Text: Despite many qualms about the hydrino theory, Spitznagel says that he believes Mills "speaks with honesty and conviction." Spitznagel notes that one reason Mills didn't pursue further energy work with Siemens Westinghouse was that BlackLight Power focused for a time on the novel compounds Mills was producing. National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists were also encouraged that the Mills cell seemed to be producing energy, but they couldn't rule out alternatives to the hydrino effect as the cause, says Dr. Janis Niedra of NASA's Glenn Research Center. Niedra broke with many other scientists in a letter following an interview, writing that while Mills's theory butts up against popular interpretations of quantum mechanics, "in fact, however, quantum mechanics may permit such [hydrino electron] levels." If Mills is right, Niedra wrote, "not only would such transitions give off hard UV light, but also the probability of room temperature nuclear fusion of the shrunken hydrogen, or deuterium, atoms would be greatly increased. The continuation of such processes to higher atomic numbers would of course emulate the power generation of a star! Considering the potential value of a new energy source, it seems worthwhile to restudy the Mills [proto]type cell in configurations allowing an accurate account for recombination and water loss." When two nuclei are forced to fuse under high temperatures and pressures, copious amounts of energy are released. It's the power behind the hydrogen bomb and the sun. But two generations of physicists have failed to master nuclear fusion despite the billions of government dollars sunk into it. Attempts to achieve cold fusion, the same result without adding great heat and pressure, have been given the cold shoulder since 1989 when two chemists in Salt Lake City cried "Eureka!" in the media but then couldn't provide others with a systematic way of reproducing their claims. The backlash was so virulent that government and university research grant writers run from anything that smacks of cold fusion. Mills is adamant that his work is unrelated to cold fusion, even as diehards in the field attempt to claim him as their own. Dr. Charles Haldeman says he also was tripped up in cold-fusion phobia after he produced excess energy from several variations of a Mills cell while a senior staff member at the Air Force's MIT-managed Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts. "I got pretty good gain compared to the power I was putting in. The effect wasn't as large as Mills was getting, but it was in the direction that was predicted," Haldeman says. Because the results were smaller than he'd hoped, which he now says may have been due to contaminated materials, he wasn't in a position to fight management when funding was stopped. "They said, 'There must be some other error that you're not including,' but I couldn't figure out what it might be and neither could they," Haldeman says. "This area is clearly not well understood. There's clearly incontrovertible evidence that there's something going on in the work of Mills and others that certainly deserves further study. It's a tragedy that the politics of cold fusion has prevented science from taking its course." Michael Jacox, assistant director of Texas A&M's Commercial Space Center for Engineering and a nuclear engineer, says he felt compelled to study the Mills cell in relative secrecy when he was a research scientist for the Department of Energy. While at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, Jacox says he read about the Mills cell and decided in 1991 to perform independent experiments along with electrochemical experts on staff in battery development. "We actually purchased a total of three large electrolytic cells and conducted very controlled experiments," Jacox says. "We followed the protocols Randy suggested and followed his technique and we got the same results he had," Jacox says. "We were encouraged but we determined that what we had was probably not sufficient to break a news release, especially with [cold fusion] going sour so soon before." The team began more thorough testing, Jacox says, including side-by-side comparisons of catalyzed cells and control cells, when his bosses suddenly balked. "In the middle of that process there was a management decision that said we should pull the plug on the whole project and not disclose that we had been involved in the project at all," Jacox says. The team decided to instead investigate hydrino compounds in "almost a clandestine operation." "We probably have hundreds of different projects going on at all times, and this isn't one I was aware was going on," says John Walsh, a spokesman for the Idaho lab. Researchers at other well-known government labs also say they are afraid to speak on record about their interest in Mills's work. One said that he plans to visit BlackLight Power on his vacation time. Jacox says his team found in the materials "an anomaly that we could not explain with conventional theory but that we could explain with Randy Mills's theory. That does not necessarily validate the Mills theory, but gosh." Jacox continued to be frustrated by the proscription against testing Mills cells, "so I left the lab in large measure because of that." Applied scientists have a rigorous standard in their work that is sometimes referred to as the Kmart Test. In other words, can the research at hand lead to an off-the-shelf product? By this criterion, the materials wing of BlackLight Power has great