Memories of Brian

By Wade Frazier

April 2012

Introduction

Brian’s Early Years

After NASA

On the Frontiers of Science

I Meet Brian

Brian’s Ride Gets Rough

New Energy and Other Controversies

Brian’s Last Years

Brian’s Legacy

Footnotes

Introduction

On July 29, 2011, Brian O’Leary passed on.  His departure from this world left a tremendous hole in the lives of many people, including mine.  After having curiously similar paths in ways, our lives had various intersections for 20 years.  In 2008, I helped edit his last book, The Energy Solution Revolution.  In 2009, we did a joint interview.  In 2008, he finished a multi-year bout with skin cancer, and in early 2009, Brian asked me to help him with his NASA and Wikipedia biographies, and we wrote a proposal together for the Department of Energy (Brian briefly discusses it here).  In retrospect, I wonder if Brian knew that the end was near.  One of my life’s greatest honors was helping Brian.  When he passed, he was going as hard as ever.  We did more interviews together in 2011, and Brian was planning to mount a public effort relating to the principles that I learned for bringing free energy to the world. 

I initially planned to write an essay of my memories of Brian, but it quickly became something else.  This essay is partly biographical, partly reminiscences, and partly about Brian’s life’s work and legacy. 

Brian’s Early Years

When I wrote Brian’s biographies, I partly drew on the rich biographical information in his books, various articles, interviews, and a book on NASA’s scientist-astronauts.[1]  Brian was born in 1940 in Boston and was raised in America’s middle-class suburban post-war Baby Boom, as I also was.  Brian was imbued with American Revolution mythology, which can be seen in his books, such as his playing the Paul Revere of free energy.[2]  His teenage visit to Washington D.C., and his awe at the Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln memorials, filled him with a flag-saluting patriotism that presaged a long and self-admittedly co-dependent relationship with his nation’s capital.[3]

Brian was precocious and had a gift for mathematics.  A visit to the Harvard Observatory when he was eight years old, on the night that Truman beat Dewey, glimpsing the planets through a telescope, helped set his path to becoming an astronomer.[4]  At age nine, he was drawing pictures of rockets and dreaming of exploring the moon, and eagerly read Wernher von Braun’s articles on the upcoming era of space exploration.[5]  In his senior year in high school in 1956, the year before Sputnik launched, Brian wrote a paper on space satellites, which puzzled his class and teacher, as it was such a strange topic.  Brian was slightly ahead of his time. 

During high school, Brian was at the top of his classes, and was an Eagle Scout, an athlete, and he further described his traits as, “devout Catholic, Republican, no liquor, no sex, and obedient to authority.”[6]  Life at Williams College changed all of that.  Brian was a middling student during his early collegiate years, but was busy exploring adult life.  He got that phase behind him and was accepted at Georgetown to seriously study astronomy, which eventually led him to NASA’s astronaut program.  His over-achieving tendencies were regularly in evidence; he ran the Boston Marathon and climbed the Matterhorn in his early twenties.[7] 

After obtaining his bachelor’s degree, he landed his first space-related job at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center near Washington D.C., and became a research assistant in Georgetown’s astronomy department.  From a blind obedience to authority while growing up, previews of Brian’s fractious relationship with the Establishment became evident at Georgetown.  Brian performed an experiment that proved the department chair’s notions of Mars’s atmosphere incorrect, and he wrote a play that satirized the Georgetown faculty.  He was expelled from Georgetown.[8] 

In 1964, Brian and his new wife moved to California and he began his doctoral studies at Berkeley, where he matured as an astronomer.  Brian performed experiments with his mentor Donald Rea and wrote scientific papers regarding Mars, Venus, and Mercury.  Their papers were regularly published in the scientific establishment's house organs: the magazines Science and Nature.[9]  The publisher of Science, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, made Brian one of its Fellows in 1975. 

Brian’s doctoral thesis was on the Martian atmosphere, and while completing it in late 1966, he noticed a pamphlet pinned to a board at Berkeley that invited qualified scientists to apply to be in the second group of NASA’s scientist-astronauts.  Brian applied, and in early 1967 he experienced the astronaut application process, which culminated in his astronaut interview in Houston in June 1967, which was about two weeks after I moved from Houston, after my father quit NASA in the wake of the Apollo 1 disaster.

That interview may have become Brian’s greatest claim to fame, as he is history’s first and only person officially asked to visit another planet, at least publicly.  The questions startled Brian, but they were serious, and Alan Shepard was adamant that Brian had better be willing to accept the Mars mission.  Brian later discovered that his astronaut selection was influenced by von Braun, who planned to build a really big rocket for his Mars mission dreams.

Between Brian’s interview in June 1967 and his first day at NASA in September 1967, NASA’s big dreams began fading.  The American invasion of Vietnam had to be paid for somehow, and NASA was on the losing end of a budget battle in Washington, D.C.  On Brian’s first day at NASA, Deke Slayton told that second group of scientist-astronauts that NASA was losing its funding and that those newly-hired astronauts were not really needed, because NASA would scrap flights and programs.  Slayton invited them to all quit on their first day on the job.  Those 11 scientist-astronauts were stunned, and they called themselves the XS-11 (“The Excess 11”).[10]

On his first day, Brian was immersed in the astronaut corps’s pilot culture.  Brian often wrote critically about the astronaut corps's test-pilot culture.[11]  On his first day at NASA, Brian was also informed that his public persona would be owned by Time-Life Corporation, which had monopoly rights over all astronaut stories, and each astronaut earned about $3,000 per year from the contract.  Time-Life could censor anything that it did not want the astronauts divulging for public consumption.[12]  The contract was not compulsory, but no astronaut dared to refuse to sign it, and Brian complied like the rest of them.   

While Brian passed through the selection process, his peers were concerned about what Brian would sacrifice to become an astronaut.  Scientists’ most productive years were usually their late twenties and thirties, and Brian would not be spending them performing science, but learning how to execute space missions that had rather obscure scientific goals.  The Space Race was largely an exercise in nationalism, to beat the Soviet Union to the moon.

