IT WAS DOWNRIGHT SPOOKY. Without a sound, the peculiar, spiky contraption rose straight up, hovered awhile, climbed higher.  Then it did a few graceful turns, stopped again, and just sat there silently in midair.
It seemed like levitation- some trick to overcome gravity.  I couldn't shake off the feeling that I was attending a kind of spiritual seance, or maybe a Buck Rogers Show, instead of an engineering demonstration.
The eerie scene took place in the big, barnlike laboratory of Electronatom, Inc., a research firm in Long Island City, New York, devoted to the development of a new kind of flying machine.  I had been invited to watch a scale model being put through its paces by remote control.  What we saw was by far the oddest aircraft since the Wright Brothers motorized kite.  It had no prop.  No jet.  No wings.  In fact, it had no moving parts at all.  Looking somewhat like an old-fa shioned bedspring, the rectangular rig is the nearest thing to a magic carpet.
It needs no runway, takes off vertically and is expected to climb as high as 60 miles.  It can crawl through the air like a snail, or go faster than a jet.  Nobody yet knows its speed limit.
After a while, I closed my mouth.  But David Yorysh, one of the project engineers, noticed my puzzlement.

"Any questions?" he grinned.    "Yes.  What holds it up?"

"Ions," said Yorysh, as he launched into an explanation of a wholly new flight concept.
The magic carpet, called the Ionocraft, flies on pure electricity.  It depends specifically on the fundamental principle of electricity that electric current always flows from the negative to positive, and it uses to basic pieces of equipment to take advantage of this principle - tall metal spikes that are installed above an open wire-mesh grid.  High negative voltages is shot from the spikes toward the positively charged wire grid, just like the negative and positive poles on an ordinary batter y.  As the negative charge leaves the spike arms, it peppers the surrounding air like buckshot, putting a negative charge on some of the air particles.  Such negatively charged air particles are called ions, and these are attracted downward by t he positively charged grid.
"Okay," I said. "But I still don't see what holds it up."
"I'm getting to that," Yorysh assured me as he spelled out the rest of the Ionocraft principle.