handy later as
a potential basis for Antigravity research. However, I didn't have any specific ideas, and began
asking Marcus questions offline to find out more about his research.

So in terms of helping to make things more public I have some guilt about helping things get out
of control for the poor fellow, because instead of being able to ask small questions in public
without much public knowledge about what he was doing or how he was doing it, all of a sudden
I was putting pieces together online, which tended to bring him into more of a public focus. All of
the little questions that he'd asked innocently enough to different people in the newsgroups now
came into some type of focus in mid-December as indicators that he was working on a new and
radically different technology.

In reality, I'm nobody special, so I think that perhaps this would have happened in any event no
matter what my reaction would have been. Certainly I'm not the only person that took an early
interest in his work, and from what I learned later he'd already been a little bit too honest in the
BBC online newsgroup before he ever became involved with the Antigravity newsgroups.

From January to mid-February Marcus became like somewhat of an addiction in the

You have to understand that most inventors tend to segregate their time into "public" and
"private". I do, Naudin does, heck -- pretty much everybody does this. When you talk to the
public about what you've built, you really get into it -- but when you are actually working on it,
you tend to hole up in the garage and put the entire world on "ignore" until you've finished with
whatever it is that you're doing.

It's not uncommon for me to take an entire week and hole up in the garage without talking to
anybody. It can be very rewarding to emerge later with a completed project, and usually I have a
few hundred photos that I can post online to answer questions. Naudin is even worse -- he'll go
a few weeks without really talking to anybody, but in his case he'll emerge from his lab with a
15-page spread detailing a completely new technology. It's because without the ability to focus
and concentrate you're pretty much stuck on being able to develop a new idea.

In the case of Marcus, his research time went from "whenever he wanted to work on it" to
"highly-measured". Imagine having to tell people when you want to take a couple of days to
work with something he claimed he'd been working on at leisure for 7+ years. Suddenly it
appears that his time isn't his own, and that if he doesn't make sure that everybody knows he'll
be away from the computer the entire online community is going to start having panic attacks
that he was snatched by 'The Men in Black'.

I know that it sounds like I am playing up the publicity aspect of Marcus research, but I'm really
not. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, had any idea how big it would get, and how fast.

I typically get about 40 to 50 emails per day. A lot of those are spam from people who get my
email address online and want to sell me HgH or Viagra (?), and I typically delete those
immediately. The rest are honest questions from persons like yourself that I can answer easily
and in a straightforward manner.

Last year I went on the Art Bell radio show and Wired Magazine Online did a feature about Lifter
technology within a 1-month period of time. Even at that point I was only getting maybe about
300 emails per day -- and most of them were easy to answer, because I'd already written a
detailed article that explained a lot about how the technology worked. The people that I couldn't
help went to Naudin's site, and many more went to the Lifters online community with its (back
then) 700+members. We were sitting pretty on the media front -- we had the ability to handle the
amount of attention that we were getting, and we were able to tell a lot of people about the new
technologies as a result.

Marcus literally blew us all away. I KNOW that he wasn't lying about the volume of email that he
was getting, because his email box would fill up to "over mailbox limit" about halfway through
each passing day. This is within a 1-month period of time that it did this.

Marcus really started to get publicity in late November 2002, and it built up over a few week
period of time. By mid-December, he had a healthy following in the Antigravity newsgroup and
people in the 5 or 10 other AG newsgroups were develping more than just a passing interest.
Great stuff for Marcus - he'd thought that he was the only person doing this research, and it
turned out that lots of people shared this common interest with him. We had lots of really
valuable and productive exchanges.

Marcus bided his time working on the projects -- he'd initially stated that he could lift around 200
pounds of weight with his November version (prototype #161, if I remember correctly). He didn't
have a digital camera, and he didn't want to publish photos until he had a better prototype
anyways. That was OK with me -- I'm used to working with a variety of inventors and came to
realize a long time ago that everybody has their own style. I was content to wait until Marcus
had additional data, and the only thing that I insisted upon was that sooner or later he ante-up
and provide some photographic evidence.

Despite lacking photos or video evidence, Marcus did have documentation. In fact, he wrote
more documentation about his device than I'd ever hoped to receive. He cranked out about the
equivalent of 30-pages of "real" documentation in a very detailed form within 1-month, and had
the email equivalent of many more pages in postings about how the device worked online. The
compilation that I sent you earlier contains what Jerry Montgomery was able to put together
from Marcus postings, and that's based solely on newsgroup correspondence taking place
within a 1-month period of time. At that point Marcus had already been publishing details online
for about 2.5 months.

Despite the incredible amount of published data that Marcus was able to complete, in some
ways it made things worse for him than not having anything at all. The reason was the nature of
his research. My work, currently focused on Lifters, was in a technology that's easy to explain --
the device is built like this, it works like that, and it can be described in a manner similar to some
other thing ....basic, easy to explain, and easy to compare.

