This addresses one of my favorite groups of all: the
professional skeptic crowd. I want to define my terms here. By
"professional" I mean those who do it for a living or spend much
more time doing it than any healthy hobbyist would. James Randi
is a professional skeptic. So was the recently-departed Carl
Sagan. Those people literally made money, and lots of it, from
their "skeptical" efforts. And then there is a whole population of
people who almost without exception work for big power structure
organizations, like James Oberg of NASA, or Isaac Asimov, who
spent many, many hours of their lives being "skeptical." And while
they don’t make money officially for their "skeptical" efforts, there
are power structure awards aplenty showered on their heads (Like
Randi winning a prestigious physics award for helping debunk an
immunologist who apparently found evidence that water had
"memory." An effect that is apparently getting more scientific
confirmation today.), and I can only wonder how many in their
ranks are like Bill the Hit Man, getting quietly paid for their efforts
through either the large corporations or the CIA. And I happen to
know what I am talking regarding that phenomenon of secret
payments for dutiful work on behalf of the CIA or corporate
America, and I won’t go further into it here to protect identities.
And I have a real problem with the moniker of "skeptic" that
those groups have nearly appropriated. Most prominent is the
Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal, abbreviated CSICOP. CSICOP publishes a quarterly
magazine called The Skeptical Inquirer. I go into their particular
contributions in my science piece a little, and here will be a more
thorough job on it. In one of the back issues of The Skeptical
Inquirer that I read I saw a little piece that took pains to define the
word "skeptic." Well, I wish those people at CSICOP would
evidence a little more skepticism where it really counted, like at
their own cherished beliefs. I have yet to see one article in their
pages that seriously challenges the power structure. And they
even bless power structure hatchet jobs, like the one done on
Reich, replete with a massive book burning.
Here is my take on skepticism. True skepticism is one of
the more important qualities of the human mind. Virtually every
breakthrough in thought that has ever occurred has skepticism to
thank. Being skeptical is to look at something with no beliefs, with
a fresh eye that takes nothing for granted. The greatest skeptical
breakthroughs have happened when the founding presumptions of
a body of thought were looked at with a skeptical eye and
questioned. Einstein’s rejection of Newton’s presumptions of
absolute time and absolute space led to the physics we have
today. Questioning the infallibility of the Pope and the Bible
sparked all sorts of fireworks that led to the scientific
establishment that we have today. True skepticism is an
invaluable tool of discovery. In many, many cases it bears little or
no resemblance to the CSICOP crowd’s efforts. In so many ways
what they do is in spirit identical to what the Holy Office of the
Inquisition did so many years ago, as it viciously defended its
wealth and power. And I had better back some of that up with
facts.
The recently departed Carl Sagan was the most famous and
active member of the CSICOP crowd. Carl Sagan was a
household word and I’m sure the eulogies are pouring in, as he
died two days ago as I write this. Carl was the big gun and hero of
the CSICOP crowd, being the honored guest at their annual
meetings, writing pieces for the Skeptical Inquirer, and lending his
huge reputation to their cause. I have been aware of Sagan’s
"skeptical" efforts for awhile now, like the past twenty years. In
1974 I took Silva Mind Control and found out that I and every
person on the planet was inherently psychic, something the armies
of professional skeptics can never take away with their
proclamations. While I was exploring the nature of my
consciousness, Sagan was forming an inquisition to wipe out any
funding to any academic institution for exploring "paranormal"
phenomena. My father apprised me of Sagan’s efforts twenty
years ago.
Over the last several years I have read quite a bit about
Sagan’s debunking efforts. In 1985 I read a piece by Carl Sagan
regarding the Face on Mars issue. I write about it in some detail
in my revised science section. Sagan’s effort was such a blatant
piece of out and out lying on the issue that it eventually inspired
Professor Stanley McDaniel to write his McDaniel Report, where
he laid Sagan’s lies bare for all to see. McDaniel did it in very
conservative language and scholarship, but for anybody who had
read Sagan’s piece in Parade magazine in 1985 and McDaniel’s
dissection of it, where the reader gets to find out the facts about it,
Sagan is exposed as not only a huge liar, but one who used his
lies to beat other researchers over the head very unfairly. Sagan
abused his position as the nation’s most prominent scientists to
savage research being done by other researchers, and he did it in
a very mean-spirited and dishonest way. Get the McDaniel report
if you don’t believe me, and round up that Parade magazine article
of June 2, 1985.
In my science piece I go into the Velikovsky affair, and as I
write this I am reading Ginenthal’s book on the Sagan/Velikovsky
controversy. Ginenthal’s book is awesome. I cannot overstate
how completely Ginenthal dismantles Sagan’s lying and bogus
science on the Velikovsky issue. Sagan is completely demolished
as a scientist in Ginenthal’s book, and his Grand Inquisitor’s hat is
clear for all to see as he led the Inquisition against Velikovsky.
