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

224 The Hunt for Zero Point
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.
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