After all, Lifters have been accused by science of being ion-wind devices. If nothing else,
rebutting this claim gives us someplace to start -- something to compare against to provide
people with an idea about how the device works. Additionally, we had TONS of video and
photographic evidence to back up our claims. We had so much data that the entire group was
running out of places to store it online. On the CD-Rom's that I sell on the AAG site, I now have
300+ megs of data -- much of it being photographic and video evidence regarding how the
Lifters work. That 300 megs is mostly just my own research -- Naudin probably has a stack
of CD's as tall as a book-case containing the work from his website...

In Marcus case, the documentation that he provided made things worse because his technology
is so utterly different. It's not ion-wind, nor the Biefeld-Brown effect, nor apparently the Searle
effect. In fact, the more than you tried to pin down exactly what it was, the harder it became to
describe it.

Also, its not like he could simply fall back onto describing the construction of the device --
reason being that it contained a series of interrelated coils with a unique configuration that were
intrinsically tied to the operation of the device. Every time he wrote a detailed summary of the
construction of the device, we'd come away with more questions than we'd started out with.
After a time I gave up trying to understand how it was constructed, because I only had bits and
pieces.

Marcus was using an arrangement of 6-coils, and what are described as "bifilar windings".
Essentially, this means that you wind two wires together around a coil and then tie one of the
ends to together, making the two wires essentially one long wire wound "against itself" down the
length of the armature its on. There are 6 of these armatures on the device, mounted around a
central RP (or reference point).

Marcus created all of the terminology for these parts -- this lends additional credibility to the idea
that he'd had 7 years of experience with it. These are ideas that you just don't "make up" for
publicity. For instance, the bifilar windings on the armature-coils are self-cancelling fields, and
even a basic-electronics education will tell you that. However, the interesting thing is that once
you really start to get into the advanced "post-scientific" research on magnetic fields you start to
see self-cancelling magnetic coils all over the place. The reason is apparently that while the "B-
field" of the coils cancel, the "A-field" that Tom Bearden keeps talking about doesn't -- which
means that you can isolate the really interesting effects from the coil without having to deal with
the high field-intensity effects from normal electromagnetism.

Marcus had described these six armatures as being activated in a series, or order, to obtain
results. Each of the coils was spun by an electric motor mounted on the armature, and when the
coil was spun up to a certain speed and "stubs" mounted a periodic intervals on the side of the
armature were fired in sequence the antigravity effect was created.

Marcus Antigravity effect was a directional force that was applied in a unique manner depending
on which coils were activated. This means that by activating (for instance) coils 1 and 3, he
could create an antigravity effect AND move the device left -- or something to that effect.
Turning on and off each set of coils gave him movement on one axis of thrust, which
corresponded to X, Y, or Z in a standard 3-D geometric graph. Since you can move in either
direction down any given axis of thrust, this means that you have 6 axis of movement height (up
and down), width (left or right), and depth (forward or backward). His device provided movement
on any axis by either one coil or an arrangement of coils.

For a while Marcus didn't want to talk about side effects, but I pressured him into it. The reason
was that I have seen side-effects that were pretty darned strange in a number of different
experiments, and I was willing to bet that if I pressured him a bit he'd talk about what he'd seen
but didn't want to reveal (for fear that people wouldn't take him seriously). It turns out that I was
right.....
Marcus had talked about the RP, or "Reference Point" upon several occassions. This is a multi-
layered device that acts somewhat like a capactive element. It sits in the direct center of the
Marcus device, and it IS the reference-point for the entire device. The RP is manufactured from
cast-iron, and Marcus says that he has a local company build them for a few bucks each by
pouring iron into a mold based on one of his designs.

You can active the RP at the same time that you activate the coils. You have coils rotating
around the RP, with "stubs" on the coils firing periodically at points corresponding to spots on
the surface of the RP. Meanwhile, you also have an electrical charge on the RP itself, which
means that there are a lot of elements interacting at once to create a very complex dynamic.

One of the interesting side effects was a darkening and "blurring" effect of the RP, as if light was
being reflected off it. Another was a Star-Trek like "force shield" around the RP. These ONLY
occurred when ALL of the coils were activated at once. Also note that since the coils are
opposing in nature (one for each direction on each axis), that when you are creating the force
field effect the device cannot be levitating. However, the device is operational, and you have a
force-field that you can apparently bounce a heavy hammer off of without being able to
penetrate it (Marcus description).

Another interesting note is that the force-field effect can be modified to create a vacuum. I'm not
sure how Marcus noticed this, but he'd said that it appeared to create a vacuum inside of the
field's boundaries during operation. Interestingly, it also ran VERY cold -- apparently down to a
hundred degrees below zero, but only within the localized boundaries of the field.

I am not a professional physicist, but this is something that has been reported with the Searl
effect and several other experiments, and the reason that I believe it occurs is because you are
taking the kinetic energy of the devicem as well as some of the kinetic energy of its molecules
(ie: heat energy), and injecting it into another dimension. After all, anytime we directly modify a
gravitational field we are creating a dimensional effect, but in normal life we don't notice it
because the boundaries between gravitational fields are very gradual.

