If you spend enough time in the digital back alleys of UFO land, you’re bound to run into some shadowy figures eventually. “Retired” spooks offer bumps of acronyms and codenames, anonymous scientists pass around baggies of saucer secrets. They’ll open their trenchcoat and say, “Hey kid, you look like you wanna try some exotic physics.”
“Ever done high-frequency gravitational waves? That’s the good shit.”
That’s how I got hooked on the story of Dr. Robert M.L. Baker Jr.
Dr. Baker grew up on Crenshaw Boulevard in the 1930s. In between episodes of granny falling down the stairs and his father throwing law school textbooks at his head, bedridden Bob passed the time getting lost in fantasy worlds he laboriously constructed inside his mind.
His sickness left him trailing behind his classmates by a year, at least on paper. He found himself enrolled at a training school for UCLA to round out his elementary education, and gravitated heavily toward mathematics. The children were subjected to regularly-scheduled IQ testing. “I was able to, as they say, game the system,” Bob said. “So I wound up with an IQ of 164.”
Just after his eleventh birthday, he received a letter from a staff director at Washington DC’s National Inventors Council. Anxieties were swelling over the war brewing across the pond, and the imaginative young Bob had submitted an idea that he thought could give General Patton a leg up over Hitler. It was the first time he pinged the radar of the American military enterprise.
Baker envisioned a scheme that would allow the Allies to roll up on Nazi forces at greater speeds than ever before, accomplished by mounting the vehicles on “retractable heavy duty aircraft landing gears.” The United States government was fully prepared to begin putting his concept, dubbed “Tank Wheels” by Bob, to the test at Aberdeen Proving Ground. That is, until they spoke to him on the telephone and realized there was a prepubescent boy on the other end of the line.
His patriotic pursuits continued into his teenage years, powered by connections wired at Harvard Military High School, a now-defunct funnel from private education to the armed forces. He became fast friends with Malcolm and Jim Douglas, sons of aerospace genius Donald Douglas.
Bob would often have breakfast with the senior Douglas at their home in Santa Monica. Jim and Bob made use of the family’s backyard bomb shelter and ran homebrewed chemistry experiments there, somehow never blowing themselves to pieces or burning the neighborhood to the ground.
After the setback suffered to his blossoming career in tank design, Bob Baker’s gaze had shifted from the battlefield to the stars. A grad student had rented out a spare room in the family home and wowed Bob with his expertise in atomic energy and rocketry, answering any and all questions thrown his way about the budding field of rocket science. When it was time to go to college, Baker followed in his old housemate’s footsteps to UCLA, studying rocket navigation under Samuel Herrick, a premier expert in the dizzying discipline of astrodynamics.
His DIY mad scientist streak followed him there. He had built a homemade “Atom Smasher” in high school, a device powered by an electric motor and capped by an aluminum sphere that, when charged up, generated a field with voltages capable of accelerating subatomic particles. Teenage Bob met with Charles Lauritsen, a nuclear physics trailblazer, who gave him pointers on the design of this makeshift Van de Graaff generator.
The hardware was kept in the loft above the garage at his college accommodations, his own private laboratory. It became the centerpiece of his “atom smasher parties,” frying the neighbors’ television sets and sending his cat scrambling across the ceiling with its fur standing on end.
Bob thrived at UCLA, receiving a world-class initiation into the upper echelons of space science in between polishing his boots for AFROTC. Real pursuits in cutting-edge physics were becoming intertwined with popular science fiction. His mentor Dr. Herrick’s equations for solving a “three body problem” were scribbled across a chalkboard featured in the legendary sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still. His class took a field trip to a screening of the movie and erupted in cheers and applause when Klaatu, a humanoid alien eventually murdered by the fictional United States Army, produced a solution to the calculations.
Dr. Robert M.L. Baker Jr. was awarded the first ever PhD in Space Navigation.
Even that could not help him dodge UFOs.
Bob was on graveyard duty at Douglas Aircraft when he got a knock on his door. He’d been picking up odd-hour shifts at the company while powering through his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, working under German-born rocket scientist Wolfgang Klemperer, lovingly referred to as Klemp by his colleagues. Klemp had an exciting opportunity for him. The boys over at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base had some UFO films that needed to be analyzed and he seemed like a perfect fit for the job.
