Plato: Unlimited Energy - Here Already!

27 March 2009 by admin.

Plato: Unlimited Energy

 

If you are a reader of my blog, you know about Plato. It is what I call a software program that I have been working on since the late 1980’s that does what I call “concept searches”. The complete description of Plato is in another story on this blog but the short of it is that it will do web searches for complex interlinked and related or supporting data that form the basis for a conceptual idea. I developed Plato using a variety of techniques including natural language queries, thesaurus lookups, pattern recognition, morphology, logic and artificial intelligence. It is able to accept complex natural language questions, search for real or possible solutions and present the results in a form that logically justifies and validates the solution. Its real strength is that it can find solutions or possibilities that don’t yet exist or have not yet been discovered. I could go on and on about all the wild and weird stuff have used Plato for but this story is about a recent search for an alternative energy source….and Plato found one.

As a research scientist, I have done a considerable amount of R&D in various fields of energy production and alternate energy sources. Since my retirement, I have been busy doing other things and have not kept up with the latest so I decide to let Plato do a search for me to find out what is the latest state-of-the-art in alternate energy and the status of fusion power. What Plato came back with is a huge list of references in support of an source of energy that is being used by the government but is being withheld from the public. This energy source is technical complex but is far more powerful than anything being used today short of the largest nuclear power plants. I have read over most of what Plato found and am convinced that this source of power exists, it is being used but is being actively suppressed by out government. Here is the truth:

On January 25, 1999 a rogue physicist researcher at the University of Texas named Carl Collins clamed to have achieved stimulated decays of nuclear isomers using a second-hand dental x-ray machine. As early as 1988, Collins was saying that this was possible but it took 11 years to get the funding and lab work to do it. By then, it was confirmed by several labs including Dr. Belic at the Stuttgart Nuclear Physics Group. Collins’ results were published in a peer reviewed Physical Review Letters. The science of this is complex but what it amounts to is a kind of cold fusion. Nuclear isomers are atoms with a metastable nucleus. That means that certain when they are created in certain radioactive materials, the protons and neutrons (nucleons) in the nucleus of the atom are bonded or pooled together in what is called an excited state.

An analogue would be like stacking balls into a pyramid. It took energy to get them into that natural state but what Collins found is that it takes relatively little energy to destabilize this stack and release lots of energy. Hafnium and Tantalum are two naturally occurring metastable elements that can be triggered to release their energy with relatively little external excitation.

Hafnium, for instance, releases a photon with an energy of 75 keV (75,000 electron volts) and one gram produces 1,330 megajoules of energy – the equivalent of about 700 pounds of TNT. A five-pound ball is said to be able to create a two-kiloton blast – that is the equivalent to 4,000,000 pounds of TNT. A special type of Hafnium called Hf-178-m2 is capable of producing energy in the exawatt range, that is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10¹⁸) watts of energy! This is far more than all the energy created by all the nuclear plants in the US. As a comparison, the largest energy producer in the world today is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva which cost more than $10 billion and can a beam of energy estimated to be 10 trillion watts (10¹² ) but that is power that lasts for about 30 nanoseconds (billionths of a second).

Imagine being able to create 1 million (10⁶) times that energy level but sustain it indefinitely? We actually don’t have a power gird capable of doing that but because we are talking about a generator that might be the size of a small house, this technology could be inexpensively replicated all over the US or the world to deliver as much power as needed.

These are, of course, calculated estimates based on extrapolation of Collins’ initial work and that of the follow-on experiments but not one scientist has put forth a single peer reviewed paper that disputes these estimates or the viability of the entire experiment. It is also obvious that the mechanism of excitation would have to be larger than a dental x-ray machine in order to get 10¹⁸ watts out of it. In fact, when Brookhaven National Lab conducted its Triggering Isomer Proof (TRIP) test, it used their National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) – a powerful laser – as the excitation.

Obviously this was met with a lot of critical reviews and open hostility from the world of physics. This was just another “Cold Fusion” fiasco that was still fresh in everyone’s minds. It was in 1989 that Pons and Fleischmann claimed to have created fusion in a lab at temperatures well below what was then thought to be necessary. It took just months to prove them wrong and the whole idea of cold fusion and unlimited energy was placed right next to astrology, perpetual motion and pet rocks.

Now Collins was claiming that he had done it again – a tiny amount of energy in and a lot of energy out. He was not reporting the microscopic “indications of excess energy” that Pons and Fleischmann claimed. Collins is saying he got large amounts of excess energy (more energy out that went in) on many orders of magnitude above what Pons and Fleischmann claimed.

Dozens of labs across the world began to try to verify or duplicate his results. The biggest problem was getting a hold on the Hafnium needed to do the experiments – it is expensive and hard to come by so it took mostly government sponsored studies to be able to afford it. Surprisingly, some confirmed it and some had mixed results and some discredited him.

In the US, DARPA was very interested because this had the potential for being a serious weapon that would give us a nuclear bomb type explosion and power but would not violate the worldwide ban on nuclear weapons. The US Navy was very interested in it because had the potential for being not only a warhead but also a new and better form of power for their nuclear power fleet ships and subs.

By 2004, the controversy over whether it was viable or not was still raging so DARPA, which had funded some of the labs that had gotten contradictory results, decided to have a final test. They called it the TRiggering Isomer Proof (TRIP) test and it was funded to be done at Brookhaven National Lab.

This had created such news interest that everyone was interested in the results. NASA, Navy, Dept. of Energy (DOE), Dept of Defense (DoD), NRL, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, State Department, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Argonne Labs, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), Los Alamos, MIT Radiation Lab, MITRE, JASON, and dozens of others were standing in line to hear the outcome of this test being conducted by DARPA.

So what happened in the test? No one knows. The test was conducted and DARPA put the lockdown on every scrap of news about the results. In fact, since that test, they have shutdown all other government funded contracts in civilian labs on isomer triggering. The only break in that cover has been a statement from the senior most DOE scientist involved, Dr. Ehsan Khan when he made this statement:

“TRIP had been so successful that an independent evaluation board has recommended further research….with only the most seasoned and outstanding individuals allowed to be engaged”.

There has been no peer review of the TRIP report. It has been seen by a select group of scientists but no one else has leaked anything about it. What is even more astounding is that none of those many other government agencies and organizations have raised the issue. In fact, any serious inquiry into the status of isomer triggering research is met with closed doors, misdirection or outright hostility. The government has pushed it almost entirely behind the black curtain of black projects. Everything related to this subject is now either classified Top Secret or is openly and outwardly discredited and denounced as nonsense.

This has not, however, stopped other nations or other civilian labs and companies from looking into it. But even here, they cannot openly pursue isomer triggering or cold fusion. Now research into such subjects is called “low-energy nuclear reactions” (LENR) or “chemically assisted nuclear reactions (CANR). Success in the experiments of these researchers is measured in the creation of “excess heat” meaning that it has created more (excess) energy than was put into it. Plato has found that some people and labs that have achieved this level of success include:

Lab or company ResearcherUniversity of Osaka, Japan Arata

ENEA, Rome Frascati, Italy Vittorio Violante

Hokkaido University, Japan Mizuno

Energetic Technology, LLC, Omer, Israel Shaoul Lesin

Portland state University, USA Dash

Jet thermal Products, Inc, USA Swartz

SRI, USA McKubre

Lattice Energy, Inc. USA E. Storms

In addition, the British and Russians have both published papers and intelligence reports indicate they may both be working on a TRIP bomb. The British have a group called the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) that has developed a technique called Nuclear Excitation by Electron Transition and are actively seeking production solutions. The Russians may have created an entire isolated research center just for studying TRIP for both weapons and energy sources.

In addition to the obvious use of such a power source to allow us to wean off of fossil fuels, there are lots of other motivations for seeking a high density, low cost power source: global warming, desalination, robotics, mass transportation, long distance air travel, space exploration, etc.

These applications are normal and common sense uses but what application might motivate our government to surppress the news coverage of further research and to wage a disinformation and discredit campaign on anyone that works on this subject? One obvious answer is its potential as a weapon but since that also is well known and common sense, there must be some other reason that the government does not want this to be pursued. What that is will not be found by searching for it. If it is a black project, it will not have internet news reports on it but it might have a combined group of indicators and seemingly disconnected facts that form a pattern when viewed in light of some common motive or cause. Doing that kind of searching is precisely what Plato was designed to do.

What my Plato program discovered is that there are a number of unexplained events and sightings that have a common thread. These events and sightings are all at the fringes of science or are outright science fiction if you consider current common knowledge of science or listen to the government denounce and discredit any of the observers. Things like UFOs that move fast but make no noise, space vehicles that can approach the speed of light, underwater vessels that have been reported to travel faster than the fastest surface ships and beam weapons (light, RF, rail) that can destroy objects as far away as on the moon. What they have in common is that if you consider that there is a high density, compact source of extremely high-powered energy, then these fantastic sightings suddenly become quite plausible.

A power source that can create 10 TeV (tera-electron Volts) is well within the realm of possibility for an isomer-triggered device and is powerful enough to create and/or control gravitons and the Higgs Boson and the Higgs field. See my other blog story on travel faster than light and on dark energy and you will see that if you have enough power, you can manipulate the most fundamental particles and forces of nature to include gravity, mass and even time.

If you can control that much power, you can create particle beam weapons, lasers and rail guns that can penetrate anything – even miles of earth or ocean. If you can create enough energy – about 15 TeV, you can create a negative graviton – essentially negative gravity – which can be used to move an aircraft with no sounds at supersonic speeds. It will also allow you to break all the rules of normal aerodynamics and create aircraft that are very large, in odd shapes (like triangles and arcs) and still be able to travel slowly. Collins estimated that a full-scale isomer triggered generator could generate power in the 1,000 TeV range when combined with the proper magnetic infrastructure of a Collider like the LHC.

Plato found evidence that is exactly what is happening. The possibility of coincidence that all of these sightings have this one single thread in common is beyond logic or probability. The coincidence that these sightings and events have occurred by the hundreds in just the past few years – since the DARPA TRIP test – is way beyond coincidence. It is clear that DARPA put the wraps on this technology because of its potential as a weapon and as an unlimited high-density power source.

The fact that this has been kept hushed up is mostly due to the impact it would have on the economies of the world if we were suddenly given unlimited power that was not based on fossil fuels, coal or hydroelectric power. Imagine the instant availability of all of the electricity that you could use at next to nothing in cost. Markets would collapse in the wake of drops in everything related to oil, gas and coal. That is not a desirable outcome when we are in such a bad financial recession already.

Plato comes up with some wild ideas some times and I often check them out to see if it really is true. I was given perhaps 75 references, of which I have listed only a few in this article but enough that you can see that they are all there and true. I encourage you to search for all the key words, people and labs listed here. Prove this to yourself – it’s all true.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) Physical Review Papers Vol 99, Issue 17, id. 172502 titled, “Isomer Triggering via Nuclear Excitation by Electron Capture (NEEC) reported confirmed low energy triggering with high energy yields.

Brookhaven National Lab conducted a Triggering Isomer Proof Test (TRIP) using their National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) in which they reported; “A successfully independent confirmation of this valuable scientific achievement has been made … and presented in a Sandia Report (SAND2007-2690, January 2008). This was funded by DARPA but pulled the funding right after the test.

Posted in Future History, This IS True ! | No Comments »

Government Secrets #2 They Control You!!

11 March 2009 by admin.

They Control You!!

