Defense Intelligence Reference Document The Role of Superconductors In Gravity Research

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was evacuated and back-filled with argon to prevent YBCO degradation by water vapor.
When the static machine was operated, a light blue planar "discharge" was seen to pass
from the superconductor array to the annulus. At this instant, a pencil standing upright
on a table in an adjoining room and separated from the experiment by a thick concrete
wall fell over.
Around this time, Koczor had raised some NASA funding to commission the commercial
fabrication of a 27-cm bi-layer disk conforming to Podkletnov and Levit's 1997
specifications. Podkletnov visited the Toronto laboratory for a second time to assess the
experimental progress, in particular the fabrication of the special bi-layer sintered
ceramic YBCO disks. Upon persistent questioning about the methods he used to power
the various coils (without sustaining high-voltage arcs), keep them in phase at high
frequencies, and maintain stability during rotation, it was learned that Podkletnov was
not involved in the electrical design but only in the ceramic side of the experiment.
Nevertheless, he claimed that with our apparatus and "home-made" disks, one should
see the shielding effect, but at a somewhat smaller magnitude than his original results
owing to our expected lower rotational speeds.
For several years prior to 1999, Professor Harald Reiss had been working on tests of
gravity's influence on high-temperature superconductors and vice versa as a researcher
at Asea Brown Boveri and later the University of Wuerzburg in Germany, where he
taught courses in superconductivity. In that year he published (Reference 32) the
results of precise measurements of the weights of superconducting and non-
superconducting samples cooled below Tc and found anomalies not easily explained
away. He weighed small, disk-shaped samples held in a specially made capsule while
dipping it into LN2 and found a slight (~0.5 percent) weight increase of a high-
temperature superconductor for which he was not able to offer a prosaic explanation.
We supplied some YBCO disks for his experiments. His analysis of possible artifacts is
thorough and very useful to other researchers investigating this area. In 2003, he
published (Reference 33) an update of his ongoing LN2 experiments with increased
precision and artifact reduction. He was still observing weight changes during Tc
transition to a repeatable degree not achieved elsewhere.
1999 saw the wind-up of the NASA small-diameter nonrotating disk experiments with
no unequivocal results. As the budget for such experimentation had been exhausted by
the costly fabrication of the 27-cm bi-layer disk, Koczor tried to interest others,
including our laboratory, to take on the task of levitating and RF-spinning this monster
disk at LHe temperatures; we respectfully declined. Around 2002, Kaczor gave up
trying, as the experiment was deemed too difficult without considerable effort, and no
spare disks were available in case the only YBCO disk that was made broke!
Two years later, Podkletnov and his collaborator on theory, Modanese, published a
paper on the web concerning an enhanced version of the gravity beam, or "Impulse
Gravity" experiment (Reference 34). This was the first general publication of the high-
voltage impulse force experiment. Enough technical description was available to allow
an assessment of the validity of experimental setup. Unfortunately, many unresolved
technical questions cast considerable doubt on whether the experiment actually had
been undertaken. Neither Podkletnov nor Modanese provided by a shred of
confirmatory evidence. However, the paper presented a general summary of the
theoretical work by Modanese and included an extensive bibliography.
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