“Sure Dr. Klemperer,” Bob remembered pressing his superior. “But why me since you have over a dozen PhDs here smarter than I am?”
“Well, Bob,” Klemp explained, “UFO research is very scary to most of my people since it could easily ruin a reputation.”
He went on. “Since you have no reputation yet to ruin, I chose you!”
The 35mm footage had been smuggled into Douglas by Al Chop, head of the public information desk at the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, its officially sanctioned program for the study of unidentified flying objects. The so-called “Montana” and “Utah” films captured silvery, disc-like objects in motion, the latter recorded by a Navy man on vacation who paired his photography with unusually detailed testimony about the incident.
In the Utah case, a dozen gleaming objects were caught traversing the sky over Tremonton, seemingly in formation. The camera follows one of the suspected saucers breaking away from the pack moments before they are said to have disappeared from view.
The story goes that the Air Force found the Utah film to be so compelling that it was bounced all the way up to a high-ranking General after men from both the Intelligence branch and Air Materiel Command failed to make any sense of it. Chop had attended a private screening with the big boss himself. As the reel clicked and whirred to its end and the lights came on in the room, the only words he recalled hearing were, “how about that?”
The CIA had taken an interest in the films, too. By the end of 1952, the agency had found itself increasingly perplexed and irritated by the ballooning flying saucer problem. Its scientific chief rounded up the greatest eggheads of his day to take a look at the evidence, men molded by frantic wartime ingenuity and Manhattan Project secrecy. It became known to history as the Robertson Panel.
The panelists were briefed by members of the Navy’s Photo Interpretation Lab on the Utah case, who after 1000 man-hours studying the footage could offer no good explanation for what they were seeing. After reviewing the film for themselves, the panel signed off on the deflating verdict that seagulls, not saucers, had invaded the high desert that day.
Legend has it that frames had been removed from the UFO films shown to the Robertson Panel. Regardless, the scientists had reached their conclusions, and those conclusions painted intelligence policy on UFOs for decades to come. In the group’s eyes, there was no national security threat from the phenomenon and, based on what they had seen, popular theories about its extraterrestrial origin could be discounted.
The films would not resurface until 1956, in a quasi-documentary about Al Chop’s time working in the UFO business. Also making his off-screen debut was none other than Robert Baker.
Simply titled UFO, the audience follows Chop’s transformation from skeptic to dyed-in-the-wool believer during his time at Blue Book. Reflecting on the movie as an elderly man, Chop recalled, “I didn’t think much of it because it was too honest. There was no bullshit.”
The 1956 documentary was the first time the Utah and Montana films were made available for the public’s viewing pleasure. They came packaged with analysis extracted from weeks upon weeks (eighteen months to be exact) of painstaking, frame-by-frame examinations and in-the-field simulations by Robert M.L. Baker Jr. The Air Force kindly provided him with some fighter jets to perform his experiments.
“It convinced him, at least he told me, that he was convinced they were vehicles from outer space,” Chop said of Bob. “They were not from our world. If I hadn’t gone to work at Douglas, he would [have] never had an opportunity to see those films.”
Bob became Blue Book’s go-to guy for UFO footage for the rest of the 1950s. He would reiterate his findings on the two films in front of Congress in 1968.
In Bob’s assessment, most reports were bogus and could be dismissed with conventional explanations. However, a small percentage of the cases, like the incidents captured in Montana and Utah, were certainly worth a closer look. The needles in the haystack, the ones that could not easily be swept under the rug of “natural phenomena”, could prove valuable to study from a technical standpoint.
Bob’s old employer had seen the same potential. Exotic propulsion, particularly that of the nuclear variety, was a hot topic then. Klemp’s group was tied up with top secret projects for the Air Force and the organization that would eventually morph into NASA. At the same time, a small team working under him went where many were too embarrassed to go. If UFOs held the secrets to a new kind of physics, the engineers in the back room at Douglas Aircraft were going to squeeze them out.
The engineers on the Unconventional Propulsion Schemes study reviewed the available UFO literature, including Frank Scully’s book on the supposed recovery and exploitation of an alien spaceship that had crashed near Aztec, New Mexico in 1948. The team reported they found nothing scientifically useful in there. They interviewed airline pilot witnesses and scrutinized reports loaned to them by other aerospace groups who had dipped their toes in the same murky waters. Bob pitched in with film analysis, receiving material outside of normal Blue Book channels.