And in The Skeptical Inquirer I saw the review on the hatchet job
done on Velikovsky in 1974, where the organizer of the event
even admitted that it was an attempt to discredit Velikovsky, and
not a fair scientific forum. The Skeptical Inquirer didn’t exactly
report all the facts.
In fact there was a scandal shortly after CSICOP was
formed in the 1970s, when CSICOP debunked research into some
validity of astrological theory. CSICOP roundly debunked (By
doing their own research) the statistical data that the original
researchers came up with, by coming up some of their own. But
when it was published, Dennis Rawlins, a CSICOP executive
committee member and statistician for that particular debunking
effort, could take it no longer and made public that the CSICOP
had cooked their own numbers to fudge the data, and he resigned
from CSICOP in disgust, and there were other scandals
percolating under the CSICOP surface, but apparently covered up
before too much damage to CSICOP’s credibility was done. Since
then CSICOP does no real research of its own, but issues its
proclamations on behalf of the scientific establishment.
I go into Randi’s efforts in debunkery in my science section.
Get Richard Milton’s Forbidden Science, or Robert Anton Wilson’s
The New Inquisition for more on Randi and the CSICOP crowd, or
just read a bunch of issues of The Skeptical Inquirer like I have,
and you will get a taste of their dubious efforts.
So after having studied the skeptical crowd at length, I have
to say I seriously doubt the motivation of many in their ranks. In
even the ones that are relatively honest, they often suffer from
rigid beliefs and evidence a healthy regard for our nation’s
propaganda systems, as they are true believers in the power
structure, and have never seen and cannot seem to imagine the
power structure abusing its power.
And in the "skeptic" world they have their own special
buzzwords and attitudes. Two of their favorite words, in fact two
that scarcely any article of theirs is missing are: pseudoscience
and anecdotal. Pseudoscience means "false science," of course
with the unstated "fact" that what the debunker is practicing is the
one, true science. And "anecdotal" is even more charming.
Anecdotal means that a human being reported a fact or
phenomenon that the "skeptic" did not also witness. Anecdotal
means that it is "not reproducible," and therefore not worthy to be
entered into the scientific ledgers as actual evidence.
So if an alien spaceship landed on your lawn and you told a
scientist about it, or particularly the "skeptic" world, your report
would be chalked up as "anecdotal" and dismissed. If a million of
you witnessed a UFO on your lawn, that would sure be a lot of
anecdotes, but not really convincing evidence. And if about a
hundred thousand people witnessed the "miracle of Fatima" earlier
in this century where an apparition of apparently Jesus’ mother
appeared in the sky for quite some time, that is one heck of an
anecdote, or a mass delusion, where a hundred thousand people
somehow convinced themselves that they all saw something in the
sky that looked pretty amazing. But if the UFO did land on your
lawn, and you had a chat with the little green men, yes, you would
be laughed at by the "skeptics," but you would be the one living in
reality and they would living in the fantasy world, thinking they
have reality all figured out. Because you can’t "prove" it to them,
doesn’t mean they are right or know what they are talking about. I
know for a fact that James Randi has no idea what he is talking
about with his arrogant boasts, but I can’t "prove" his reality to him.
In the world of the "skeptic," human testimony is inherently
suspect, not really something to hang your scientific hat on, or
really consider seriously at all, because in the scientific view of the
world, what goes on between your ears is the illusion, and what is
real is what is going on "out there." But don’t ask those scientific
authorities where that idea came from, because they will point
between their ears, and we all know that what goes on in there is
some accidental byproduct of chemical reactions, an illusion at
best. And don’t tell them that attitude is somewhat akin to a snake
eating its tail. They won’t like that analogy.
And if you somehow produce a Polaroid photo of the UFO
that landed on your lawn, that also can be faked, so a "skeptic"
also knows that is inadmissible as evidence. And if you have
spectacular video footage of it, or if hundreds of people take video
footage of the same crafts, like what happened in Mexico City
during a total eclipse of a few years ago, man oh man, the faking
factories sure must have been working overtime to churn out so
much bogus footage.
And if NASA’s cameras themselves photograph a
spectacular space sequence of an apparently intelligently-piloted
craft making a greater-than-right- angle turn at speeds no human
made craft has ever been observed to attain, to avoid an
apparently ground-based "shotgun blast" that ripped through the
atmosphere, right above a super-secret American military base in
Australia, why the CSICOP bunch simply gets their NASA buddy
James Oberg to analyze the footage and conclude that what you
were seeing was a combination of illusion and coincidence. The
"craft" (And there were more than one of them in that infamous
footage.) is actually not a light hundreds of miles away, as
appears obvious, but actually are floating ice crystals a few feet
from the viewer, and them making their right angle turns was
because they were being blown by a rocket firing on the space
shuttle. See, it is all so easily explained away!
