All I knew about the Schaubergers was what I had read; that Viktor, through his early work as a forester, had developed a passionate set of theories about the essential characteristics of air and water as living, energizing media and that he viewed Nature as a complex interaction of forces that constantly created or reinvigorated matter — against the orthodox view that matter is in a natural state of decay.
Walter, a trained mathematician, had taken his father's theories a step further, merging Viktor's views with Pythagorean concepts of harmonics and the laws of planetary motion developed by Johannes Kepler. It was no coincidence, Walter believed, that a carefully cut cross section through a Pythagorean hyperbola or the elliptical planetary orbits plotted by Kepler happened to be egg-shaped, a form that was one of Nature's highest expressions of energy and strength. PKS, I remembered now, stood for Pythagoras-Kepler System.
It sounded more than a little like New Age craziness, the last place that someone with my background and training should have gone out of his way to visit; but then again, I reminded myself, maybe it was actually no crazier than NASA's Garry Lyles telling me that man would be journeying to the stars by the end of the 21st century in a spacecraft that used some kind of warp drive or wormhole.
I eased the car onto the Schaubergers' property. The institute lay at the end of a long drive. The snow-capped tops of the mountains beyond were dazzlingly bright against the blue sky.
Joerg Schauberger, Viktor's grandson, greeted me on the steps of the house and led me to the basement area where a series of small-scale experiments had been set up to demonstrate the theories developed by his father and grandfather. Viktor's maxim had been "comprehend and copy Nature" and central to this thesis had been his understanding of the vortices that occurred naturally in the environment.
These "energy spirals," as he saw them, creative whirlpools of Nature, were visible everywhere: from the spiral galaxies of the outer cosmos to the power of a tornado or simply in the whorled horn of a kudu's antler or the double helix of a DNA strand.
Nature, Viktor Schauberger had believed, employed the vortex as its most efficient conduit for the transmission of energy.
When this three-dimensional spiraling energy pattern was channeled inward, not outward, in a process Viktor called "implosion," it became endowed with "higher order" properties — characteristics which Viktor himself described as "atomic" (although his understanding of the word was quite different from that of a nuclear physicist's).These properties were capable of generating phenomenal levels of force. Transposed into machinery, Viktor had even coined a term for it: "bio-technology."
One such device, an implosion-based generator, stood disused and rusting in the corner of the basement area where Joerg Schauberger and I now viewed the fruits of his forebears' lifework.
Joerg Schauberger had signaled during our phone conversations his reluctance to prize open the family archives to a complete stranger. But he was content for me to come to Bad Ischl to plead my case. I was glad that I had. He was roughly my age and had an open, honest face. I liked him immediately. I could see that he was weighing me up every bit as carefully as I was assessing him. Both of us were entering uncertain territory. For me, his grandfather's experiments bordered on the incredible. But Joerg wasn't interested in publicity. This in itself gave me confidence. Whatever lay in the archives, I knew it would be fresh, untainted evidence, free from any kind of interpretation or bias.
Joerg was proud of his family's achievements. In the lofty, baronial entranceway of the family institute, he had shown me a cutaway section of a log flume that his grandfather had built in the forests for the efficient removal of lumbered trees.
It was then that I realized the impression painted of Viktor Schau berger in the Legend was a misleading one. Schauberger wasn't a forester in the strict sense of the word. He was an engineer; and from the look of the machinery around the house an extremely accomplished one. His milieu happened to be the forest.
Now, as we stood beside the implosion machine, his grandson spelled out his fears. Others had documented Viktor Schauberger's experiments, he told me; there was little, he believed, I or anybody else could add to this body of knowledge — the more so in my case, as, by my own admission, the science of the processes involved wasn't principally what had led me here.
I was after proof of a technology that conventional science said was impossible.
If, as the Legend had it, his grandfather had cooperated with the SS, what did his family and its reputation possibly have to gain from my seeing the archives?
I had thought long and hard about this during my drive through Ger many, but whichever way I cut it, there was nothing reassuring to say.
So I told him instead about the journey that had brought me to his house; about the series of statements in 1956 by U.S. aerospace companies that the conquest of gravity was imminent, that all that was required to make it happen — to usher in an era of clean, fuelless propulsion technology, of free energy — was money and a little application from the U.S. government.
I told him about Thomas Townsend Brown's efforts at much the same time to interest the U.S. Air Force and Navy in an electrogravitically powered Mach 3 flying saucer and how aspects of Brown's ideas had emerged in the B-2 Stealth Bomber more than three decades later.
I told him how Evgeny Podkletnov had defied the theoreticians of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program by engineering a device that shielded gravity by as much as five percent and how, officially, Brown's work had been discredited by the U.S. military — despite its very real application to the B-2.
We spoke, as well, about the glaring discrepancy between General Twining's view in 1947 that the development of a manned aircraft with the operating characteristics of a UFO was "within the present U.S. knowledge" and the fact that, even in the black world of modern U.S. aerospace technology, there were so few traces of this knowledge it was as if it had never existed. Which had brought me to the Germans. There was, via the Kammler trail, a mounting body of evidence that the Nazis, in their desperation to win the war, had been experimenting with a form of science the rest of the world had never remotely considered. And that somewhere in this cauldron of ideas, a new technology had been born; one that was so far ahead of its time it had been suppressed for more than half a century.
Joerg Schauberger's grandfather, I felt sure, was integral to the truth of what had happened at that time. But unlike the Wenceslas Mine, where few traces of Sporrenberg's court testimony remained on view, Viktor Schauberger had left records. That, I told his grandson, was why I was here.
At this, he gave an almost imperceptible nod and indicated we should head upstairs. It was getting late and there was a lot of material we needed to get through in the short space of time I was in Bad Ischl.
Like me, he said, pausing at the base of the steps that led to the upper levels of the house, he was only interested in the truth. In the complex world his grandfather had lived in, it was a commodity that was not always so easy to get a handle on.
It was then that I understood. Joerg Schauberger had been trying to assemble his own jigsaw puzzle — one that explained the intricate mystery of his grandfather's life. I held pieces of the puzzle he didn't possess.