It’s not clear what became of the Unconventional Propulsion study, but more than a decade later, Bob was pleading in front of Congress for people to take the phenomenon a little more seriously. He proposed a name change for UFOs, preferring to call them “Anomalous Observational Phenomena”, or AOP.
“I observed you were going to say that and I wonder about some of my Hoosiers back home using those terms,” a representative from Indiana cut in as Bob began to deliver his statement.
“It comes trippingly off the tongue,” Bob insisted.
“It might not only cause some Hoosiers but some laymen some problems,” the Congressman responded. “It might be easier to say UFOs. You may go ahead.”
“I call it AOP,” Dr. Baker declared before continuing.
“From the data that I have reviewed and analyzed since 1954, it is my belief that there does exist substantial evidence to support the claim that an unexplained phenomenon, or phenomena, is present in the environs of the earth, but that it may not be ‘flying,’ may not always be ‘unidentified,’ and, perhaps, may not even be substantive ‘objects.’”
Trouble seemed to lurk behind Robert Baker no matter where he went. It came with the territory. After walking away as the proud owner of a one-of-a-kind PhD, he was quickly absorbed into the sinkhole of deep black defense programs. The Soviets had just sent the Americans scrambling after sending its Sputnik satellite screaming through space. “The timing was perfect for me,” Bob said. He was put to work building systems to track anything artificial floating in orbit, foreign, domestic, and [redacted].
“I was privy to all the top secret special access required programs,” he recalled decades later, after a handful of his Cold War work had been declassified. During his time on the U-2 project, he was pulled aside by the base commander. Bob was being court martialed for publishing top secret ballistic missile data. It had been innocently included in an unclassified technical paper, but with thermonuclear annihilation at stake, the CIA and Air Force were taking no chances.
Representing the latter at an astronautics conference in Stockholm, he could feel eyes on him. They belonged to five-star general Hap Arnold.
“We just received a cable on you,” Bob remembered him saying. “Seems Gary Powers recently went down, and you became privy to all the classified satellite reconnaissance projects to replace his missions. You are now out of the country and currently under surveillance!”
Bob was riding the high after delivering his AOP spiel to Congress when he was summoned into his boss’s office at the Computer Sciences Corporation, fully expecting a pat on the back for his brilliance. Instead he was told, “Bob, do you realize CSC has a clipping service that charges us for clippings? Well, there have been thousands about your UFO testimony, and it is really costing us—so no more UFO talk.”
On top of running a humble newspaper clipping operation, the company was neck-deep in clandestine intelligence work, having just absorbed a “more than top secret” enterprise into its business portfolio. When Bob came sniffing around they slammed the door in his face. Shortly after they were on the receiving end of an angry telephone call.
“I am President Fletcher Jones and now own your company. If you do not allow Dr. Baker inside, I am disbanding your company this afternoon and immediately stopping your salaries—do you understand me?”
The company in question happened to be an NSA cutout working on an early but sophisticated voice identification system for intercepting and analyzing phone conversations. “Yes sir,” they told the president. “Send Dr. Baker back, he will have full access to everything we do.”
When Fletcher Jones died in a plane crash not long after, Bob took it as a sign that it was time to pursue other opportunities.
There was no escaping the world of the deep black for Bob. It had even leaked into his romantic life. Writing of his wife Bonnie, Baker said, “I had a top secret security clearance and Bonnie must have had a CIA security clearance even higher than mine.” He’d been shaken to his core one afternoon at a pub on Sunset Boulevard while enjoying some drinks after a long day at the office. Bonnie was casually flipping through some notes she’d brought home from her new secretarial job and wanted to pick Bob’s brain.
“Bob, tell me about some projects called ‘penetration aids,’ ‘long-wavelength infra-red satellite sensors,’ and ‘over-the-horizon radar,’” Bonnie said. Bob knew firsthand that these were some of the most sensitive projects in existence and could have fainted on the spot.
After regaining his composure about this alcohol-fueled national security breach, he made her agree to never discuss such matters in public again.
