If the Germans had been looking for an antigravity effect at the Wenceslas Mine, they would have needed something robust to test the forces generated.
And what of the weirdest variable of all? The gateway to the hyperspace itself?
There was a burst of applause in the lecture theater. If I'd got the Russian right, he was saying that gravity shielding — antigravity by another name — was a torsion field "excitation" of the physical vacuum, soaked as it was with zero-point energy.
The Bell, Schauberger's work and Podkletnov's were all linked by torsion fields and torsion fields appeared to be the key to a host of effects science was at a loss to explain; effects that came from somewhere, some other place, that lay beyond the vacuum of nothingness.
In the Q&A session after the formal part of his talk, Podkletnov had made a reference to something that I needed to follow up on. He'd mentioned that during a recent round of experiments he had generated an even more pronounced shielding effect, one that demonstrated a consistent weight loss in objects exposed to the beam of five percent — double his previous best — for short periods of time.
No doubt mindful that NASA had been unable to produce superconductors of the required size, strength and fidelity to duplicate the Russian's experiments, a member of the audience asked him what size discs he'd been using. With a look of evident pride, Podkletnov replied that he'd been using 30-centimeter discs — so strong that the president of Toshiba had been able to stand on one without breaking it.
Half an hour later, during a buffet organized by the university for its unconventional guest and the assortment of government and industry types who'd come to hear him speak, I managed to talk to Podkletnov in a quiet corner of the room.
He must have known that I wanted to pick up on the Japanese angle, because no sooner had I hit him with my business card, than he announced that most regrettably the topic of Japanese sponsorship wasn't for discussion. He had said more than he ought on the subject and that was that.
This in itself, of course, was interesting. But the block on this avenue of inquiry was so abrupt that for a moment it wrong-footed me.
I grappled for some new purchase on the conversation. "How about aerospace applications?" I asked.
I half expected Podkletnov to tell me what he had previously told Charles Platt, the American journalist who'd tracked him down in the wilds of Finland. Platt had revealed that Podkletnov was working on a spin-off of the shielding effect that had allowed him to achieve "impulse reflection" — using gravity waves as a repelling force. These, Podkletnov had told the writer from Wired, would one day permit the development of a "second generation of flying machines," beyond the brute-thrust types we rode on today. But Podkletnov went off on a different tack altogether. "I have discovered," he said slowly, watching and weighing me as he spoke, "a new and truly bizarre effect." "What kind of effect?" I probed. The low-key nature of the Russian's lecture had already signaled that he wasn't in the habit of using hyperbole.
"I'm not sure that I am ready to talk about it publicly yet," Podkletnov said, smiling awkwardly.
I was about to return to the subject of the Japanese for leverage, but in the end I didn't have to.
"I am, however, happy to share this news with you," he said. He paused to give the room a quick sweep. There was no one close enough to overhear us.
"If the superconductors are rotated considerably faster than the 5,000 rpm speeds I've been mainly using until now, perhaps five to ten times as fast, the disc experiences so much weight loss that it actually takes off." "Have you experimented?" I asked. "Yes," he said meaningfully, "with interesting results." It was then that I asked him if he had heard of Viktor Schauberger. It kind of came from nowhere but in actual fact it wasn't such a wild shot in the dark. There was something incredibly familiar about those rotation speeds.
Schauberger had been generating a lévitation effect using rotational velocities of 15–20,000 rpm. If these were rapid enough to produce a usable torsion field, no wonder Podkletnov had been getting "interesting results" from 25–50,000 rpm. Podkletnov weighed his response before replying. "You should understand that I come from a family of academics," he said after a long moment of reflection. "Both my father and grandfather were scientists. Shortly after the war, my father came to acquire a set of Schauberger's papers. Some time later, when I was old enough to understand them, he showed them to me." "Original papers?" I asked. Podkletnov said nothing, but in itself this told me as much as I needed to know. When the Red Army entered Vienna, Russian intelligence agents had made a beeline for Viktor Schauberger's apartment. There, they had found documents and certain component parts that Schauberger had spirited out of Mauthausen and the SS technical school at ViennaRosenhugel shortly before the S S transferred him and his design team away from the bombing to the little village of Leonstein.
