biosynthesize hydrogen from water. However, because of the suc-
cess of the Allies' bombing, Schauberger moved his operations to
Leonstein in Upper Austria, and the improved Repulsine was
finally ready for testing the day the Americans arrived; the SS
guards had disappeared the day before.
A British engineer, John Frost, who emigrated to Canada shortly
after the war, developed a flying saucer project called the Avrocar at
a Canadian aerospace plant, funded largely by US capital. It was to
take off and land vertically, and to fly at high altitudes at 1,500 mph.
They were having trouble with its stability and, realizing that the
power plant was inadequate, approached Viktor Schauberger with a
generous offer to buy his propulsion system. Viktor declined,
because they refused to promise that his invention would be used
only for the good of humanity. Schauberger reported that he had a
second offer of $3.5 million from an American company, which he
refused for the same reason. This was not long before the Ger-
chsheimer consortium contacted him.The American consortium
Karl Gerchsheimer, initiator of the American consortium that tried
(see p. 13) to extract Schauberger's secrets in 1958, as head of all
civilian administration and logistics had been the most powerful
non-military presence in the U.S. zone of Germany from 1945 to- He was a Bavarian who thought he understood where
Schauberger was coming from — he had read some of Viktor's
papers, and felt he shared the same love of the mountains and their
pure water.
Gerchsheimer formulated a plan with industrialist and financier
Robert Donner to bring Viktor and his son to the U.S. to help
develop radical power technology, although by that time
Schauberger was in very poor health. In May 1958 the group assem-
bled in a secret hideaway in the Texas desert. There were many
delays and serious communication problems. Gerchsheimer and
Donner had a disagreement with Donner's financial adviser, Nor-
man Dodd, their production director, whom they fired in con-
tentious circumstances. Viktor eventually became convinced,
probably mistakenly, that the consortium was part of a U.S. govern-
ment plan to make a very powerful atomic bomb by developing his
research trail, and refused to cooperate.
HIDDEN NATURE