Several dynamics led to Brian’s resignation from NASA.  Lyndon Johnson’s pork barrel politics put Mission Control in Houston and, like my father did, Brian moved to Houston from California; the culture shock alone was nearly enough to drive them away.  Brian came from radical Berkeley, of all places, to the cowboy culture of Texas.

The concerns of Brian’s peers were well-founded, as scientific considerations took a back seat to the “stunt” of landing men on the moon.  Brian later cited NASA’s “indifference” to scientific objectives in its manned space missions as his primary reason for resigning.[13]  President Johnson came to Houston in early 1968 and announced that NASA’s ambitious plans, including missions to Mars, were being scrapped to pay for the invasion of Vietnam.[14]  Brian began to believe that he would never get into space. 

In the astronaut corps’s test-pilot culture, every astronaut was issued the equivalent of a supersonic sports coup, the T-38, and was expected to log many hours per month flying it.  Three astronauts died in T-38 crashes before Brian joined the astronaut corps, and a couple of months after Brian joined NASA, another astronaut died while flying a T-38.[15]  With the Mars program canceled and astronauts regularly dying in T-38s, and those were test pilots dying, Brian the astronomer calculated the odds of dying in a training accident.  Even if he had a test pilot's background, Brian calculated that he had a one-in-five chance of dying in a plane accident before he ever went on a space mission.[16] 

Brian’s final straw was flight training.  Not only did Brian quickly discover upon joining NASA that he was prone to airsickness, but within a month of flight training, on his second solo flight, he had a bad experience, cut the flight short, and quit NASA a few days later, in April 1968.[17]  He was not a natural pilot, and when Brian told Slayton that he was resigning, he said, “I guess flying just isn’t my cup of tea.”[18]  Those words were blared across America’s media over the succeeding days, became a game show question, and even became the title of a book’s chapter about the astronauts.[19] 

After NASA

Brian was the only planetary scientist in the astronaut corps during the Apollo program.  Brian met Carl Sagan in 1965 at Harvard, where Sagan had a huge globe of Mars in his office.  When Brian resigned from NASA, Sagan recruited Brian to Cornell, and Brian and Carl became arguably the world’s two leading experts on Mars.[20]

Brian immersed himself in scientific study in those heady early days of lunar and planetary exploration, as the first probes gave humanity close-up views of the planets and the moon.  Brian studied lunar mascons with Sagan, and made predictions about how mascons would affect Apollo mission trajectories as they orbited the moon.[21]  Brian’s mascon studies allowed him to predict and help discover Mercury’s largest surface feature, the Caloris Basin.[22]

While Brian pursued his scientific work, he became politically active and somewhat of a NASA gadfly.  He protested the war in Cambodia in 1970 and began criticizing NASA publicly even before publishing the book about his NASA days.[23]

One of Brian's most memorable moments from those politically active days was his participation in the May 9, 1970 protest of the American invasion of Cambodia.  Brian told me that when he and some college professor colleagues were surprisingly invited into the White House to present their grievances, Brian tried to take the protest straight to Nixon, but was stopped at the Oval Office's door by H.R. Haldeman. 

Brian was a regular Op-Ed contributor to The New York Times, and was often openly critical of NASA, both in print and in testimonies in the U.S. Senate.  Brian’s former colleagues in the astronaut program were unhappy with his NASA critiques, even calling him out publicly.[24]  Those were also Brian’s most politically active years.  In 1975, Brian was appointed to Mo Udall’s Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, was its special consultant on energy, and became one of Udall’s policy advisors and speech writers when Udall ran for president for the 1976 election.[25]  Brian’s efforts not only helped throw cold water on America’s nuclear fever, as Nixon advocated putting one thousand nuclear reactors in the USA by 2000, but Brian helped craft the renewable energy policy that had looked remarkably like what Carter unveiled when he became president.[26]  Brian’s focus back then was not only on alternatives such as direct solar and wind power, but on the environmental devastation inflicted by burning hydrocarbon fuels and the hazards of nuclear energy.  Brian also brought his skillset as an atmospheric scientist to the hydrocarbon fuel issue, and was one of the early voices on the perils of global warming.[27]

The strain of those politically active days wrecked Brian’s first marriage.  In 1975, Gerard O’Neill recruited Brian to Princeton; they performed research and wrote papers and books on space colonization, which included orbiting cities and mining the moon, asteroids, and Mars’s moons.[28]  They also advocated space-based solar collectors.[29]  They were advocating a kind of space-based Utopia.  Princeton’s physics department had a faculty of about 40, and several of them were Nobel laureates.  On every other Tuesday, the physics faculty gathered for a luncheon and sipped their sherry, and the most common topic of conversation was debunking and ridiculing claims of the paranormal.[30]  Brian was engaged in noble and visionary work, while working in the retail political system for peaceful change and playing at the scientific establishment’s highest levels, and he later admitted how those days tended to inflate his ego.[31]  

Brian’s worldview was neatly aligned with the scientific establishment’s materialistic and reductionistic perspective, until a fateful day in 1979 when Brian took a human potential course and had what is today called a remote viewing.  My mystical awakening began while performing the same exercise in 1974.  Brian never fully returned to the scientific establishment after that exercise, although his exit took nearly a decade to complete.  On one hand, it was scary to leave his safe, lucrative career behind.  On the other, Brian got a taste of the truth and could not let go.  He realized that the materialism and reductionism of institutional science was deadening.  In 1982, he had what he called a near-death experience as he crashed his car on an icy road.  The car was completely destroyed as it flipped several times and landed in a ditch.  Brian left his body as the accident progressed, and felt as if he was viewing the accident from above it.  When the car finally came to a halt, it was completely crushed except where Brian sat, and he felt an indescribable peace as he sat there.  He walked away from the wreck unharmed.[32] 

As Brian stepped out onto science’s leading edge, he lost his standing, lost his relationships with colleagues such as Sagan and O’Neill, and eventually lost his well-paying career.[33]  In late-life interviews, Brian said that if he knew what he was in for, he would have kept sipping sherry in his soft berth at Princeton.  I know the feeling, but his willingness to explore the unknown made him an astronaut, and is what made him a great man in my eyes.  All the great ones that I have encountered made immense personal sacrifices to pursue the truth and help humanity and Earth heal, from Ralph McGehee to Dennis Lee.  Brian felt guilty when pumping gasoline into his car.  It is that nagging conscience, and acting from it, that made them great. 