And what about the "shotgun blast" ripping through the
atmosphere right where that illusionary ice particle appeared to be
sitting a few hundred miles away? Well, Mr. Oberg doesn’t see fit
to mention that little anomaly. If pressed, I’m sure he can come up
with another "rational" explanation to explain away that
phenomena. And isn’t it weird that the ice particles were getting
blown sideways mere instants before that as-of-yet unexplained
"shotgun blast" ripping through the atmosphere? Man, what a
coincidence! That phenomenon is what I call the "Rodney King
Beating Phenomenon," where by enough "analysis" people can be
convinced that their eyes didn’t really see what they saw.
It isn’t fun to read the work of the debunkers. Their bag of
tricks can be a very unsavory bag indeed, and it can get
nauseating to read Carl Sagan’s very dubious tactical inventions
in the debunker game. And here is something to really enrage the
"skeptical" crowd. There is another group out there who is lifting
the "skeptical" tactics right out of the CSICOP handbook, and
using them in a way that recalls Carl Sagan at his best: The
Holocaust Deniers. You should read their work. It is very
enlightening. All the testimony of the death camp survivors is
dismissed as "anecdotal" and unreliable. And because the Nazis
took great care to keep their genocidal activities out of the evening
news, and also because neither the German people nor any of the
other Western Nations really cared that Jews were getting
murdered by the millions in the death camps, little actual
undeniable physical evidence of the genocidal activity actually
survived. So the Holocaust Deniers get to nearly "legitimately" put
forth their arguments. Debunking the Holocaust is nearly an
industry in the Far Right circles. CSICOP should perhaps
consider admitting them as honorary members.
In my science section I stated that there are some CSICOP
members whom I actually respect, and that not all of their work is
garbage. I won’t paint them all with the same brush. And many
CSICOP members actually resigned from CSICOP when the
numbers cooking scandal erupted a generation ago, so at least
some CSICOP members get points in my book.
In the McDaniel Report, in the appendix is an abbreviated
course in debunking, a tongue-in-cheek effort by Daniel Drasin. It
is an abridged version of his full course, and it is reproduced in its
entirety in Zen in the Art of Close Encounters, edited by Paul
David Pursglove. Mr. Drasin also evidences long study of the
"skeptical" club, and many of his pointers for aspiring debunkers
are right on the mark. I will just give you some of his pointers and
some of his more astute observations.
Before commencing to debunk, prepare your equipment.
Equipment needed: one armchair.
Put on the right face. Cultivate a condescending air that
suggests that your personal opinions are backed by the full faith
and credit of God. Employ vague, subjective, dismissive terms
such as "ridiculous" or "trivial" in a manner that suggests they
have the full force of scientific authority.
Portray science as not an open-ended process of discovery
but as holy war against unruly hordes of quackery-worshipping
infidels. Since in war the ends justify the means, you may fudge,
stretch, or violate the scientific method, or even omit it entirely, in
the name of defending scientific method.
Keep your arguments as abstract and theoretical as
possible. This will "send the message" that accepted theory
overrides any actual evidence that might challenge it - and that
therefore no such evidence is worth examining.
Reinforce the popular misconception that certain subjects
are inherently unscientific. In other words, deliberately confuse
the process of science with the content of science. (Someone
may, of course, object that science must be neutral to subject
matter and that only the investigative process can be scientifically
responsible or irresponsible. If that happens, dismiss such
objections using a method employed successfully by generations
of politicians: simply reassure everyone that "there is no
contradiction here.")
Arrange to have your message echoed by persons of
authority. The degree to which you can stretch the truth is directly
proportional to the prestige of your mouthpiece.
Always refer to unorthodox statement as "claims" which are
"touted," and to your own assertions as "facts" which are "stated."
Avoid examining the actual evidence. This allows you to
say with impunity, "I have seen absolutely no evidence to support
such ridiculous claims!"
If examining the evidence becomes unavoidable, report
back that "there is nothing new here!" If confronted by a watertight
body of evidence that has withstood the most rigorous tests,
simply dismiss it as being "too pat."
Equate the necessary skeptical component of science with
all of science. Emphasize the narrow, stringent, rigorous and
critical elements of science to the exclusion of intuition,
inspiration, exploration and integration. If anybody objects,
accuse them of viewing science in exclusively fuzzy, subjective or
metaphysical terms.
Insist that the progress of science depends on explaining
the unknown in terms of the known. In other words, science
equals reductionism. You can apply the reductionist approach in
any situation by discarding more and more evidence until what is
left can finally be explained in terms of established knowledge.
Maintain that in investigation of unconventional phenomena,
a single flaw invalidates the whole. In conventional contexts,
however, you may sagely remind the world that "after all,
situations are complex and human beings are imperfect."
