A Cal-Tech physicist invited to observe Brown's disk device in the early '50s noted during the demonstration that its motivation force was the well-known phenomenon of "electric wind", and not anti-gravity, saying, “I’m afraid these gentlemen played hooky from their high school physics classes…”.
[10] There are claims that all major aerospace companies in the 1950s, including Martin, Convair, Lear, Sperry, Raytheon, were working on it, that the technology became highly classified in the early 1960s, that it is used to power the B-2 bomber,[5] and that it can be used to generate free energy.
The researcher and author Paul LaViolette has produced many self-published books on electrogravitics, making many claims over the years, including his view that the technology could have helped to avoid another Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
[5][12] Followups on the claims (R. L. Talley in a 1990 U.S. Air Force study, NASA scientist Jonathan Campbell in a 2003 experiment,[1] and Martin Tajmar in a 2004 paper[13]) have found that no thrust could be observed in a vacuum, consistent with the phenomenon of ion wind.
Byron Preiss, in his 1985 book on the current science and future of the Solar System titled The Planets, commented that electrogravitics development seemed to be "much ado about nothing, started by a bunch of engineers who didn't know enough physics".