After reading Government Secrets #1, you should know that I had access to a lot of intelligence over a long career and had a lot of insights into our government’s actions on the international political stage. What I observed first hand and in my historical research is that repeatedly over decades, the US government has gone to great effort to create wars. You will never hear a military person admit this because most of them are not a part of the decision process that commits us to war but because they believe in the idea that we are always right and they will go to prison if they disobey, they will execute the directions to go to war with great gusto. We have a very warped view of our own history. In every war we are the heroes and we fought on the side of right and we did it honorably and with great integrity. Well, that is what the history books would have you believe. Did you ever learn that we issued orders to take no prisoners at the battle of Iwo Jima? Thousands of Japanese were shot with their hands raised in surrender. To be fair, some of them would feign surrender and then pop a grenade but you won’t see this in our history books.Did you know that our attack strategy in Europe was to destroy the civilian population? The worst example occurred on the evening of February 13, 1945, Allied bombers and fighters attacked a defenseless German city, one of the greatest cultural centers of northern Europe. Within less than 14 hours not only was it reduced to flaming ruins, but an estimated one-third of its inhabitants, more than half a million, had perished in what was the worst single event massacre of all time. More people died there in the firestorm, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Dresden, known as the Florence of the North, was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city. Together with the 600.000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people. More than 700,000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million people. More than one bomb for every 2 people. The temperature in the center of the city reached 1600 centigrade (nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit). More than 260,000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted. But those who perished in the center of the city can’t be traced because their bodies were vaporized or they were never recovered from the hundreds of underground shelters. Approximately 500,000 children, women, the elderly and wounded soldiers were slaughtered in one night.

Following the bomber attack, U.S. Mustangs appeared low over the city, strafing anything that moved, including a column of rescue vehicles rushing to the city to evacuate survivors. One assault was aimed at the banks of the Elbe River, where refugees had huddled during the night. The low-flying Mustangs machine-gunned those all along the river, as well as thousands who were escaping the city in large columns of old men, women and children streaming out of the city.

Did you ever read that in your history books? Did you know that we deliberately avoided all attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki so as to ensure that the civilian population would not flee the city?

This sparked my interest to look into “my war” – Viet Nam and I began to study it in detail. I read about its start and how the famous Tonken Gulf Incident was a complete ruse to let Lyndon Johnson boost troops for political gain and out of a personal fear that America might be seen as weak. He had great faith in our might and ability to make a quick and decisive victory so he trumped up a fake excuse to get the famous Tonken Gulf Resolution passed to give him more powers to send troops. The whole war had been just a political whim by a misguided politician and bolstered by the military-industrial complex that profited by massive arms sales, which also happened to be the largest contributors to the political campaigns. More than 50,000 US lives and countless Viet Namese lives later, we left Viet Nam having had almost no effect on the political outcome of the initial civil war effort to reunite the North and the South under communism – except that there were a lot fewer people to do it.

Even our basis for most of the cold war was mostly fake. For instance, I found pretty solid evidence that as early as the early 1960’s there was a massive campaign to create a false missile gap mentality in order to funnel massive money into the military.

Look up Operation Paperclip, it had actually given us a huge advantage in missile technology so the whole basis for the cold war from before the Cuban Missile Crisis to the present is all based on a lie. Despite having the largest nuclear warheads, Russia’s missiles are known for being so poorly guided that an ICBM had a probability of hitting its target with the effective range of its warhead of only 20%. That meant that it would be expected to hit within a +/- 30 miles radius of its target. Our missiles, by contrast, are rated at less than 1,000 feet. In every crisis involving Russia in which we refused to back down, the Russians gave in because they knew that they did not have a chance in a nuclear war exchange with the US. There was never any real missile gap nor any real threat to our world from communism. It was a scapegoat for all our mistakes and expenditures.

Did you know about the testing of bio-weapons, nuke weapons and designer drugs on our own US military? Do you know the truth about the start of Viet Nam? How about Angola, Nicaragua, the Congo, Grenada, Guatemala, Panama, El Salvador, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Argentina and dozens of others? Do you know the real story of the USS Liberty? The list is huge of what is not fully known or understood by the US public. I can guarantee that what you think happened, what is in the history books and the press is NOT what really happened.

Here’s just one example of how the news is not really the news as it happened but as our government wants us to hear it. The Falkland Islands went to war in 1982. One incident we had a lot of intelligence about was the sinking of several British warships. One of these ships was hit and sunk by an Exocet air to surface missile despite the use of extensive electronic countermeasures. Or so that was the way it was reported in the news.

Because of my access to intelligence reports, I found out that the use of electronic countermeasures by the British was nearly flawless in its effectiveness to divert or confuse these missiles. The skipper of the HMS Sheffield, in the middle of a battle, ordered the electronic countermeasures equipment to be shut off because he could not get a message to and from Britain with it on. As soon as his equipment was off, the Argentine air attacks from the Super Etendard launched the Exocet.

OK this was a tragic screw up by a British officer but what our military planners and politicians did with it was the REAL tragedy. The bit about shutting of the electronic countermeasures equipment was deleted from all of the news reports and only the effectiveness of the Exocet was allowed to be published by the US press. The Navy and the Air Force both used this event to create the illusion of an anti-missile defense gap in the minds of the public and politicians and to justify the purchase of massive new defensive systems and ships at the cost of billions of dollars. All based on a false report.

In fact, an objective look at how we have been playing an aggressive game of manifest destiny with the world for the past 150 years would make you wonder how we can have any pride in our nation. From the enslavement of millions of blacks to the genocide of the American Indian to the forceful imposition of our form of government on dozens of sovereign nations, we have been playing the role of a worldwide dictator for decades. It has all been a very rude awakening for me.

The military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about is real but latter day analysts now call it the “military-industrial-congressional complex”. It is congress and some of the Presidents that we have had that are the power side of the triangle that consists of power, money and control.

The money buys the power because we have the best government in the world that is for sale on a daily basis and that sale is so institutionalized that it is accepted as a way of doing routine business. The bribing agents are called Lobbyists but there is little doubt that when the visit a congressman to influence his vote, they are clearly and openly bribing him with money or with votes. The congressmen, in return, vote to give tax money to the companies that the lobbyists represent. Or perhaps they will vote to allow those companies to retain their status, earnings or advantages even when that is at the cost of damage to the environment, other people or to other nations.

The control comes in the form of propaganda to sway and manipulate the masses; the military might to exert control over our enemies and our allies and the control of the workers and people that empower the congressmen – thus making the interlocking triangle complete.

What is not well known is a basic psychological mechanism that the military-industrial-congressional complex employs that few people understand or realize. Historical Sociologists (people that study how societies think over time and history) have discovered that every successful society in the world and over all of history, has had a scapegoat group of people or country or culture on which to blame all their problems.

Scapegoating is a hostile social - psychological discrediting routine by which people move blame and responsibility away from themselves and towards a target person or group. It is also a practice by which angry feelings and feelings of hostility may be projected, via inappropriate accusation, towards others. The target feels wrongly persecuted and receives misplaced vilification, blame and criticism; he is likely to suffer rejection from those who the perpetrator seeks to influence. Scapegoating has a wide range of focus: from “approved” enemies of very large groups of people down to the scapegoating of individuals by other individuals. Distortion is always a feature.

In scapegoating, feelings of guilt, aggression, blame and suffering are transferred away from a person or group so as to fulfill an unconscious drive to resolve or avoid such bad feelings. This is done by the displacement of responsibility and blame to another that serves as a target for blame both for the scapegoater and his supporters.

Primary examples of this include 1930 Germany in which Hitler used a variety of scapegoats to offset the German guilt and shame of World War I. He eventually chose the Jews and the entire population of Germany readily accepted them as the evil cause of all their problems. The US did this in the south for more than a century after the civil war by blaming everything on the black population. But this is true today for most of our successful countries: The Japanese hate the Koreans, the Arabs hate the Jews, in the southwest of the US, the Mexicans are the targets but in the southeast, it is still the blacks, the Turks hate the Kurds…and so it goes for nearly every country in the world and for all of history.

In some cases the scapegoat might be one religious belief blaming another as in the Muslims blaming the Jews or the Catholics blaming the Protestants. These kinds of scapegoats can extend beyond national boundaries but often are confined to regional areas like the Middle East or Central Europe. Finally, there are the political and ideological scapegoats. For many years, the US has pitted conservatives against liberals and Democrats against Republicans. This often has the effect of stopping progress because each side blames the other for a lack of progress and then opposes any positive steps that might favor the other side or give them the credit for the progress. Unfortunately, this scapegoat blame-game ends up being the essence of the struggles for power and control.

What is not well understood or appreciated is that our government is very well versed in this scapegoating and blame-game as a means to avoid accountability and to confuse the objectives. By creating an enemy that we can blame all our insecurities on – like we did with communism in the cold war – we can justify almost any expense, any sacrifice demanded of the public. If you question or oppose the decisions, then you are branded a communist sympathizer and are ostracized by society. Joseph McCarthy is the worst example of this but it exists today when we say someone is not patriotic enough if they dare to question a funding allocation for Iraq or for a new weapon system.

We, the public, are being manipulated by a power and highly effective psychological mechanism that is so well refined and developed that both the Democrat against Republican parties have an active but highly secretive staff composed of experts in the social psychological propaganda techniques that include, among others, scapegoating. In the Democratic Party this office is called the Committee for Public Outreach. In the Republican Party, their staff is called Specialized Public Relations. Even the names they choose make use of misdirection and reframing. Right now, the Democratic Party has the better group of experts partly because they raided the staff of the Republican office of Specialized Public Relations back in 1996 by offering them huge salary increases. By paying them half a million dollars per year plus bonuses that can reach an additional $50 million, they have secured the best propaganda minds in the world.

In both cases, the staffs are relatively unknown and work in obscure private offices located away from the main congressional buildings. Their efforts are passed as quietly and as low a profile as possible and to only the senior most party members. The reports begin with clearly defined objectives of diverting public attention or countering fact-based reports or justifying some political action or non-action but as they work their way through the system of reviewers and writers, the objective remains the same but the method of delivery gets altered so that the intent is not at all obvious. It is here that the experts in psychology and social science tweak the wording or events to manipulate the public, allies or voters.

The bottom line is that the federal government of the US has a long and verifiable history of lying but it is a fact that the lies that have been discovered are perhaps 5% of the lies that have emanated from the government. If you care to look, you will find that a great deal of what you think you know about our nation’s history, our political motivations and accomplishments and our current motives and justifications are not at all what you think they are. But I warn you – don’t begin this exploration unless you are willing to have your view of your country and even yourself seriously shaken up. But, if you don’t want to see the truth, then at least be open minded enough to listen to what will be declared the radical views that oppose the popular political positions of the day.

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A few of you doubt me?!!

7 March 2009 by admin.

 

I have gotten a number of comments about the science of my stories. Since I spent most of my life in hard core R&D, science is my life and the way I talk. To read my stories, you have to be willing to either accept that the science behind it is fact or go look it up yourself. You will quickly find that there is damn little, if any fiction, in my stories. I take exception to people that say the science is wrong so I’m going to self analyze one of the stories that I have gotten the most questions about.

 

In the story about the accidental weapon discovery, I described a C-130 with a multi-bladed prop - See US Patent 4171183 - . Also see http://usmilnet.com/smf/index.php?topic=9941.15 and http://www.edwards.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123089573. As I said in the story the long and telescoping blade is still classified so there are no public pictures of it.

 

The ATL (airborne tactical laser) program being run out of the ACTD program by the DUSD(AS&C), an office within OSD. The ACTD program is where the original project was started in cooperation with the Naval Research Lab (NRL). The original objective was to improve the speed and range of long distance transport by aircraft. It followed some research that showed that if the variable pitch of prop were extended outward from the hub further, then the efficiency would improve.

 

Since a prop is a lifting wing that lifts horizontally, it must maintain a constant angle of attack (AoA) over the entire length of the blade. AoA is the angle between the camber line of the wing and the axis of the flow of air over the blade. Since the relative speed of the prop changes as a function of distance from the hub, the blade must twist or pitch more as you move further out the blade. This was the essential secret that the Wright Brothers discovered in 1902 and is the basic difference between a screw propeller and a wing propeller.