Dr. Baker didn’t allow his experiences in the underworld of the military-intelligence complex to suffocate his internal mad scientist. He reunited with his old friend Jim Douglas in the late 1960s, reigniting the spark from those long-gone days of backyard experimentation. The two built a floating laboratory out of a specially modified sailboat and parked it in Marina del Rey. The contraption never failed to turn heads, with one onlooker commenting, “That is the strangest looking thing I have ever seen in this Marina… except for some strange hydrofoil conveyance that had been sailed around here.”
“That’s mine as well,” Bob said.
In 1972, with the help of his son, he broke up the earth underneath their family home to install a room he called INCASE, short for “in-house chamber of absolute security.” Inside metal-clad, steel-enforced concrete over a foot-and-a-half thick, surveilled by CCTVs from every possible angle, and powered by solar panels, INCASE was shielded from any conceivable attack—biological, chemical, radioactive, and even electromagnetically-pulsed. All communications were routed through a computerized system that incorporated shortwave radio transmissions.
Dr. Baker reached out to a friend who was a producer on Star Trek, inquiring about secret sliding doors that made a “swish swish sound” when opening and closing. “You will need to hire two stagehands to move the door panels and get an audio system to provide the swish swish,” he told a disappointed Bob. He opted for an electrical door hidden at the back of a room staged to look like a broom closet.
He attempted to market INCASE but no one bit.
Bob had been a longtime member of the Bel Air Bay Club, joining its ranks after his father took over as president. The prestigious organization made its home in the Palisades, overlooking the ocean and shielded from the snooping eyes of the unwashed masses zipping by on the Pacific Coast Highway below. There he rubbed elbows with three successive heads of the Northrop Corporation, a behemoth aerospace contractor. One recognized him as “the one with all the initials” from his published works. The man’s face lit up as he recalled, “I took your classes and used your textbook for my PhD,” not an uncommon sentiment.
In the winter of 1961, while Bob was heading up a group under the name of the Lockheed Astrodynamics Research Center, he organized a series of lectures that would change the course of his life. A physicist from the Hughes Research Lab rang him up to chat about some work on gravity gradients, a project Bob had been wrapped up in during his time as Klemp’s special assistant at Douglas. The scientist had worked with the inventor of the “Weber bar” while earning his doctorate, a device for the detection of gravitational waves. Bob perked up immediately and pulled together a team of UCLA brainiacs to take a crack at the problem.
They convened at an estate off Sepulveda Boulevard owned by the chief executive of Northrop, later converted into a vineyard and sold off to Rupert Murdoch. For most of the scientists present, it was the first time they’d heard the term “gravitational waves.” While it was all very interesting to Bob, one particular phrase uttered by the man from Hughes lit a fire inside of his brain that was never extinguished.
“High-Frequency Gravitational Waves.”
Weber’s research was catered toward capturing waves of gravity oscillating at “low frequencies,” in Bob’s characterization. Future scientists would look at ripples in spacetime trickling out from merging black holes, passing through the material universe with minimal resistance. Dr. Baker, on the other hand, was stricken with visions of what could be accomplished if he could harness the other end of the spectrum, no astronomical events required.
In Bob’s assessment, these high-frequency ripples could completely overhaul planetary communications. Waxing and waning in extraordinarily rapid cycles, if a means to generate and detect them could be built, it could allow for “direct picosecond communication” straight through the earth. His calculations began to drip with possibilities on a cosmic scale.
“I suggested their use for global communications here on Earth, to monitor extraterrestrial intelligence communications, and study the beginning of our universe,” Bob recalled of one lecture he gave to the Lockheed Astrodynamics group. “Since HFGWs passed through all matter without attenuation they would provide the very best means for all these applications.”
He’d be facing an uphill battle against the laws of general relativity where, conventionally, gravitational waves must adhere to the speed limit of light. They also interact extremely weakly with matter, making them incredibly challenging to detect. The first “low-frequency” gravitational wave signal would not be picked up until 2015.
That was no matter to Bob, and he kept the idea in his back pocket for decades. Bonnie, working as a LARC secretary, had seen the notes from the meeting. Despite having no training in physics and no college education, Bob valued her scientific input.
“Why don’t you work on gravitational waves?” he later recalled her asking. “I have a feeling they may be important in the future.”
