DENNIS LEE
-The JULY 12 demonstration-
An independent review by Bob
Subject: Dennis Lee -- Hackensack Demo
Well people. It looks like Dennis's excuses for not offering acceptable proof of free energy were both "dang, it worked fine last week" and "there, see it worked for a few seconds". Apparently, the only amazing thing was that most of his dealers bought it hook line and sinker. I'm sorry I wasn't able to show up my self and hand out tracts giving the other point of view. Dennis's most recent voice mail messages have talked of problems involving: pinched fingers, broken cars, bad teeth, and over flowing bath rooms. -not much about their turning down my offer to give them incredible positive publicity if they would let me verify the claim. He also said a dealer in jail for growing dope endorses the sonic bloom. I haven't heard of Dennis asking for more money which is a relief. I offer the following well written review from a fellow who went to show:
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Date: Saturday, 12-Jul-97 04:20 PM
From: Bob D
Subject: Dennis Lee -- Hackensack Demo
Dear Eric,
I wish that I had seen your web page about Dennis Lee before today, but until today I didn't know his name.
I am an electrical engineer, MIT class of 1975. I am, apparently like you, a cheerfully skeptical sort of person. My father, also an electrical engineer, is a less cheerfully skeptical sort - for example, he regards the Laws of Thermodynamics as quasi religiously set in stone. I am always willing to at least glance at something which on the surface violates them in the hope that maybe there is a loophole. It would be so wonderful if there were a loophole. But I am never surprised when, as invariably happens, an apparent violation turns out to be a misunderstanding, an error, or chicanery.
But it was my father who ran across a quarter page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal a few days ago. It said that The International Tesla Electric Company was going to demonstrate free electrical power, free home heating, earthquake-, tornado- and hurricane proof home construction which would last 2,000 years, explosion proof netting and a few other equally wondrous things which I don't recall at the moment. This demonstration would take place in South Hackensack, New Jersey.
His first inclination was to ignore it as an obvious scam, but since it was free, and since the location is only about fifteen minutes by car from our respective homes, we decided to go.
When we got there a few minutes before the scheduled start time of noon, several hundred people were waiting in the hot sun in front of what appeared to be an out of business warehouse outlet store. I spent the time eavesdropping on conversations around me in the crowd; one fellow was talking about how he had been to previous demonstrations in Charlotte and Philadelphia, and he was getting concerned that he had yet to see the electricity machine work.
A few minutes before noon a Chrysler mini van pulled up into the middle of the crowd. Several people were on board. The driver got out, and I got a good look at a man around 40 years old. About my height, 5'10", maybe a little taller. Probably about 200, 210 pounds; very paunchy - didn't strike me as being in good physical condition. Walked with a limp. A couple of people called out to him; he smiled and waved in response. It seemed odd, somehow, that he wasn't saying anything, but that got explained shortly. Somebody said, "That's him - that's Dennis Lee." As he walked into the building, a portion of the crowd gave him a small burst of spontaneous applause. My instant evaluation was, "Personality cult?"
A few moments later an amplified voice was heard. A high-pitched painful tenor rasp. It was Lee, explaining that he had come down with a horrible case of laryngitis, but that his wife would work from a script that they had prepared, and the show would go on. Meanwhile, he said, there would be a delay of thirty minutes or so. The Tesla machine had lost its charge, and would have to be recharged. Also, there had been a problem with the water welding machine, and the mess had to be cleaned up.
At that point we just about decided to leave, but became engaged in conversation with somebody in the crowd. He claimed to be an engineer, and when we asked him what was going on, he explained some of Lee's background, complete with the classic conspiracy theory description of "the powers that be" that would not let him succeed. He enthusiastically described the "impossible" welds that he had seen of dissimilar metals (like copper to steel), and of seeing a steel rod welded to a brick. He also discussed that there was energy all around us, and that the trick that Lee had just about solved was that of converting that energy to useful form. When I mentioned the "Tesla machine" that had "lost its charge", he suggested that the charge mentioned was a charge of coolant, as opposed to an electrical charge.
Another person expressed surprise that we had come because of an advertisement, convincing me further about the personality cult aspect of the proceedings.
By then enough time had passed that we decided to go see the show instead of just heading home. Several hundred people were in the room, which had been fitted out like an auditorium or lecture hall. Color TV monitors high on the walls offered views of what would have otherwise been invisible up front. Very comfortable rental chairs. A woman, about 55 years old, directly behind us, was engaged in conversation with her chance seat mate. She told him that when she traveled and stayed in hotels, she slept on the floor. That was because the foam mattresses that hotels use "suck the energy out of you."
Lee's wife opened the proceedings with an explanation about the laryngitis. She explained that this was a show to introduce the public to the technology. The scientific demonstration for scientists and engineers would come at a later time, and so there were to be no questions asked during the show. So, please, she asked, be gentlemanly about it, and Doubting Thomas's in the audience should be quiet. She then gave a heartfelt prayer that everything should go well and that people should keep open minds, open eyes, and open hearts about what they were going to be shown. I was struck that she kept using the word, "show". I would have thought "demonstration" to be more appropriate.