Well, in the Marcus device the boundary between gravitational fields is not a several thousand
mile-long gradient like the Earth's field is -- instead of you have a gradient perhaps 10-times
more intense focused within a 3 to 4 inch area. That means that you area creating essentially a
rift in time and space (self-healing) that is kept open by the energy that you're pumping into the
device.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the most accurate description that I have seen yet for why
his device does this. Marcus himelf couldn't explain why these effects occurred, and to be
honest I scared him more than a little when I told him my theory.

In the hypothesis that I just put forth on the origin and functionality of the Marcus device effect,
the interesting this is that there really isn't a direct correlation between input energy and the
effect itself. That's because you aren't using the input energy to actually cause an effect -- you
are essentially using the input energy to translate the device into another dimension ( although it
is still partially within ours).

Einstein called these "frames of reference". The idea is that the energy input is used only in
putting the device into another frame of reference, but that any interaction between us and our
"normal" frame would have to be modified for any interactions with the "modified" frame.
Again, this takes place in normal physics -- but usually it involves motion, and normally it takes
place over a vastly larger gradient of time/space/whatever. The difference between two frames
is the difference between two locomotives moving at different speeds -- the energy input goes
into accelerating each locomotive up to that speed, but the actual work performed if those two
trains interact is solely a product of the frame of inertial reference (mass & velocity = energy).

Another excellent example is a helium-balloon. You put the energy into condensing the helium
and pumping it into the balloon, but it's not the helium that creates lift --it's the surrounding
atmosphere. In a very real sense a helium balloon gets its energy from the surrounding
environment. The energy that you put into "maintaining flight" in a helium balloon is only the
strain on the fabric used in holding the helium into the confines of the bag that encloses it. With
the Marcus device, I'd bet money that its not the input energy creating these effects -- it's
instead the difference in frames of dimensional/inertial reference between "our" environment
and the "device's" environment, whatever that difference may be.

You see, even though this sounds like a load of BS, magnetism isn't real. This isn't an idea that
I'm making up -- in fact, it's an entire chapter in the physics 101 textbook kicking around
downstairs in my house. Take two magnetic fields, and project them in the same direction at the
same speed. Field A can't interact with Field B, because neither of the fields really exists -- they
are merely ripples on a pond, and that pond is the background of the time-space continuum.
People that believe in relativistic gravitational effects take for granted that things like this happen
-- after all, gravity isn't a force per se in relativity -- only a modification of the dimensions of time-
space. Well, most people don't realize that Einstein based his theory of gravitational force on his
study of magnetism. Magnetism is the same thing -- its a modification of the fabric of time-
space.

Take the two magnetic fields that didn't interact from a moment ago, and now change the
direction that one of them is travelling in. Suddenly, the two fields that coudn't even see each
other a moment ago now create an incredible "torque" - this is the same thing that we see in
bar-magnets and electric motors. This is the "torsion field" research that Russia spent millions of
dollars on in the cold-war, because they understood that magnetism is the MOST
misunderstood force in the Universe.

Bar magnets are different than pure fields because they are composed of the discrete fields of
thousands of tiny magnetic "domains". That's why the fields from bar-magnets are never
"invisible" to each other -- its because that the fields in bar magnets are too jumbled to ever
really "line up" to the point of being invisible. Pure fields can do this, however, reinforcing the
supremacy of Einstein's relativistic effects with relation to electromagnetism.

Anyhow, that's about it for now -- I will try to come up with a more detailed picture for you on this
if you like, but I expect that you will probably have more questions about Marcus theory and
device in near future. It's a very complex idea underlying his research, but the basis of it is the
idea of "rotating magnetic fields".

If you want to do additional research on your own into related fields of study, I would definitely
look up "relativity and magnetism" -- it provides an excellent example of how to visualize
relativity theory in the study of magnetic field interactions. This is something that electronics
engineers aren't taught, which is why you've never heard of this in an engineering sense before.
However, in physics is a well-known concept, although most physicists prefer to work with
quantum mechanics rather than relativity these days.
In terms of rotating magnetic fields, you can look up "torsion fields" - again, the Russians have
the best understanding of advanced torsion field physics, although their best material probably
hasn't been translated yet. Additionally, rotating magnetic fieds are the basis for the Searle
Effect and the Hamel device.

Marcus was intrigued by Searle's claims, because they appear to have matched many of his
own results. Interestingly, Marcus had developed his work within an "intellectual vacuum" and
had never heard of Searle before I told him about the similarities. Nevertheless, force-fields, ice-
cold operating temperatures, and antigravity seem to be a pervasive similarity between all
manner of experiments that have been reported using rotating magnetic fields. I'd assumed that
Searle's claims were bunk, but after hearing about similar effects from Marcus' research its led
to to reconsider some of the criticism surrounding Searle lately.

One a final note -- one group that may lend additional credibility to this research is Godin and
Roschin in Russia. They obviously benefit from the years of knowledge that the Russians
accrued in magnetic field systems theory, and they attempted a replication of the Searle effect
device some years back (and claimed to get some results). I hear that they have been working
on a revised version of their experimental setup recently and hope to have even better results in
the very near future.

Kinda makes you wonder, huh?

Sincerely;

Tim Ventura
http://www.americanantigravity.com &
http://www.americanantigravity.com/marcus.html