Although science is not supposed to tolerate vague or
double standards, always insist that unconventional phenomena
must be judged by a separate, yet ill-defined, set of scientific
rules. Do this by declaring that "extraordinary claims demand
extraordinary evidence" - but take care never to define where the
"ordinary" ends and the "extraordinary" begins. This will allow
you to manufacture an infinitely receding evidential horizon, i.e. to
define "extraordinary" evidence as that which lies just out of reach
at any point in time.
Practice debunkery-by-association. Lump together all
phenomena popularly deemed paranormal and suggest that their
proponents and researchers speak with a single voice. In this way
you can indiscriminately drag material across disciplinary lines or
from one case to another to support your views as needed. For
example, if a claim having some superficial similarity to one at
hand has been (or is popularly assumed to have been) exposed
as fraudulent, cite it as if it were an appropriate example. Then
put on a gloating smile, lean back in your armchair and simply say
"I rest my case."
If a significant number of people agree they have observed
something that violates the consensus reality, simply ascribe it to
"mass hallucination." Avoid addressing the possibility that the
consensus reality, which is routinely observed by millions, might
itself constitute a mass hallucination.
Ridicule, ridicule, ridicule. It is far and away the single most
effective weapon in the war against discovery and innovation.
Ridicule has the unique power to make people of virtually any
persuasion go completely unconscious in a twinkling. It fails to
sway only those few who are of sufficiently independent mind not
to buy into the kind of emotional consensus that ridicule provides.
By appropriate innuendo and example, imply that ridicule
constitutes an essential feature of scientific method that can raise
the level of objectivity, integrity and dispassionateness with which
any investigation is conducted.
Trivialize the case by trivializing the entire field in question.
Characterize the study of orthodox phenomena as deep and time
consuming, while deeming that of unorthodox phenomena so
insubstantial as to demand nothing more than a scan of the
tabloids. If pressed on this, simply say "but there’s nothing there
to study!" Characterize any serious investigator of the unorthodox
as a "buff" or "freak," or as "self-styled" - the media’s favorite code
word for bogus.
Remember that most people do not have sufficient time or
expertise for careful discrimination, and tend to accept or reject
the whole of an unfamiliar situation. So discredit the whole story
by attempting to discredit part of the story. Here’s how: a) take
one element of a case completely out of context; b) find something
prosaic that hypothetically could explain it; c) declare that,
therefore, this one element has been explained; d) call a press
conference and announce to the world that the entire case has
been explained!
Ask unanswerable questions based on arbitrary criteria of
proof. For example, "if this claim were true, why haven’t we seen
it on TV?" or "in this or that scientific journal?" Never forget the
mother of all such questions: "If UFOs are extraterrestrial, why
haven’t they landed on the White House lawn?"
Be selective. For example, if an unorthodox healing method
has failed to reverse a case of terminal illness you may deem it
worthless - while taking care to avoid mentioning the shortcomings
of conventional medicine.
Fabricate confessions. If a phenomenon stubbornly refuses
to go away, set up a couple of colorful old geezers to claim they
hoaxed it. The press and public will always tend to view
confessions as sincerely motivated, and will promptly abandon
their critical faculties. After all, nobody wants to appear to lack
compassion for self-confessed sinners.
And Drasin’s class goes on and on, quite brilliantly.
Drasin’s course is a must for all aspiring debunkers. Actually Mr.
Drasin I’m afraid can be accused of plagiarism, because much of
the course material was lifted from the CSICOP handbook, with
generous contributions by Sagan, Randi and others.
And for all those skeptics out there, combing the planet,
looking for things to debunk, some phenomena and bodies of work
have just plain slipped their attention. I invite your attention to
Moongate by William Brian II. He can be reached at P.O. Box
86372 Portland, Oregon, USA 97286-0372. He published it in
1982, and I go into Brian’s work in some detail in my science
section. His conclusions, based on some very persuasive data
from NASA, are that we have been lied to about the moon shots,
the surface gravity on the moon is higher than we have been told,
and he concludes that conventional rocketry technology was not
used to land and take off from the moon. They are some very bold
charges, backed up with plenty of data, mathematical derivations,
references, footnotes, etc. It is a very scholarly work. So in the
fifteen years since Moongate has been published, how many
"experts" have taken on his charges (Like big gun Oberg.), and
particularly the very impressive neutral point discrepancy? I
contacted Brian, asking him. "How many times have the experts
taken you on William?" His answer is: not even once. Moongate
is simply ignored like it was never written. And it is a relatively
high profile book. I have seen much lesser books receive the full
blast of the "skeptics."
The same can be said of the microscopes of Naessens and
Rife, and their attendant microbiological discoveries. You wonder
just what the "skeptics" are all about. They can’t wait to try to
prove something a "scam" or "hoax" that doesn’t conform to
orthodox dogma. But when very impressive evidence suggests
that we were hoodwinked by the establishment on the moon shots
as part of a general overall plan to keep free energy from the
public, or that orthodox cancer treatment is a fraud, sentencing
millions of people to unnecessary deaths, and there have been
microscopes built that have allowed research that has largely
proven those claims, the "skeptics" are nowhere to be found. I
mean, it is surreal.
