It was during the '50s, according to Callum Coats' book, that Gerchsheimer met Donner, the retired former owner of the Donner Steelworks in Philadelphia. Donner, Coats wrote, was a "patriot who waged constant war against subversive activity in the United States." Between them, Gerchsheimer and Donner became sold on the idea that there had to be an alternative to the use of explosive forces to generate power and motion — a view that Gerchsheimer, through his NASA work, even took up with the master of rocketry himself, Wernher von Braun.
In 1957, Gerchsheimer came to Schauberger's home in Austria, telling him that there were millions of research dollars waiting for him in the United States and an engineering facility in Sherman, Texas, that was all ready to implement his ideas for safe, clean energy production. All he had to do was cross the Atlantic and make it happen. Schauberger, who was suffering from emphysema and a bad heart, took some persuasion, but eventually agreed, the stipulation being that he would stay just long enough to get things up and running — around three months — before returning home to Austria. His son Walter, a trained physicist and mathematician, would remain on in the U.S.A. for a year to turn his ideas into blueprints from which the Americans could put his implosion technology into production.
Throughout this dialogue, it is clear that Schauberger felt that Gerchsheimer had come to him as some kind of representative of the U.S. government. And while Gerchsheimer subsequently denied this, his evident connections with U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, connections that he never hid from the Schaubergers, merely reinforced the view in the inventor's mind that the offer carried official U.S. sanction. This impression was compounded when Viktor and Walter arrived in the States and Gerchsheimer and Donner tapped physicists at the National Atomic Research Laboratories at Brookhaven, Long Island, for expert advice on implosion technology. Seven weeks after the Schaubergers' arrival in Texas, Gerchsheimer instructed them to write up separate reports about implosion, then forwarded them to Brookhaven for analysis.
At first, Viktor Schauberger was happy to go along with the Gerchsheimer/Donner plan because at long last he believed here was something that would allow him to implement his free-energy ideas for the benefit of mankind. But as the weeks dragged into months, and negotiations in the high heat of Texas turned sticky, Schauberger's health became ever more fragile and he yearned increasingly to go home.
Gerchsheimer and Donner, meanwhile, had become frustrated at the painfully slow pace with which Schauberger was transcribing his ideas onto paper, and the whole relationship broke down.
Prepared to do anything that would enable him to get home quickly, Schauberger made the cardinal error of signing a document that he had not bothered to translate properly. When, later, he fully absorbed the text of it, he realized that everything he owned — models, sketches, prototypes, reports, even intellectual property — had become the sole possession of the Donner-Gerchsheimer consortium.
The release form also stipulated — just as U.S. intelligence agents had, 12 years earlier — that Schauberger was to commit himself to total silence on the subject of implosion and that any further ideas he might develop were never to be discussed with anyone other than designated U.S. personnel.
It was the last straw. On September 25, five days after arriving back in Linz, Viktor Schauberger died a broken man.
There was no point looking for any explanation of this tragedy on the U.S. side. Other researchers had petitioned U.S. intelligence agencies under the Freedom of Information Act for papers relating to Schauberger's period in Texas, but had been blocked by officialdom, which would neither confirm nor deny the existence of such records, always citing the National Security Act of 1947.
In seeking to find something that explained this final sequence of events in Schauberger's life from the Austrian's side, however, I had come across a small, almost throwaway reference in the Schauberger archive that had seemed to act as the trigger for it.
Shortly before the Gerchsheimer approach, Schauberger records that he was contacted by two aircraft companies, one American, the other Canadian, and that they both offered him substantial sums of money— the U.S. company, according to Schauberger, pitched its bid at $3.5 million — for the rights to acquire his propulsion ideas.
Schauberger never referred to either firm by name, but as this period coincided exactly with the rise of John Frost's shadowy Special Projects Group and its design of a top secret Mach 3–4 flying saucer for the U.S. Air Force — Project Y2/Silverbug — the Canadian company could only have been Avro. No other Canadian aerospace firm at that time was remotely engaged in such advanced technology work.
I recalled my long phone conversation with Frost's son and his reve lation that his father had once made a secret visit to West Germany in 1953. There, at a "Canadian/U.K. government installation," according to declassified documents in Canada, John Frost had met with an engineer who claimed to have worked on a flying saucer project at a site near Prague in 1944-45. Since Frost was probing in all the right areas, he would inevitably have come across Schauberger's work; the engineer whom he debriefed might even have known him personally.
Schauberger rejected both offers because neither company would meet his twin overarching demands: that his turbine should be used "for the common good" — i.e. for commercial aviation purposes — and that the deal should be made public.
This period, of course, also coincided with the period in which George S. Trimble of the Martin Aircraft company, backed by his counterparts in other aerospace firms across the U.S.A., was talking up the conquest of gravity and the impact this breakthrough would have on air and space flight. The world, they announced, was poised on the brink of an era in which free, clean energy would be the norm; and one day, they predicted, it would take us to the stars. In 1955, Trimble had set up RIAS — Martin's Research Institute for Advanced Studies — whose charter had been "to observe phenomena of Nature and to encourage, promote and support investigations in search of underlying knowledge of these phenomena… to discover fundamental laws … and to evolve new technical concepts for the improvement and welfare of mankind." RIAS' charter could have been Schauberger's own. And look at what had happened next. No sooner had people started showing an interest in Schauberger again than a man with clear ties to the U.S. intelligence community turns up on his doorstep, tempts him over to the United States and shuts his operation down — permanently.
In 1956, Trimble and others announce to the world that gravity can be harnessed in the same space of time it took to develop the atomic bomb.
Within two more years, all of the companies that had been waxing to the rooftops about the coming antigravity revolution had fallen silent on the subject. By 1960, it was as if none of them had ever even thought of it.
In the meantime, Avro Canada, the only company in the world to have openly admitted to working on a flying saucer — a dog of a thing that has trouble even getting off the ground — has had the rights to the real but highly secret technology, the supersonic models that show phenomenal promise, acquired by the United States. Then that operation is shut down, too.