What was discovered in the development of vertical wind turbines is that blades as long as 50 feet but as thin as 5 inches could be made to be more efficient and with higher torque than conventional blades. In wind power, the added torque allows you to turn a larger generator but this is due to the wind passing over the blade making it spin. But in an aircraft the engines would be spinning the blade to make it take a bigger (more efficient) bite out of the air, this would mean being able to create more thrust or it might be able to operate at a higher altitude (in thinner air). Do a Google search for “Vertical Wind Turbine”. You’ll see designs like the WindSpire that is 30 feet tall with blades less than 8 inches wide that is so efficient that it produces 2000 kilowatts and can operate in 8 MPH winds and it can handle 100 MPH gusts.

 

The guys at NRL took that and reversed it into an efficient propeller design for the C-130 in the hopes that it would give a similar improved performance. The carbon-fiber telescoping blade was just a natural extension of that thinking.

 

As to the laser beam creating a wide range of frequencies, that is also easy to explain. The Doppler Effect says that an increase in wavelength is received when a source of electromagnetic radiation is moving away from the observer and a decrease in wavelength is received when a source of electromagnetic radiation is moving toward from the observer. This is the basis for the Red Shift (redshift) used by astronomers to examine the movement of starts. It is the reason that a train has a rising pitch whistle as it coming toward you and a decreasing pitch sound as it passes and goes away from you. This is basic high school physics.

 

As the laser beam was rotated, any observer in a lateral position to the aircraft would see one part of the rotating beam rotating toward them (for example, the part above the prop hub) and another part rotating away from them (in this example, the part below the prop hub). The bottom part would have a redshift to its visible light because it is moving away from the observer. The part of the prop that is moving the slowest, near the hub, would have the least redshift but as the observer looked at the light coming from the laser beam further out on the prop, the speed would increase and the redshift would be greater until the Doppler shift would be so great that the light would shift to a frequency below the visible light spectrum. This would move the light energy into the infrared area but as the light traveled faster and faster, it would shift lower and lower. Since the laser beam extended for miles and the beam was traveling at speeds from a few hundred MPH to thousands of mils per second, the red shift along the beam path constantly moved down the electromagnetic spectrum passed radar, TV, short wave radio and down into the ELF range.

 

That portion of the prop above the hub was doing the same thing but it was moving toward the observer in the lateral position and so it was giving a blue shift – toward higher frequencies. As the light frequencies compressed into the blue and ultraviolet range, it became invisible to the naked eye but it still was emitting energy at higher and higher frequencies – moving into X-rays and gamma rays at speeds toward the end of the beam.

 

The end result of this red and blue shift of the light from the laser beam is that there was a cone of electromagnetic radiation emanating from the hub of each of the two engines (on the C-130) or the one engine on the retrofitted 707. This cone radiated out from the hub with a continuously changing frequency to the electromagnetic emissions as the cone widens out behind the aircraft. The intensity of the emissions is directly proportional to the power of the laser and the speed of the props so the highest and lowest frequencies were the most intense. These also happened to be the most destructive.

 

This is just one story that is firmly based in real and actual science. You have to be the judge if it is true or not but I defy you to find any real flaw in the logic or science. As with all of my stories, I don’t talk about space cadet and tin foil hat stuff. I have 40 years of hard core R&D experience along with four degrees in math, computer modeling, physics and engineering so I’m not your usual science writer but whether it is science fiction or not is up to you to decide. Just don’t make that decision because you don’t believe or understand the science – that is the part that should not be questioned. If you doubt any of it, I encourage you to look it up. It will educate you and allow me to get these very important ideas across to people.

Posted in Science...."Fiction?", Maybe True, This IS True ! | 1 Comment »

Government Secrets #1 - Be Afraid…Be Very Afraid

7 March 2009 by admin.

I was involved in a long career of classified work for the military and then did classified work for the government after I got out of the military. Doing classified work is often misunderstood by the public. If a person has a Top Secret clearance, that does not mean they have access to all classified information. In fact, it is not uncommon for two people to both have Top Secret (TS) clearances and still not be allowed to talk to each other. It has to do with what the government calls “compartments”. You are allowed your clearance only within certain compartments or subject areas. For instance, a guy that has a TS for Navy weapons systems may not know or allowed to know anything about Army weapon systems. If a compartment is very closely held – meaning that it is separately controlled even within the TS cleared people, then it is given a special but often obscure names and additional controls. For instance, for years (back in the days of Corona but not any more) the compartment for satellite reconnaissance was called “talent-keyhole” and “byeman” and was usually restricted to only people within the NRO – National Reconnaissance Office.

These code words were abbreviated with two letters so talent-keyhole became TK and byeman became BY. As a further safeguard, it is forbidden to tell anyone the code word for your compartment – you are only allowed to tell him or her the two-letter abbreviation. And you cannot ask someone if they are cleared for any particular compartment, you have to check with a third party security force. So if you work in a place like CIA or NRL or NSA, and you want to have a meeting with someone from another department, you meet them at the security station outside your department office area (every department has one). When they arrive, you ask the guard if they are cleared for “TK” and “BY”. The guard then looks at the visitor’s badges and then checks them against a picture logbook he keeps. The picture and codes on the badges and the log book have to match and if they do, then gets out another book that has just the visitor’s numeric coded badge number and looks up his clearances. If he has TK and BY after his badge number, then you are told that he can be admitted to your area for discussions on just the TK and BY programs and subjects. In some departments, the visitors are given brightly colored badges identifying them as being cleared only for specific subject areas. This warns others in the department to cover their work or stop talking about other clearance areas when these visitors are nearby.

There are hundreds of these coded compartments covering all aspects of military and civilian classified topics and programs. If you are high enough or if your work involves a lot of cross-discipline work, you might have a long string of these code words after your name….as I did.

If a program has any involvement with intelligence gathering (HUMINT – human intelligence, SIGINT – signal intelligence or IMINT – imagery intelligence), then it may get additional controls that go well beyond the usual TS background checks. For instance, you might be subjected to frequent polygraph tests or be placed in the PRP – Personal Reliability Program. PRP was a program that constantly monitors people’s lives to see if they ever get even close to be vulnerable or easy targets for spies. In the PRP, your phone might be tapped, your checking accounts are monitored, you debt and income are watched, and your computer is hacked. This is all with the intent of making sure you never get into debt or get psychologically unstable. PRP administers a series of psychological tests that can take up to 3 days to complete every year. These tests can peer into your mind so well that they can feel reasonably confidant that you are mentally stable if these tests say so.

Because of my work, I had a TS clearance for more than 40 years and had a string of two-letter codes after my name that went on for three or four lines on a typewritten page. I was in the “Poly” program and in the PRP and some others that I still can’t talk about. The reason I had so many was because I was involved in doing decision support using computer modeling – Operations Research, Math Modeling and Simulations. This meant I had to have access to a huge range of information from a wide variety of intelligence sources as well as other kinds of R&D work. I then had to be able to analyze this information, model it and present it to the senior decision-makers in an easy to understand form. This meant I was often briefing congressmen, senators, people from the CIA, FBI and high ranking officers from all of the services, JCS and OSD as well as the working level analyst that were giving me their classified data for analysis.

Now I can begin telling you some of what I learned by being exposed to all of that intelligence over all those years but I still have to be careful because although most of my limitations have expired, some are still in effect and I can’t violate them or I will join the ranks of the “disappeared”.

First, let me make it clear that the entire military is run by the top most 1% of the people in the services combined with the top 5% within the federal government. Imagine a pyramid in which only the guys at the top point are deciding where all the rest will go. I’ll call them the “Power Elite”

There are just a handful of officers in the Pentagon and in JCS that make all of the decisions of what the services will do and what direction they will take. Perhaps 50 officers total. These guys are so high in rank and so close to retirement that they have, for intents and purposes, ceased being military people and are simply politicians that wear a uniform. They are essentially the liaison officers for the highest ranking congressmen and the office of the President. They cater to these politicians in order to gain additional power through the control of more money or to feather they nest of future involvement in the political arena.

There are of course a few – a very few notable exceptions. Colon Powell and Dwight Eisenhower are two that come to mind. Officers like General Norman Schwarzkopf are not in this group because they chose not to seek political office or extend their power or control beyond doing their military jobs.

It is easy to see why all of the military is controlled by 1% of the officers. This is an organization based on the “chain-of-command” structure and everyone is taught to follow orders. In fact, once you are in the military, you can go to jail if you do not follow orders and in time of war, you can be executed for not following orders. Most of the bulk of the military is so biased by the indoctrination and propaganda created and put out by the government, that they willingly follow orders without questioning them.

What this 1% of high ranking military and 5% of the federal government have in common is that they measure their success in money and power. The source of that money and power comes from commercial, industrial and business sources. By making decisions that favor these businesses, those businesses, in turn, empower and enrich those involved. What is truly tragic is that this is not a recent occurrence but rather thee has been a Power Elite in our government for many decades – going back to the mid 1800’s.

The 5% of the federal government refers to the most powerful members of the Executive branch – President, VP, Sec. of Defense, Sec. of State, etc. and the top most powerful congressmen and senators. The reason that the newer, younger and less powerful legislators do not fall into this group is because of the way the political parties are setup behind the scenes. The most senior congressmen and senators are put into positions of power and influence over the committees and programs that have the most influence on contracts, budget money and funding controls. When one congressman can control or seriously impact the budget for the entire military or any major commerce area, then he has control over all of the people in those areas. To see who these people are, list all of the congressmen and senators by length of service and take the top 5% and you will have 99% of the list. Not surprisingly, this top 55 also includes some of the most corrupt members of congress – Murtha, Stevens, Rangel, Renzi, Mollohan, Don Young and others.

At the highest levels of security clearances, many people gain insights into how this Power Elite manipulate and twist he system to their gain. When Dick Cheney orchestrated the fake intelligence to support his war on Iraq, don’t think for a minute that the CIA, NSA and Pentagon did not know exactly what he was doing but being good little soldiers that are, by law, not allowed to have a political opinion, they kept quiet. If they had not kept quiet, their personal careers would have been destroyed and their departments or agencies would have been punished by under-funded budgets for years to come.

The money and power comes from lobbyists and donations of funds and promises of votes so that the Power Elite can remain in power and extend their control and riches. A study by Transparency International found that of all the professions and jobs in the world, the one job that is most likely to make you a millionaire the soonest is being a congressman and senator in the US. In a job that pays less than $200K peer year, the net income and wealth of most congressmen and senators rises by 30-40% per year while they are active members of the legislature. That’s a fact!

So where’s the SciFi in all this? It’s just this, these members of the Power Elite have so much control that they can operate a virtual parallel government that functions out of sight of the public and often in complete opposition to the actions of their publicly expressed policies. Of course, statements like this cannot be made without positive and verifiable evidence and I can provide facts you can check and a long history of this occurring going back decades. Read about these incidents in the rest of this series of stories – Government Secrets #2, #3 and #4.

Posted in This Happened or Will !, This IS True ! | 1 Comment »

Ocean Dumping – A Summary of Studies

6 March 2009 by admin.

Ocean Dumping – A Summary of 12 Studies Conducted between 1970 and 2001

By Jerry Botana

The dumping of industrial, nuclear and other waste into oceans was legal until the early 1970’s when it became regulated; however, dumping still occurs illegally everywhere.  Governments world-wide were urged by the 1972 Stockholm Conference to control the dumping of waste in their oceans by implementing new laws. The United Nations met in London after this recommendation to begin the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter which was implemented in 1975. The International Maritime Organization was given responsibility for this convention and a Protocol was finally adopted in 1996, a major step in the regulation of ocean dumping.

The most toxic waste material dumped into the ocean includes dredged material, industrial waste, sewage sludge, and radioactive waste. Dredging contributes about 80% of all waste dumped into the ocean, adding up to several million tons of material dumped each year. About 10% of all dredged material is polluted with heavy metals such as cadmium, mercury, and chromium, hydrocarbons such as heavy oils, nutrients including phosphorous and nitrogen, and organochlorines from pesticides. Waterways and, therefore, silt and sand accumulate these toxins from land runoff, shipping practices, industrial and community waste, and other sources.  This sludge is then dumped in the littoral zone of each country’s ocean coastline.  In some areas, like the so called “vanishing point” off the coast of New Jersey, in the United States, such toxic waste dumping has been concentrated into a very small geographic area over an extended period of time. 