And when the King of the Debunkers is shown to be a
completely fraudulent debunker, and I have sent that information
to the "skeptics" time after time, the answer I get back from them is
complete and total silence. I haven’t seen one debunker utter one
word about the fact that Sagan was a fraudulent debunker. So I
am very skeptical of the skeptics.
NOTE FROM ERIC: this whole file was made from Dennis's most
loyal follower ever, Wade Frazier. For some reason, Wade just seemed
to disappear right after promising to look at my web pages.
And that brings me to Dennis’
most vocal skeptic on the Internet, Eric Krieg. Eric is a very
interesting dichotomy. I actually think he is sincere, but fell in with
the skeptic crowd (Actually a more descriptive term is "true
believer in the scientific establishment and the power structure."),
and has been led astray. I am going to give Eric the benefit of the
doubt here and believe he is well-meaning, and not an agent of
the NSA or some Rockefeller-related organization.
If I was a "skeptic" out there, looking at Dennis for the first
time, there would be some questions I would be asking myself. Is
he real and does he really have the marvelous technology that he
says he has or is pursuing, is he a scam, or (And this is an option I
haven’t seen pierce Eric’s brain yet.) is he a man who is trying to
get up enough momentum from the people so they can together
overcome the amazing suppression efforts that appear to have
been directed Dennis’ way, and he may or may not have the
technology he claims he has, but he is doing his best in the face of
almost impossible odds?
That is how I would start my investigation if I was a true
skeptic. And to call somebody a fraud is serious business.
Nobody should do that unless they have some serious evidence.
But unfortunately Eric takes the fraud stance as his initial stance,
claiming to want to be swayed that maybe Dennis isn’t a fraud.
Just look at his web pages, with their crackpot logos, Tom Napier’s
debunker masterpiece, etc. Now let’s get back to investigating
Dennis. Let’s look at the fraud issue. To call somebody a fraud is
to say they are of dishonest intent, taking advantage of people to
take their money in a clever theft attempt. The cornerstone of
fraud is that the defrauder be of "evil" intent.
If Dennis was a defrauder and a real bona fide crook, and
he has been at it for twenty years now, I’m sure he would have a
string of victims a mile long. Well, who would be a victim?
Basically a victim would be somebody who lost their life’s savings
by letting it get into Dennis’ greedy hands. I have known Dennis
for almost eleven years now, and in that time the biggest financial
losers who have dealt with Dennis have been me, Mr. Professor
and Mr. Financier.
Mr. Professor and I got bankrupted directly by our
involvement with Dennis, as well as losing our life’s savings, which
in Mr. Professor’s case was one heck of a lot bigger than mine.
Mr. Professor lost over $250,000 by his support for Dennis. And
the ordeal also ruined Mr. Professor’s health and almost killed
him. My net worth is still negative, and will likely be that way for
awhile. And we weren’t just idle investors, giving Dennis the cash
and never seeing him again. I lived with Dennis and his family for
a year, while I was his investor and employee. When Dennis was
in jail the first time, Mr. Professor took in Alison and her children,
and they lived with Mr. Professor for over a year, and when Dennis
got out of jail, they all lived with Mr. Professor for several more
months. It isn’t like Mr. Professor and I don’t know who Dennis is.
And what kinds of bad things do we have to say about Dennis,
after having lost it all due to our involvement with him? Well, I
think my web page speaks for itself. Mr. Professor speaks even
more highly of Dennis than I do. I don’t think Mr. Professor can
even bring himself to make the relatively few criticisms that I have
made on my web pages.
And a "skeptic" could say that Mr. Professor and I won’t tell
the world what a crook Dennis is either because we are just as
culpable, or are still planing on getting our money out of Dennis
someday, when the big scam really gets pulled off, or we are still
under his "malevolent spell," gullible to the end. I have a hard
time somebody reading my web pages and calling me gullible. I
can see people calling me a cynic, but I have a hard time
imagining them thinking that I am under Dennis’ artful spell, one
he has been able to sustain through two stints behind bars and
bankrupting me. Well, for one thing, Dennis is under no legal
obligation to Mr. Professor or me. If Dennis becomes the world’s
next zillionaire, Mr. Professor and I know we will be taken care of,
not because of a legal claim we have on Dennis, but because we
know who he is. OK, so the intrepid skeptic discards all that
testimony from two of Dennis’ biggest economic "victims."
Then what about the biggest economic victim of all, Mr.
