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

236 The Hunt for Zero Point
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