In the 1970s, 17 million tons of industrial waste was legally dumped into the ocean by just the United States.   In the 1980’s, even after the Stockholm Conference, 8 million tons were dumped bincluding acids, alkaline waste, scrap metals, waste from fish processing, flue desulphurization, sludge, and coal ash.

If sludge from the treatment of sewage is not contaminated by oils, organic chemicals and metals, it can be recycled as fertilizer for crops but it is cheaper for treatment centers to dump this material into the ocean, particularly if it is chemically contaminated. The UN policy is that properly treated sludge from cities does not contain enough contaminants to be a significant cause of eutrophication (an increase in chemical nutrients—typically compounds containing nitrogen or phosphorus—in an ecosystem) or to pose any risk to humans if dumped into the ocean, however, the UN policy was based solely on an examination of the immediate toxic effects on the food chain and did not take into account how the marine biome will assimilate and be affected by this toxicity over time.  The peak of sewage dumping was 18 million tons in 1980, a number that was reduced to 12 million tons in the 1990s.

Radioactive Waste

Radioactive waste is also dumped in the oceans and usually comes from the nuclear power process, medical use of radioisotopes, research use of radioisotopes and industrial uses. The difference between industrial waste and nuclear waste is that nuclear waste usually remains radioactive for decades. The protocol for disposing of nuclear waste involves special treatment by keeping it in concrete drums so that it doesn’t spread when it hits the ocean floor however, poor containers and illegal dumping is estimated to be more than 45% of all radioactive waste. 

Surprisingly, nuclear power plants produce by far the largest amount of radioactive waste but contribute almost nothing to the illegal (after the Stockholm Conference) ocean dumping.  This is because the nuclear power industry is so closely regulated and accountable for its waste storage.  Off the coast of southern Africa and in the Indian Ocean, is the greatest accumulation of nuclear wastes.

The dumping of radioactive material has reached a total of about 84,000 terabecquerels (TBq), a unit of radioactivity equal to 10¹² atomic disintegrations per second or 27.027 curies. Curie (Ci) is a unit of radioactivity. One curie was originally defined as the radioactivity of one gram of pure radium.  The high point of nuclear waste dumping was in 1954 and 1962, but this nuclear waste only accounts for 1% of the total TBq that has been dumped in the ocean. The concentration of radioactive waste in the concrete drums varies as does the ability of the drums to hold it.  To date, it is estimated that the equivalent of about 227 million grams (about 500,000 pounds) of pure radium has been dumped on the ocean floor.

Until it was banned, ocean dumping of radioactive waste was considered a safe and inexpensive way to get rid of tons of such materials.  It is estimated that the 1960’s and early 1970’s era nuclear power plants in New Jersey (like Oyster Creek – which is located just 21 miles from the Barnegat Lighthouse) and 12 other nuclear power plants located in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York have dumped more than 100,000 pounds of radioactive material into the ocean off the New Jersey coast.

Although some claim the risk to human health is small, the long-term affects of nuclear dumping are not known, and some estimate up to 1,000 deaths in the next 10,000 years as a result of just the evaporated nuclear waste. 

By contrast, biologists have estimated that the ocean’s biome has been and will continue to be permanently damaged by the exposure to radioactive material.  Large scale and rapid genetic mutations are known to occur as dosage levels of radiation increase.  Plant, animal and micro-organisms in the immediate vicinity of leaking radioactive waste will experience the greatest and most radical mutations between successive generations.  However, test show that even long term exposure to diluted radioactive wastes will create accelerated mutations and adaptations.

The Problems with Ocean Dumping

Although policies on ocean dumping in the recent past took an “out of sight- out of mind” approach, it is now known that accumulation of waste in the ocean is detrimental to marine and human health. Another unwanted effect is eutrophication. A biological process where dissolved nutrients cause oxygen-depleting bacteria and plants to proliferate creating a hypoxic, or oxygen poor, environment that kills marine life. In addition to eutrophication, ocean dumping can destroy entire habitats and ecosystems when excess sediment builds up and toxins are released. Although ocean dumping is now managed to some degree and dumping in critical habitats and at critical times is regulated, toxins are still spread by ocean currents. Alternatives to ocean dumping include recycling, producing less wasteful products, saving energy and changing the dangerous material into more benign waste.

According to the United Nations Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Pollution , the amount of ocean dumping actually brings in less pollution than maritime transportation, atmospheric pollution, and land based pollution like run-off. However, when waste is dumped it is often close to the coast and very concentrated as is the case off the coast of New Jersey.

Waste dumped into the ocean is categorized into the black list, the gray list, and the white list. On the black list are organohalogen compounds, mercury compounds and pure mercury, cadmium compounds and pure cadmium, any type of plastic, crude oil and oil products, refined petroleum and residue, highly radioactive waste, any material made for biological or chemical warfare.

The gray list includes water highly contaminated with arsenic, copper, lead, zinc, organosilicon compounds, any type of cyanide, flouride, pesticides, pesticide by-products, acids and bases, beryllium, chromium, nickel and nickel compounds, vanadium, scrap metal, containers, bulky wastes, lower level radioactive material and any material that will affect the ecosystem due to the amount in which it is dumped.

The white list includes all other materials not mentioned on the other two lists. The white list was developed to ensure that materials on this list are safe and will not be dumped on vulnerable areas such as coral reefs.

In 1995, a Global Waste Survey and the National Waste Management Profiles inventoried waste dumped worldwide to determine what countries were dumping waste and how much was going into the ocean. Countries that exceeded an acceptable level would then be assisted in the development of a workable plan to dispose of their waste.

The impact of a global ban on ocean dumping of industrial waste was determined in the Global Waste Survey Final Report the same year. In addition to giving the impact for every nation, the report also concluded that the unregulated disposal of waste, pollution of water, and buildup of materials in the ocean were serious problems for a multitude of countries. The report also concluded that dumping industrial waste anywhere in the ocean is like dumping it anywhere on land. The dumping of industrial waste had reached unacceptable levels in some regions, particularly in developing countries that lacked the resources to dispose of their waste properly.

The ocean is the basin that catches almost all the water in the world. Eventually, water evaporates from the ocean, leaves the salt behind, and becomes rainfall over land. Water from melted snow ends up in rivers, which flows through estuaries and meets up with saltwater.  River deltas and canyons that cut into the continental shelf – like the Hudson Canyon and the Mississippi Cone – create natural channels and funnels that direct concentrated waste into relatively small geographic areas where it accumulates into highly concentrated areas of fertilizers, pesticides, oil, human and animal wastes, industrial chemicals and radioactive materials.  For instance, feedlots in the United States exceed the amount of human waste with more than 500 millions tons of manure each year – about half of which eventually reaches the ocean basin.

Not only does the waste flow into the ocean, but it also encourages algal blooms to clog up the waterways, causing meadows of seagrass, kelp beds and entire ecosystems to die. A zone without any life remaining is referred to as a dead zone and can be the size of entire states, like in coastal zones of Texas and Louisiana and north-east of Puerto Rico and the Turks and Caicos Islands.  All major bays and estuaries now have dead zones from pollution run-off. Often, pollutants like mercury, PCBs and pesticides are found in seafood meant for the dinner table and cause birth defects, cancer and neurological problems—especially in infants.

One of the most dangerous forms of dumping is of animal and human bodies.  The decomposition of these bodies creates a natural breeding ground for bacteria and micro-organisms that are known to mutate into more aggressive and deadly forms with particular toxicity to the animals or humans that they fed on.  Of the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States was a common dumping zone for animals – particularly horses and human bodies up until the early 1900’s.  Today, the most common areas for human body dumping is in India in which their religious beliefs advocate burial in water.  The results of this dumping may be seen in the rise in extremely drug resistant strains of leprosy, dengue fever and Necrotizing Fasciitis bacteria.

One of the largest deep ocean dead zones is in the area between Bermuda and the Bahamas.  This area was a rich and productive fishing ground in the 1700’s and early 1800’s but by the early 20^th Century, it was no longer productive and by the mid-1900’s, it was virtually lifeless below 200 feet of depth.  This loss of all life seems to have coincided with massive ocean dumping along the New Jersey and Carolina coasts.

Recreation

Water recreation is another aspect of human life compromised by marine pollution from human activities like roads, shopping areas, and development in general.  Swimming is becoming unsafe, as over 12,000 beaches in the United States have been quarantined due to contamination from pollutants. Developed areas like parking lots enable runoff to occur at a much higher volume than a naturally absorbent field. Even simply driving a car or making a house warm can leak 28 million gallons of oil into lakes, streams and rivers. The hunt for petroleum through offshore gas and oil drilling leaks extremely dangerous toxins into the ocean and luckily is one aspect of pollution that has been halted by environmental laws.

Environmental Laws

In addition to the lack of underwater national parks, there is no universal law like the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act to protect the United States ocean territory. Instead, there are many different laws like the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act , which only apply to certain aspects of overfishing and are relatively ineffective. The act developed in the 1970’s is not based on scientific findings and is regulated instead by the regional fisheries council. In 2000, the Oceans Act  was implemented as a way to create a policy similar to the nationwide laws protecting natural resources on land. However, this act still needs further development and, like many of the conservation laws that exist at this time, it needs to be enforced.

 The total effects of ocean dumping will not be known for years but most scientists agree that, like global warming, we have passed the tipping point and the worst is yet to come.

Posted in Future History, This IS True ! | 1 Comment »

Perpetual Motion = Unlimited Power….Sort of…

6 March 2009 by admin.

The serious pursuit of perpetual motion has always intrigued me. Of course I know the basic science of conservation of energy and the complexities of friction, resistance, drag and less than 100% mechanical advantage that dooms any pursuit of perpetual motion to failure…but still, I am fascinated at how close some attempts have come. One college professor built a four foot tall Ferris wheel and enclosed its drive mechanism in a box around the hub. He said it was not perpetual motion but that it had no inputs from any external energy source. It did, however, make a slight sound out of that box. The students were to try to figure out how the wheel was turning without any apparent outside power source. It turned without stop for more than two years and none of his students could figure out how. At the end of his third year, he introduced his mechanism. He was using a rolling marble design that was common for perpetual motion machines but that also had been proven to not work. What he added was a tiny IC powered microcircuit feeding a motor that came out of a watch. A Watch! The entire 4 foot high Ferris wheel needed only the additional torque of a watch motor to keep it running for nearly 4 years!

This got me to thinking that if I could find a way to make up that tiny little additional energy input, I could indeed make perpetual motion. Unlike most of my other ideas, this was not something that could easily be simulated in a computer model first. Most of what does not work in perpetual motion is totally unknown until you build it. I also knew that the exchange of energy to and from mechanical motion was too inefficient to ever work so I concentrated on other forms of energy exchange. Then I realized I had already solved this – back in 1963!

Back in 1963, I was a senior in high school. Since 1958, I had been active in science fairs and wanted my last one to be the best. To make a long story short, I won the national science fair that year – sponsored by Bell Telephone. My project was “How far will sound travel” and my project showed that the accepted theory that sound diminishes by one over the square of the distance (the inverse square law) is, in fact, wrong. Although that may occur in an absolutely perfect environment of a point source of emission in a perfectly spherical and perfectly homogeneous atmosphere, it never ever occurs in the real world.

I used a binary counting flashing light circuit to time sound travel and a “shotgun” microphone with a VOX to trigger a measure of speed and power of the sound under hundreds of conditions. This gave me the ability to measure to 1/1000^th of a second and down to levels that were able to distinguish between the compressions and rarefaction’s of individual sound waves. Bell was impressed and I got a free trip to the World’s Fair in 1964 and to Bell Labs in Murry Hill NJ.