Afterward, the Russians had blown up the apartment. But they had evidently taken what they could from it. And for some reason, Podkletnov's father had acquired some of the plunder.
"Perhaps you know that the Germans experimented quite extensively with gyroscopic forces for aircraft during World War Two," Podkletnov continued.
I wanted to tell him about the evidence I had uncovered in Austria and Poland, to share some data quid pro quo so I could learn more about his father's work, but out of the corner of my eye I could see one of the civil servants from the Ministry of Defense making his way toward us, a plate of sandwiches in one hand, a notepad in the other. A discussion about Podkletnov Senior and German "gyroscopic aircraft" would have to wait till another time.
On the way to the train station, I called Marckus and told him about the three significant facts I had learned that day. First, that the Japanese were in on the antigravity/free-energy act; and Toshiba wasn't routinely in the business of throwing good money at crackpot ideas. Second that Podkletnov was generating a free-floating levitational effect by rotating his superconductors at 25–50,000 rpm. And third, that Evgeny Podkletnov's father had come to acquire original Schauberger documents soon after the end of the Second World War.
"What would Evgeny's dad have been doing with them, Dan? It's a hell of a coincidence, isn't it?" "Leave it with me," he said, "I'll call you back." He did so within the hour. He'd been on the Internet, he said, scanning, processing stuff, eventually finding what he was looking for on the IBM patent-server, a voluminous website. I could tell from his voice that this was Marckus' kingdom; the place where he was happiest.
"I grind away at this material in low gear like a Stalin tank, but I always get there in the end." "What did you find?" I asked. "Something … curious. More than a coincidence, I believe. It seems that Podkletnov's father filed a master patent in 1978. It's funny, because I damn near quipped to you earlier that he'd probably turn out to be the father of the Moscow sewerage system. Well, guess what? The patent relates to industrial techniques for the continuous pure enameling of metal pipes. Evgeny's dad, in other words, had come up with a novel way of lining steel water pipes. It tells us two things: that he was a materials scientist, just like his son; and that he knew about water. My guess is that the Podkletnovs would have been quite comfortably off under the old Soviet system." "How did he come to acquire the Schauberger papers?" "Ah, well, let's postulate a little. Russian intelligence agents enter Schauberger's apartment in Vienna at the end of the war and find a bunch of papers, the contents of which they really don't begin to understand. But they know they're important, because they've already tied Schauberger to the S S secret weapons program. So they bring the documents back to Moscow and look around for someone who can decode them. Most of Schauberger's work, remember, related to machines that used air and water as their driving medium. What was Evgeny's dad? He was a leading academician in the hydro-engineering field — a pipes man. Not exactly the first person you'd think of approaching to do the work had he lived over here, but then again, in Schauberger's field, remember, there weren't any dedicated experts. So, Podkletnov Senior, a water engineer, got the job." "You think the Soviets took the technology further?" "Who knows? The Russians have never been afraid to exploit weird science. Remember the remote-viewing program kicked off by the CIA under Hal Puthoff? The reason the CIA was into it at all was because it picked up on the fact that the Soviets had started to dabble in the psychic spying business. There is ample evidence that the Russians have been tinkering with torsion fields for a long time, too. But my guess is that they never found enough in Schauberger's apartment to make practical use of his theories." "But enough for Evgeny's dad to be intrigued by them," I suggested. Marckus paused. "What is it?" I asked. "Podkletnov's discovery probably wasn't the accident he's cracked it up to be." "You mean, when his assistant's pipe smoke hit the column of gravity shielded air he was already looking for an effect?" "That's certainly how it appears now we know what we know about his father." "Jesus," I said, "if he can do it on a shoestring, anyone can." "Right. Scary, isn't it?" He sounded like he meant it, too. But I was still left staring at the end-wall of the same blind alley in which I'd found myself on the way back from Bad Ischl.