Although Brian fled Princeton, he was not quite finished with the scientific establishment.  He went to work for Science Applications International Corporation ("SAIC") in Los Angeles.  Brian began at SAIC in 1982, just as the Reagan Revolution  began.  Brian’s peaceful goals had been firmly established with his Washington D.C. protest and subsequent Capitol Hill work.  At SAIC, Brian continued the direction that he took with O’Neill, with space colonies and asteroid mining.  Brian’s interest in Mars continued, and he advocated a joint USA-Soviet mission to Mars.[34]

While his relationship with NASA became strained, Brian was not completely estranged from his astronaut brethren; he helped get Buzz Aldrin a job at SAIC and shared an office with him.  While Brian stayed true to his convictions and refused to work on military applications at SAIC, he had extensive military contact.  Brian once briefed Robert McNamara, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and others of their stature, and he came away disturbed; they acted like robots, and Perle acted quite arrogantly.[35]  Brian once informed me that if he had played ball at SAIC, he could have retired as a millionaire, but he refused to work on Reagan’s Star Wars project and was laid off in 1987, just before his retirement benefits would have vested.  They literally gave his office to a former Air Force colonel who was showered with millions of dollars to study the American military’s options after an all-out nuclear war.[36]

On the Frontiers of Science

Brian’s departure from SAIC marked the end of his scientific establishment days.  When he left SAIC, Brian’s greatest adventures began.  He approached the paranormal as a scientist, not a mystic.  Brian realized that many paranormal experiences were not easily subjected to scientific experiments; people should have their own experiences, which was the greatest evidence of all.  But Brian also advocated scientific study of paranormal phenomena, from psychic healing to after-death experiences to crop circles to zero-point energy.[37]  Brian also became involved in peace efforts with the Soviet Union, including traveling to Moscow in 1988 to promote a joint American-Soviet mission to Mars.[38]  In 1989, Brian participated in a peace cruise down the Ukraine’s Dnieper River with the first fellow Westerners to visit the area in decades.[39] 

Beginning around 1990, Brian visited laboratories across the world and spent quality time with leading-edge scientists.  Brian did not know it when he had his remote-viewing experience, but at Princeton at the same time, Robert Jahn, Princeton’s Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, founded a laboratory devoted to studying psychokenesis and other paranormal phenomena.  In 1990, Brian and his son successfully performed an informal psychokenesis experiment there.[40]  In 1990, Brian worked with Marcel Vogel and reproduced his experimental results of subjecting juice samples to crystal-based energy and preventing decay.[41]

Brian also visited psychics who provided incredible demonstrations of their skills, including Sathya Sai Baba and Thomaz Green Morton.  After Morton performed his feats, the kind that the “skeptics” cannot hope to convincingly fake, Brian watched Morton’s body light up several times, as if his body was a flash bulb, and one flash produced a “brilliant green filamentary structure.”[42] 

In the early 1990s, Brian began examining the free energy issue.  He visited Tom Bearden in May 1991, and at the conference where we met in July 1991, Brian met Moray King, another free energy theorist.[43]  Brian was initially somewhat skeptical of Bearden’s claims of free energy suppression and similar “political” activities, and was more focused on understanding the physics behind free energy, which seems to be related to all manner of paranormal phenomena.  Brian’s “political” understanding would radically change in coming years.  Brian co-founded the International Association for New Science, and as with other similar efforts, Brian eventually found himself on the outside looking in.[44]

Brian had always been quite an international traveler, and for the next several years he intensively traveled across the globe, visiting laboratories, ashrams, crop circles, and so on.  He always approached those situations as a scientist, but it was a challenging stance to maintain when incredible events transpired. 

In 1994, Brian visited free energy and exotic technology inventors, and eventually more than a dozen free energy labs.  Some were pillar-of-the-establishment labs such as Shiuji Inomata’s in Japan and Dr. Paramahamsa Tewari’s in India, while other labs wished to remain anonymous.[45]  Brian also visited Yull Brown, for another one of many overlaps in our journeys.

Those events culminated in Brian’s first free energy book, Miracle in the Void, published in 1996, which was when our relationship really began, but I need to back this narrative up to when we first met, in 1991.

I Meet Brian

Not long after Brian's SAIC sacking in the Los Angeles area in 1987, I was improbably returning there from Brian's hometown of Boston, hauling our company’s assets in a moving van and towing my 1973 Pinto wagon behind it.  My teenage dream of changing humanity’s energy paradigm led to a series of preposterous paranormal events (1, 2) that landed me in the midst of arguably the greatest attempt ever made to bring alternative energy to the American marketplace.  While my initial orientation was squeezing more energy from a gallon of gasoline, in late 1986 my eventual partner, Dennis Lee, began thinking in terms of free energy.  Dennis moved the operation to my hometown, Ventura, in June 1987, and then things got “interesting.”  Three years later, I moved from Ventura to Dayton after my life was shattered.  I had been radicalized. 

A few months before I moved to Ohio in 1990, a close associate told me about his visit with a free energy inventor with the goods.  The International Tesla Society contacted my associate and arranged the meeting.  During my years with Dennis, there was plenty of secrecy and “security,” which I did not like, but it came with the territory.  When I was told about that free energy inventor, I was not told his name or the location of his laboratory.  However, I was told that when the device ran, ice formed on it, and that the inventor’s wife had Alzheimer’s disease; caring for her took a great deal of his time. 