As a side project of my experiments, I attempted to design a sound laser - a narrow beam of sound that would travel great distances. I did. It was a closed ten-foot long Teflon-lined tube that contained a compressed gas – I used Freon. A transducer (a flat speaker) at one end would inject a single wavelength of a high frequency sound into the tube. It would travel to the other end and back. At exactly 0.017621145 seconds, it would pulse one more cycle at exactly the same time that the first pulse reflected and returned to the transducer. This was timed to exactly coincide with the first pulse so that it was additive, making the first pulse nearly double in amplitude. Since the inside of the tube as smooth and kept at a constant temperature, the losses in one pass through the tube were almost zero. In less than 5 minutes, these reinforcing waves would build the moving pulse to the point of containing nearly all of the gas in the tube into the single wave front of one pulse. This creates all kinds of problems so I estimated that it would only be about 75% efficient but that was still a lot.

Using a specially shaped and designed series of chambers at the end opposite the transducer, I could rapidly open that end and emit the pulse in one powerful burst that would be so strong that the wave front of the sound pulse would be visible and it would remain cohesive for hundreds of feet. It was dense enough that I computed it would have just over 5 million Pascal’s (Pa) of force or about 750 PSI. The beam would widen to a square foot at about 97 meters from the tube. This is a force sufficient to knock down a brick wall.

One way to make the kind of transducer that I needed for this sound laser was to use a carefully cut crystal or ceramic disc. Using the property of reverse piezoelectric effect, the disc will uniformly expand when an electric field is applied. A lead zirconate titanate crystal would give me the right expansion while also being able to respond to the high frequency. The exit chambers were modeled after some parabolic chambers that were used in specially made microphones used for catching bird sounds. The whole thing was perfectly logical and I modeled it in a number of math equations that I worked out on my “slip stick” (slide rule).

When I got to Bell Labs, I was able to get one scientist to look at my design and he was very intrigued with it. He said he had not seen anything like it but found no reason it would not work. I was asked back the next day to see two other guys that wanted to hear more about it. It was sort of fun and a huge ego boost for me to be talking to these guys about my ideas. In the end, they encouraged me to continue thinking and that they would welcome me to work there when I was old enough.

I did keep thinking about it and eventually figured out that if I can improve the speed of response of the sensors and transducer, I could shorten the tube to inches. I also wanted more power out of it so I researched what was the gas with the greatest density. Even this was not enough power or speed, so I imagined using a liquid – water – but it turns out that water molecules are like foam rubber and after a certain point, they absorb the pulses and energy too much. The next logical phase of matter was a solid but that meant that there was nothing that could be emitted. I was stumped…for awhile.

In the late 1970’s I figured, what if I extended the piezoelectric transducer crystal to the entire length of the tube – no air – just crystal. Then place a second transducer at one end to pulse the crystal tube with a sound wave. As the wave travels the length of the crystal tube, the compression and rarefaction’s of the sound wave pulse create stress or strain on the piezoelectric crystal, making it give off electricity by the direct piezoelectric effect.   this is how a phonograph needle works as it bounces on the grooves of the record. 

Since the sound pulse will reflect off the end of the tube and bounce back, it will create this direct piezoelectric effect hundreds of times – perhaps thousands of times – before it is reduced by the transfer into heat. As with my sound laser, I designed it to pulse every single bounce to magnify the amplitude of the initial wave front but now the speed was above 15,000 feet per second so the pulses had to come every 0.0001333 seconds. That is fast and I did not know if current technology was up to the task. I also did not know what it would do to the crystal. I was involved in other work and mostly forgot about it for a long time.

In the late 1980’s, I now was working for DARPA and had access to some great lab equipment and computers. I dug out my old notes and began working on it again. This time I had the chance to actually model and create experiments in the lab. My first surprise was that these direct piezoelectric effects created voltages in the hundreds or even thousands of volts. I was able to get more than 10,000 volts from a relatively small crystal (8 inches long and 2 inches in diameter) using a hammer tap. I never thought it would create this much of a charge. If you doubt this, just take a look at the Mechanism paragraph in Wikipedia for Piezoelectricity.

When I created a simple prototype version of my sound laser using a tube of direct piezoelectric crystal, I could draw off a rapid series of pulses of more than 900 volts using a 1/16^th watt amplifier feeding the transducer. Using rectifiers and large capacitors, I was able to save this energy and charge some ni-cads, power a small transmitter and even light a bulb.

This was of great interest to my bosses and they immediately wanted to apply it to war fighting. A friend of mine and I cooked up the idea of putting these crystals into the heels of army boots so that the pressures of walking created electricity to power some low power devices on the soldier. This worked great but the wires, converter boxes, batteries, etc.,  ended up being too much to carry for the amount of power gained so it was dropped. I got into other projects and I dropped it also.

Now flash forward to about 18 months ago and my renewed interest in perpetual motion. I dug out my old notes, computer models and prototype from my DARPA days. I updated the circuitry with some newer faster IC circuits and improved the sensor and power take-off tabs. When I turned it on, I got sparks immediately. I then rebuilt the power control circuit and lowered the amplitude of the input sound into the transducer. I was now down to using only a 9-volt battery and about 30 ma’s of current drain to feed the amplifier.   I estimate it is about a 1/40th watt amplifier.  The recovered power was used to charge a NIMH battery of 45 penlights of 1.2 volts each.

Then came my epiphany – why not feed the amplifier with the charging battery! DUH!

I did and it worked. I then boosted the amplifier’s amplitude, redesigned the power take-off circuit and fed it into a battery that was banked to give me a higher power density. It worked great. I then fed the battery back into an inverter to give me AC. The whole thing is about the size of a large briefcase and weighs about 30 pounds – mostly from the batteries and transformers. I am getting about 75 watts out of the system now but I’m using a relatively small crystal. I don’t have the milling tools to make a larger properly cut crystal but my modeling says that I can get about 500 watts out of a crystal of about 3 inches in diameter by about 12 inches long.

I call my device “rock power” and when I am not using it for power in my shop or on camping trips, I leave it hooked up to a 60 watt bulb. That bulb has been burning now for almost 7 months with no signs of it diminishing. It works! Try it!!!

Posted in Science...."Fiction?", Maybe True, This IS True ! | 1 Comment »

The Power of the Mind!

15 February 2009 by admin.

  

An idea that we often hear is that we really only use 10% of our brains and if we used all of it we could do some pretty amazing stuff.  It has been speculated that we might be able to do things like remote viewing, telekinesis or mental telepathy or see the future.  This, of course, sounds like crazy talk from some wing-nut with a tinfoil hat but the reality is that a great deal of very serious research has gone into this very subject.

 In 1972, the CIA began a serious 24-year look into remote viewing and clairvoyance.  In 1981, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) began serious studies in the same areas.  These programs had code names like Star Gate, Grill Flame and Center Lane, Sun Streak and others.  DoD kept looking at these subjects up thru June 1995.  Stanford Research Institute (SRI) of Menlo Park, CA., SAIC, Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin and the American Institutes for Research (AIR) all have been or are still working on research in these areas.   

The Cognitive Sciences Lab at Palo Alto Calif. did extensive studies that were critical of the government’s studies of this subject (DIA and CIA).  Their conclusion, published in March of 1996 found, “that a statistically significant effect had been demonstrated” but they also pointed out that the CIA and DoD had ignored compelling evidence and had set the outcome of the studies before they began by using questionable National research Council’s reviews.  “As a result, they have come to the wrong conclusion with regard to the use of anomalous cognition in intelligence operations and significantly underestimated the robustness of the basic phenomenon.”  The reasoning for the government’s perspectives on these studies have been shown to have nothing to do with the science or the efficacy of the research but rather were the petty squabbling of top-heavy bureaucrats and mismanagement of the political and financial support.   

In other words, studies that were conducted by numerous contractors, scientists and government labs over a period of three decades found important evidence that showed this was a viable field of study but for unrelated reasons, they botched the studies and the results so that the net result was that the whole subject has been taboo for serious studies or funding ever since. 

All this is to day that there is much more to this subject than my personal interests.  Lots of very serious scientists, government agencies and academic research facilities have looked and are still looking into these various psychological properties of the mind collectively grouped under headings like parapsychology, “anomalous cognition”, and psi abilities. 

If you read all these reports as carefully as I have, you will find that almost all of them did, in fact, find some statistically significant effect to a greater or less degree.  In fact, some of these studies found capabilities that defied both logic and conventional science so much so, that the scientists involved were ridiculed and derided to the point of nearly destroying their careers, when they tried to get some recognition of their results.  For that reason, many of these kinds of studies are no longer popular or abundant as they once were and are now done, if at all, in secret facilities and those involved are very cautious to keep a low profile. Since I have no interest in research money and have mostly retired from my R&D career, I have no qualms about telling of my adventures and success – especially since they have led to such startling discoveries. 

Most of this is completely verifiable from numerous Internet sources – including many reports from the government and R&D reports from and about programs described above.  For the most part, I have not so much blazed a new trail of research as much as I have combined various proven methods, techniques and processes in a variety of ways that probably were not tried before.  I have used special aids and tools to assist me that have proven to be effective by themselves but have a synergistic effect when combined with other aids and techniques.  In some cases, I have stumbled upon methods or techniques that have been well proven to work but I did not know about them beforehand.  If you doubt any of this, then do your own research on what I am trying and you will find it is all based on sound and proven science.  

What I am about to tell you will be hard to believe because we have all been told that this whole subject area is foolish nonsense and that only tricksters and con-men and deluded space cadets really believe in any of this.  If you are to understand the significance and why it is true, I have to give you some background and tell you the whole story of how I discovered this.  Let me start from the beginning…  

The truth is that humans dream but we don’t know why.  There are lots of theories.  The latest and most accepted is that it is the brain’s way of establishing and organizing our memories.  This sounds plausible until you consider the continuity, complexity and detail of some dreams that bear no relationship to any real-life experience.  It is also thought that dreams might be subconscious manifestations of our emotions but that does not explain the majority of dreams that appear to be about random events and places.  Some people believe that dreams are much more powerful and can tell the future or reveal a person’s innermost feelings.   

One generally accepted biological concept about dreams is that the conscious mind becomes inactive and the subconscious mind takes over.  The subconscious mind is that portion of the brain that is not directly controlled by willful and deliberate thoughts of a person.  It is the part of the brain that runs everything without being told to do so.  It keeps the heart beating, the blood flowing and controls the body’s reaction to temperatures, fear, surprise and other automatic reflexes.   

Some parts of the body seem to be controlled by both the conscious and the subconscious mind.  Like breathing and eye movement.  We can control these parts when we want to but it seems that they shift into automatic for most of the time.  During a dream, the real physical presence around the dreaming person can often be incorporated into the dream.  If you get cold in your bed, your dream might conjure up a dream that involves you getting cold.  If you hear sounds like dogs barking or bells, your dream might also have these sounds.  This implies that the subconscious mind is receptive to the body’s real senses and can incorporate the real world into the dream and yet it can also modify those real world sensations so that they appear in the dream in a totally different form.  Of course, this is simply anecdotal observation and is not a scientific analysis of what is really happening. 

The truth is that our best scientists and researchers don’t know much about dreams beyond what we can observe.  But because we do this every night and there are so many different aspects of it, there is a lot of interest by the hard-core scientists as well as a lot of average people.  I was one of those that was intently curious and wanted to find out more. 

About nine years ago, I began reading and working with lucid dreaming.  This is a technique of training your conscious mind to remain aware and active during a dream so that it can direct and control the subconscious mind and your dreams.   

