Viktor Stepanovich Grebennikov is a naturalist, a professional entomologist, an artist-simply put, an intellectual with a wide range of interests and pursuits. He is known to many as the discoverer of the Cavernous Structures Effect (CSE). But very few people are familiar with his other discovery, one that also borrows from Nature and its innermost secrets.
Back in 1988 he discovered anti-gravitational effects of the chitin shell of certain insects. But the most impressive concomitant phenomenon discovered at the same time was that of complete or partial invisibility or of distorted perception of material objects entering the zone of compensated gravity. Based on this discovery, the author used bionic principles to design and build an anti-gravitational platform for dirigible flights at the speed of up to 25 km/min. Since 1991-92 he has used this device for fast transportation.
Bio-gravitational effects are a wide spectrum of natural phenomena, apparently not confined to just a few species of insects. There is much empirical data to support the possibility of a lowered weight or complete levitation of material objects as a result of directed psycho-physical human action (psychokinesis)-e. g. levitation of yogi practicing transcendental meditation according to the Maharishi method. There are known cases of mediums levitating during spiritistic sessions. However, it would be a mistake to think that such abilities are only found in people who are gifted by nature.
I am convinced that these abilities are an understudied biological regularity. As is known, human weight significantly drops in the state of somnambulistic automatism (sleepwalking). During their nocturnal journeys, 80-90 kg sleepwalkers are able to tread on thin planks, or step on people sleeping next to them without causing the latter any physical discomfort (other than fright). Some clinical cases of non-spasmodic epileptic fits often result in a short-term reversible transformation of personality (people in such state are commonly referred to as "possessed"), whereby a skinny, exhausted girl or a ten-year-old boy acquire the physical prowess of a trained athlete.
Currently this psychological phenomenon is known as multiple-personality syndrome because it significantly differs from the classical complex of epileptic symptoms. Such clinical cases are well-known and well-documented. However, phenomena accompanied by a change in the weight of humans or of material objects are not confined to functional pathologies of the organism.
Healthy people in the state of acute psychological stress caused by a life-threatening situation or an overpowering motivation to achieve a vitally important goal have the ability to spontaneously overcome obstacles insurmountable in their normal condition-e. g. to lift enormous weights, etc. These phenomena are commonly explained by an extreme mobilization of muscular strength, but precise calculations do not agree with such hypotheses. Apparently, athletes (high jumpers, weightlifters, runners) have particularly developed bio-antigravitational mechanisms.
Their athletic performance is mostly (if not wholly) determined not so much by the rigor of their training as by their psychological preparedness. If an accurate scientific task of studying the anomalies of the human weight in various psycho-physiological states were ever set up and technical means of dynamic weight monitoring created, we would then have objective data on this unusual phenomenon. There is also evidence of other phenomena of short-term mass increase in biological objects, including humans, that are not related to mass transfer.
V. S. Grebennikov's book has high literary merit and includes the author's own illustrations. It is a kind of a "dactylogram" for his system of spiritual values, his environmental outlook, and his entomological autobiography. Many readers are likely to perceive the book as nothing more than a popularized summary of the entomologist's 60-year experience of scientific observations, peppered with some elements of science fiction. But such a conclusion would be deeply erroneous. As Viktor Stepanovich's friend and as someone with an intimate knowledge of his work (our homes are only 10km apart), I can vouch I have never met a more careful, conscientious, honest, and talented experimental scientist.
Grebennikov is also widely known in the so-called scientific underground (i. e. the branch of advanced Russian science constantly persecuted by the official scientific establishment). Thus, a committee for combating pseudoscience, created in Novosibirsk division of the Russian Academy, has victimized many talented members of our local scientific community. The situation is much the same at the Russian Agricultural Academy. It is very easy to lose one's job at a lab (even as its head, regardless of one's degree and title). One only needs to publish an article on, for example, the evolutionary significance of antigravitational mechanisms in insects.
But I am convinced that discoveries of such proportions must not be buried in manuscripts just because pragmatism still rules science. Let this book be nothing but "science fiction" for those at the top. Each person has his own beliefs. But he who has eyes shall see. Catastrophism in both the evolution of living nature and in the nature of human knowledge is actually a drastic destruction of old belief systems-a destruction that runs ahead of theoretical prognostications. A fanatical faith and idol-worship links our contemporary academic science with pagan religion. But a harmonious development (in the sense of Pavel Florensky's pneumatosphere) would not be possible without breaking old stereotypes in the process of mastering the wisdom and experience of older generations.
