New Energy News (September 2001), Special Symposium Issue Part II
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | New Energy News (September 2001), Special Symposium Issue Part II |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Patrick G Bailey |
| Keywords | New Energy, suppressed inventions, classified patents, antigravity, UFOs, Institute for New Energy |
| Published | 2001 |
| Journal | New Energy News |
| Volume | 8 |
| Number | 9 |
| No. of pages | 24 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
This item is an issue of a newsletter (ISSN 1075-0045) rather than a single research paper, and carries no author's abstract. The contents are summarized below.
Overview
This is Volume 8, Number 9 of New Energy News, the monthly bulletin of the Institute for New Energy (INE), issued as "Special Symposium Issue Part II" for September 2001. It is a compilation rather than a research paper: seven items of varying length, most of them submitted by Hal Fox or Patrick G Bailey, reprinted or summarized from outside sources with editorial commentary attached. The subjects are missile-defence testing, a heat-resistant coating invented by an amateur, energy-policy advocacy, classified energy patents, a Russian claim of a new current source, wind power economics, and — at the greatest length — Bailey's own position paper on whether UFO and antigravity research belong within the INE's remit.
The unifying thread across the issue is institutional rather than technical. Every item is chosen to illustrate the same claim: that promising energy and materials work is being obstructed, either by credentialism inside professional science or by deliberate classification outside it. The issue contains no original experiment, no data and no derivation. Its interest to a reader of this wiki is documentary — it records what the new-energy community was arguing about in 2001, in that community's own words, and it includes an unusually frank statement by the INE's president about where he wanted the boundary of respectable inquiry drawn.
Contents of the issue
Missile defence and the credibility of official test results
The lead item summarizes a Nature report (Jonathan Knight, Nature 412, 468, 2 August 2001) that MIT's Theodore Postol was asked to return documents — freely available on the Internet — after stating that effective missile-defence technology does not exist and that the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization had modified test results. Fox, writing as a former missile systems engineer, adds an anecdote: on an earlier programme a test missile was fitted with a radio-control system and guided to the target by a team member positioned near it, in order to demonstrate progress to the funding agency. He judges hit-to-kill interception at that stage of development "an unusual waste of taxpayer's money" and asserts that beam technology could do the job more cheaply.
Maurice Ward's heat-resistant coating
Two separate items — one summarized from Richard Milton, one contributed by Remy Chevalier from Milton's alternativescience.com — describe Maurice Ward, a Blackburn hairdresser and former fork-lift driver who mixed his own hair preparations and, in the course of amateur chemistry, produced a thin coating said to withstand 2,700 °C. The demonstration recounted is the painted raw egg held under an oxyacetylene torch on the BBC's Tomorrow's World in 1993 and cracked open uncooked. The item that matters to the newsletter's thesis is the reported internal audit at ICI's paint laboratory, which is said to have found an inverse correlation between scientific qualification and patent contribution, the single largest contributor having no scientific qualifications at all. Fox draws the moral bluntly, advising students not to assume their professors or textbooks are correct, and naming the Big Bang, special and general relativity and "much of quantum dynamics" as taught dogma he considers already shown incorrect.
Brian O'Leary on the energy policy debate
An adaptation of the introduction to Brian O'Leary's Re-Inheriting the Earth (August 2001) argues that public debate has narrowed to short-term political and economic questions while omitting the demise of the fossil-fuel age. O'Leary quotes Noam Chomsky on limiting the spectrum of acceptable opinion, proposes a "global green democracy" and endorses John Bunzl's Simultaneous Policy as an adoption mechanism. He states that "the possibility of free energy is imminent, with hundreds of reputable reports of 'over-unity' power coming in from laboratories all over the world", says he has personally seen many such demonstrations, cites Tom Bearden's remark that "the cost of a single large power plant will solve the entire world energy crisis forever", and argues that going "outside the box of materialistic western science to the realms of consciousness" would ease the paradigm shift — while conceding that solar, wind and hydrogen are the necessary short-term remedies.
Classified patents and the Berkley bill
Two linked items concern secrecy orders on energy inventions. Gary Vesperman reports that Congresswoman Shelley Berkley of Nevada introduced a bill for $750 million annually in Small Business Administration loan guarantees for renewable and innovative energy technologies. Vesperman and Thomas Valone of the Integrity Research Institute assert that a nine-member Patent Office committee screens applications for national-security implications and that its hidden purpose is to lock up energy patents threatening fossil-fuel and grid interests; Valone, describing himself as a former Patent Examiner, puts the number of "secretized" applications at 4,000 or more, against Don Kelly's earlier figure of 3,000. The claim is made that a classified invention receives no patent number, that the inventor is rarely compensated, and that working on or publicizing it risks twenty years' imprisonment. Readers are asked to write to their representatives, and to press for a clause prohibiting classification of any invention not developed with direct government funding.
