Unlike the bomb, however, this was a secret that had held for more than 50 years.
Days after the end of the war, U.S. intelligence agents found Schau berger in Leonstein and apprehended him. Exactly as the Legend had it, the agents, who were almost certainly Counter-intelligence Corps — the same outfit that had detained and interrogated Skoda's director, Wilhelm Voss — were remarkably well informed about his entire operation. It was as if, Schauberger noted later, someone had guided them directly to him.
Across the country, at almost exactly the same moment, Russian intelligence agents located and entered his apartment in Vienna. They removed anything of value they could lay their hands on, then blew the place up, presumably to prevent anyone else from discovering information they had overlooked.
For the next nine months, until March 1946, Schauberger was held under close house arrest and extensively debriefed by U.S. technical intelligence about his activities during the war. Years later, he disclosed that it was his knowledge of "atomic" energy that had got the Americans so vexed. This is understandable. The merest suggestion that Schauberger had engaged in nuclear research would have set alarm bells ringing at the local headquarters of Boris Pash's Alsos agents, the U.S. team charged with scouring the former Reich for atomic weapons activity.
And yet, it would have taken the CIC and Alsos days, if that, to ascertain that what Schauberger had really been up to had nothing to do with a Nazi bomb or even atomic energy production — at least, not in the sense Los Alamos understood it.
That night, back at my hotel, I applied myself to a study of the Schauberger effect that had been written up by a researcher named Callum Coats. I had picked up a copy of one of his books at the Schauberger institute. In it, there was a description of what happened when a Repulsine was rotated at 20,000 rpm. The high rotation speeds appeared to cause the air molecules passing through the turbine to pack so tightly together that their molecular and nuclear binding energies were affected in a way that triggered the antigravity effect. "A point is reached where a large number of electrons and protons with opposite charges and directions of spin are forced into collision and annihilate with one another," Coats wrote. "As lower rather than higher orders of energy and the basic building blocks of atoms, they are upwardly extruded as it were out of the physical and into virtual states." Virtual states? What the hell did that mean? A few paragraphs on, Coats elaborated on this theme: "Through the interaction between centrifugal and centripetal forces functioning on a common axis, he was able implosively to return or re-transmute the physical form (water or air) into its primary energetic matrix — a nonspatial, 4th, or 5th dimensional state, which has nothing to do with the three dimensions of physical existence."
"I stand face-to-face with the apparent 'void,' the compression of dematerialization that we are wont to call a 'vacuum,' " Schauberger had written in his diary on August 14, 1936. "I can now see that we are able to create anything we wish for ourselves out of this 'nothing.' '
More than 60 years after Schauberger had consigned these thoughts to paper, I had stood in the Austin, Texas, offices of Dr. Hal Puthoff and listened to the American's descriptions of a near-identical scientific process. All you had to do — somehow — was perturb the zero-point energy field around an object and, hey presto, it would take off. Long before the term had ever been coined, Schauberger had been describing the interaction of his machines with vacuum energy — the zero-point energy field.
Part of the contribution to the craft's ascent, Coats explained, was due to a quasi-aerodynamic phenomenon — something I knew as the "Coanda effect." But another part came from the expulsion of the densely compressed "emulsion" of molecules and atoms that had not been "virtualized" as they passed through the gill-like slits of the craft's compressor blades. This would have produced a glowing bluish-white luminescent discharge akin to ionization, exactly as described in the Legend.
I closed the book and reached for the large manila envelope that Joerg Schauberger had given me before I left his home.
"Drawing No. 71," signed off on by Schauberger at Mauthausen, showed the simple innards of the Schaufelentwurf, the design for the shovel intake, that had bolted onto the top of the craft. I pressed the drawing flat, amazed that a thing of such organic grace should have come from a place that had once been the embodiment of evil. I thought, too, of the effect this must have had on the fragile psyche of the onetime forester, the man who had wanted to bequeath his grandchildren's generation— my generation — a limitless source of safe energy, to do good for the world, but who'd ended up working for the machinery of the Holocaust.
Chapter 22
The sun was just hitting the peaks of the Salzkammergut and the roads were all but empty. Two and a half hours to Munich airport via Bavaria, the cradle of Nazism, and I could box up this whole thing and head home. The beauty of the topography and the shadows of the past were inextricable. It was time to move forward again.
I now had a sequence of events that allowed many of the pieces to fall into place. I had seen the plans of a craft that had drawn on a source of energy that could not be explained by conventional science. The Germans, a people who knew the value of good engineering when they saw it, had had sufficient confidence in the technology to throw money and resources at it. When all else fails, follow the money. It rarely lies. It must have freaked the Americans out. At the end of the war, the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps, the CIC, had spent nine months debriefing Schauberger. They would rapidly have come to realize that implosion technology had nothing to do with "nuclear" energy in the bomb sense, even though Schauberger himself described the processes at work as "atomic."
What they would have learned, however, would have been no less unsettling.
Schauberger believed that his machines were generating an antigravity effect whose power potential was unlimited.
The CIC agents would have had little comprehension of the mechanics of the device — why should they? — but somebody must have been spooked by it. Why else did they incarcerate the old man for nine months? Why else did they threaten him?
By the early part of 1946, following the debriefings and their admonition to Schauberger never again to involve himself in "atomic" science, the CIC would have had in its possession the rudiments of an entirely new propulsion medium — one that 18 months later would have allowed General Nathan Twining, head of the USAAF's Air Materiel Command, to admit to a subordinate in a classified memorandum that it was possible "within the present U.S. knowledge — provided extensive detailed development is undertaken — to construct a piloted aircraft" with the operating characteristics of a UFO; a craft that seemingly defied the laws of physics. What had happened to this knowledge? Part of the answer, I felt sure, lay in some curious synchronicity between the final months of Viktor Schauberger's life and events that had started to unfold at around the same time in quiet corners of the North American aerospace industry.
In the spring of 1958, Schauberger, by now 72 years old and in poor health, was visited by Karl Gerchsheimer, a German-American acting as an intermediary for a U.S. financier and multimillionaire named Robert Donner, who had heard of Schauberger's inventions and wanted to develop and implement them in America.
Gerchsheimer, a 55-year-old German living in the U.S.A., was a man with a colorful past. He left Germany in 1922, eventually settling in Texas in 1937. During the war, he appears to have been deeply involved in U.S. counterespionage activities, ending up as an intelligence agent, almost certainly for the CIC. From the war's end in 1945 to 1950, he was the U.S. civilian property administrator-in-chief in charge of all civil administration, logistics, transport and accommodation for the U.S. army of occupation, and in this role was described as "the most powerful nonmilitary individual in the U.S. zone." In 1950, he returned to the U.S., where he set up a metal fabrication business that ended up doing significant business, ironically, with NASA.