Financier? He was the really big loser in Seattle. Eighty percent
of those Seattle heat pump buyers didn’t pay one dime for their
systems. All CONSERVE ever got was the tax credit money that
the customer got back with their tax return, and most never made
any payments under the System for Savings contracts because so
many of them didn’t work and Mr. Financier had his company
stolen from him at almost the same time Dennis did. Mr. Financier
lost literally millions of dollars, and the company he had spent his
whole life building to boot. If Dennis was a crook, you could count
on Mr. Financier to really let Dennis have it.
What does Mr. Financier have to say about the whole deal?
His affidavit is an exhibit in Dennis’ book, The Alternative, dated
July 3rd, 1990 four years after Mr. Financier lost it all, and he
definitely has no legal claim on Dennis. And Mr. Financier put his
money where his mouth was and put up millions of dollars to
finance Dennis’ heat pumps. If you are a skeptical investigator,
meaning one who actually investigates, that should be a very
impressive piece of testimony, if you were trying to find out if
Dennis was a fraud. And Mr. Financier has nothing bad to say in
his affidavit, but instead says that he had done very careful
research into the heat pump, to make sure it performed like
Dennis claimed it had, before he put up his millions of dollars.
And Mr. Financier spoke very frankly about the actions of the
Attorney General’s office in their "consumer protection" act against
Dennis’ company. And Mr. Financier ended his affidavit with
stating his belief that it was a conspiracy that caused his company
to be stolen mere weeks before Dennis had his company stolen.
Eric Krieg e-mails me that he gets many e-mails a day
saying all sorts of bad things about Dennis. Well, does he get
them from anybody who really knows what they are talking about?
Dennis’ biggest "victims" have spoken out, and they aren’t telling
the world what a crook Dennis is. Eric’s very public fraud
suspicions appear to be built on sand. But Eric also says that
Dennis has had the officials after him in three states now, and
doesn’t that say a lot about Dennis’ possible criminality? Well,
what it does demonstrate is what Eric has put his faith in: lawyers.
Every attack I have seen made on Dennis by the power structure
was lead by lawyers, lawyers who couldn’t find any victims to help
them build their "cases." In Seattle Dennis’ 400 heat pump
customers actually signed a petition to tell the Attorney General to
stop "protecting" them!
If Eric was a competent and complete investigator, he would
have dropped all his "is Dennis a fraud?" stuff from his web site
long ago. Eric simply has no idea what he is writing about. And I
know what I am talking about. Eric acts like he is just an impartial
empiricist, but, as you will see soon, I believe he is far more of a
theorist than an empiricist. In our e-mails I have a number of
times presented facts to him, and he would e-mail back that he
had a hard time believing the facts, because his beliefs and
theories told him otherwise.
Eric has written time and again that he didn’t want to look
into the heat pump because he felt it wasn’t worth his time. Well,
how on earth can you call Dennis a fraud when you aren’t willing
to look into about the only technology he has really sold for the
past fifteen years, and is literally half of his current public free
energy scheme? Eric finally relented on that position and said he
would love to test one of the heat pumps, partly because he didn’t
want to rely on the mountain of testing documentation that had
been generated over the last twenty years, because it could all be
wrong.
And he talked about how hard it was to measure something
like a C.O.P. And Eric says measuring energy systems is his
specialty. Well, I have news for Eric, measuring the C.O.P. of the
heat pump is no big deal. You only have to measure the water
flow rate through the heat exchangers, the rise in temperature and
the electrical draw on the compressor. That is it. I have seen that
test performed many times over the years, by professionals. I
have done it myself a number of times, we even had systems
rigged with BTU and electric meters, where the whole
arrangement had a very low margin of potential error. Several test
labs have tested the heat pump, people who do that sort of thing
professionally. I have a hard time crediting Eric’s concerns.
But that is not to say that I don’t want to let Eric have the
opportunity to test a heat pump, which brings me to a problem that
is better classified in my "problems" section, but I will bring up
here. As I stated earlier, a hundred companies came and went
regarding the LAMCO system, with hundreds of the systems being
installed by the people who bought them. As those companies
across America sold five or twenty or fifty systems before going
out of business, Dennis is the closest thing there has been to a
"heart of the industry" for the last fifteen years. And Dennis has
kept up with some of his customers from fifteen years ago, and
from time to time, when he has been riding high, another person
who used to sell or install the LAMCO system would come out of
the national woodwork and contact Dennis.
Back in 1988, just before the raid, an old LAMCO dealer
contacted us who was from Minnesota. His name was Norm.
Norm’s company sold and installed about fifty of the heat pumps
before going out of the LAMCO business. Norm was still in the
HVAC business, and so he kept servicing those customers when
they would have the rare system problem, like a leak, or a failed
compressor, etc. We actually sent a cameraman to Minnesota
and filmed a tour that Norm took through Minnesota in the winter
to some of his old customers. They sure were a bunch of a happy
customers, including one of the system’s best references ever,
Glen Johnson from Hibbing Minnesota, whose letter from 1982
has been in many of Dennis’ reference packages over the years.