After my mystical awakening at age 16, I became a devoted mystical student and thought that I had just about seen it all by age 30.  In those days, I joined meditation groups and other mystical efforts, and in 1990 I joined the U.S. Psychotronics Association ("USPA") in Dayton which was one of numerous “New Science” organizations that formed in the 20^th century’s final quarter.  The USPA described itself as one that pursued “the science of mind-body-environment relationships, an interdisciplinary science concerned with the interactions of matter, energy, and consciousness.”  That is a fairly standard description of New Science organizations that I am aware of.

In July 1991, I was unemployed and volunteered to work at the national USPA conference held in Yellow Springs, next to Dayton.  The conference was dedicated to Vogel's memory; he had recently died.  I worked the registration table and discovered how a corporate hit man arrived to wreck one of Dennis’s appearances at a New Science conference a couple of years earlier.   Brian was a speaker at that USPA conference, and I was assigned to drive him from the airport.[46]

I had no idea who Brian was; he was just one of the speakers that I ferried back and forth in my Pinto.  When I picked him up, we hit it off immediately.  I mentioned my free energy background, and Brian mentioned his visit with Bearden that May.  I then asked Brian if he knew of a free energy inventor whose device became coated with ice when it ran and whose wife had Alzheimer’s disease.  Brian replied that it was Sparky Sweet, and one mystery was solved.  I promptly forgot Sparky’s name for the next decade, and it was only within the last several years that I learned that Sparky lived in the San Fernando Valley, just down the road from us when we were in Ventura. 

Somewhere in our conversation, I may have learned that Brian was a former astronaut, and as we drove to the conference, we went right past Wright-Patterson Air Force Base's front gates.  By that time, I was pursuing the research that became my website and knew that Wright-Patterson was the reputed home of captured extraterrestrial craft and even alien corpses.  Barry Goldwater once asked to see the ET show, and his friend Curtis LeMay harshly berated him for asking. 

As we drove past Wright-Patterson, Brian and I joked that we should drive to the Wright-Patterson front gates with a couple of busloads of USPA conference attendees and innocently state that we were there to tour Hangar 18 and the Blue Room.  I always smile when I think of that scenario.  If Hollywood has not shot a scene like that before, it should.

I did not talk with Brian at the conference after I delivered him.  I cannot remember quite how I thought of him in those days, other than he was pretty hip to the free energy and UFO milieus.  Brian’s speech at the conference, which I did not attend as I was busy with my duties, was about the need for a new science. 

I soon landed my next career position and continued reading incessantly on the subject matter that my site addresses.  In late 1995, I heard of Brian’s new book on free energy, titled Miracle in the Void.  I got it and was impressed.  Not only did Brian write one of the best summaries of the free energy conundrum that I had yet encountered, which he called, “The Suppression Syndrome,” he was about the first writer that I encountered who mentioned Dennis and didn’t lie about him.  I bought 35 copies of the book; Brian later said that I was that book’s biggest fan.  That was when our relationship really began.

Dennis emerged from prison in 1994, visited me in 1995, and in early 1996 began his legendary barnstorming tours.  Brian called me one day and said that he and Dennis were speaking at the same New Agey expo, and asked me to connect him with Dennis, and I did.  They met at the conference.  Dennis attended Brian’s talk, but Brian did not attend Dennis’s because he was tired and needed a nap.  I met Brian before his 1992 heart attack, and I was surprised to hear how frail his health seemed to be in the wake of his heart attack.  Several years later, I noted the same lack of energy that was evident in 1996.

In Miracle in the Void, Brian wrote about becoming the Paul Revere of free energy.  With my free energy nightmares, watching Dennis’s efforts since Ventura, and several years of making my own attempts to interest various parties in free energy, I had serious doubts whether anybody was going to open their sleepy eyes as Brian rode through their town.  Dennis attracted people’s interest primarily because he threatened to pull the quadrillion dollar rabbit out of his hat, and the audience’s motivation was nearly invariably about getting a piece of the action.  Getting people’s interest for any reason other than self-serving motivation was extremely difficult.  But, Brian could pound on doors that people such as Dennis and I could not, so I wished him the best in his Paul Revere efforts and looked forward to hearing how it went. 

Brian’s Ride Gets Rough

Leaving the Establishment was far harder than Brian imagined it might be.  Losing a well-paid steady income and comfortable retirement was part of his pain.  Brian wrote and edited several books during his academic days; publishing books and scientific papers was part of his job, and the publishers were organizations such as Houghton-Mifflin and Cambridge University Press.  But after Brian left the scientific establishment, the publishers steadily became less prominent, and for one of his last books, his distributor went bankrupt when Brian’s book inventory was in the distributor’s warehouse.  Brian had paid for the printing and lost that inventory in his distributor’s bankruptcy, which in turn drove Brian into bankruptcy.

Brian played Paul Revere honestly; he rode and rode across the world.  He pounded on every door that he could.  He looked up his environmentalist pals.  With almost the sole exception of Alden Bryant, who was the hippest environmentalist that I ever met, Brian found no takers.  Brian approached one of humanity’s most prominent scholars on the environment and humanity’s immense problems, whose publications Brian liberally cited in his books.  When Brian mentioned free energy as a potential part of the solution to humanity’s seemingly intractable problems (it would be the cornerstone), the scholar looked at Brian as if he had insulted his mother.  When Brian mentioned free energy as a possible solution to Amory Lovins, one of the world’s leading voices regarding innovative energy “solutions,” Lovins became “very flustered” and fled.[47]  Brian approached the physics department’s dean at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions, which Brian once called home during his scientific establishment days.  The dean vehemently and pedantically thrust his finger into the air as he pronounced the idea of free energy as “impossible” and contrary to the “laws of physics.” 