potential. Energy is a messy thing to measure, but as Mills says, "the good thing about materials is that they exist, or they don't. There's no argument." BlackLight Power's marketing people say they expect far more profits from compounds than from the energy released by hydrinos. The energy portion could even be seen as a mere spin-off of the chemical manufacturing that should simply be used, rather than wasted. Even the unpersuaded Professor Wilson of Harvard offers, "Maybe he hasn't found the gold of a grand unified theory, but there could be some silver there" in the hydrino compounds. Tests at Lehigh University are interesting, confirms Dr. Alfred Miller, a senior research scientist there who has tested BlackLight Power's compounds. Miller probed the energy levels of the atoms by bombarding them with X rays and measuring the energy of the electrons leaving the atoms‹a technique called X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. "I try and exhaust all possibilities and there really aren't an enormous number of conventional explanations" for what he found. Miller emphasizes that he didn't want his tests being interpreted as unequivocally confirming the hydrino theory, but "over the years I haven't really come across too many things that haven't been explainable. At least if you thought about it long enough and hard enough." Because Mills has produced freely available physical materials and has been "incredibly more open in getting people to confirm what his hypothesis predicts . . . this is not the equivalent of cold fusion," Miller says. "He's serious and honest. . . . He may well have ventured upon something." Ricerca Inc.'s lab east of Cleveland was similarly flummoxed by what it found when studying BlackLight Power's materials. "They were inorganic compounds that have organic properties. That is unusual," says Dr. Yong-Xi Li, manager of Ricerca's advanced mass spectrometry lab. "We totally don't know what's going on. The reason is that I've never seen before these kinds of properties in all my career. Probably we have to do more work." The BlackLight Power research has excited the U.S. Navy, but the company isn't entirely thrilled with that. "It's kind of like letting a lion loose in the building," Mills remarks. "You have to remember that their goal is to find better ways of killing. But there are worse militaries [than that of the U.S.] out there." Board members have another concern about getting too deeply involved with the armed forces. Some say they fear that the military could "black out" the project, making it a national security secret. That would deprive the company of other commercial prospects. The issue came up at a BlackLight Power board meeting, according to sources. Executives at the meeting urged Mills to refer to energetic materials as potential propellants, and not explosives, even though a rocket is just a controlled explosion. One source says Mills bridled at the inherent intellectual dishonesty in the euphemism. "That would be as if I pointed a duck gun at you and said not to worry, because it only kills ducks," Mills reportedly said. BlackLight Power and researchers at the weapons division of the Naval Air Warfare Center at China Lake, California, confirm that they are heading toward a research and development pact that would allow the navy to produce energy and materials from hydrinos and to develop applications of the new compounds. A spokeswoman for the Indian Head Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Maryland says in ane-mail letter that after a meeting with Mills "there was considerable interest in the reported properties of the new hydrogen-containing compounds, and in obtaining samples for independent analysis and evaluation." BlackLight Power's newest board member is retired vice admiral Michael P. Kalleres, who commanded the U.S. fleet in the Atlantic during the Gulf War and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Striking Fleet. He's also a consultant for the Defense Science Board and the Naval Studies Board of the National Academy of Science. "I feel very confident in what [Mills] has created," Kalleres says. He adds that he has no investment in BlackLight Power and takes no salary from the company, although he anticipates an option to invest later. After observing the company's practices for years, he believes that it's produced things of which the military should make use. Ships with hydrino material cladding would likely be stealthy and rustproof, Kalleres says. Eliminating rust could radically reduce crews on some ships, savings millions of dollars. It's not just BlackLight Power's work in bombs, rockets, and rusty ships that has the military's attention. Mills has stacks of proprietary research on artificial intelligence. In what he calls Brain Child Systems, Mills has done the math for a reasoning machine with consciousness. To advance the project, Mills may soon enter into a collaboration with the Institute for Simulation and Training at the University of Central Florida, which does the bulk of its work for the military. But Mills wasn't thinking of the military when he began his work in artificial intelligence. Mills has a lifelong dream of making spaceships to travel at near light speed, and he says that only a mind with the switching rates of a computer could pilot them. A human brain, which Mills disdains as "wet processing," would fly into a rock before its owner could blink. If spaceships are to hit such speeds, NASA scientists agree that rockets are a dead end. Mills says the answer