Thomas Bearden's list of energy researchers

Thomas Bearden's list of energy researchers

Date	May 2002
Topics	Propulsion & physics (topic)
People	Thomas Bearden
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 147
Year	2002 in UFO history
Timeline	2002 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	7

Thomas Bearden's list of researchers is a roll of names that the free-energy advocate Thomas Bearden, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, gave in an email of 1 May 2002 to Tim Ventura of the website American Antigravity.^[3][5] Praising Ventura's experiments with "lifters", small high-voltage devices said to fly with no moving parts, Bearden named people he called "fine researchers in this field". They included Hal Puthoff, Jean-Louis Naudin, James Woodward, Alfonso Rueda, Bernard Haisch, Ning Li and Eugene Podkletnov.^[3] A 2024 timeline submitted to Congress used the list to ask whether any of these people might have been working on UFO-related projects under cover of their public research. It cited no evidence that they were.^[5] Bearden is also known as a co-inventor of the "Motionless Electromagnetic Generator", patented in March 2002.^[1][2]

The 2002 email

The email is reproduced on SVPwiki, a site devoted to "free energy" and "vibratory physics". It appears there under the heading "Free Energy from Vacuum, Bearden", with the subject line "RE: Lifter Research Information" and the date Wednesday 1 May 2002.^[3]

• Praise for Ventura. Bearden thanked Ventura for his letter and praised the experiments shown on his website. He was especially impressed that researchers published exactly how to build the devices, so others could test them and see that a lifter works and "really doesn't fit the electrodynamics they were taught in university".^[3]
• A call for funding. He urged funding from the scientific community, the Department of Energy or large non-profits. If the nation could spend 50 years and billions on hot fusion, he wrote, it could spend "20 years and a billion or two dollars" on this research. Space exploration would need "better propulsion and lifting systems than rockets".^[3]
• The list. "Just to mention a few", Bearden named Tim Ventura himself, Jeff Cameron, Hal Puthoff, Jean-Louis Naudin "and quite a few other fellows corresponding on his website", Woodward, Rueda, Haisch, Campbell, Ning Li "(now returned to China)", Podkletnov, Serrano, Kulikov, Corum, Cox, Black "and others too numerous to mention".^[3]
• Patents. He said perhaps more than 100 patents had been issued in the field, and that even NASA held a lifter patent, apparently a variation of T. T. Brown's capacitor effect.^[3]
• Theory. The rest of the email argued that conventional electrodynamics wrongly assumes an inert vacuum. Bearden claimed that every electric charge continuously draws energy from the vacuum through "broken symmetry", citing his own 2000 paper "Giant Negentropy from the Common Dipole".^[3]

The earlier version of this article described the list as one of "energy researchers". In the email itself the field is lifter and antigravity propulsion research, though Bearden tied it to his ideas about energy from the vacuum.^[3]

The names in the timeline

The 2024 timeline compiled by Michael Shellenberger and submitted as written testimony to the House Oversight Committee dates the list to May 2002. It cites the SVPwiki page and Naudin's lifter page, and gives fuller identifications than the email.^[5]

• Jeff Cameron of Transdimensional Technologies.^[5]
• Hal Puthoff of EarthTech.^[5]
• Jean-Louis Naudin of JLN Labs.^[5]
• James Woodward and Alfonso Rueda of California State University.^[5]
• Bernard Haisch of Lockheed Martin.^[5]
• Jonathan Campbell of NASA.^[5]
• Ning Li of AC Gravity.^[5]
• Others. Eugene Podkletnov, Hector Serrano, John Rusek, Kulikov, Corum, James Cox, Black and others.^[5]

The name "John Rusek" in the timeline does not appear in the email as reproduced on SVPwiki, and the full names given for several others are the timeline's own additions.^[3][5]

Lifters

The French experimenter Jean-Louis Naudin's JLN Labs website, cited in the timeline, ran a long-standing "Lifter" project.^[4][5]

• What a lifter is. Naudin describes it as an asymmetrical capacitor run at more than 20,000 volts that produces thrust with no moving parts. He says it can lift its own weight plus a payload.^[4]
• Its origins. He attributes the effect to the Biefeld–Brown effect, which he says Thomas Townsend Brown discovered in 1928. He says the basic design is set out in Brown's US patent 2,949,550, "Electrokinetic Apparatus", filed on 16 August 1960.^[4]
• Replications. Naudin's site claims more than 350 successful replications worldwide. It says a 250-gram lifter carried a 60-gram payload in January 2003.^[4]
• Vacuum tests. It hosts video of asymmetrical capacitors tested in a vacuum chamber in summer 2003 by Gravitec Inc., whose president was Hector Serrano, at NASA's facility in Huntsville, Alabama.^[4]
• Military tests. The site says the lifter was "fully tested" by Britain's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the US Army Research Laboratory, but does not give their results.^[4]