“Out of the mouth of a beautiful babe comes wisdom,” he wrote. “Bonnie’s wisdom possibly upending the standard cosmological model.”
After making his exit from the Computer Sciences Corporation, Bob began incorporating his ideas about high-frequency gravitational waves and the origins of the universe into his lectures. At the beginning of the 1980s, he orchestrated a bureaucratic coup at a small institution by the name of West Coast University. “I eliminated tenure, downgraded the faculty senate, fired all those that I believed were lazy,” he said of this time.
Dr. Baker had converted the no-name university into a respected institution offering flexible coursework for defense and aerospace professionals. Contractors had been lamenting about a massive shortage of qualified workers, and Bob had stepped in to fill that hole. The university under Bob pioneered practices in remote education. Using a television link, he was set to award the first ever master’s degree to someone in outer space, until plans were tragically foiled by some faulty O-rings on the Challenger space shuttle.
The university’s international reputation was growing and glowing, especially in places like Taiwan and China, where Dr. Baker made frequent visits.
During one trip to Hainan Province to recruit students to WCU, Bob was greeted with an elaborate ceremony in his honor.
Bonnie and Bob were escorted by police cars and “even a platoon of the Chinese military for added protection.” They were presented with flowers from dozens of young women in celebration of an educational agreement worked out with officials, one “that would add hundreds of enrolments [sic] to WCU.”
“This was the best parade I had ever been in,” he said.
The 1990s were in full swing when antigravity came back into vogue, after decades of hibernation when it reached an initial peak at the dawn of the Cold War. This revival on the fringe of physics was catalyzed in large part by the work of a Russian engineer with an interest in the exotic, perhaps gravity-defying, properties of rotating superconductors. A Chinese scientist named Ning Li, living stateside in the American south since 1983, developed a working theory of her own similar to the Russian’s, and the government quickly took interest in it. Li was encouraged to continue her work in Alabama’s Rocket City courtesy of a grant from the Pentagon and, to outsiders, it appeared as if her lab had gone dark.
Robert M.L. Baker Jr. was part of the team who evaluated her work at Redstone Arsenal on behalf of the United States Army.
“Some of their work I have seen, and it had [an] interesting correlation with frequency,” Bob said in a 2019 interview. “In other words, the higher the frequency, the greater the effect, or rather with the square of the frequency.”
Ning Li’s research had tickled a very particular part of Bob’s brain. “That caught my attention, because high frequency gravitational wave influence also increases with the square of its frequency, so again I can’t help but wonder if there’s an HFGW effect that might explain their claims.”
While he knew there was still much experimental work to be done, the preliminary data he’d been privy to was extremely seductive to Dr. Baker. Gravitational waves had been whispering in his ear since 1961, and now he was presented with something he might actually be able to sink his teeth into.
“My thesis has been that high frequency gravitational waves are the basis for the effects Li and Podkletnov have claimed,” Bob went on. “In other words, the rotating disc, fields, high frequencies, harmonics and so on could be producing HFGWs that are perhaps about below the limits of detection at the magnitudes they work at, but may be influencing the local gravitational field, perhaps through self-rectification or something along those lines.”
Ning Li continued her work in Huntsville until 2014, when she was struck by a car while crossing the street. The accident resulted in severe damage to her brain that led to her ultimate demise in 2021.
She wasn’t the only Chinese scientist who had caused Dr. Baker’s ears to prick up. Fangyu Li (no relation to Ning), working out of Chongqing University, had sketched up a theoretical scheme for detecting gravitational waves by combining high-intensity magnetic fields with Gaussian electromagnetic fields. Viewing it as a promising development for finally capturing his elusive HFGWs, Bob studied the work in extreme depth, and emerged with a Chinese patent in hand. The Li-Baker HFGW generator and detector caused quite the headache for him and his patent attorneys, as no one was fluent in the language.
China had sponsored a month-long trip for Bob overseas, where he lectured on high-frequency gravitational waves at scientific institutes across the country. The interaction of electromagnetic waves with gravity was a physics Holy Grail, and in Dr. Baker’s view, the Chinese were holding the keys to the temple. “There are probably more scientists in China working on HFGW research than in the whole of the rest of the world,” Bob lamented. He’d spend the rest of his life hammering home the national security threat posed by falling behind our geopolitical rivals in this esoteric field.