Those were typical examples of Brian’s encounters as he played Paul Revere.  While the big names treated the idea of free energy like the plague, it was not always so with the world’s youth.  Brian was a visiting faculty member at Cal Tech in 1970-1971, while taking a sabbatical from Cornell.  While at Cal Tech, Brian published papers in Science and Nature, using Cal Tech’s affiliation in his papers.[48]  Brian also was on the Mariner 10 TV Science Team as the deputy team leader, and the team leader was a Cal Tech professor.  They won awards from NASA for their work.  In 1998, a Cal Tech honors graduate student in physics asked Brian to speak at the commencement about new energy, new science, and their suppression.  When a Cal Tech faculty member heard about the invitation, he tried to get the student to cancel the invitation and said that Brian had never worked at Cal Tech.  Brian eventually prevailed, as far as speaking went, but they moved his talk to the commencement event’s end, when almost everybody had already left.[49]  Brian had other incidents like that in which he was disinvited, or projects were killed due to high-level intervention.[50]

Brian’s defrocking continued on several fronts.  Soon after SAIC dumped Brian, Wally Schirra publicly questioned whether Brian was really an astronaut.  Schirra promoted a 50-mile-high club, in which only people who had been 50 miles or more above Earth’s surface could call themselves astronauts (which would have disqualified Roger Chaffee).  Not long afterward, Brian’s credentials were challenged by a leading UFO organization that alleged that NASA stated that Brian was not an astronaut.  Brian then provided NASA documentation that showed his job title as “astronaut.”  In 2009, Brian discussed those issues in his Project Camelot interview. 

For many years, Brian was the only former-astronaut without an official NASA biography.  When Brian asked me to write his biographies, I decided to do NASA’s first, for strategic reasons.  I already had bad experiences with editing at Wikipedia, and did not look forward to trying again (so far, it has not been too bad of an experience, but I had to battle the editors).  When the public asked NASA why Brian did not have a biography, its reply was that Brian did not sign a release form.  Brian informed me that NASA’s answer was technically accurate, but there was obviously more to it.  When I wrote Brian’s biography, I went through the same public channel that NASA used for its quick reply to questions about Brian’s lack of a biography.  I received silence as a reply.  A month later, I submitted it again.  Silence again.  I even had Brian do it.  Silence.  I eventually used one of Brian’s connections from his astronaut days and directly contacted the astronaut corps.  One of the most famous active astronauts was assigned to work with me, and I was treated by the astronaut corps fairly and better than I expected.  The astronauts were gracious, I am happy to report.

Immediately after his NASA biography was published, Brian’s Martian credentials were challenged by prominent ex-NASA personnel.  I then asked Brian for anything that could bolster his Martian credentials, and Brian provided his Shepard and von Braun anecdotes. 

But all such instances were minor nuisances compared to what happened in the early days of Brian’s adventures on the frontiers of science.  Brian told me about it in 2001, and everybody who knew him well heard about the string of incidents, and there were similar events, but I do not have the details for them.  Brian publicly alluded to the events numerous times but would not discuss them in detail, for reasons of self-preservation.  Brian does not have to worry about retribution anymore, but I have also removed nearly all identifying information so that nobody feels threatened by the disclosure. 

During Brian’s early days of exploring free energy and other fringe science topics, one of them was the UFO phenomenon.  During his public work on UFOs, Brian was approached by high-ranking military officials to perform UFO-related research for the USA’s military.  It was a cloak-and-dagger operation and Brian wanted nothing to do with it.  The USA’s military is deeply into the UFO issue, and its public denials are official lies.  The day that Brian returned home after refusing that offer, he nearly died in an incident that Brian said was the military’s response to his refusal.  Brian believed that they used exotic weaponry to try to kill him, and they nearly succeeded.  Brian’s health never recovered from the incident, and I believe that it shortened his life.  When Brian told me the story, he told it in a light-hearted fashion and finished his story with “Thanks, guys.  I was their guinea pig.”  The closest thing that I saw to Brian publicly telling what happened was in the prologue to his last book.  Brian’s encounters were similar to Ted’s.

In the circles I have run around in, surviving a murder attempt is how people “join the club” of high-level activists.  Nearly everybody whom I respect in the free energy field knows or believes that the situation is conjoined with the extraterrestrial issue.  The motivation to keep the lid on the ET situation is not to prevent a War of the Worlds panic amongst the public, but to keep the public ignorant of technologies that come with ETs, such as free energy and anti-gravity.  Surviving a murder attempt over the UFO situation made Brian an honorary member of the free energy suppression club. 

New Energy and Other Controversies

In 1984, Brian still worked in the scientific establishment but was drifting toward its fringes, and Richard Hoagland and professional image analyzers persuaded Brian that the Face on Mars might be artificial.  Brian called for scientific investigation of the Face, to determine whether it might have an artificial origin.  Brian also thought that Hoagland stretched the data too far in making his case for a “city” at Cydonia.  Before the 1998 reimaging of the Face by NASA, Brian publicly stated that many speculations about the Face and “city” were “weak, at best.”[51]  But Brian was highly interested in what the reimaging would show; I talked to him as the image was being slowly downloaded to computers around the world (before high-speed Internet connections were readily available), and he downloaded it like the rest of us.  The Face on Mars issue was one of many in which Brian himself became a political football, because of his stature as an ex-astronaut and prominent astronomer, as people used him to gain credibility for their causes.

Brian visited Sathya Sai Baba’s ashram several times and had private audiences.  They were extraordinary encounters, but Brian approached them as a scientist, not a devotee.  However, his relationship with Sai Baba became the focus of rancorous battles over the years as people used it for their personal crusades.  

While many controversies that dogged Brian became maddening for him, the area that may have caused him the most grief was the Apollo moon landings controversy.  Brian publicly stated that the moon landings could have been faked, but that the possibility was remote, and his appearance on a FOX TV show in 2001 caused a firestorm of controversy around him that never quite went away.  My relationship to the Apollo moon landings controversy is told at this footnote.[52]  I made an original contribution to the issue when I co-discovered footage of Neil Armstrong leaping to the Lunar Module, which largely ended any residual doubt that I had about the moon landings.  There are cover-ups and skullduggery regarding space exploration.  I have inside information that would curl most people’s hair, but faked moon landings is not one of those areas.  When I found Armstrong’s Leap, I informed Brian.  A few weeks later, Brian invited me to meet him in Sacramento.  I drove from Seattle, played his chauffeur, and hosted him at my wife’s parents’ home.  That was an eventful meeting, and our relationship began to become collaborative.

