ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

106 The Hunt for Zero Point
And that, for the next year or so, was that. It was only when an
intermediary told Platt that Podkletnov had returned to Finland, where
he was now set up as a materials scientist in a local company, that the
American jumped in a plane and finally managed to confront the man
who'd dared to claim he had shielded gravity.
What Podkletnov had been doing during his yearlong self-imposed
exile in Moscow was never made clear, although the Russian soon hinted
that he had not been idle. He was quick to explain to Platt that his original
findings at Tampere had been meticulously charted using a mercury
barometer. Immediately above the superconducting disc, it had registered
a 4 mm drop in air pressure, because, the Russian said, emphasizing
the point, the air itself had been reduced in weight.
When he'd taken the barometer upstairs, Podkletnov had found the
same drop in pressure over the point where the experiment was taking
place on the floor below. He went up to the top floor of the building and
it was the same thing.
This showed that gravity reduction would not diminish with distance,
that the effect had no limit. Podkletnov's gravity shield went on,
extending upward in a 30 cm diameter column—forever.
And then, if that wasn't good enough, pay dirt. The two percent
weight reduction in all the air above the disc meant that a vehicle
equipped with gravity shielding would be able to levitate, buoyed up by
the heavier air below.
"I'm practically sure," Podkletnov had told Platt, giving him an
intense look, "that within ten years this will be done. If not by NASA,
then by Russia."
During his year in Russia, he went on to reveal, he had conducted
research at an unnamed "chemical scientific research center" where he
had built a device that reflected gravity. By using superconductors,
resonating fields and special coatings—and "under the right
conditions"—gravitational waves had been repelled instead of blocked.
Applied to an air vehicle, Podkletnov said, this "second generation of
flying machines will reflect gravity waves and be small, light and fast, like
UFOs. I have achieved impulse reflection; now the task is to make it work
continuously."
Their meeting over, Podkletnov slipped back into the shadows and
Platt returned home. While there had been sightings of Podkletnov in the
years since—reports of his whereabouts had surfaced in Japan, Russia
and Finland—he had, to all intents and purposes, disappeared again.
Back in the States, Platt canvassed the physics mainstream for its