Flight - Chapter V of V. S. Grebennikov's My World
CHAPTER V. FLIGHT
A quiet evening in the steppe. The sun's red disk has already touched the faraway, misty horizon. It is too late to get back home-I've stayed too long here with my insects and am preparing to spend the night in the field. Thank goodness I still have water in the flask and some mosquito repellent-one needs it here, what with hosts of gnats on the steep shore of this salty lake.
I am in the steppes, in Kamyshlovo valley. It used to be a mighty tributary of the Irtysh, but the ploughing of the steppes and deforestation turned the river into a deep, broad gully with a string of salty lakes, like this one. There is no wind. Pods of ducks gleam over the evening lake, sandpipers are also heard in the distance.
The high, pearl-colored sky stretches over the calming world of the steppe. How good it is to be out here, in the open country!
I settle for the night on the very edge of the steep, on a grassy glade. I spread out my coat, put my backpack under the head, and before lying down, collect a few dry cakes of cow manure, and light them up. The romantic, unforgettable smell of bluish smoke slowly spreads across the dozing steppe. I lie down on my simple bed, stretch my tired legs and anticipate yet another wonderful night in the country.
The blue smoke quietly takes me to the Land of Fairy Tales; sleep comes fast. I become very small, the size of an ant, then enormous, like the sky, and am about to fall asleep. But why is it that today these "pre-sleep transformations" of my bodily dimensions are somewhat unusual, too strong? A new sensation has mixed in-a sensation of falling, as though the high cliff has been snatched away from under my body, and I am falling into an unknown, terrible abyss!
Suddenly I see flashes. I open my eyes, but they don't go away-they are dancing on the pearl-and-sliver evening sky and on the grass. I get a strong, metallic taste in my mouth, as though I pressed my tongue to the contact plates of a small electric battery. My ears start ringing, I distinctly hear the double beats of my own heart.
How can one sleep when such things are going on!
I sit up and try to drive away these unpleasant sensations, but nothing comes out of my efforts. The only result is that the flashes are no longer wide and blurred but sharp and clear, like sparks or perhaps small chains; they make it hard to look around. Then I remember: I had very similar sensations a few years ago in Lesochek, or to be more precise, in the Enchanted Grove [the author is referring to localities of an entomological preserve in Omsk Region].
I have to get up and walk around the lakeshore. Does it feel like this everywhere around here? No: here, a meter from the edge, I feel a clear effect of "something", while ten meters further into the steppe the effect clearly disappears.
It becomes a bit frightening: I am alone in the deserted steppe, by the "Enchanted Lake". I should quickly pack up and clear out. But my curiosity takes over: what is this, really? Could it be that the smell of lake water and slime is doing this to me? I go down, under the steep and sit down by the water. The thick, sweetish smell of sapropel-rotted remains of algae-is enveloping me like in a mud spa. I sit there for five, ten minutes-no unpleasant sensations. It would be suitable to sleep here, if it weren't so wet.
I climb the steppe-same old story! My head is spinning, I again get that "galvanic", sour taste in the mouth and feel as though my weight is changing-I am at one moment incredibly light, and unbearably heavy at the next. I see flashes in my eyes. If it was indeed a "bad spot", some nasty anomaly, then there would be no grass here, and large bees would not be nesting in the loamy steppe.
Meanwhile, their nests are all over it-in fact, I was trying to make my bed right above their underground "bee city" in whose depths there is of course a multitude of tunnels, chambers, lots of larvae, cocoons-all of them alive and healthy. I understood nothing that time. I got up with a headache even before sunrise and, tired, hobbled off toward the road to get a hitch to Isilkul.
That summer I visited the "Enchanted Lake" four more times, at various times of day, and under various weather conditions. By the end of the summer my bees got incredibly busy stuffing their holes with flower pollen-in a word, they were feeling great. Which I wasn't: a meter from the edge of the steppe, above their nests, I again had a set of most unpleasant sensations. Five meters away, I had none... And there was the same old bewilderment: why, why do these bees feel so good here that the entire steppe is dappled with their holes like Swiss cheese, and in places, almost like a sponge?