That we found Norm was fortuitous, but it also highlights
one of the major problems we have encountered over the years.
Norm was an HVAC man who kept in touch with his old customers.
He was still in the business and was able to keep serving them
when the need arose. Most of the 100 companies that came and
went from the LAMCO days just disappeared from the map, and
those customers were on their own. So when a compressor failed
or a system got a leak, who were they gonna call, Ghostbusters?
No, they ended up calling up a normal HVAC man, who came out
and scratched his head as he looked at that exotic piece of
equipment. If he changed out a compressor, he often needed to
evacuate and recharge the system. And if he had no training with
the LAMCO heat pump, it was guaranteed that he wouldn’t
evacuate it, charge it, or adjust it properly. And then the system
wouldn’t work well at all, and just limp along, not saving nearly as
much as it used to do. So the homeowner may have eventually
had the damn thing removed and gone back to good old natural
gas or something like that.
And each time Dennis would rebuild his company from
scratch, after a jail stint or having his company stolen, he would
encounter the skepticism about his heat pump all over, and those
dwindling references he had used for so many years would get
another flurry of calls from the "skeptical" and some people would
tire of the calls, and ask to be removed from the reference list. In
Boston, as we were getting it going again, Dennis had to organize
a "reference" trip for all those new skeptics, to of all places,
Philadelphia, right in Eric Krieg’s back yard. And I got to see all
those skeptics return from Philadelphia, beaming with new-found
faith in the system, talking to happy customer after customer. One
of the Philadelphia customers even went so far as to say, "You
can take my car, you can take my furniture, you can even take my
wife, but you aren’t gonna get my LAMCO system, unless it’s over
my dead body." The Philadelphia crowd were the ones who were
getting around a 100% savings on their heating bills.
And I don’t know if any of them are around today or not.
What happens when they finally sell the house and move away?
The new owners have no idea about those panels on their roof,
and if the system ever needs repair work, it’ll probably get botched
and eventually the system will get removed.
A funny story surrounds the system that was installed on a
Minneapolis restaurant many years ago. That restaurant was the
one that Dennis uses all the time in his presentations. It was the
one that got a C.O.P. of five in January. Back in 1987/1988, as we
were beginning to fly high, one of those who got involved in the
Midwest took a trip to Minneapolis and looked up the restaurant.
The restaurant had changed owners, and the men asked the new
owner what he thought of the LAMCO system on his building. The
new owner said, "You mean those piece of junk panels on the side
of the building? The piece of garbage doesn’t work. It has never
worked that I have seen, you can take it away if you want. I’ll sell
it to you, cheap." The men then asked if they could take a look at
the system and see what shape it was in. As they looked the
system over and the hot water system, they could see no other
heating system hooked up to the water heating system, and then
asked the owner how he was heating his water then. And the new
owner just shrugged his shoulders, "I don’t know." It didn’t
take them long to realize that the LAMCO system had been
working perfectly and providing all the restaurant’s hot water, and
the new owner didn’t even know it. Those men did some testing of
the system and measured a C.O.P. of nine on that system, and it
wasn’t summer.
Dennis’ goal for many years was to be able to build an
industry around that heat pump, so it would survive, and so the
heat pumps would not all eventually get removed because nobody
had the arcane knowledge anymore on how to fix them. Of the
two thousand systems that have been installed over the last
generation, we literally have no idea how many are still
functioning, another tragedy brought about by the suppression
efforts of the Big Boys, and the corporate apathy demonstrated by
that heat pump plant manager so many years ago.
So when Eric says he needs to be able to see one working
before he stops his open fraud speculation on his web pages, he
is not exactly fighting the battle on the front it needs to be fought
on. And at this time I don’t think Dennis is going to burn up the
relatively few active references he still has on the system to
please a man who publicly wonders whether Dennis is a fraud.
Eric can do some real investigative work and find some systems to
test if he really wanted to, and I have told him where to look for
some of them. Heck, he says he is contacted by ex-dealers of
Dennis’ all the time. The materials they bought are full of
references, and some of them must still be active. I’m sure Eric
the Skeptic could find some ex-dealer to fax him some of those
many references. If Eric is an investigator worth his salt, he could
easily find out the truth of the matter about the heat pumps, and
drop his "Dennis is a fraud" musings.
Now, whether Dennis has "free electricity" is indeed open to
debate, and I express my skepticism about his heat pump married
to a hydraulic heat engine in my physics piece. Now there is a
world of difference between "does he have free electricity?" and
"is he a fraud?" Eric’s black/white view of the issue is not only
uninformed, but amazingly naïve. And this brings me to Eric the
Theorist versus Eric the empiricist. That Dennis is alive at all
today amazes many of us who are close to him, and those who
know how the suppression syndrome works. Eric on the other
hand has been steeping himself over the years with the writings of
the CSICOP crowd, avidly reading the works of people like Martin
Gardner, one of those in the CSICOP pantheon, right up there
with Carl Sagan.