The timeline's question

In a note on the entry, the timeline observed that "there are only so many anti gravity experts in the United States". It asked whether any of the listed researchers were working on UFO-related projects "using their public research as cover", and whether any held "unexpected clearances" over the past three decades.^[5]

• UFO links. As possible links, it noted that Cameron mentioned UFOs in a 2004 press release, that Haisch had referred to them before, and that Puthoff took part in the Pentagon's AATIP program and advised BDM's ATP group on UFOs from the standpoint of the CIA's remote-viewing program.^[5]
• Huntsville. It added that the journalist Ross Coulthart had named Huntsville, Alabama, as a site of deep-black antigravity work. Several of the listed researchers, Campbell, Li and Cameron, had worked there. (See Coulthart on Huntsville physicists.)^[5]

The timeline poses these as questions. The sources read here give no evidence that any of the listed researchers worked on a UFO program under cover of their public work.^[5]

The Motionless Electromagnetic Generator

Bearden's best-known invention was patented two months before the email.^[1][2]

• The patent. US Patent 6,362,718, "Motionless electromagnetic generator", issued in March 2002, names Bearden among its inventors. It describes a magnetic generator that produces electrical power with no moving parts and, once running, without external input power through its input coils.^[1][2]
• How it works. The device uses permanent magnets and coils, with timed electrical pulses switching the magnetic flux between two paths.^[1]
• Claimed output. The patent reports measurements in which the output power was "substantially higher" than the input power.^[1] The patent attorney Charles Mirho, writing in Strange Horizons, gives the prototype's ratio as 3.4 watts out for every watt in.^[2]
• A disclaimer. The patent states that the device "should be considered not as a perpetual motion machine". Instead it presents it as a system that converts flux "radiated from a permanent magnet" into electricity, likening it to a reactor's fuel rods.^[1] Google Patents nonetheless classifies it under "alleged dynamo-electric perpetua mobilia".^[1]
• Patent status. A continuation application was later abandoned.^[1]

Mirho came across the patent through a New Age periodical that billed it as "the first commercially-available free-energy device in history".^[2]

• A magnetic battery. On his reading of the patent, the device was "unambiguously a depleting magnetic potential battery": it slowly uses up the magnetism of its permanent magnet, as a battery uses up its chemicals, until the current stops.^[2]
• No net gain. Counting the energy needed to make the magnet, he suspected the true ratio fell well below one. The prototype produced only milliamps.^[2]
• The white paper. After winning the patent with its disclaimer, the inventors posted a 69-page white paper claiming the magnet would be "continually replenished from the active vacuum". Mirho called it largely qualitative "techno-babble" short on rigour.^[2]

The earlier version of this article said physicists consider the device a breach of the conservation of energy and that no working MEG has been independently demonstrated. Mirho, a patent attorney, makes the conservation argument; the question of independent tests is not covered in the sources read here.^[2] The earlier version also said Bearden promoted "scalar electromagnetics" as explaining everything from free energy to weather control. The sources read here call him a free-energy proponent but do not mention weather control.^[2]

Bearden in the congressional timeline

• 1998. The timeline includes a 1998 scheme by James Cox that classified supposed antigravity devices. One category, "nuclear antigravitation", cites "the alleged work of Bearden" alongside others.^[7]
• 2013. In December 2013, according to the timeline, Bearden claimed to have seen experiments in which drawing energy from the quantum vacuum "was possible". He said he and others had built devices that showed it, and that "certain powers" preferred to keep such technology private. The timeline notes that modern electrodynamic theory does not allow this. (See Bearden's vacuum-energy claim.)^[6]

People and topics

• Thomas Bearden — Retired Army officer who promoted "scalar" free-energy claims.

On the Timeline

• Will Miller's offer to Davis and Puthoff (25 April 2002) — A retired Navy commander offers his services researching crash retrievals.
• Vallée on privatized UFO research (2002) (6 May 2002) — Vallée writes that UFO research has likely been privatized in the U.S.

See every 2002 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References