She started in with the prepared lecture. Perpetual motion is impossible, she read. You don't expect your car to run forever unless you have a perpetual source of gasoline to put in its tank. And energy is all around us. We have an energy source that moves at 67,000 miles per hour (nervous about her reading, she didn't notice her husband sitting next to her grandly gesticulating at the ground) and all we have to do is tap into it. She went on in that vein for about five minutes. My father, deciding that the semantic content of what he was listening too was null, fell asleep.
After some more talk in that vein she turned the proceedings over to another fellow whose name I didn't catch, who went on to talk about the "most advanced heat pump in the world."  The first element of the system was a pair of large black plates. He held up a demo section of the material. He said it was aluminum, and that it had tiny veins running through it. It was on the order of a quarter of an inch thick. This was the "solar panel", but it could work in a blizzard at night. A special refrigerant boiled inside this panel at very low temperatures, and he described, as if it were obvious, that when things boil there is a lot of heat in them. A short side lecture pointed out that even if zero degrees Fahrenheit seems cold to us, it's really about five hundred degrees above absolute zero. I happily noted the seemingly intentional effort to confuse heat and temperature. I woke my father to tell him, "It's a refrigerator." Not being particularly interested in refrigerators, he fell asleep again.
After that, the boiled refrigerant goes to a compressor. The TV close-up showed what sure looked to me like an ordinary refrigerator compressor. There, it is compressed, and as everybody knows, when you compress a bunch of air, it gets hot. Some people in the audience were invited to feel the output side of the compressor. Yup, it was hot. Those coils were used to heat some water. Yup, the water was warm. No mention of the fact that the compressor was plugged into the wall using electricity generated by the coal fired power plant about ten miles south of us.
This system can also be used for cooling. He threw a switch. The TV monitors went dead, and some of the lights went out. The fuss woke my father again. During the five minutes that it took to find and reset the circuit breaker and get the video equipment running again, I remembered a cartoon that a coworker once had on his office wall. It showed a stage surrounded by a big collection of outdoor speakers. A sign announced that this was the "First Annual Solar Powered Anti-Nuclear Rally." The fellow at the podium was looking back over his shoulder. An obvious techie, crouched at the mixing panel for the audio system, was calling out to the guy at the podium, "It IS on."
During that impromptu break, we overheard a conversation in the aisle. One guy said that he was a distributor of Lee's stuff. When he was asked what the distributorship cost him, he said, "One hundred thousand dollars."
I looked at my father. He said, "Let's buy two."  At this point the show got going again. The cooling capabilities consisted of running a hose through a coil of copper tubing and releasing "an environmentally safe hydrocarbon coolant" to the atmosphere. Having said that, he held the end of the hose pointing straight up, and opened a valve. He let the compressed gas, whatever it was, escape freely into the room for about five seconds. It wasn't just pure air; there was a clear stream of some kind of condensed material coming out of that hose. I suppose that it could have been ordinary air with some water vapor. People in the front rows were invited to touch the copper coil. Yup, it was cold.
At that point I had been sitting there for about forty-five minutes and had been shown an ordinary heat pump using drilled aluminum plating as one of the sink/sources (as opposed to the more ordinary finned coils), and a grade school demonstration of adiabatic cooling that can be duplicated by anybody willing to waste a can of hair spray by holding the button down until the can gets too cold to hold.. Had I been there on my own, I might have stayed, but I figured that my father would be more comfortable falling asleep in his own chair at home.
I nudged him awake and said, "Let's go." And we left.  We came, obviously, with the preconception that it was chicanery. We would have stayed if it looked like *good* chicanery - but it wasn't. It seemed rather clumsy. I suppose to be fair I should have stayed through the whole "show" and watched more carefully. But you know what? If I had available to me the kind of technology that The ITEC was claiming to have, I could put together a demonstration that would make Siegfried and Roy look like kid stuff. And I'd be rich beyond dreams of avarice.
If you like this kind of stuff, you have to get hold of the movie "Gizmo." It is thoroughly delightful. Towards the end, we hear a song about an hapless inventor who is never daunted by his ideas that don't gel, and his inventions that just don't work. The inventor in the song is named, "Benjamin Lee." I wonder if there is any relation?
If you think this account might be of interest, feel free to post it.