may again lie in the electron, which according to his theory might be made to respond negatively to gravity. He quickly emphasizes that this part of his work awaits experimentation, and he has kept quiet about it so far because he's quite aware of how his critics will ridicule it. Mills is uncharacteristically coy in referring to the antigravity machine as a "relativity device." There was a moment when it seemed NASA engineers might look into Mills's antigravity theory. Luke Setzer, a mechanical engineer at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida requested permission to investigate the idea's potential. Setzer says as a mechanical engineer, he's more intuitively comfortable with Mills's deterministic view of the universe. Engineers, he says, "are used to classical physics. Mills applies classical physics to the subatomic level." Setzer was encouraged by his two managers to pursue the work, but after NASA physicists objected, "I dropped the whole thing." Without their nod, there would be no funding. "One of them kept referring to 'fictional energy' rather than theoretical energy" after glancing at Mills's self-published thousand-page tome, The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics (1995), Setzer says. "That kind of language tells me they're already shutting their minds to possibilities." Setzer also plans to visit BlackLight Power's labs on his vacation time. "I think he's a real Renaissance man," Setzer says. "And even if reality is different than his theory, it could still be another source of energy. The Mills theory may accurately predict previously inexplicable phenomena. That doesn't mean that he's right, but string theory seems less well defined than Mills's theory yet is more accepted than Mills's." Marc Millis, who is leading NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, says that a major reason for not pursuing BlackLight Power projects is that tight budgets dictate that administrators approach ideas with a triage mind-set. "If someone else has the funds to get behind an idea, why should we redouble that?" he asks. "We have to use our resources for things that look promising and we know we'll have to do for ourselves." The craft Mills imagines would be made of hydrino compounds and powered by hydrino engines and batteries. There would be pods containing intersecting helium and electron beams under a negatively charged plate. The electrons in the beam would be deformed in such a way that they would oppose gravity and push up against that electric field of the negative plate, Mills theorizes. Anything attached to the plate would also experience lift. Every part of the craft, except the electrons, is still subject to gravity. "Once you've got it up, what would you use to travel horizontally?" Mills asks. Thrusters? Mills gently waves that solution away. "Too inelegant. Try a flywheel to play off angular momentum," he suggests, "and the craft itself would act as an airfoil." Yes, that would be a flying saucer. The universe his flying saucers would explore was not made in six days nor in a big bang, Mills says. "The Big Bang is not a theory. It's a fact," Dr. Michio Kaku claimed at a recent lecture at the New York Public Library. Mills argues that the universe is forever oscillating between matter and energy over thousand-billion-year cycles, expanding and contracting between finite set points. In fact, he says, the universe doesn't get much smaller than it is now. His theory predicted in clear language two recent astronomical discoveries‹one, the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, and, two, there are stars that measure as older than the expansion of the universe itself. He also says hydrinos explain several mysteries about the sun and are the unidentified "dark matter" that astrophysicists say makes up most of the universe. Mills sees the conversion of matter into energy as the engine of universal expansion. Einstein and others showed that a mass creates a dimple in space-time. As that mass burns itself out, throwing off energy, that dimple formed by gravity is smoothed, causing the universe to expand, Mills explains. "The sun is turning matter into energy every second; that forces the universe to expand," Mills says. "Even, in the tiniest way, the chemical reactions in your body are pushing the universe out." Eventually all of this action expends itself until the universe becomes a giant cloud of photons that begin to gather into themselves to create matter again. "You're existing, maintaining your internal order as a life-form, at the expense of your surroundings. The more you do to keep yourself as you are, in that order, a being as opposed to inanimate matter, the universe is going to decay at a faster rate. Eventually your borrowed time runs out and then it's dust to dust," Mills says. "It's sad, but that unfortunately is how it is. "It's a beautiful thing that we can exist the way that we do for the time that we do and people should appreciate it," he says. Does it all start over again in exactly the same way, as some religions teach? Is there a God? Mills is at first curt. "That can't be experimentally tested, so I won't speculate on it." But then he adds, "There are some questions science will never answer. That's where you have faith." Tell us what you think. editor@villagevoice.com Copyright © 1999 VV Publishing Corporation 36 Cooper Square New York, NY 10003 The Village Voice and Voice are registered trademarks. All rights reserved.

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