Word: gharib
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Sound ludicrous? That's what her friends said. So Clemmons did some research and conferred with Mory Gharib, an aeronautics engineer at the California Institute of Technology, who surprised everyone by endorsing her concept. According to Gharib, two 6-ft. by 15-ft. kites, used in conjunction with three pulleys, will easily lift the average pyramid stone in a 25-m.p.h. wind. "It needs more study," Gharib says, "but all of the math works." Others were persuaded by what they witnessed. "I thought it was bull," admits Lynn Velazquez, an administrator at Pepperdine University who assists with the field tests...
Nonetheless, Caltech's Gharib is drafting plans to assemble a full-scale, 15-ft.-wide kite for use with a pulley system capable of lifting blocks as heavy as the pyramid stones. The initial tests will take place in California's Mojave Desert--once someone secures the $100,000 required to fund the research. To that end, Clemmons persuaded several companies to collaborate on a new perfume dubbed Ala (Latin for "wing"), which goes on sale in pyramid-shaped bottles in December, with all profits donated to the kite-research project...
From outside the Abu Gharib barracks near Baghdad, inspectors for the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency could see what one member called "frenzied activity": trucks, cranes and forklifts moving out heavy, draped objects. But Iraqi soldiers would not let them in until three days later. By then, said Hans Blix, head of the IAEA, there was "no longer any trace of the activities and objects" his people had seen before...