As I drove Brian around, we traded notes.  I asked Brian about that old guy with the free energy device that got coated with ice when it ran.  Brian then told me about Sparky Sweet’s last days.  Sparky was accosted, shown a photograph taken of him in his home, working on his free energy device, and simultaneously threatened; that is a famous event.[53]  Sparky received death threats and other harassments in those days, but Brian said that that was only the warm-up.  The final threat was an entire package of photographs taken through the walls of Sparky’s home.  They made it clear that they could watch him use the toilet, and he was given his final ultimatum: quit or die.  Sparky was closely involved with Tom Bearden in those days, and they were apparently trying to work with General Motors.  Sparky fled into the Mojave Desert.  Brian visited Sparky a week before he died, in his hiding place.  Sparky is not the only inventor to flee into the Mojave Desert.  Brian said that Sparky was tired at his life’s end; he was 85, and his journey became far more than he bargained for.  Sparky died a week after Brian saw him, of a “heart attack.”  There was a sad sympathy in Brian’s voice when he talked about Sparky’s last days.  Then Brian proceeded to tell me about his health incident. 

Before long, I was telling Brian about the exotic technology show that a friend received.  When I began to describe it, Brian’s response was, “So, he got a show from the spooks.”  That show was unremarkable to Brian.  I did not press Brian about it, but it seemed like my friend was in good company to witness a show like that.  Brian was more interested in my relative who was a CIA contract agent who worked for a household-name diplomat.  We had that chat after we almost got run out of town, in what became a famous event. 

We also talked about environmental issues and solutions.  I brought up the global warming issue and the scientific “skeptics” who were on the hydrocarbon lobby’s payroll, and Brian discussed a former atmospheric-scientist colleague who Brian believed had “sold his soul” to the hydrocarbon interests, and was one of the leading global warming “skeptics.”  There was anger, betrayal, and sadness in Brian’s voice as he talked about his former colleague.

That night, I took Brian to a restaurant in Nevada City, where my wife’s parents once lived.  We discussed many subjects over dinner, and one of them was the moon landings and Brian’s appearance on that FOX TV show.  Brian said that the camera crew ambushed him and took those aired ten seconds out of context.  Brian was highly impressed with Armstrong’s Leap.  I said that I could put Brian in touch with the best source that I knew of about the moon landings effort, and the next week I introduced Brian to Jay Windley through email, and their encounter became the initial source of Jay’s page on Brian.  I was not privy to their exchanges, but Jay’s account squares with my recollection of how Brian saw the issue at the time.  That Fox played a bait-and-switch on Cydonia, to steer it into the moon landings for the moment that they could use for their show, is how the “news” typically operates.  

That did not mean that Armstrong’s Leap removed all of Brian’s doubt about the moon landings, although I explained why it nearly did for me.  Two years later, Brian was still writing about the moon landings in this way:

“To set the record straight, there is no doubt in my mind that the capsules went into orbit around the Moon, because of the photographs, signals received on Earth, and the capabilities of the enormous Saturn V rocket booster.  It is conceivable but highly doubtful that the lunar landings didn’t take place.  Who am I to say for sure one way or the other, since I wasn’t there?  Regardless, the Apollo program was a great success.  It gave me a valuable reference point for what we must do now.”[54] 

But, Brian would never enjoy peace on that issue.  That FOX TV show largely wrecked what little remaining relationship that Brian had with his fellow astronauts.  The moon hoax crowd kept trying to drag Brian into their cause.  With all that Brian saw on his odyssey, he was justified in suspecting that the USA’s government would not have been above trying to fake the moon landings if they had to.  Brian knew that the federal government’s stance on the UFO issue was duplicitous at best, and believed that he nearly lost his life over it.  In his life's last year, as the moon hoax situation kept rearing its head, Brian wrote his “final word” on the subject.  Brian did not want to be remembered as the astronaut who doubted that we landed on the moon. 

During our note-trading sessions, I also heard how his ride as the Paul Revere of free energy went.  Some of those violent reactions related previously came from Brian that day.  During our conversations, Brian questioned if humanity was really a sentient species.  He said something like, “we are an allegedly sentient species…” and tucked into the middle of a sentence, saying it in passing, almost as if he was embarrassed to say it, but when he said it, I understood.  I have no doubt that it was a direct result of playing Paul Revere and finding out that virtually nobody was home, anywhere on Earth.  Brian made a similar statement a couple of years later.[55]  When I heard it and read it, my heart hurt for him.  It is not fun to discover that grim truth.  Einstein discussed sentience, too.  Brian repeatedly stated late in his life that the free energy journey is a lonely one. 

During that 2001 trip, I took Brian to the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre in Grass Valley.  Brian was one of their yoga instructors and lectured at their centers around the world, and I first experienced Brian the Rock Star.  We had lunch there, and Brian was treated with great veneration.  Brian was a man of the people, in the same way that Dennis is.  People loved being in Brian’s gentle presence, and I came to understand why.  The photograph at the top of this essay was taken at the yoga center that day.  During the 1990s and early 2000s, Brian gave more than a thousand lectures all over the world, on his New Science topics. 

When I saw the World Trade Center’s towers smoking a month later, I knew that my efforts were too little and too late, and that event marked the beginning of my midlife crisis’s dark phase.  When Mr. Professor died a year later, and that voice popped up unbidden and claimed credit for leading me to him, I got pretty angry with the voice, and do not want to hear from it again, unless it first plans to do a lot of explaining. 