Robert D
July 12, 1977
Bob also wrote the following when granting me permission to repeat this: Feel free to post it.I suggest removing the word "clear" from the adiabatic cooling episode. I meant it in the context of "there clearly was some condensed material" in the stream; as it stands it is confusing.Given that some of Dennis Lee's followers may be excitable, please remove my name, since I have given more than enough clues so that somebody could find my address and phone number. But you can leave my e-mail address in.There was absolutely no chance of my being sucked in. A book that my father remembers, with great fondness, having read once is named, "The Big Con." Confidence games are absolutely fascinating. If it weren't for the money lost by people who just can't afford it, it would be great sport. We only went for the opportunity to see a con game at work.Sigh. Why can't people *think*? Here is a man who claims to be able to feed the hungry, house the homeless, drain swamps, irrigate deserts, build motors that have no exhaust, deliver free electric power, and, probably, cure warts.But he drives to the show location in a Chrysler, powered by an ordinary gasoline engine. The show is held up when a circuit breaker pops.The mystery is not what Dennis Lee does or doesn't do. He is a charlatan, like Uri Geller or any other snake oil salesman, and if he couldn't make money at it he'd do something else. And maybe he is slightly pphacthotic and actually believes that he is on the trail of something, and that it's okay for him to generate some cash this way so that he can get on with his true work. The mystery is that people are willing to believe him. Gads. The things people *are* willing to believe. 300 MPH carburetors, when the energy content of gasoline just isn't there. Alien visitations. Area 54. Black helicopters. All of a sudden the government is competent to keep secrets? I wish that his voice had been healthy -- it must have been so incredibly frustrating when something so obviously built on one man's personal charisma couldn't be supported by that man speaking to the crowd. I glanced over your web page. Keep up the good work -- I hope that even a couple of people might read it and decide to keep their money in their pocket.
eric@voicenet.com
http://www.phact.org/e
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The following is what I was hoping to distribute at his show:
especially after hearing him say stuff like: installations before 1997, OJ is innocent, Indians or secret businessmen will loan millions, anti-gravity, magic camera, farmers pumps, etc. You probably came here to finally see really evidence of the free energy machine (which Dennis has been promising for 10 years). So far Dennis has been offering nothing but excuses for the lack of evidence: "must warn the government first". "God says wait", "need more $", "a few more adjustments", "must clean up radiation first", "must locate Fisher", "lets cash flow other stuff", etc. 
Dennis doesn't mention the 200+ year history of people losing money on phony free energy claims. Other "free energy messiahs" also have been known to target Christians, only produce promises and excuses, mix in politics and religion, switch causes, claim deity channeling, hide behind conspiracy claims and get in protracted battles. (i.e.. Joe Newman is still taking investor money after 20 years with out valid proof.) 
James Randi offered Dennis Lee over $1,000,000 just for simple proof of what was to have been installed nation wide. Dennis has run a foul of Pat Robertson, Tesla society people, the law enforcement community, skeptics, newspaper investigators, businessmen, internet people, and many current dealers. If he has a real free energy machine as promised, we all should help him - but if not, investors deserve to know so they can get on with their lives. The MAIN claim that motivated dealers to write checks is the free energy machines. You could of sold power plugs, fire retard ants and fertilizers with out buying a dealership- Don't be distracted by the other ordinary products which have questionable proof, disputed ownership, limited application, inflated prices, and history of past failures in the market place. 
There are a number of open prizes for proof of free energy but, all the free energy messiahs out there today avoid such open tests. Dennis has been breaking promises to have open free energy demonstrations for about 10 years (before that, he was charged with fraud for several unrelated scams) So far, any demonstrations just use conventional stored energy to generate power for just a few seconds. Don't be fooled such a lame demonstration. An extraordinary claim needs extraordinary proof. A real demonstration of free energy should have a machine no covers or connected wires on a raised clear Plexiglas frame, lighting banks of bright light bulbs continuously for hours (not seconds) with trained independent engineers making measurements. Such precautions are perfectly reasonable considering the long history of free energy and perpetual motion fraud. Dennis has not responded to independent offers to confirm his claims scheduled for July 12. Dennis is an excellent salesman with pathological optimism who is able to convince people to trust him. Dennis makes many serious scientific errors in his presentations. Many scientists and engineers have long told him his theory is fatally flawed. There seem to be no trained scientists or engineers willing to openly argue in favor of Dennis's theories. 
People should be skeptical when hearing "God" and "Money" in the same breath. Dennis (like Do, Koresh, Jim Jones and Moon) has claimed to receive regular revelations directly from God (he's also claimed to "write in tongues"). But the bible warns us to beware of false profits ;) Cult leaders all demand huge amounts of money, preach belief in a conspiracy against the cult, make endless grandiose promises to loyal members, hold marathon training/recruiting sessions, strongly attack unbelievers, hold strange political views, are self educated and have big run ins with the law or main stream society. It looks questionable when he has people sign away legal rights after midnight for a "tonight only" deal. see Math 7:15-20, 24:24, 2Cor 11:18-21 Please pass this on to other dealers. 
But it's exciting to keep hearing Dennis's amazing claims and it's easier to wishfully hope that one of his claims will pay out than deal with the possibility of having been scammed.
For more unofficial information on Lee: contact the NJ BBB or the Christian Broadcasting Network, or the Utah Deseret News Also, find a high school kid to get information on the internet from: http://www.phact.org/e/dennis.html For free information by mail, send a self addressed stamped envelope to "the Other side of BWT" Box 21970 Philadelphia PA 19124
 See:
http://www.phact.org/e/z/lee_rev.htm
 

Skeptical information on BWT is found at:
http://www.phact.org/e/dennis.html
and pro info at:
http://www.UCSofA.com/
 

a good source of fraud links:
http://www.crimes-of-persuasion.com/links.htm

--- some of the lessons learned: