Antigravity by Modification of Local Gravity Fields
Yevgeny Podkletnov is a Russian engineer, formerly affiliated with the Materials Science Department at the Tampere University of Technology, Finland, who is best known for his controversial work on a so-called “gravity shielding” device. Born in Russia in 1955, Podkletnov graduated with a master’s degree from the University of Chemical Technology, Mendeleyev Institute, in Moscow; he then spent 15 years at the Institute for High Temperatures in the Russian Academy of Sciences. Later he received a doctorate in materials science from Tampere University of Technology, and worked at the university, on superconductors, until 1996.
Podkletnov’s gravity shielding experiments
According to the account Podkletnov gave to reporter Charles Platt in a 1996 phone interview, during a 1992 experiment with a rotating superconducting disk,
Someone in the laboratory was smoking a pipe, and the pipe smoke rose in a column above the superconducting disc. So we placed a ball-shaped magnet above the disc, attached to a balance. The balance behaved strangely. We substituted a nonmagnetic material, silicon, and still the balance was very strange. We found that any object above the disc lost some of its weight, and we found that if we rotated the disc, the effect was increased.
Podkletnov published a paper in 1992 reporting that the weight of an object directly above the disk was decreased. He concluded that the superconducting disk was shielding the Earth’s gravitational force above it.
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