Does Dr. Anilir's "ATA space elevator project" exist?

One of the most important works of Dr. Serkan Anilir is known as "ATA space elevator project". However, a careful examination reveals many questions, which make even the existence of the project doubtful.

In his Japanese books (for general public), he describes the "ATA space elevator project" was pursued at NASA. However, in Turkey, he claimed that he was the "Head of the Space Physics Department" of JAXA (Japanese counterpart of NASA), where the "ATA space elevator project" was carried out. However, there is no evidence of his claimed position and even of the Space Physics Department.

He gave a talk on the "ATA space elevator project" at ASANSOR 2005 in Istanbul, Turkey. His presentation file can be retrieved from here.

Note added (October 10, 2009): apparently the file is removed from ASANSOR site above. A colleague has a backup copy for your examination. Appeal to ASANSOR people: we would appreciate your co-operation to discover the truth.

The "cover" page (page 1) of the presentation is shown above.

On page 2, it appears that he lists the awards he obtained for the project. However, none of the records can be found from other sources.

On page 3, he shows the "ATA Project Team". Several people on this page are actually well-known persons (although we are not sure they are involved in the project.) However, there is an entry "Prof. Dr. Susumu NARA 2004 Physics Nobel Award Winner, Kyoto University". The physics Nobel laureates for 2004 were Gross, Politzer, and Wilczek (all in the USA). Moreover, no person of the name "Prof. Susumu NARA" is found among physicists at Kyoto, let alone among Japanese Nobel laureates.

On page 16, he presents a "U.S. Patent 6,378,203" which is supposed to be crucial for the "ATA space elevator project." However, the patent number given by him shows a completely different patent by different people. In fact, no U.S. patent related to Dr. Anilir can be found. You can verify that by yourself here: doing a search with "Anilir" as the search term yields no result.

The content of his presentation up to page 18 is introduction. Starting page 19, Dr. Anilir presents some technical analysis of the space elevator project. However, the technical part is very similar to the material on the webpage by Ranko Artukovic of Zadar, Croatia. In fact, many figures look identical. For example, we show page 21 of his presentation (left: upper panel), along with Fig. 2 of Artukovic (left:lower panel). At Internet Web Archive, you can verify that Artukovic's web page existed in 2001, well before Dr. Anilir's talk.

Finally, in his Japanese book "Space Elevator" (p. 32) and also in the web article, he uses a beautiful picture (shown left) to explain the "ATA Space Elevator project." However, it turns out that the same picture had appeared in the proceeding of International Astronautical Congress in 2004, by Dr. Brad Edwards. The picture actually consists of several parts, and these parts were first published in July 2004 issue of Discovery Magazine, in order to illustrate Dr. Edwards' plan for space elevators.

In conclusion, although the "ATA space elevator project" is often advertised as a very important project, the organization responsible for the project is unknown. The Project Team members include an unknown "Physics Nobel Award winner." The project is apparently based on a non-existing U.S. patent. More seriously, the technical analysis and the concept figures are strongly suspected of blatant plagiarism. It is difficult to expect that a real project on space elevator is ever carried out as "ATA space elevator project" led by Dr. Anilir.