I had read about brain waves called delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma that are related to various thought patterns in the brain.  Way back when I was in the Navy, I bought a surplus recording electroencephalograph (EEG) and all of the hookups.  I had played with it as an interface to my computer and eventually had gotten it to recognize binary responses to my thoughts.  I could, for instance, answer yes-no questions using the output of this EEG fed into an A-D converted and then into the game-port on my old computer.  Now I got out that old EEG and began recording my night’s dreaming to map my REM and NREM sleep and to record my brain’s electrical activity.  I wired the EEG into some lights and into my computer so I could trigger various events with my brain waves.  It was fun to experiment and helped me define and refine my lucid dreaming. 

It took me about a year of practice before I had my first lucid dream and it was amazing. 

I tried keeping a log of my dreams and ordering my brain to remember to dream but I found the best technique was to first relax all over and then to imagine that I was walking up a long stairway to a special sleep temple.  I enhanced this image by slightly rubbing my feet together as if I was taking the steps up those stairs.  When I reach the temple, I was asleep and dreaming and was aware I was doing it.  Over time, I could shorten this climb up those stairs and even got to the point that I could do it during the day while waiting or riding a bus or train and while riding in a car.  After awhile, I could enter my dreams as if I was a spectator at a movie but I gradually began trying to exert control over what I was dreaming.   

I tried to enhance the lucid dreaming state with various drugs and herbs and teas and other foods.  I tried melatonin, kava kava, passionflower, St. John’s wort, and various herb teas with and without caffeine.  They all had some effect but I did not like the idea of having to take a drug to make this work so I stopped all of them except a multi-vitamin that gave me a bunch of “B” vitamins, fish oil, choline, and other stuff for an old guy like me. 

Eventually, I gained almost complete control of my dreams so that I could conjure up any event, environment or people I wanted to and then will them to do something.  The nature of this control is a little weird.  The subconscious mind is still creating the dream and can take it in an independent direction if I don’t exert some willpower but I can’t just command it to do my bidding.  I have to think it and want it, to make it happen and even then, it will do it but in a way I might not have chosen to do if my conscious mind had full control.  For instance, if I want to go fishing, it will create the entire fishing environment before I can define the boat or where or what I want to fish for.   

When my subconscious mind leaped ahead like that with something I did not want, it took me a long time and it was hard for me to learn to backup and redesign the dream.  At first, I’d have to dock the boat and walk to another boat in order to change.  Now I have learned how to “reset” the dream and do an instant redesign to something more like I want.  My reset signal is a little weird and I found it by accident.  I dropped an LED flashlight in my bed covers one night.  While in a deep sleep, I suddenly lost the dream I was dreaming as if it had been erased.  I willed myself awake and found that the flashlight was on and was under the covers near my legs.  It was odd that it would have any effect on my legs but I wired up a light to a pressure switch on my finger and then tried to reset a dream.  Eventually, I found that if I put the light under my legs, it would give me just the right amount of mind control over resetting my dreams.  Weird but it works so used it.  Using this reset signal, I can exert a lot of control but I have to work at controlling the switch. 

At first, I felt thrilled by this newfound capability and would sometimes remain excited for hours after I woke up.  After awhile, I realized this was not just being thrilled but I was feeling anxious and nervous.  I sometimes felt guilty for what I was seeing or felt anxiety over simply being in the dream.  This got to be a problem until I started making overt efforts while I was in my dream state to tell myself to be relaxed and calm when I woke.  I practiced meditation and yoga-like poses in my dreams to facilitate this effort with very good results.  Eventually, I was able to calm down and enjoy my dreams and actually feel relaxed and calm after it was over – even if the dream itself was exciting. 

I wanted to expand on my capabilities so I contacted a psychology professor friend of mine that I met back in my government R&D days.  He is a good friend and knows how to keep a secret.  I won’t give you any information that will let you identify him because I don’t think he wants to be seen as being involved in any of this but the truth is; he has been dabbling in it for years.  He pointed me toward lots of studies on the various brain waves and processes like REM and NREM sleep and slow-wave sleep and the stages of sleep and circadian rhythms, etc.  He told me about sleep inducements like being body temperature, (hot baths), a high carbohydrate diet and exercise.  I told him I wanted to stay clear of any drugs but he told me that lots of foods and over-the-counter drugs could affect sleep.  I must have spent months reading all about sleep, how it works and what causes it.  As with dreams, I found that there was a lot about what can be observed about sleep but not much about why we sleep. 

One of the most amazing aspects of lucid dreams is that you can immerse your entire being in the dream so that it seems as real as if you were really there.  You get the sights, smells, feelings and taste of your dream world.  It reminds me very much like the holodeck that they showed on the Star Trek TV series in which the computer could create artificial environments, people and nature. 

This realism is great most of the time but it can also be very disturbing.  I foolishly dreamed I was in a shooting war against some gang members and I got shot.  The link between my conscious and subconscious mind was so powerful and complete that I felt the shock and pain in my dream as if I had really been shot and it forced me to wake up and when I did, my heart was racing, my body felt flushed and I was breathing very hard.  I don’t think I would really die if I died in my dream but I have not wanted to test that theory. 

At first it was fun to experiment with stuff.  I even used it to conjure up famous scientists living and dead to discuss some science problem I was having at work.  Amazingly I often would solve relatively complex problems in these dreams and then take them to work and find out that they worked.  I also found that I could look at a book or magazine as fast I could turn the pages while awake and then recall that book in my dream and see every page clearly and even do a word search of the contents.  It was sort of a weird kind of photographic memory that I could tap into only in my dreams. 

I also explored other sensations and wild experiences.  I made myself able to fly, I swam faster than fish, and I became super strong, and other super powers.  I went through a phase of experimenting with sex and drugs – or what I imagined what drugs would do to you.  I played out all the great movies I had ever watched.  Some of these experiences were so much fun that I really looked forward to getting a good night’s sleep and often wanted to remain asleep in the morning. 

One interesting event happened about this time.  I go for a physical every year but the one I had about this time showed me to be in much better shape than ever in the past.  My blood chemistry was that of a person half my age and I had no visible or detectable problems of any kind.  Since I am an old guy with the typical old- guy problems – arthritis, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, age spots, etc., the doctor was both amazed and confused that I showed no signs of any of these maladies.  He wanted to do the tests over but first asked me a lot of questions.  I mentioned that I had gotten a lot of sleep over the past two years but I was careful to not mention my lucid dreaming.  He did run the tests again and told me that he added a few extras.   

When he got back the results, we had another meeting.  He told me that I had elevated levels of something called dimethyltryptamine and decreased levels of cortisol.  These were not just slight changes but at levels that he thought were way out of the ordinary.  He also noted that I had unusually high levels of acetylcholine, serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine and said, “no wonder you feel good, you are high on natural uppers”.  I tried to downplay the results and told him it was probably diet. 

After about two years of this, I got tired of all the weird stuff and decided I try to find something really useful I could do.  I wanted to try to do things like remote viewing, telekinesis or mental telepathy, mind reading or see the future.  I quickly discovered that this was not like trying to influence my dreams – I had to exert much more control over my subconscious mind in order to make it focus on what I was trying to do.   This required me to not just direct the subconscious mind with my conscious mind but to actually superimpose the two over each other so that I would have all the benefits of both.   

As with all of this, I did my own research and found that the two sides of the brain are connected by the corpus callosum.  A sort of communications superhighway between the two hemispheres of the brain.  It turns out that this inter-hemispheric communications is vitally important to my efforts to superimpose the conscious mind onto my subconscious mind.  I discovered that being left handed, a musician and having worked in both artistic and math related career jobs, were all contributors to my corpus callosum being very efficient in letting me overlap my subconscious mind with my conscious mind. 

I can’t tell you have many hours it took but about a year later, in 2007, I was able to begin to control the essence of my subconscious.   I began to have some success when I began using a sleep sound machine that gave me 60 choices of various sounds to sleep by.  I began with white noise but soon found that something that had a background beat to it worked better.  To explore more sounds faster, I got two sound machines and put them on the left and right side of my bed for stereo sounds.  After a lot of fiddling with them, I found a range of frequencies that worked best and surprisingly, they worked best when they were not both set to the same tone.  A psychology professor that is a friend of mine told me this was called binaural beats and entrainment and that it was a well developed technique to create infrasound inside the brain.  I read up on this subject and soon was tweaking my sound machines to give me exactly what I needed. 

I also saw an advertisement for a relaxation aid that put flashing LED lights on the inside of some sunglasses so that you could see them with your eyelids closed.  I bought a pair and experimented with them.  I found that different combinations of sounds and flashing lights gave me different capabilities while in my dream state.  With some, I was very pensive and analytical and used them for problem solving and designing.  With other combinations, I was more aggressive and physical and could imagine building things and making decisions better.  I also found that when I used the right combination of lights, I could induce sleep almost immediately and by putting the lights on a timer, I could end my dreams on a set schedule.  My psychology professor friend told me this is called hypnagogia. 

After more than a year of experimentation, I began to have some success but frankly, at first it was a big letdown.  I was able to feel my senses while asleep so that I could feel and hear the environment around my sleeping body.  At the time, I thought “no big deal”.  Almost by accident, I decided to see if I could feel my heart and suddenly I was actually inside my heart – looking at it beating.  I could touch it and feel it and even change its speed of beating, at will.  I continued this exploration all over my body – lungs, brain, ears, eyes, etc.  I tested it by going to my lower left leg where I have been shot.  Some tiny bullet fragments are still in my leg and I could actually see them.  I later matched up where I “saw” them to an X-Ray of my leg and they agreed.  I had actually seen the inside of my real leg…and heart and lungs, etc. 

Then I began trying to push the capabilities of my subconscious to do some of those wild paranormal tricks.  Using all my tricks and aids I have learned over the past 6 years, I was able to eventually totally dominate the subconscious mind with my conscious thought.  The results were amazing.  Every time I tried it I discovered something new I could do or experience.  Here are just a few… 

Hyper-Senses – I was immediately aware of my surroundings at a level far beyond anything I could have imagined.  I could feel the variations in the thread covering of my bed sheets.  I could hear air moving in the room.  I could hear sounds from outside the house like I was using a massive hearing aid.  I could smell individual objects in the room like the wood dresser, the wool rug and the wall paint.  I could feel the vibrations of the furnace and after awhile, I could feel the vibrations of cars driving on the road a block away from my home.   I learned to open my eyes without waking out of my dream state and found I could see colors and detail I never thought possible.  And what was even more amazing was that I could do this selectively so that it was not all flooding my senses at once.  It was like listening to someone talking in a rock concert – only easier - I could tune in our tune out whatever I wanted to concentrate on.  

As I explored these hyper senses, I realized that when I sensed something by smell or touch or hearing, I almost immediately imagined an image of that thing.  When I truck drove down the road, I heard it first and then smelled it and then felt it and as I added each new sensation, I enhanced my image of it until I was convinced it was the garbage truck.  I then looked out the window and – for the first time – visually saw that it was indeed the garbage truck.  I did this with hundreds of things until I could “see” well beyond my visual range. 

X-Ray vision.  Well not exactly x-ray vision, more like having a selective virtual reality vision.  Because I know what it looks like on the other side of a wall, I could look at the wall and then look thru it.  Because of my heightened senses, I could hear, feel, smell and sense things in the next room even if they had been moved since I was in the room last.  It was as if the 3-dimensional qualities of my vision were expanded to include hearing, smell and feelings.  I could “see” – in my mind’s eye - my dog as he was walking across the next room until he walked into my door and was visible. 

Remote viewing  (RV) – or at least something like RV.  My hyper senses and this x-ray vision combined to give me the ability to look outside my house and then into other houses and down the street.  The limit seemed to be about ¼ mile but it was amazing.  I spent hours nosing around inside my neighbor’s houses; listening to their conversations and watching them do stuff. 

These were all just variations on the hyper senses that my mind was giving me but it was rapidly going beyond that.  I added these improved senses to the near photographic memory of what I could do and see now and added in a nearly perfect recall of my own memory to create some really bizarre capabilities.  For instance, I discovered I could revisit a moment in my past and see it in details even beyond what I experienced the first time the event happened.  I remembered going camping with my Dad when I was 12.  I could smell the pine trees and hear the nearby river and feel the heat of the sun on my face.  I could imagine the scene to the point of seeing in 3-D and being able to walk around the scene and see myself back then.  I could play it like a videotape and slow or stop the actions to study and see things that my senses recorded by that I have not remembered in all these years.  It was utterly amazing. 

