In regulating the movement of water via dams and irrigation schemes, man had obstructed the complex, vortex flow patterns that water naturally adopted for itself, Viktor Schauberger said, causing widespread degeneration and decay in the ecosystem. Harnessed in this unnatural state, water, he came to believe, acted as a pollutant upon the earth, not a life force.
In seeking to come up with methods to restore the earth's ecological balance, he turned to the development of "bio-technical" machinery and promoted his ideas through books, some of which came to the attention of Berlin.
In 1934, a year after Hitler came to power, Schauberger was sum moned to the German capital to explain to his Führer and fellow countryman how processes of natural motion and temperature and the vital relationship between soil, water and vegetation combined to create a sustainable and viable society; a society, in effect, that was at ease with itself.
At the meeting was Max Planck, the great German physicist and pioneer of quantum theory, who when asked by Hitler at the end of Schauberger's talk what he thought of his theories replied testily, "Science has nothing to do with Nature" and withdrew from the discussion. Hitler nonetheless asked his technical and economic advisers what could be done to incorporate Schauberger's ideas into the country's four-year economic plan, but nothing ever came of it.
For his part, Schauberger told Hitler that the short-termism of Germany's economic strategy would undermine and ultimately destroy the country's biological foundations.
As a result, he said, the thousand-year Reich would be lucky if it lasted ten.
By using an "impeller" — a propeller that induced an inward-, instead of outward-flowing motion — to draw water through a tube, a flow pattern Schauberger referred to as "centripetal [the opposite of centrifugal] force," he found that the output he was getting was nine times greater than could be achieved with a conventional pressure turbine.
His early egg-shaped implosion machines were also generating extremely high vacuum effects.
By substituting air for water, Schauberger began to envisage a device that with some refinement could be put to use as a radical form of aeroengine; one that sucked rather than pushed its way through the atmosphere.
In 1939, he conceived of a device that could be put to use either as an energy generator or as a power plant for aircraft or submarines. In the application he lodged to the Reich Patent Office the following year, Schauberger described the essential characteristics of this machine as a "multistage centrifuge with concentrically juxtaposed pressure chambers."
Shortly afterward, he wrote to his cousin that he had invented an aircraft that didn't make any noise.
With these devices, Schauberger realized he had created an entirely new methodology for propelling vehicles through air and water.
As Joerg Schauberger and I settled into the archive, which was crammed full with the old man's files and papers, it was clear that Viktor Schauberger had documented every turn of his career in meticulous detail.
Through his letters, duplicates of which he always placed on file, it was possible to paint an intricate profile of the man and his inventions. The challenge, even for his family, lay in decoding the shorthand Schauberger had used to decribe his work.
During the war, he had concentrated on the development of several types of machine — the Repulsator and Repulsine for water purification and distillation, the Implosion Motor for electricity generation, the Trout Turbine for submarine propulsion and a "flying saucer" that used air instead of water as its driving medium. Because they all worked on the same principles, Schauberger tended to interchange the names of these devices and their applications when it suited him.
So, when Viktor wrote in 1940 that he had commissioned a company in Berlin called Kaempfer to build a "Repulsator," it wasn't immediately apparent what this machine was for. It was only when he ran into contractual difficulties with Kaempfer, which was having enormous problems manufacturing the machine to Viktor's demanding specifications, that its function became clear.
By February 1941, Viktor had switched contractors to the Kertl company in Vienna, and here, in correspondence, he described the prototype (which he was building at his own expense) as having a twofold purpose: to investigate "free energy production" and to validate his theories of "levitational flight."
The machine relied on a turbine plate of waviform construction that fitted onto a similarly molded base plate. The gap between the plates was whorl-shaped, mimicking the corkscrew action of a kudu's antler.
Having drawn air in via the intake, the rapidly rotating turbine propelled it to the rim of the rotating mass under centrifugal force.
The vortex movement of air created by the waviform gap between the plates led to its rapid cooling and "densation," producing a massive reduction in volume and generating a vacuum of enormous pressure, which sucked more air into the turbine.
The machine required a small starter motor to commence the process (as depicted in the Legend), but having whipped the turbine up to around 15,000-20,000 rpm the motor was turned off and the operation became self-sustaining.
By connecting the machine to a gear shaft, electricity could be generated from it; or left to its own devices, it could be made to take off.
This capacity to fly Schauberger partly attributed to the creation of the vacuum in the rarefied region immediately above the plates. But the primary levitating force, he claimed, was due to some other process altogether — a reaction between the air molecules in their newly excited state and the body of the machine itself.
Here, we had touched on the heart of the matter: Had Viktor Schau berger created an "antigravity" device? If the files were anything to go by, the answer was unequivocal. Soon after work on the device restarted at Kertl, an associate of Schauberger's made an unauthorized test run while Schauberger was absent from the plant. During this experiment, the machine generated such a powerful levitational force that it shot upward, smashing against the roof of the hangar.
Schauberger's correspondence makes it clear that March 1941 was when things really started to happen. It was then, while work began on repairing the Kertl device, that the Gestapo, the secret police arm of the SS, became aware of his work.
That same month, he reported that Professor Ernst Heinkel, inventor of the world's first jet aircraft, was also showing an interest in his technology.
In fact, Professor Heinkel had illegally obtained sight of Schauberger's patent application at the Reich Patent Office and, without the Austrian inventor's knowledge, had begun to incorporate his ideas into a Heinkel project — one that is presumed by some who have studied the Schauberger archive to have been the He 280 fighter, which made its maiden jet-powered flight on March 30, 1941.
While it is known that development of the He 280 ran into technical problems, especially in the area of its troubled HeS 8 turbojets, there is no confirmation that the He 280 was the aircraft in question. And so I found myself wrestling with a heretical notion. It could just as easily have been the "Flying Top" proof-of-concept vehicle supposedly being built by Rudolf Schriever in a "garage" under Heinkel's guidance at Marienehe, near Rostock on the Baltic coast. Try as I might to resist the notion, it would be bolstered by additional data on Heinkel in the space of a few more minutes.
The Schriever story was part of the legend that had grown up around Rudolf Lusar's German Secret Weapons of World War II, the book that had drawn me into the contentious area of German flying disc research. In it, Lusar, who had been well informed on all other aspects of Geman secret weapons activity, made the bold assertion that the first Nazi flying saucer projects commenced in 1941 and that the research was centered on two places: Prague and Breslau.