The Sobolev claim
The longest reprinted item is a Pravda story of 25 July 2001, forwarded by Harry Mason, on claims by Valerian Sobolev of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. Sobolev's statement lists seven discoveries, among them a "new substance condition" of non-stoichiometric composition able to radiate a time-varying magnetic flux; a "depletion process" (also rendered "exhausting process") that strips electrons from oxide melts; the experimental discovery of a magnetic charge — attributed not to a particle but to the bulk medium; a "physical current source" whose power is said to be replenished from the Earth's natural force fields; and a method of generating low-temperature plasma leading to superconductors and "unsupported" UFO-like propulsion. The evidential claim offered is that a substance producing 300 volts was again at 300 volts after a four-hour disconnection. Sobolev insists this "does not break the law about energy conservation", the energy being drawn from ambient fields rather than from nowhere, and states an initial goal of a 3-kilowatt autonomous source. The newsletter reprints the statement without independent verification, and the editorial note observes only that an abstract had appeared in the August 2001 issue.
Shorter items
A note forwarded by Bailey reports that Eugene Podkletnov had published a new paper (physics/0108005) describing not the earlier gravitational "shielding" but an apparent repulsive effect from a cold superconductor carrying large current in an intense magnetic field, with the claim that the results contradict general relativity. Another reports Stanford engineers' calculation that some 225,000 wind turbines, at an initial cost of $338 billion, would make wind cheaper than coal. The issue closes with five quotations on knowledge and invention (Emerson, Bierce, Juvenal, Henry George, Beecher).
Bailey: "Advanced Energy Research vs. UFOs & Antigravity: Friends or Foes?"
The issue's substantial original contribution is Bailey's essay, written as INE president. His conclusion is stated before the argument: UFO and antigravity research "should be kept separate from the INE and its research as much as possible." He reaches it by case analysis. If UFOs are not real, associating with the subject can only discredit the INE. If they are real and human-built, the technology is at the highest classification level and the INE would attract unwanted attention. If they are real and extraterrestrial, he reports the view — drawn from Robert Dean, Bruce Maccabee, Stanton Friedman and Phillip Krapf — that contact is being withheld until humanity governs itself responsibly, from which he draws the same practical moral: "Get your own act together! And — DO IT YOURSELF!" Every branch terminates in the same recommendation, which Bailey presents as the argument's strength.
What he wants for the INE instead is "solid devices that we can see and touch on the kitchen table or the test bench", developed by advancing the understanding of electricity and magnetism, "and not spend too much time worrying about advanced theoretics, UFO witness accounts, and possibly the ever present fanciful stories." He notes that he pursues his own antigravity interests through a separate outlet, Antigravity News and Space Drive Technology, deliberately kept away from the INE.
Assessment
As a historical document the issue is genuinely useful, and Bailey's essay is the reason. It is a boundary-drawing statement written by someone inside the field, openly weighing reputational cost, and it shows that the new-energy community was not undifferentiated: its own president wanted testable bench hardware separated from witness testimony and disclosure politics. His insistence on devices one can put on a table is a serviceable demarcation criterion, and his candour about motive — that the association would "allow discredit to the INE" — is more honest than the usual silence. The issue is also transparent about provenance: each item names who submitted it and where it came from, so a reader can trace the chain.
The difficulties are equally plain. The structure of Bailey's argument is that of a conclusion defended under every premise, which means no evidence could have counted against it; and although he asks the INE to avoid "fanciful stories", the essay itself devotes far more space to Robert Dean's fifty ET races, the Roswell and Socorro crashes and Phillip Krapf's Verdant federation than to any energy conversion device, and treats these as reportable fact rather than as claims requiring support. The editorial standard elsewhere in the issue is looser still. The Sobolev material is reprinted essentially verbatim from a newspaper, with a self-recycling voltage source as its only quantitative content — no current, no load, no energy accounting, no independent replication — and no scepticism is registered; a source that returns to 300 V after disconnection is exactly what an ordinary partially depleted electrochemical cell does, and the newsletter does not raise the possibility. Sobolev's "magnetic charge" is presented as experimentally confirmed with "100 per cent recurrence rate", which sits against decades of null results from monopole searches (the MoEDAL and earlier induction-loop and accelerator experiments), a conflict the item does not acknowledge.
The credentialism argument is the issue's most quotable and least secure. The ICI patent-count correlation, as reported, is at best an artefact of who in an industrial laboratory is assigned to applied product work; it does not license Fox's inference that students should distrust textbooks wholesale, still less his listing of special and general relativity among doctrines "shown to be incorrect" — a claim he makes in passing, without argument, in a newsletter that elsewhere reprints the GPS-era physics it would undo. Relativity's predictions are among the most heavily tested in physics: the (1+z) time dilation of Type Ia supernova light curves, the Hulse–Taylor binary pulsar orbital decay, and the daily 38-microsecond clock corrections applied in satellite navigation. A publication that asserts otherwise in an aside, while asking to be judged by bench-test standards, weakens the very demarcation Bailey is arguing for in the same issue.