At the start of the year 2000, Bob reached out to the NSA about the looming HFGW situation. He received a letter in response. “It provided some additional gravitational wave equations but showed no real NSA interest,” he wrote.
In 2003, Bob helped organize the first ever international conference on high-frequency gravitational waves, with another meeting to follow a few years later. Drinking bad coffee under fluorescent lights with Hal Puthoff may have been the greatest mistake he ever made.
Ron Pandolfi had been sentenced to time in a cramped back office at the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1996, he was billed in the media as the agency’s top-ranked scientist. Unfortunately for Ron, he’d ended up on the wrong side of the Clinton administration at the height of “Chinagate”. After testifying in a (still secret) closed briefing to Congress about the potentially treasonous transfer of space and missile technology to the PRC, he was relegated to evaluating “alternative energy” developments on the Company’s behalf. Speaking through civilian proxies over rapidly expanding cyberspace channels, Ron’s name began popping up in UFO circles across the world wide web. By some accounts, he took over the agency’s infamous “Weird Desk,” earning the title of “the real life Fox Mulder.”
Ron was no stranger to high strangeness. Reportedly, he’d been pounding on doors trying to get access to the government’s psychic spy program to no avail. It had kicked off in the early ‘70s and had worked like a magnet attracting a certain subset of Cold War spooks. Two names that have been stamped across the annals of UFO history were heavily involved in the endeavor, men that saucer fiends will no doubt be familiar with.
The program’s birth certificate was signed in Sid Gottlieb’s office, the mastermind behind the CIA’s controversial mind control program. Physicist Hal Puthoff, a formerly high-ranking Scientologist, was brought in on a classified contract to evaluate so-called remote viewers and develop protocols for astrally snooping on adversaries. Kit Green, a medical doctor and CIA Life Sciences extraordinaire, stepped in as the project’s monitor. Years later, he was branded as Ron’s mentor and predecessor at the Weird Desk.
Ron Pandolfi was a bloodhound trained on the scent of pseudoscience. From where he was sitting, the psychic spy program smelled an awful lot like an effective way to pass classified information onto hostile intelligence services. After all, at the beginning of the 1970s, the Church of Scientology had successfully infiltrated a number of government agencies, stealing documents and installing wiretaps at an unprecedented scale.
“Using methods perfected by Scientologists, the crooks create shared delusions, then attempt to give them the appearance of credibility by injecting them into the mainstream media,” Ron would later remark on the state of UFOlogy.
Collaborators on the widely-criticized 1988 television special UFO Cover-Up Live! may have led credence to Ron’s pessimistic view of the remote viewing program. During the broadcast, graphics were displayed identifying a “parapsychology research unit” housed inside the Defense Intelligence Agency. The still-classified project had been effectively revealed to any foreign nationals who happened to be tuning in.
Almost two decades later, Pandolfi remained on high alert, haunted by the ghosts of PRC technology transfer and Scientological infiltration. One of the shadowy, voice-distorted figures from the 1988 special, an associate of Kit Green and Hal Puthoff, had set him off with a bizarre ordeal involving DIA email addresses and outlandish claims about extraterrestrials.
“If the story of the sources/visitors is true,” Pandolfi wrote, “they are falsely representing themselves as DIA employees, possibly to access sensitive facilities and acquire classified information for a foreign service.”
Not long after, Kit and Hal were meeting up with Dr. Robert M.L. Baker Jr. to discuss high-frequency gravitational waves.
Bob, who had linked up with a scientist from the Defense Intelligence Agency to pursue the problem, was banging the drum about Chinese technological surprise.
Ron Pandolfi rang up the Jasons.
The Jasons were forged in the same scientific trenches as the Robertson Panel, an elite collection of highly-cleared scholars and thinkers burdened with the heaviest (and deepest black) problems plaguing the American national security state. When they reviewed Bob’s work, to say they were less than impressed would be an understatement.
“We conclude that previous analysis of the Li-Baker detector concept is incorrect by many orders of magnitude; and that the following are infeasible in the foreseeable future: detection of the natural ‘relic’ HFGW, which are reliably predicted to exist; or detection of artificial sources of HFGW,” the abstract to their Pandolfi-commissioned report states.