When Brian and I met in Sacramento, he lived in Colorado, but in the spring of 2003, just as the dust was settling on our invasion of Iraq, Brian lived near Nevada City, and invited me to help found the New Energy Movement ("NEM").  In retrospect, I should have declined the invitation.  I was an emotional wreck.  Simply listening to the Bush junta's evil drum beat since the summer of 2002 was a nightmare in of itself.  The bloody invasion, similar to how Hitler invaded Poland, as Americans waved their flags and cheered, was one of my life’s more agonizing episodes.  I was unemployed, so I had a front-row seat for it.  Several million imperial deaths later, the American oil industry is pretty happy to now control Iraq’s oil fields, which is about Earth’s last “easy” oil, as far as how costly it is to extract and refine.  Brian and I never directly discussed it, but his timing in founding NEM was likely related to our genocidal invasions of Asia’s hydrocarbon country. 

In June 2003, several of us founded NEM.  My most pleasant memory of Brian was the day after our first board meeting, when Brian invited me to his house to relax.  He rented a house that had the Yuba River literally in his back yard.  That day he and I swam across the Yuba River and sunned ourselves on the rocks, while Brian’s wife Meredith and a neighbor played in the river.  Brian was a fun-loving person who possessed a gentle, sometimes childlike, humor.  Brian began opening up more that day, and we had some intimate personal conversations.  There is a great deal about my journey that I cannot publicly reveal at this time, but we shared plenty.  During our conversation, Brian sadly spoke of his dismay that a close relative was a Rush Limbaugh fan.  Virtually every progressive American pal that I have has at least one relative who is a Rush Limbaugh or Fox News fan.  It comes with being an American. 

Brian also talked about his substance abuse issues, which also comes with this territory.  I was forced into drinking early in my career and wrestled with the bottle for 20 years.  Brian only quit alcohol a couple of years before he died, and an ayahuasca ceremony precipitated his second heart attack.  Anybody on this path for long knows quite well the urge to deaden the pain, however briefly.  Being aware on this planet is no easy task.  For some, their respite is accompanied by drugs; for others it is comfort food, for others it is TV, religion, sex, meditation, nature, fasting, etc.  The Global Controllers (GCs), study such “proclivities” so that they can be exploited to take free energy aspirants out of contention. 

A month after NEM's first board meeting, I found work after being unemployed for nearly a year, and resumed my high-stress career.  Most of my career has been working at high-stress jobs in which the 50-to-60-hour workweek is normal, and it was no exception when I resumed my career.

We had another NEM board meeting in December 2003, and I got to hear more free energy war stories from non-NEM members who attended.  But, I was the only NEM board member who had really been through the free energy meat grinder.  I saw the organization heading to painful places where I had already been, and I did not want to see that territory again, not when it could be avoided.  At a board meeting on May 8, 2004, we began planning what became our conference in Portland in September.  On one hand, I began wanting out of NEM, but on the other, I was the only board member with a well-paying job.  I committed to spending a lot of money on NEM, but I also let Brian know that I was getting cold feet.

Most of the NEM board knew Eugene Mallove, and he was the first person who committed to speaking at the conference, and Brian later said that he intended for Mallove to be the keynote speaker.  As I began buying professional assistance for NEM, the next week we had some technical issues with the help that I brought in.  I was working 12-hour days at the office and coming home to try to get things straightened out at NEM.  Brian got agitated.  Some was understandable, but some seemed a little over the top.  By Friday evening, I had calmed the waters. 

On May 14, 2004, at 9:37 PM, Pacific Time, Brian wrote me an email where he thanked me for getting things back in control, and further wrote:

“Sometimes, the best projects try to be psychically sabotaged in its early stages.  Thanks for hanging in there.  Something's happening.”

As Brian wrote that email, the police had just discovered Mallove’s body.  We all heard about his murder the next morning.  That was the beginning of the end of Brian’s involvement in NEM.  Mallove’s murder spooked Brian, for good reason.  Brian figured that he was next.[56]  Brian was psychically gifted; while I will never know what Brian was alluding to in that email, he was feeling the vibe, and I was too. 

Mallove’s murder was an unsolved crime for several years, and Mallove’s former tenants were convicted.  As Brian would later write, there are many ways to cause somebody’s death and make it look like an accident, suicide, natural disease, or random crime.  With some of the exotic technologies that the GCs possess, and my impression that they used mind-attacking psychotronic technology the week before Mallove was murdered and immediately after the conference, I doubt that I will ever accept the random-crime explanation of Mallove’s death.[57]

Brian began planning his move to South America immediately after Mallove’s murder, and kind of went AWOL in South America as we organized the conference, which made it difficult.  Brian’s friend John Mack was killed the day after the Portland conference ended, and Brian later cited that as part of his motivation for moving to Ecuador. 

Those were terrible times for some of us, but throughout it, I always loved to hear Brian talk and write about free energy and related issues.  Many of his talks can be seen on YouTube, for instance.  I have yet to meet anybody whose perspective was closer to mine.  Brian had not been through the free energy meat grinder like I had, but he had his own amazing path of discovery, and I learned plenty from Brian over the years, as he kept banging on the world’s doors.  I also watched Brian weather personal attacks, and he did it with a generosity of spirit that I have often seen Dennis display toward his innumerable assailants.

Some of my Internet stalkers are probably professionals, and Brian was treated similarly.  In his last years, we traded stalker notes.  Brian had a high-profile stalker that dogged him when he spoke at conferences, and one was coming up that the stalker would attend.  Brian was not looking forward to the experience, but accepted it as coming with the territory.  It is well known that the CIA and other agencies send agents to New Science gatherings (they have to identify their employment status when asked, and they do, and some gatherings made that a practice and identified numerous federal agents that way), but they are not the wet-work spooks that people need to be wary of.  People such as Bill the BPA Hit Man are privatized provocateurs.  I worked the registration table at NEM’s Portland conference, and plenty of shady characters attended.

