Popularly Seen As A Device Of The Rich And Famous

Catch and Kill is a favourite trick in today’s world of industrial espionage

Desperately needed limitless clean energy too cheap to meter – Cold Fusion/LENR is

Private Enemy Number One

This story begins a few months after the March 1989 announcement of COLD FUSION. The news offered by one of the world’s most distinguished electro-chemists and his former grad student, now chairman of the department of chemistry at the University of Utah, shook the world. A few months later the US Departments of Energy and Defense convened a secret meeting in Rockville Maryland just outside of Washington DC. On the agenda was how to catch and kill cold fusion, for nearly 30 years they have been largely successful.

The topic of the secret meeting was about the newly discovered energetic process found in nature that, if developed into practical technology, could supply the country’s energy needs, with no more smog, no more nuclear waste, no more depending on other countries for oil. It was so simple making use of the most common and smallest atom in the universe, hydrogen. Fused together hydrogen will make helium, the second smallest atom in the universe. When it does, just as Einstein had shown in his famous math, E=MC2, staggering amounts of clean energy are released.

This new obscure process found in Nature was being heralded far and wide and something surely had to be done about that. It would if it made it to market. transform the world of energy from the world’s largest profit centre to nothing as the fuel for cold fusion was simply water.

Gaslighting By The Official Secret Society Known as the Jasons

The Jasons are a well-guarded group of world-class scientists, briefly outed in the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, who have been meeting every summer since 1960. Among many stunning innovations, they have helped hasten are our electronic battlefield and Star Wars missile defense technology, and are now looking into ways to improve our intelligence gathering. What is not clear is how many technological breakthroughs they have suppressed. Recounting the unknown story of the Jasons, author Ann Finkbeiner takes advantage of her unprecedented access to this elite group to explore the uncertain bargains between science and politics sealed with secret handshakes. It is a story older than Faust and as timely as tomorrow’s headlines. Read the book on the Jasons.

Prof. Peter Hagelstein of MIT has been one of the Jason’s though he was forced to leave the secret society when its head William Happer told him to choose between Cold Fusion and the Secret Society. Haglestein choose Cold Fusion and resigned. He now describes the mainstream scientific community as “mafias” that promote and publish their friends’ work, unwilling to accept new ideas. “From time to time there will be wild claims that will be wrong,” he says. “Let’s accept that, instead of destroying the careers of the folks who either say such things or work on such things. This is a normal part of the process, too.”

Speaking of timely headlines about boobs

Jasons Grand Master Nabob Will Happer these days is still around and prominently so. His latest appointment by President Trump is illustrative of his life long trail to catch and kill. CNN proclaims this week, “William Happer, a Princeton atomic physicist and prominent skeptic questioning whether humans are causing rapid climate change, is joining the National Security Council as senior director for emerging technologies, according to NSC officials.”

When it was rumored last year that Happer would be appointed to a key role in the White House, he was asked how, as a prominent and ardent climate change denialist, he would respond to resistance over his appointment from the vast majority of fellow scientists. He said he would do his best to provide the best technical advice.

“I’m a scientist; I know a lot about some areas, and I know how to find out about others. I know how to reach out to people who really do know,” he told The Scientist.

“And I think I could provide the best possible advice, technically related and scientifically related advice, for the administration for policy decisions that really need to get the science and technology right.”

Prof. Hagelstein has elaborated on his being ousted by the Jasons by saying “leading physicists came out swiftly and prematurely against cold fusion. A prominent physicist Nathan Lewis at Caltech first said Pons and Fleischmann were “suffering from delusions”, then later quipped that ‘any discovery of such profound nature would never be made at a second-rate institution in Utah but rather would come from an institution like his’, yeah sure.

William Happer, a Princeton professor, called Prof. Fleischmann, a prominent Fellow of the Royal Society and his colleague Prof. Pons “incompetent boobs.” Now nearly 30 years later that comment about ‘boobs’ brings a wry smile to my face as Happer has clearly sold what is left of his pitiful soul to a man who knows something about such boobs and more often than not hires them to be close to him.

Along with Happer another key player in the ‘catch and kill’ ops against cold fusion is the mouthpiece of the American Physical Society. His office has been located prominently in Washington DC just around the corner from the National Press Building. Located not amongst the academic world but rather in offices amidst those of myriad foreign news agencies, Bob Park, director of APS public information, and avowed enemy of cold fusion, wrote a weekly column up until his retirement in 2012 titled “What’s New” that laid claim to a subscriber list of some 40,000.

Park’s fallacious attack methods are classical, he lumps all that he does not like, Bigfoot, little green aliens, and cold fusion into to one conflated lump, and declares them all damned by the same broad brush of guilt by association. His book of scientific sins he titles ‘Voodoo Science’. Of cold fusion he allows one tiny sliver of hope as he reported on Edward Teller’s keen support for some scientists in the field, including myself.

Park says,“When the master (Teller) says it’s right, it must just be a matter of showing it.”

But Park and the American Physical Society to this day never gave cold fusion a chance.

Decades ago I was one of the scientists given a block of time to present my own work in the field at a meeting of the APS in California. The half-dozen or so of we scientists which included top nuclear scientists from the US Navy, Department of Energy, commercial nuclear energy industry were stunned to discover a change of venue. On the day of our oral paper presentations the dignified conference room we had been allocated, at the urging of Park, Happer, and others, had been abruptly changed. The catch was in hand, now for the kill.

