Dennis Lee’s Unbelievable Journey – Part 1: The Early Years

He is the Indiana Jones of Free Energy.

It is time to write a series of posts on my former partner, Dennis Lee. As much as I admired and loved Brian O’Leary and Ed Herman, as great as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn were, as much I was amazed and heartened by the courageous journeys of my friends Gary Wean and Ralph McGehee, as wonderful and brave as Sam Husseini, Chris Black, and Bill Ryan are, and as influential as my first professional mentor and Mr. Professor were, Dennis has been the 800-pound gorilla of my life. I have never heard of another like him. More than anybody else that I ever heard of, Dennis gave the people who run the world some interesting days at the office and probably even some sleepless nights. He is the Indiana Jones of Free Energy.

As with David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, there are important parts of Dennis’s story that I cannot publicly tell unless I outlive some more people. The full story as I know it is simply unbelievable, and there is also plenty that Dennis has not told me. But I know enough. So here goes. I have done this before (1), and this will be a relatively short version.

Dennis was born in 1946 in Yakima, Washington, as the firstborn of migrant farmworkers, when white Americans still did that. His childhood was spent following the plantings and harvests around the USA (Dennis said that harvesting asparagus was the worst). When Dennis was 13, his father told him that he had done his part and could no longer afford to feed Dennis, so he was on his own. That was not that unusual back then, to leave home at that age. One of my father’s engineer friends was on his own at age 11.

Dennis is a genius, and even though he was on his own, he kept going to school. He lived in abandoned homes and the like, and for the last two years of high school, he was able to hide out in the janitor’s closet at school and sleep there. Two weeks before graduation, he was caught. In those benighted times, he was expelled from school for doing that. Dennis soon did what white American farmers had done throughout the 20^th century and joined the army. He was a paratrooping medic who wanted to become a surgeon, and he once performed an unassisted appendectomy. He was stationed in Germany, and a month before he was discharged, he was drafted into a secret operation and dropped into Cambodia to clean up a CIA operation gone bad, to help keep the war in Cambodia secret from the American public. After recovering the bodies and injecting the Cambodian mercenaries with heroin as part of their compensation, they marched overland to Saigon (they hiked 50 miles in a day) and they killed everybody that they encountered. Dennis killed many people on that mission.

Dennis was discharged, moved back to Yakima, and began going to college. He was young, handsome, and had big dreams. He became the president of his college class and was a straight-A student. As a baby boomer in the most prosperous era in the human journey so far, Dennis’s religion was American nationalism, and he was going to live the American dream. His surrogate religion soon went up in smoke in a bank lobby, as he saw how the poor were treated. Dennis nearly killed himself, but just as he was about the pull the trigger, a voice in his head spoke up and talked him out of it. Dennis made a deal with that voice (which he calls “God”) to live his life to make the American dream real, instead of kill himself because it was a fiction.

During a summer between college years, he worked in the infirmary on a radar base in Alaska, and the local mob tried to recruit him to dispense the illicit drugs on that base. But Dennis contacted the FBI and helped them pull off a sting on the mobsters that wrecked their operation. The mobsters then tried to kill Dennis twice.

While at the infirmary, Dennis worked for a famous surgeon who pioneered heart surgery for children, and he buried most of his patients. He did not want Dennis to go through the heartbreak of being a surgeon, and he told Dennis that if he gave up his ambition to become a surgeon, that he would pay for the rest of Dennis’s college. As Dennis left Alaska with a price on his head (he had nearly died many times in his life by then), he moved to where that surgeon lived, in New Jersey. Dennis lives in New Jersey today.

Raging idealist that Dennis was, he studied social psychology and Utopian civilizations because he wanted to build one. He attended Fairleigh Dickenson University in Newark and was in honors college at the top of his class. He lived among the Eastern Oligarchy, but in his last year of college he went to work for Sears as an aluminum siding salesman. Dennis is the best salesman that I ever met or heard of. At Sears, his commission check was bigger than the rest of his department’s combined. He was making more than the president of Fairleigh Dickenson. With Sears’s credibility behind him, he was unstoppable, but Sears was not used to somebody like Dennis and fired him. Dennis never worked as an employee again.

But before he was fired by Sears, Dennis was invited to a conference led by B.F. Skinner. During the conference, Dennis slowly became horrified, as the conference was about manipulating the public to believe whatever elites wanted them to. It was Pavlov for humans. Dennis had unwittingly stumbled into the “brainwashing under freedom” activities that Noam and Ed wrote about. Dennis was in a special section near the stage, and while Skinner was speaking, Dennis stood up, gave Skinner a Nazi salute, and stormed out. All that Dennis had to do was submit some paperwork to graduate, but he refused to and dropped out. I believe that the year was 1972. Then his big adventures began.