Brian also had personal idiosyncrasies that all of us can lay claim to, but they were harmless, such as his Lapis Pig activities.  The original Lapis Pig was only a couple of inches long and kept next to his kitchen sink, but during one of our board meetings, Brian took out his puppet version of Lapis Pig and made some cute capitalist comments.  Lapis Pig’s personality was like Dogbert’s.  I considered Brian’s idiosyncrasies lovable, but I saw him get attacked for them, and he always shrugged them off. 

Brian’s Last Years

When Brian moved to Ecuador immediately after the Portland conference finished, it began what I consider his life’s last years.  Brian kind of lived in a semi-self-imposed exile, although he built a center with Meredith to host gatherings.  They hosted a number of them in Brian’s last years.  Also, as with every place that he lived while I knew him, he picked one of the world’s most beautiful places to call home, in Vilcabamba, where the Incas had their vacation homes.  It also stretched his Social Security check further.  Brian remarked in his last years that every time he visited the USA, it seemed to become crazier and harsher, and I will not disagree with his assessment.  Brian ceased active involvement with NEM in what became a controversy; he felt deposed and exiled, others felt differently, and I steered clear of the issue.  Similarly to how I saw Dennis act, such as when he was behind bars, Brian grew where he was planted, and before long, he was trying to stir things up in Ecuador, such as saving the rain forests, stopping the oil companies, and promoting free energy, and he kept globetrotting.

When the Portland conference finished, I quit NEM and became very quiet on the free energy front for years.  I was delivered an invitation to the White House a couple of years after I quit NEM, which I instantly declined, but it brought my midlife crisis to a head.  I then received professional help, and by late 2006 the dawn was beginning to break, after seven years of nearly unceasing emotional agony.  I wrote little during those years.  In late 2006 and early 2007, I slowly began to engage the public once again.  As I look through my emails, I see that I had nearly no contact with Brian from the time I quit NEM until the summer of 2007.  Then we began coming back into each other’s lives; although the last time I saw him was at the Portland conference, in this Internet age, Brian did not seem so far away.  I was beginning to receive invitations into various efforts, and through Brian’s connections I did my first public interview in early 2008.  I wrote this essay in the summer of 2008, largely in response to invitations from progressives.  That essay brought Brian fully back into my life; that essay’s themes could be discerned in Brian’s interviews and writings afterward.  I helped Brian edit his final book, The Energy Solution Revolution, in late 2008 and, in March 2009, Brian and I did a joint interview with Bill Ryan and Kerry Cassidy of Project Camelot. 

During those days, Brian asked me to write his NASA biography and revise his Wikipedia biography, which was abysmal before I rewrote it.  Brian had heavy input to those biographies.  It was an iterative process, and NASA made us edit Brian’s biography a couple of times before accepting the version that they published.  Before I began working on his biographies, Brian asked me to do other things, such as join a free energy effort with some scientists and inventors.  I declined that invitation, but helped Brian write a proposal for the Department of Energy.[58] 

I did not entirely escape the economic mayhem that I predicted, and my landlord lost his job at Microsoft and evicted me to sell the house, just as Brian asked me to help write that DOE proposal.  I will always have semi-fond memories of writing my parts of that proposal as I was literally packing boxes for my hasty move.  A couple of months earlier, I began to write a letter to Brian on what I learned during my journey.  The public version of that letter is my lessons learned essay.  I did not complete it for nearly a year.  Even though Brian had witnessed many incredible events, he eventually admitted how naïve he still was late in his life, and he devoted his last book’s prologue to the dangers of being on the leading edge of efforts to heal the planet and humanity, where such people are made offers that they cannot refuse and are fortunate if they survive the experience.  Brian wanted to write an essay with me about the darkness.  In the epilogue of The Energy Solution Revolution, Brian reproduced an email that I wrote to him partly about that subject, which is reproduced at this footnote.[59] 

Soon after his 2010 heart attack, Brian knew the end was near, and taped a presentation which inspired me to write a preview to my upcoming energy essay.  Brian was very frail near the end of his life, which was obvious to anyone who saw him.

In 2011, I did several interviews, and in the last few months of his life, Brian and I did some interviews with David Gibbons, one of which Jeane Manning also joined.  Brian invited me to what became the last conference that he hosted at his home.  I am not nearly the world traveler that Brian was; I have not been more than a few miles from the USA since 1974, and I took my mother for her last trip to her childhood home instead.  In the last private email that I received from Brian, the day before his last public blog post, he was planning to promote my plan to mount a free energy effort with a chance of success without risking lives.  Will I regret not making that trip to Vilcabamba?  I hope not.  I will likely see Brian soon enough on the other side.  The night that Brian died, some of us were trying to get an alternative cancer treatment sent to him.  Because there has been some controversy over his death, I am producing a portion of the last email that Brian wrote, at this footnote.[60]

Brian knew that his days on Earth were ending (especially after his heart attack in late 2010), and wanted to make them count.  Unlike earlier email correspondence over the years, in which he might sign off with a “best” or “cheers,” all of the private emails that I received from Brian in the last two years of his life were signed off, “Love, Brian.”  He will be greatly missed, and it was an immense blessing to have known him.

Brian’s Legacy

During my years in the free energy trenches and while playing less demanding roles, I met many pretenders and few contenders.  They broke the mold with Dennis and I never met anybody quite like Brian.  When I met Brian, he said that he was a “generalist,” and I did not really know what he meant.  It was not until I was introduced to Bucky Fuller’s work that I understood.  Brian’s deep scientific background, vast political experiences, and mystical awakening, combined with his great heart and conscience, made him a unique member of the free energy field. 

Brian’s departure from this world leaves a hole behind that cannot be filled.  Brian promoted comprehensive thinking, which is another way of saying “generalist,” and he believed that the more of us who could think comprehensively and achieve a high level of heart-centered sentience, the better chance that humanity had of getting over the hump.  Together, such people can help manifest a world that can look a lot like Heaven on Earth.  That was Brian’s beautiful dream.  He devoted his life to it, and that is quite a legacy to leave us.  What will we do with it?

Footnotes