Driven from the Temple

Our session on COLD FUSION, months in peer review and planning by the APS, had been moved to the third floor of a parking garage across the street from the posh conference hall. A space amounting to several stalls of the packed busy parking garage had been roped off where we were told we were to present our papers to the tens of thousands attending the APS conference across the street. There was outrage by many scientists at the conference and in some ways, it all worked out.

The disgusting parking garage space to which we cold fusion scientists and paid up members of the APS had been banished was packed with some of the most noted physicists in the world. Many of those in attendance held Nobel Prizes and they made a special effort to attend and befriend those giving Cold Fusion talks in spite of the car exhaust fumes and fuming of the usual nefarious ‘catch and kill’ suspects. Those making the effort to attend were as fantastic and useful new friends as any scientist might ever hope to find.

In another case the Dept. of Energy and Dept. of State in the USA were sponsoring and hosting a conference on future energy (COFE) in Washington. A number of scientists working on ‘out of the box’ energy technologies, including me, were invited by Tom Valone of the US Patent Office who was the organizer. Park and another of his cabal of influential physics zealots, Zimmernan, were outraged. Park had emailed his friend Zimmerman saying, “Pete, if you can’t get that meeting killed, what’s the point of having a Department of State.” Within days the State Department killed the meeting. Park later boasted at a meeting of the American Physical Society that ‘killing the meeting was his proudest accomplishment of the year.’

That matter of showing it

The story of cold fusion continues to this day. And just as Park noted those many years ago when he gave Teller’s point of view a sliver of hope that matter of time to show it has finally delivered. In the beginning of the cold fusion saga, Fleischmann’s and Pon’s work was supported first in the USA by mainstream industry and science. At least until the withering attacks led Minaru Toyoda, scion of the Toyota Motor Corporation to give Fleischmann and Pons his support to set them up in a laboratory in the South of France away from the constant trolling and fake news of the ‘catch and kill’ denizens of the US establishment. But with the exile of the founders of Cold Fusion from the USA the field descended into a long and dangerous descent. The ostracized work became anathema for any scientist that deigned to study it.

Catch and kill, this vital new energy technology and hope with honey traps and tar pits.

Champions of cold fusion like Edward Teller, Glen Seaborg, Linus Pauling, Dick Taylor, Art Schalow (all with Nobel prizes on their chests) have given support. Meanwhile, other ‘wannabe’ physicists emerged as predators with intent to aggrandize their pitiful lives, steal new ideas, and to catch and kill whatever and whomever looked promising. To do so were heavily financed to set ‘honey traps’ where promising work might be enticed to enjoy the benefit of some of the ordinary resources of atomic science.

It became dangerous territory where one with demonstrated skills in the art might find themselves invited to carry out work in such opulent facilities outside of our more accustomed ‘inventors garage laboratories.’ The problem was that many of these institutions that seemed to be offering ‘honey’ were allied with major academic institutions and parleyed their games upon the reputation of their namesakes. In reality, they were/are honey taps where earnest scientific collaborators were clearly set up to be lured and insidiously and cleverly maligned in the catch, kill, or steal game.

Today while the afore-mentioned institutions remain true to their dogmas others have joined the catch and kill game. The tactic of choice is more and more via supposed ‘investors’ otherwise known as ‘vulture capitalists’ doling out pitiful sums of a few thousand dollars to buy the obedient servitude of the aging few scientists left in the cold fusion scientific community. For those that these vultures can’t buy they instead send denizens to surreptitiously invigilate and tar the credibility of work that offers potential for success. In this age of the internet and endless everlasting space for proclamations of supposed librarians, blustering braggadocio, and trolls it has easily become the force de jour to confound googlers and ooglers. Ces’t la vie.

Quite by accident of an email that has gone astray that lists in its content some of the principal miscreant conspirators working to catch and kill cold fusion are revealed. As that ‘leak’ now rumoured to be in circulation makes its rounds it might at least help some avoid the traps and tar.

As the field of cold fusion diminishes yearly in number and competence so does the hope for transformation. The open career destroying hostility of the Jasons and the APS have been successful in deterring young scientists from daring to enter into the field. The attacks on Fleischmann and Pons and Haglestein have proven that if one ever dares to touch the cold fusion ‘tar baby’ the most likely scenario is that you will be tarred forever. Very very few new recruits to the field are seen and one by one the original scientific community of cold fusion scientists have been passing away. The obituary list is outgrowing the new recruit list,  obits RIP

Can’t keep a good girl (Mother Nature) down

If cold fusion, aka LENR, or as I like to refer to this field of science as Atom-Ecology, were a mere invention the ‘catch and kill’ with their fallacious condemnation, honey traps and tar baby suppression tactics would work to prevent it from heralding the end of the planet killing fossil fool/fuel age. It’s clear that in these end of days time for the likes of climate change and cold fusion denialists their time is over.

Cold fusion is hale and hearty and better proven and even more miraculous than it has ever been. You can read a great deal about the ecology of atoms and the resulting cold fusion that is showing up throughout Nature here on this blog.

The legendary Max Planck once said about new discoveries being accepted by the old guard,

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” 

From time to time I’ll be adding to this post. If you have some personal recollections or directions to more elements of this story please send them to me as a comment.