Defense Intelligence Reference Document The Role of Superconductors In Gravity Research

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produced a modified set of London equations. These papers laid the theoretical
foundations for the later work of Li, Torr, and Tajmar, for example.
In the late 1980s while at the University of Alabama, Douglas Torr was examining
neglected areas of physics, including aether theories and experiments, as well as
gravitational wave antennas, the subject of a paper awarded the Gravity Research
Foundation's "First Award" in 1989. In 1991, Torr and Ning Li published a paper on the
effects of a gravitomagnetic field on superconducting matter (Reference 16). Ordinarily,
all magnetic fields are excluded from the interior of a superconductor because of
Meissner expulsion. However, by solving the coupled Maxwell, GR, and London
equations for the internal magnetic and gravitomagnetic fields of superconductors
exposed to external gravitomagnetic and magnetic fields, they predicted a small
residual internal magnetic field. This in turn produces an internal gravitomagnetic field.
The fields are related to one another by the Cooper pair mass-to-charge ratio. The
gravitomagnetic field penetration depth is larger than the normal magnetic field depth.
A year later the same authors presented papers at a meeting of the American Physical
Society (Reference 17). Buoyed by the apparent success of their previous analyses,
part of the title of one presentation was "A Theoretical Basis for a Principle of
Electrically Induced Gravitation." In this paper, they used coupled Ginzburg-Landau
equations to calculate the relative strengths of the electric and gravitational fields in
superconductors in the presence of magnetic and gravitomagnetic fields. They
concluded that under certain circumstances, a secondary gravitational field could be
induced inside a superconductor and "provide a basis for the electrical generation of
gravitational fields in the laboratory."
Then came the bombshell. A Russian materials scientist on staff at the Institute of
Materials Science at the Tampere University of Technology in Finland published a paper
in 1992 on an apparent gravity shielding experiment using a spinning superconductor
disk (Reference 15). In the mid-1980s, the lead author, Evgueny E. Podkletnov, had
published several papers on ceramics while at the Institute for High Temperatures in
Moscow. He later moved to Finland, where he completed his doctorate under then-
Director of the Institute of Materials Science Pentti Kettunen. Podkletnov's thesis was
on preparation of pure YBCD whiskers by magnetron sputtering, and he was producing
this material for powder-in-tube high-temperature superconducting wire for a local
business concern. According to Kettunen (Reference 21), the spinning disk experiment
was not actually performed at the institute but rather was conducted by Podkletnov and
others "after hours." Kettunen also confided that although he was aware of the
existence of the gravity shielding experiment through "so many others" telling him
about it, he never witnessed it himself. He did confirm the story Podkletnov later told
about discovering the shielding effect by watching the smoke from a coworker's pipe
float up exactly in the "shadow" of the spinning disk. The disk was apparently made in
Russia for sputtering purposes and brought to Finland.
The coauthor of the gravity shielding experiment, Risto Nieminen (this Risto Nieminen
is emphatically not the more famous professor of computational physics currently at
Helsinki University of Technology), was a technician working at the Institute of
Materials Science during Podkletnov's time there. He was not involved in Podkletnov's
experiments but noted (Reference 22) that they were likely conducted at either the
Tampere Institute of Technology's Department of Electrical Engineering or the Institute
of Physics. To this day, he is still not sure why he was asked to coauthor the paper,
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