I was in an accident in which I was hit by a school bus that ran a stop sign.  I cannot remember anything that happened that day from before I got up in the morning until I woke up in the hospital room.  I used these newfound senses of the overlapped mind to revisit that day and follow myself up to the accident.  Just as the accident happened, my visual memory of it went blank but I still was mentally recording the sounds and smells and feelings of the events around me.  I was able to recreate the scene as if I was watching from above looking down on the scene and saw what happened to me.  I heard the bus driver crying when she thought she had killed me.  I felt the ambulance guys working on me and the ride in the gurney to the hospital and the loud sound of the siren blasting.  It was incredible to relive those long forgotten moments.  These discoveries kept me busy for weeks but I wanted to push the limits even more.   

Remembering my earlier studies of brain waves called delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma and that they are related to various thought patterns in the brain, I wanted to see if I could sense these waves.  I invited a friend over for a late night dinner.  She is a sound sleeper and I have had her over many times before so I knew I could count on her being a good test subject.  She slept in the guest room and after several glasses of wine; I knew she would sleep thru almost any noise. 

I waited until she was well asleep and then entered my dream state and quickly moved into my conscious control state.  While remaining asleep, I walked into her room and sat in a chair by her bed.  I then concentrated on visualizing her brain waves.  To my surprise, I began to see a totally new dream scene.  It took me a minute or two to realize I was seeing her dream.  I was looking at her dream as if it was a 3-D movie being projected on a screen in front of me.  She was dreaming of swimming on a beach.  Within a minute or two, her dream changed to a completely different dream.  Now she was back in college and was studying for a test with some friends.  In another minute or two, it changed again.  I sat there for two hours watching her dream snippets come and go. 

She was a good friend and so I did not try to enter her dreams or influence them in any way.  I somehow thought that was not a good thing to do to a friend.  However, in the weeks that followed, I tried this same effort on several other people – mostly neighbors that I knew very little.  Soon, I was able to do it without leaving my bed.  I could use my remote viewing and hyper senses to “see’ the person’s brain waves and then see their dreams.  I even was able to do this with my neighbor but the range of this was very limited – to about 100 feet.  Once, I even went to a motel and roamed all of the nearby rooms and explored their dreams. 

What I found, over time, is that most people dream in very short dreams that often seem disjointed and illogical.  It sometimes seemed like I was seeing a 2-minute excerpt of a longer movie and the film kept skipping and jumping thru scenes.  Only about one in 25 or 30 tries did I find someone that would dream a coherent story line that I could follow and was interesting.  This disappointment prompted me to move into other new directions. 

I figured if I could use my hyper-senses on someone asleep in the next room or next house; why not try it while they are awake.  I began tweaking my sound machines and lights and searching for the right conditions.  I found that noise from them talking or watching TV or music overwhelmed the sensation of vibrations and made it impossible to read anything.  It was like trying to feel your heart beat while riding on a motorcycle.  I began looking for someone that liked to sit in a quiet room and remain awake.  I began buying books for all my neighbors in the hopes they would sit and read.   

Unfortunately, this too was a disappointment.  I found that most people that are reading are paying attention to what they are reading – duh!  The effect was that the image in their mind was simply a dreamlike version of what they were reading and not of any thoughts that they might have about their lives or living.  Once in awhile, I would get someone that would project themselves into the story but even then, the story moved slowly – at the speed they were reading – and had very little personal insights.  It was time to move on to other efforts. 

We are now up to about a year ago.  I have been doing this for more than ten years and have found it has almost dominated my life.  I started it after I retired and I retired with enough money to never have to work again but I have actually done little else.  I have not interacted with my neighbors and I have done relatively little community service or helping of others other than sending money to charities.  I decided I wanted to get active again outside of myself but I was not sure how or what I could do and I wanted to try to do something with my new found skills.  Everything I could think of seemed like it could not bridge the gap between my mental world and the real world.  I could imagine and dream and sense all kinds of things and situations but there was no way to translate that into the real world.  So that became my goal – find some way to manifest my mental capabilities in the real world. 

I got out my old EEG again and began to experiment with the brain-to-computer interface again.  This time, I was in full control of my dream state, my subconscious and my body.  I quickly found I could create code sequence patterns in my delta waves.  I was able to consciously send patterns of two and three cycles of delta waves into the A-D converter and have the computer interpret them.  In my dream, I imagined that I created a typewriter that had a cord that ran first to my head and then to an antenna so that as I typed my brain waves were being “transmitted” out in the proper pattern for each letter.  I then programmed my computer to recognize about 40 different code patterns based on the old ASCII codes that they use to use in TTY devices back in the 1950’s.  This gave me a way to type in my dreams but have the actual printing occur in the real world on a real computer. 

This is a simplified version of what took me a year to do but I eventually got it working.  I found that I could type in my dream state a whole lot faster than I can type in real life.  In fact, what you are reading right now has taken me about 5 minutes to type.  Several other stories on this blog were also typed this way.  I am going to start a novel next week and hope to have it done by the first of March (it is now Feb 15^th). 

I hope you have enjoyed this description of my exploits over the past decade in lucid dreaming.  I can only say that that if I can do it, anybody can.  Give it a try.    

Posted in Did I Dream This?, This IS True ! | 2 Comments »

Nuclear Attack Communications

20 July 2008 by admin.

While I was active duty Navy, I was involved in a lot of strategic communication studies that involved researching and computer modeling to find ways to guarantee reliable communications under all circumstances - including things like the worst possible weather, earthquakes, terrorists and nuclear attack. We called it Communications Continuity.  The objective is to have assured communications in the trans and post attack phase of a nuclear war or other crisis.  That means that you cannot rely on any fixed installation since it will be bombed in the opening salvo.  Likewise all of the satellites and fixed communications centers, including phone and computer lines and all of the major nodes on the internet will be destroyed.Despite all this, there are entire networks that are designed to survive and work even after a major attack.  The one that is most reliable is to use is low frequency radio waves in the ELF range.  Extremely Low Frequency.  Way below the AM broadcast band.  These frequencies have two very good characteristics:  They will punch thru the static and noise created by atom bomb blasts and they will penetrate into the water to reach submerged submarines.  Unfortunately, they also have two bad characteristics.  To make use of ELF effectively, you need a BIG antenna to receive and transmit and you need a whole bunch of power – like in the multiple megawatt range.To receive ELF, subs use a trailing wire antenna that can drag behind the submerged sub by more than a mile, if needed.  Aircraft (like SAC bombers) have drop-down wires that can reach out 18,000 feet to snag an ELF signal.  Since these guys mostly receive only, they do not need the power of a megawatt transmitter to respond to these signals.  But someone has to have that power and a really big antenna.  It’s there, right under your nose and you have probably seen it and did not know it.One of the backups to the backups that the military uses to send ELF messages is the power lines that normally deliver power to your homes and businesses.  By cutting these wires at two ends and making some other minor changes, they can turn a stretch of highway telephone pole power wires into a very long ELF antenna.  This allows them to not have to use tuning systems to try to pump out all that power into a ¼ wavelength antenna or shorter, less efficient antenna.The power comes from two 18 wheeler trucks.  One has fuel and a small command post and the other is one huge generator – capable of creating about 20 megawatts of electrical power.  A third vehicle is usually an RV with the crew quarters and other support.  These three vehicles travel in teams around the US – constantly in motion – driving along routes that have been surveyed to make ideal ELF antennas.  They are all disguised as normal 18 wheelers and have all the fake papers to let them move among all the other truckers on the road.At last count, there are 24 of these teams covering an area of 350, 000 square miles from Alaska to Florida and all of Canada.  They never stop.  There are dozens of crews that are rotated out every 45 days at special bases where they can get equipment spares and run testsNext time you have a totally unexplained power outage, look for two 18 wheelers and an RV traveling together or near each other.  You might have just witnessed a test of the emergency communications network.Think this is far fetched.  Consider this.  Each military and intelligence service has an office dedicated to this subject as well as several entire organizations (DIA, DISA, DSS, NRO, NSA, CSC, etc.)but the overall office with DoD is the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Communications, Command, Control and Intelligence (ASD-C3I). There is also a new office called the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration (ASD-NII).

Posted in This IS True ! | No Comments »

Achieving the Speed of Light NOW

18 July 2008 by admin.

Scientists have been telling us for some time that it is impossible to achieve the speed of light.  The formula says that mass goes to infinity as you approach C so the amount of power to go faster also rises to infinity.  The theory also says that time is displaced (slows) as we go faster.  We have “proven” this by tiny fractions of variations in the orbits of some of our satellites and in the orbit of Mercury.  For an issue within physics that is seen as such a barrier to further research, shouldn’t we see a more dramatic demonstration of this theory?  I think it should so I made up one.

Let us suppose we have a weight on the end of a string.  The string is 10 feet long and we hook it up to a motor that can spin at 20,000.  The end of the string will travel 62.8 feet per revolution or 1,256,637 feet per minute.  That is 3.97 miles per second or an incredible 14,280 miles per hour.  OK so that is only .0021% of C but for only ten feet of string and a motor that we can easily create, that is not bad.

There are motors that can easily get to 250,000 RPM and there are some turbines that can spin up to 500,000 RPM.  If we can explore the limits of this experimental design, we might find something interesting.   Now let’s get serious. 

Let’s move this experiment into space.  With no gravity and no air resistance, the apparatus can function very differently.  It could use string or wire or even thin metal tubes.  If we control the speed of the motor so that we do not exceed the limitations imposed by momentum, we should be able to spin something pretty fast.

Imagine a motor that can spin 50,000 RPM with a sting mechanism that can let out the string from the center as the speed slowly increases.  Now let’s, over time, let out 1 mile of string while increasing the speed of rotation to 50,000 RPM.  The end will not be traveling at nearly 19 thousand miles per hour or 2.82% of C.

If we boost the speed up to 100,000 RPM and can get the length out to 5 miles, the end of the string will be doing an incredible 188,495,520 miles per hour.  That is more that 28% the speed of light.

What will that look like?  If we have spun this up correctly, the string (wire, tubes, ?) will be pulled taunt by the centrifugal force of the spinning.  With no air for resistance and no gravity, the string should be a nearly perfect vector outward from the axis of rotation.  The only force that might distort this perfect line is momentum but if we have spun this setup slowly so that the weight at the end of the string is pulling the string out of the center hub, then it should be straight. 

I have not addressed the issue of the strength of the wire to withstand the centrifugal force of the spinning weight.  Not that it is trivial but for the purposes of this thought experiment, I am assuming that the string can handle whatever the weight size we use.

Let us further suppose that we have placed a camera exactly on the center of the spinning axis facing outward along the string.  What will it see?  If the theory is correct, then despite the string being pulled straight by the centrifugal force, I believe we will see the string curve backward and at some point it will disappear from view.  The reason is that as you move out on the string, its speed is going faster and faster and closer to the C.  This will cause the relative time at each increasing distance from the center to be slower and appear to lag behind.  When viewed from the center-mounted camera, the string will curve.

If we could use some method to make the string visible for its entire length, its spin would cause it to eventually fade from view when the time at the end of the string is so far behind the present time at the camera that it can no longer be seen.  It is possible that it might appear to spiral around the camera, even making concentric overlapping spiral rings. 

If synchronized clocks were places at the center and at the end of the string, and then we placed a camera at both ends but could view the two images side-by-side at the hub.  Each one would view a clock that started out synchronized and the only difference would be that one is now traveling at some percentage of C faster than the other.  I believe they would read different times as the spin rate increased. 

But now here is a thought puzzle.  Suppose there is an electronic clock at the end of the string as described by the above paragraph but now instead of sending its camera image back to the hub, we send its actual reading by wires embedded in the string back to the hub where it is read side-by-side with a clock that has been left at the hub.  What will it read now?  Will the time distortion alter the speed of the electrons so that they do NOT show a time distortion at the hub?  Or will the speed of the electricity be constant and thus show two different times?  I don’t know.

Posted in Science...."Fiction?", Future History, This IS True ! | 1 Comment »

Plato Rises!

18 July 2008 by admin.

This is one of two email exchanges I had with some other writer/scientists in which we explored the outer edge of science.  You have to remember that way back then, there were some ideas that have since died off - like the monuments and face on Mars and the popularity of UFOs. 

Some of this is part of an on-going dialog so it may seem like there is a part missing because this is a response to a previously received message.  I think you get the gist of what is going on.  Despite the fact that this is mostly from 9 years ago, the science described and projected then is still valid or has not yet been proven wrong. You might find these interesting. 

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October 13, 1998

I want to thank you for letting me post your article about gravity shielding that appeared in the March ‘98 WIRED magazine.  Your comments on my article about lightning sprites and the blue-green flash are also appreciated.  In light of our on-going exchange of ideas, I thought you might be interested in some articles I wrote for my BBS and WEB forums on “bleeding edge science” that I hosted awhile back.  Some of these ideas and articles date back to the mid-90’s, so some of the references are a little dated and some of the software that I use now is generally available as a major improvement over what I had then.

What I was involved with then can be characterized by the books and magazines I read, a combination of Skeptical Enquirer, Scientific American, Discovery and Nature.  I enjoyed the challenge of debunking some space cadet that had made yet another perpetual motion machine or yet another 250 mile-per-gallon carburetor - both claiming that the government or big business was trying to suppress their inventions.  Several of my articles were printed on the bulletin board that pre-dated the publication of the Skeptical Enquirer.

I particularly liked all the far-out inventions attributed to one of my heroes - Nikola Tesla.  To hear some of those fringe groups, you’d think he had to be an alien implant working on an intergalactic defense system.  I got more than one space cadet upset with me by citing real science to shoot down his gospel of zero-point energy forces and free energy.

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These articles deal with the fringe in that I was addressing the “science” behind UFO’s.

  I have done some analysis on life in our solar system other than Earth and the odds against it are very high.  At least, life as we know it.  Even Mars probably did not get past early life stages before the O2 was consumed.  Any biologist will tell you that in our planet evolution, there was any number of critical thresholds of presence or absence of a gas or heat or water that, if crossed, would have returned the planet to a lifeless dust ball.  Frank Drakes formulas are a testament to that.  The only reason that his formulas are used to “prove” life exists is because of the enormous quantities of tries that nature has to get it right in the observable universe and over so much time.

  One potential perspective is that what may be vesting us, as “UFO’s” could be a race or several races of beings that are 500 to 25,000 years more advanced than us.  Given the age of the universe and the fact that our sun is probably second or third generation, this is not difficult to understand.  Some planet somewhere was able to get life started before Earth and they are now where we will be in the far distant future.

  Stanley Miller proved that life, as we know it, could form out of organic and natural events during the normal evolution of a class M planet.  But Drake showed that the chances of that occurring twice in one solar system is very high against it.  If you work backwards from their formulas, given the event of earth as an input of some solution of the equations, you would need something like 100 million planets to get even a slight chance for another planet with high‑tech life on it.

  Taken this into consideration and then comparing it to the chances that the monuments on mars are natural formations or some other claim of extraterrestrial life within our solar system, you must conclude that there is virtually no chance for life in our solar system.  Despite this, there are many that point to “evidence” such as the appearance of a face and pyramids in Mars photographs.  It sounds a lot like an undated version of the “canals” that were first seen in the 19th century.  Now we can “measure” these observations with extreme accuracy - or so they would have you believe.

The so‑called perfect measurements and alignment that are supposedly seen on the pyramids and “faces” are very curious since even the best photos we have of these sites have a resolution that could never support such accuracy in measurements.  When you get down to “measuring” the alignment and sizes of the sides, you can pretty much lay the compass or ruler anywhere you want because of the fuzz and loss of detail caused by the relatively poor resolution.  Don’t let someone tell you that they measured down to the decimal value of degrees and to within inches when the photo has a resolution of meters per pixel!

   As for the multidimensional universe; I believe Stephen Hawkin when he said that there are more than 3 dimensions however, for some complex mathematical reasons, a fifth dimension would not necessarily have any relationship to the first four and objects that have a fifth dimension would have units of the first four (l,w,h & time) that are very small ‑ on the order of atomic units of scale.  This means that according to our present understanding of the math, the only way we could experience more than 4 dimensions is to be able to be reduced to angstrom sizes and to withstand very high excitation from an external energy source.   Lets exclude the size issue for a moment since that is a result of the math model that we have chosen in the theory and may not be correct.

  We generally accept that time is the 4th dimension after l, w, and h which seem to be related as being in the same units but in different directions.  If time is a vector (which we believe it is) and it is so very different than up, down, etc, then what would you imagine a 5th dimension unit to be?

  Most people think of “moving” into another dimension and it being just some variation of the first 4 but this is not the case.  The next dimension, is not capable of being understood by us because we have no frame of reference. 

Hawkin makes a much better explanation of this in one of his book but suffice it to say that we do not know how to explore this question because we cannot conceive of the context of more than 4 dimensions.  The only way we can explore it is with math ‑ we can’t even graph it because we haven’t got a 5-axis coordinate system.  I have seen a 10 dimensional formula graphed but they did only 3 dimensions at a time.  Whatever the relationship of a unit called a “second” has with a unit called a “meter”, may or may not be the same relationship as the meter has with “???????” (Whatever the units of the 5th dimension are called).  What could it possibly be?  You describe it for me, but don’t use any reference to the first 4 dimensions.  For instance, I can describe time or length without reference to any of the other known dimensions.  The bottom line is that this is one area that even a computer cannot help because no one has been able to give a computer an imagination ……..yet.

  As for longevity, there has been some very serious research going on in this area but it has recently been hidden behind the veil of aids research. There is a belief that the immune system and other recuperative and self‑correcting systems in the body wear‑out and slowly stop working.  This is what gives us old‑age skin and gray hair.  This was an area that was studied very deeply up until the early 1980’s.  Most notably were some studies at the U. of Nebraska that began to make some good progress in slowing the biological aging by a careful stimulation and supplementation of naturally produced chemicals.  When the AIDS problem surfaced a lot of money was shifted into AIDS research.  It was argued that the issues related to biological aging were related to the immune issues of AIDS.  This got the researchers AIDS money and they continued their research, however, they want to keep a very low profile because they are not REALLY doing AIDS research. That is why you have not heard anything about their work. 

Because of my somewhat devious links to some medical resources and a personal interest in the subject, I have kept myself informed and have a good idea of where they are and it is very impressive.  Essentially, in the inner circles of gerontology, there is general agreement that the symptomatology of aging is due to metabolic malfunction and not cell damage.  This means that it is treatable.  It is the treatment that is being pursued now and as in other areas of medicine in which there is such a large multiplicity of factors affecting each individuals aging process, successes are made in finite areas, one area at a time.  For instance, senility is one area that has gotten attention because of the mapping to metabolic malfunction induced by the presence of metals along with factors related to emotional environment.  Vision and skin condition are also areas that have had successes in treatments.

  When I put my computer research capability to look at this about a year ago, what I determined was that by the year 2024, humans will have an average life span of about 95‑103 years.  It will go up by about 5% per decade after that for the next century, then it will level out due to the increase of other factors.

_____________ Are They Really There? ___________ Life is Easy to Make:

 Since 1953, with the Stanley Miller experiment, we have, or should have discarded the theory that we are unique in the universe.  Production of organic life and even DNA and RNA have been shown to occur in simple mixtures of hydrogen, ammonia, methane and water when exposed to an electrical discharge (lightning).  The existence of most these components has been frequently verified by spectral analysis in distant stars but, of course, until recently, we can’t see the star’s planets.  Based on the most accepted star and planet formation theories, most star systems would have a significant number of planets with these elements and conditions.

 Quantifying the SETI

 A radio astronomer, Frank Drake developed some equations that were the first serious attempt to quantify the number of technical civilizations in our galaxy.  Unfortunately, his factors were very ambiguous and various scientists have produced numbers ranging from 1 to 10 billion technical civilizations in just our galaxy.  This condition of a formula is referred to as unstable or ill‑conditioned systems.  There are mathematical techniques to reduce the instability of such equations.  I attempted to do so to quantify the probability of the existence of intelligent life.

 I approached the process a little different.  Rather than come up with a single number for the whole galaxy, I decided to relate the probability to distance from Earth.  Later I added directionality.

 Using the basic formulas Drake used to start, I added a finite stochastic process using conditional probability. This produces a tree of event outcomes for each computed conditional probability.  (The conditions being quantified were those in his basic formula: rate of star formation; number of planets in each system with conditions favorable to life; fraction of planets with on which life develops; fraction of planets that develop intelligent life; fraction of planets that develop intelligent life that evolve technical civilizations capable of interstellar communications and the lifetime of such a civilization).

 I then layered one more parameter onto this by increasing the probability of a particular tree path inversely to the relation of one over the square of the distance.  This added a conservative estimate for the increasing probability of intelligent life as the distance from Earth increases and more stars and planets are included in the sample size.

 I Love Simulation Models

 I used standard values used by Gamow and Hawking in their computations, however, I ignored Riemannian geometry and assumed a purely Euclidean universe.  Initially, I assumed the standard cosmological principles of homogeneity and isotropic distributions.  (I changed that later) Of course this produced 1000’s of probable outcomes but by using a Monte Carlo simulation of the probability distribution and the initial computation factors of Drake’s formula (within reasonable limits), I was able to derive a graph of probability of technical civilizations as a function of distance.

 But I Knew That

 As was predictable before I started, the graph is a rising, non‑linear curve, converging on 100%.  Even though the outcome was intuitive, what I gained was a range of distances with a range of corresponding probabilities of technical civilizations.  Obviously, the graph converges to 100% at infinite distances but surprisingly, it is above 99% before leaving the Milky Way Galaxy.  We don’t even have to go to Andromeda to have a very good chance of there being intelligent life in space.  Of course, that is not so unusual since our galaxy may have about 200 billion stars and some unknown multiple of planets.

 Then I made It Directional

 I toyed with one other computation.  The homogeneous and isotropic universe used by Einstein and Hawking is a mathematical convenience to allow them to relate the structure of the universe to their theories of space‑time. These mathematical fudge‑factors are not consistent with observation in small orders of magnitude in distance from earth ‑ out to the limits of what we can observe ‑ about 15 billion light years.  We know that there is inhomogeneous or lumps in the stellar density at these relatively close distances.  The closest lump is called the Local Group with 22 galaxies but it is on the edge of a super cluster of 2500 galaxies.  There is an even larger group called the Great Attractor that may contain tens of thousands of galaxies. 

By altering my formula so that I took into account the equatorial system direction (ascension & declination) of the inhomogeneous clustering.  Predictably, this just gave me a probability of intelligent life based on a vector rather than a scalar measure.  It did however, move the distance for any given probability much closer ‑ in the direction of clusters and super clusters.  So much so that at about 351 million light years, the probability is virtually 100%.  At only about 3 million light years, the probability is over 99%. That is well within the Local Group of galaxies.

 When you consider that there are tens of billions of stars and galaxies within detection range by Earth and some unknown quantity beyond detection - it is estimated that there are galaxies numbering as many as a 1 followed by 21 zeros - that is more that all the grains of sand in all the oceans, beaches and deserts in the entire world.  And in each of those galaxies, there are billions of stars!  Now you can begin to see that the formula to quantify the number of technical civilizations in space results in virtually 100% no matter how conservative you make the input values.  It can do no less than prove that life is out there.

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