In his Miracle in the Void, not only did Brian not lie about Dennis Lee, he wrote the most brilliant short summary of free-energy suppression (and suppression in other fields, including parapsychology and medicine) that I had yet seen. He called it the Suppression Syndrome, which consisted of:
1. The scientists themselves – when new discoveries or inventions threaten their paradigms;
2. Industrial suppression – as industries protect their turf from disruptive innovation;
3. Governmental secrecy – spooks and black-budget operations orchestrated the UFO/ET, free-energy, and other cover-ups, which made the Iran-Contra Scandal seem like a kindergarten exercise;
4. The aliens – who seem to want the secrecy, so that they can operate freely with abductions and human experiments;
5. The media – which abrogated its duty to report the truth;
6. Ourselves – which Brian called the biggest factor, as humanity seemingly does not want free energy and abundance, but wants to perpetuate this nightmare of scarcity and fear, and humanity does it largely unconsciously.
That has aged well since I saw it in 1996. I might dispute the alien factor somewhat (there also positive reasons why they hang in the shadows), but they have played a role of some kind. My guess is that at least half of what my friend saw in his underground show had an ET origin.
Brian’s summary became a chapter of a book on the suppression of discoveries and inventions. Brian then had chapters on Elisabeth Kübler Ross’s stages of grieving. Brian’s “fringe” books – the last five of his lifetime – were not works of scholarship, but chronicles of Brian’s adventures after leaving the Establishment, peppered with brilliant summaries like the above one. They were more big-idea exercises, like Kuhn’s book on scientific revolutions. Looking back, the way that he summarized the issue may have influenced how I presented issues. When I wrote my levels of free energy awareness, I did it in less than an hour, as I recall, off the top of my head, as I had witnessed thousands of reactions by then. But it was influenced by Brian’s statement that getting to the truth of these issues is like peeling an onion, so I did it with a layer concept. Brian mentioned my layers in his Camelot interview, and that essay brought Brian back into my life after the New Energy Movement fiasco.
As I have written, my monster of a midlife crisis began in the summer of 1999, as I wrote my war essay. World War II and the Holocaust was grim subject matter, and the emotional toll of that exercise damaged my marriage, but on the bright side, it was part of the impetus to help me finally conquer the bottle the next year, after a decade of trying. If I had not stopped drinking then, I might not be here today. Being introduced to year-round hiking also helped, and may have been the critical missing ingredient.
The 9/11 terror attacks happened the month after Brian and I hung out, and that triggered a series of events that led to my withdrawal from public interaction, as my nation lost its sanity. Mr. Professor died in the spring of 2002, which sent me into the dark phase of my midlife crisis. Then we had the spectacle of the drumbeat for the invasion of Iraq, which was a nightmare for me. Just as the dust was clearing from the USA’s crime of the century, Brian asked me to help him found the New Energy Movement (NEM). I was unemployed at the time, in the midst of the high-tech collapse and Enron aftermath and finishing my website. In retrospect, I should have declined Brian’s invitation, just as I should have resisted Dennis’s entreaties to rejoin his effort. But I can’t regret anything. I finally got the mass-movement approach out of my veins after those disasters. The mass-movement approach won’t work for this Epochal undertaking.
When I hung out with Brian in August 2001, I put him up at my parents-in-law’s home, on acres of idyllic woods in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Brian lived in Colorado at the time. But when he contacted me to help him found NEM, he moved to be less than an hour from my in-law’s home. He lived on the Yuba River. So I drove down, stayed with my in-laws, and drove over to Brian’s place. In my first half-hour at Brian’s place, he introduced me to the others that he had asked to join us. Right then, I should have bowed out. It was a motley crew. He had me talk to a man who reminded me of how I might have turned out if I had not met Dennis: well-intended but naïve. I gave him the 15-minute version of my story, and when I got to my radicalizing moment on the witness stand, he looked at me like I was crazy. Right then, I should have bowed out. Another board member continually begged for money from the other board members, and he got $1,200 from me before it was over (and he did not deliver). Only Alden Bryant seemed like the real deal. He was the only environmentalist that I ever met who supported free energy. But his assistant that he brought with him was divisive, and Brian kicked her out after the first meeting.
That December, Brian had another meeting at his home, where I met Jeane Manning and I heard Mark Comings talk about his adventures a little (I met him on my 2001 visit with Brian). While Mark had sobering experiences, I was the only person in NEM or affiliated with it who had been through the free-energy meat grinder. Nearly all the rest were spectators or dabblers, and it really showed in our May 2004 meeting, as we began planning a conference (which can be a fatal undertaking). They wanted to invite people to speak who had attacked Dennis, and one did it criminally. Not one of the NEM board members understood the integrity issue. Without a bedrock of people with integrity, the rest was pointless, and none of them understood, even Brian. I wanted out then and there, but Brian begged me to stay and I funded the conference, as well as paid to have NEM’s website professionally mastered. I spent $17K on NEM, and it was all wasted money.
The week after that May meeting, the first person that agreed to speak at our conference, Eugene Mallove, was murdered. Sometimes a murder is just a murder, and untimely deaths are merely untimely, but in the free-energy field, untimely deaths are normal. Mallove’s murder spooked Brian, who immediately left the USA and planned his move to South America, and I did not blame him. But he went AWOL, as we planned the conference. That naïve Boy Scout member did nearly all of the legwork that summer, after losing his career after he tried to proselytize to his industrial company about free energy, which I warned him against doing. Free energy and corporate America do not mix.
I agreed with Brian to stay to the conference, but the last place on Earth where I wanted to be was manning the registration desk at the conference, which my wife helped me man. I took an hour off to watch Steven Greer’s presentation, and got good information from it. On day two of the conference, before it began, Brian and that begging board member were giving bear hugs to Dennis’s chief libeler in the free-energy field, not 20 feet from me! Within 20 minutes, I had packed up and left, and gave my resignation the next day, the same day that Brian’s friend John Mack was killed. The conference was bookended by the untimely deaths of two of Brian’s closest colleagues. Brian moved to Ecuador mere weeks later, and spent the rest of his life there.
I could fund NEM because I began a new career position at a software company the month after our first meeting. But I was an emotional wreck and withdrew from all interaction with the public or anybody involved with free energy for years, including Brian. That did not end until Dennis invited me to the White House and I sought professional help. Then the clouds finally began parting, and by 2007, I was engaging the public again, in forums where I had seen my work discussed. But the trolls came swarming, as did my “skeptical” stalker.
But that essay brought Brian back into my life, and one of the first things that Brian did was complain to me about what happened to NEM after I left. Brian invited in new board members after I left, and one was a famous free-energy figure. But he soon led an effort to kick Brian out of NEM, and that begging board member joined in, along with another new board member, presided over by that naïve member. I had lived through many attempts to steal our companies when I was with Dennis, so it was nothing new to me. It had also happened to Brian at that new science organization that he founded, which hosted that infamous UFO conference.
NEM was Brian’s last big effort toward free energy.