He started to talk about torsion fields, a term still fresh in my mind from Marckus' analysis of the experiment down the mine. Igor Witkowski, my Polish guide, had also talked of "vortex compression," a term used by SS police general Jakob Sporrenberg in his deposition to the Polish courts. Witkowski had remarked how this had linked in with Podkletnov's gravity-shielding experiments.
"The observed effect," Podkletnov said, talking about his own tests, "might be caused by a torsion field excitation of the physical vacuum inside and outside the superconductor." The idea came from somewhere far and remote, then steadied long enough for me to begin processing it. Marckus and I had spoken at length since my return from Austria about the Bell experiment and Schauberger's ideas. There was no doubt at all in his mind that what the Nazis had been trying to do at the Wenceslas Mine constituted an investigation into the arcane properties of space-time. And the fact that they had tested the effect of the torsion field on vegetation, lizards, mice and, God only knew, humans as well, suggested that there had been a practical aspect to the experiment as well. There was evidence, Marckus had told me, that particles appeared to slow down when they entered a torsion field.
"Since the zero-point energy field is composed of billions of tiny fluctuations of energy that pop in and out of existence every split second, relentlessly and infinitely," he'd explained, "anything that can mesh with those fluctuations, so the theory goes, can tap into them and extract energy from the field. That's what some people, myself included, believe that a torsion field does."
A torsion field, he'd continued, was best imagined as a rotating whirlpool. If you created one of these whirlpools, dipped it into the zeropoint energy field, the seething mass of latent energy that existed on an almost undetectable level all around us, there was evidence to show that it reacted in an almost magical way by directing the flow of energy. Anything that rotated, even a child's spinning top, Marckus said, was capable of generating a torsion field, albeit a very small one. "There's evidence of this?" I'd interjected. Marckus had looked at me and nodded. "If you imagine the zero-point field as a giant vat of treacle and man-made torsion field generators like the Bell and Schauberger's Repulsine as mix-masters — food-blenders— then you can begin to visualize their effect."
Some things were better at stirring the zero-point field than others, Marckus had said. Anything that generated an electromagnetic field was a case in point.
"The Bell would have been radiating like hell," according to Marckus, "generating electromagnetic energy on all frequencies, from radio waves to light — no wonder they'd buried the damned thing so deep." The fact that the Germans had also filled the rotating cylinders with a mix of different metals was also significant, he believed. If you could get the proportions exactly right you stood an even better chance of interacting with the zero-point field. But it would have been a very hit-andmiss process — an observation that was borne out by Sporrenberg's testimony. Each test had been very short, lasting on average of around a minute.
It seemed very much as if the scientists had been trying to "tune" the Bell, much as you would a radio set.
"Get it right and you've got a very interesting piece of hardware," Marckus had told me, "get it wrong and all you've got is some expensive junk."
Sixty-two scientists shot dead by the S S told both of us that the Bell tests had to have been at least partially successful.
It had been the same with Schauberger's machine. The air molecules whirling around within it had been spun into such a state of superexcitement that something very strange seems to have happened.
Compounded by collisions of electrons and protons—"the building blocks of atoms," as Callum Coats had called them — the result had been the creation of a vortex — a torsion field — similar to the Bell's, only without the electromagnetic component.
This was no ordinary "twister" in a three-dimensional sense, but a coupling device to the zero-point field — a pump, if you will — that not only acted as a conduit for its infinite source of energy, the seething mass of fluctuations, but had combined with an aerodynamic lift component and the Coanda Effect to produce lévitation.
If, as Puthoff and others were suggesting, gravity and inertia were component forces of the zero-point field, along with electromagnetism, then the vortex/torsion field was also responsible for interacting with the zero-point field's gravity and inertia properties. Tune the machine right and you could manipulate them.
Manipulate the inertia of an object and you removed its resistance to acceleration. Put in space and it would continue to accelerate all the way up to light-speed — and maybe even beyond.
Manipulate the local gravity field around an object and you could get it to levitate.
Both of these pathways to "advanced propulsion" were being explored within NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics initiative.
But here was the truly wild part. The vortex, Marckus said, wasn't a three-dimensional phenomenon or even a four-dimensional one. It couldn't be. For a torsion field to be able to interact with gravity and electromagnetism it had to be endowed with attributes that went beyond the three dimensions of left, right, up and down and the fourthdimensional time field they inhabited; something that the theorists for convenience sake labeled a fifth dimension — hyperspace.
It was here, they said, beyond the vacuum of absolute space, beyond what we now know to be a "plenum" (the opposite of a vacuum) flooded with zero-point energy, that the binding mechanisms of the universe actually lay.
To date, we know of four of these fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force.
If a whirling torsion field with or without an electromagnetic com ponent was binding with gravity to produce a levitational effect — an antigravity effect — it wasn't doing so in the four dimensions of this world, but somewhere else.
It explained why the Germans had attempted to use a torsion field to act upon the fourth dimension of time. Time, like gravity, the theorists said, was simply another variable stemming from the hyperspace.
"Say," Marckus had told me, "to use an extreme example, the Germans had been able to slow time within the area of the Bell's torsion field, this ceramic-lined chamber, to one thousandth the rate at which it was progressing outside and you sat inside the chamber for a year. What you've done is slow time down on the inside, while on the outside it progresses at its normal rate. Step outside the chamber after a year has ticked by on your calendar and you find yourself a thousand years into the future."
The chances were, Marckus said, the Germans had only been able to generate a tiny time perturbation — perhaps of the order of a hundredth or a thousandth of one percent. Its area of influence, mercifully, would also have been very localized. God only knew, Marckus said, what effect a larger-scale manipulation of the space-time matrix would have had otherwise. Science itself could offer few clues.
I believed from what I had seen in the Schauberger archive that anti gravity was real and that the Germans had thrown considerable resources into cracking the problem.
It struck me then that they wouldn't have pursued a single pathway to antigravity, but several. In the same way that the Americans had pursued several different theoretical and applied approaches to the creation of an atomic bomb.
And in the same way that NASA was investigating multiple different routes to breakthrough propulsion physics for taking us to the stars.
In my mind's eye I imaged the strange henge-like edifice next to the power station. Maybe, just maybe, Witkowski was right. Maybe it had been a test rig of some sort. A test rig for a highly unconventional engine or a large circular aircraft.