The solution came many years later, when the bee city in Kamyshlovo valley died: the tillage came to the very edge which consequently fell off. Now instead of grass and bee holes, there is nothing there but an atrocious heap of mud.
I only had a handful of old clay lumps-fragments of those nests, with multiple chamber cells. The cells were side by side and reminded of small thimbles, or little jugs with narrowing necks.
I already knew that these bees were of the quadruple ring species-that was the number of light rings on their elongated bellies. On my desk, packed with equipment, ant- and grasshopper-houses, bottles with chemicals, and other stuff, I had a wide receptacle filled with these spongy clay lumps. I was about to pick something up and moved my hand over these porous fragments.
A miracle happened: I suddenly felt warmth emanating from them. I touched the lumps with my hand-they were cold, but above them I felt a clear thermal sensation. Besides, in my fingers I felt some hitherto unknown jerks, some sort of "tick" as it were. And when I pushed the bowl with the nests to the end of the desk and leaned over it, I felt the same sensation as on the lake-my head was getting lighter and bigger, the body was falling down, the eyes saw rapid flashes, and the mouth tasted an electric battery. I was feeling slightly nauseous...
I put a sheet of cardboard on top of the bowl-the sensation didn't change. A pot lid changed nothing either; it was as if the "something" was cutting right through it. I had to study the phenomenon at once. But what could I do at home, without the necessary physical instruments? I got assistance from many research scientists of various institutes of the Agricultural Academy in Novosibirsk.
But alas, the instruments-either thermometers, or ultrasound detectors, magnetometers and electrometers-did not respond to them in the slightest. We conducted a precise chemical analysis of the clay-nothing special. The radiometer was also silent... But ordinary human hands, and not just mine, distinctly felt either warmth or a cold draft and a tingle, or sometimes a thicker, stickier environment. Some people's hands got heavier, others felt theirs were pushed up; some people's fingers and arm muscles got numb, they felt giddy and had profuse salivation.
Similar phenomena could be observed in a bunch of paper tubes inhabited by leaf-cutting bees. Each tunnel had a solid row of multi-layered cans of torn leaves, covered with concave lids (also of leaves). Inside the cans there were silk, oval cocoons with larvae and chrysalides. I asked people who knew nothing of my discovery to hold their hands or faces over the leaf-cutter nests, and took a detailed record of the experiment. The results may be found in my article "On the physical and biological properties of pollinator bee nests" published in the
Siberian Bulletin of Agricultural Science, no.3, 1984.
The same article contains the formula of the discovery-a brief physical description of this wonderful phenomenon. Based on the structure of bee nests, I created a few dozen artificial honeycombs-of plastic, paper, metal, and wood. It turned out that the cause of all those unusual sensations was not a biological field, but the size, shape, number, and the arrangement of caverns formed by any solid objects. And as before, the organism felt it, while the instruments were silent.
I called the discovery the Cavernous Structures Effect (CSE) and carried on with my experiments. Nature continued to reveal its innermost secrets one after another... It turned out that the CSE zone inhibits the growth of saprophytic soil bacteria, of yeast and other cultures, as well as wheat grain germination. It also changes the behavior of microscopic algea chlamydospores. Leaf-cutting bee larvae begin to phosphoresce, while adult bees are much more active in this field and finish pollination two weeks earlier.
It turned out that the CSE, like gravitation, could not be shielded-it affected living organisms through walls, thick metal, and other screens. It turned out that if a porous object were moved to another spot, the human would feel the CSE not immediately but in a few seconds or minutes, while the old spot would retain a "trace", or as I called it, a "phantom" perceivable by the hand for hours, and sometimes for months thereafter.
It turned out that the CSE field did not decrease evenly with distance, but surrounded the honeycomb with a system of invisible, yet sometimes clearly perceivable "shells". It turned out that animals (white mice) and humans entering the zone of the CSE (even a very strong one) soon adapted to it. It couldn't be otherwise: we are everywhere surrounded by caverns large and small: by grids, cells of living and dead plants (as well as our own cells), by bubbles of foam-rubber, foam plastic, foam concrete, rooms, corridors, halls, roofing, spaces between machine parts, trees, furniture, buildings. It turned out that the CSE "ray" had a stronger impact on living organisms when it was directed away from the sun, and also downwards, facing the Earth's center.
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