It goes on with a laundry list of dismissals. “No foreign threat in HFGW is credible, including: Communication by means of HFGW; Object detection or imaging (by HFGW radar or tomography); Vehicle propulsion by HFGW; or any cutting-edge research or other practical use of HFGW. For the relatively weak fields in the lab, on the Earth, or indeed in the solar system (far from the cutting-edge science of black holes or the Big Bang), the general theory of relativity and its existing experimental basis are complete, accurate and reliable.”
Bob’s collaborators were incensed at what they viewed as a smear job on the part of Pandolfi and the Jasons. Physicist Eric Davis, a close colleague of Kit Green and Hal Puthoff, aired his grievances via email.
“The Jason Report was commissioned by Ronald S. Pandolfi of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the sole purpose of damaging the reputation of Dr. Robert Baker and his associates,” Davis wrote.
“Mr. Pandolfi has a history of attacking certain people in the U.S. government scientific establishment (scientists who work at the national laboratories or at the military service science laboratories) that he has personal issues with by filing false security violation, or other, allegations against them in order to get them fired from their government job or to tarnish their professional reputation if they are U.S. civilian scientists,” he continued. “Unfortunately, the CIA only punishes him but never terminates his employment.”
The Jason study didn’t deter Bob. He doubled down.
“In retrospect however, I owe Ronald S. Pandolfi a measure of gratitude,” he wrote in his autobiography.
“If Pandolfi had not slowed down my HFGW research, then I would have devoted all my time after 2008 exclusively to HFGW research,” Bob said. Now freed from the narrow scope of the hunt for high-frequency gravitational wave detection, Dr. Baker was able to throw himself fully into other pursuits. These included “the celestial mechanics truth about the non-human source of climate change” and “airborne-drone automated grape harvesting machines,” an ode to his time with the Lockheed group at the vineyard off Sepulveda Boulevard.
Bob was brought in as a consultant for the Pentagon’s UFO program, offering up a technical paper on high-frequency gravitational wave-based communication. The endeavor was staffed by billionaire Robert Bigelow’s scientific team of paranormal investigators, with Drs. Puthoff, Green, and Davis offering up their own contributions. Revelation of the program’s existence in 2017 propagated a strain of UFO fever among the public not seen since the Cold War.
Dr. Baker published his theories widely, often with his wife Bonnie as co-author. He no longer placed any real stock in the idea of harnessing HFGWs for exotic propulsion. Their true unrealized potential became far more existential to Bob.
His ideas began to take on a decidedly transhumanist bent. The next step in the evolution of the species, the most efficient outcome of survival-of-the-fittest according to Bob, would entail Homo sapiens transitioning into a race of cyborgs. By his logic, it followed that any advanced extraterrestrial species would have taken the same step to ensure their continued existence in the cosmos.
He took the theory even further. In his interpretation of natural selection, the most desirable form for any lifeform to take would be spherical.
“We believe that life forms will evolve into spheres composed of living mental material whose size will be determined by their density needed to properly function, environment, and the local gravitational field,” he wrote in one paper co-authored with Bonnie. “That is, the sphere’s mass will need to allow necessary movement and be ‘sustainable’ in the sphere’s local gravitational field. For their sustenance or energy, life forms would, therefore, evolve into spherical ‘artificial’ planets composed of high-density living mental material orbiting stars or galaxies—nourished and powered by ‘starlight.’ Their inter-life-form and inter-stellar communications … would be by means of mind-controlled and brain activated transceivers of high-frequency gravitational waves.
“The first cataclysmic encounter with them is expected to be interception of their interstellar communications,” Bob proclaimed in another publication. “The predicted frequency of intercepted messages under one set of assumptions is at least 1500 per day. After decoding the intercepted messages, keys may be found to improve vastly the present and future quality of life for us earthlings.”
The 2025 documentary The Age of Disclosure dedicates time to sounding the alarm about China’s supposed reverse-engineering efforts outpacing American attempts at cracking nonhuman technology. The richest man in the world has tweeted about fulfilling “our purpose” of making the mind of a sentient sun. Bob’s timeline for HFGW development has yet to bear fruit, at least publicly.
I, for one, hope that Dr. Robert M.L. Baker Jr.’s consciousness has been uploaded to the great cyborg orb in the sky. And I hope that he is laughing his ass off.