In the world view of Eric, Dennis is likely the latest in a very
long line of free energy scammers and quacks that have paraded
through American society over the years. Eric can barely imagine
the suppression efforts that have been directed at Dennis and
others over the years, and Eric puts great stock in the attacks of
the establishment, and studiously ignores the voluminous
documentation in books like The Alternative that very seriously
challenge the notion that there was anything legitimate in the
establishment’s repeated attacks against Dennis. The
documentation is very persuasive evidence that Eric completely
ignores in his musings about Dennis.
Time after time I will e-mail Eric about the fact that CIA spies
were crawling all over an International Tesla society meeting in
Colorado (Which is something blatantly illegal, as the CIA is
expressly forbidden by law to do domestic spying. And they
literally showed their badges at the conference when they were
asked to, as the law requires.), or the reception the Wright
Brother’s plane received for five years by the establishment, and
those kinds of facts, and telling him where to find the
documentation. And Eric comes back with something like, "I find
that hard to believe." In those instances it is Wade the Empiricist
versus Eric the Theorist. I keep putting facts in front of Eric that
challenge his view of the establishment that he is such a proud
member of, and he keeps coming back with "I find that hard to
believe." Eric takes pains to tell his audience that he was a proud
Eagle scout and is an avid church goer. That is precisely Eric’s
problem. He has done too much Boy scouting, church going, and
watching the Disney hour. He has a very naïve view of how the
world works, and every time he comes back with "I find that hard to
believe," it is showing how he theorizes in the face of
uncomfortable data, not wanting to believe it.
If Eric was the empiricist that he presents himself as on his
web page, he wouldn’t be saying something like "I had better be
able to test a free energy machine or else I have to conclude
Dennis is a fraud," and list on his web pages all the state fraud hot
lines. Eric would simply say, "I want to test a free energy
machine" period. If he was really the pure empiricist he presents
himself as, he wouldn’t keep theorizing aloud about if Dennis is a
fraud, particularly when he has absolutely no credible information
that Dennis might be one. But of course he can point to Dennis’
stints behind bars as hard evidence, but my testimony and the
documentation in The Alternative are far more credible and
convincing than all the legal actions that have been directed at
Dennis over the years, and if Eric was really the empiricist that he
presents himself as, only a little true investigation would show him
beyond any reasonable doubt how fraudulent the legal attacks on
Dennis have been. I mean every single one of them. But again,
Eagle Scout Eric has a real hard time conceiving that there is any
corruption in our hallowed legal system.
The bottom line is that I have been there as a witness, and
have done my homework and found out how the world works. Eric
hasn’t yet been able to overcome all his Disney indoctrination.
And many times now Eric has e-mailed me questions that show
me that he has yet to fully read my web pages, pages that are
being called masterpieces (if long-winded). I have asked Eric at
least three times now if he knows who Bill the Hit Man is, and his
role in Dennis’ story, and I have yet to hear a word in response
from Eric. Bill the Hit Man is a character Eric will have a hard time
believing exists, as his mere existence calls into question Eric’s
entire world view. Well, I have been there seeing Bill’s handiwork
up close, and even seeing the trails he leaves here and there. Bill
isn’t a product of my imagination, like some boogie man. And I
have encountered more than one like him. And Eric I’m sure has a
hard time believing that Mr. Deputy was making faces at me as I
was testifying, or that he threatened witnesses. One day Eric is
going to wake up and figure out how the world works, and he can
cry on my shoulder.
Eric has actually been gracious with me on the Internet,
even linking his page to mine. And at times Eric seems even
willing to learn. I will return the favor. Here we are Eric. And this
is the first link I have ever made, we’ll see if I did it right.
Link to Eric Krieg’s Home Page
I’ll end this skeptic piece by mentioning a classic debunking
exercise by Eric’s buddy Tom Napier, which is on Eric’s Home
page. Read again the excerpts from Daniel Drasin’s short course
for debunkers, and see for yourself how well Tom learned his
lessons. From the title of Napier’s piece you can see his ridicule
and condescending attitude is fired up and ready to go. And the
reader won’t be disappointed, Napier keeps up his ridicule and
condescension steady throughout his entire piece. And he takes
aim early, calling Dennis scientifically illiterate. I won’t make any
great claims regarding Dennis’ scientific literacy. Dennis is a
promoter, and his grip on the science is often tenuous at best.
But, and this is a big but, he has had some very big
scientific and engineering heavyweights on his team in the past,
and is associated with a few today. Dennis wasn’t making up his
stuff out of the thin air, he was repeating what other giant minds
had told him. And Napier actually staked out a pretty impressive
claim to scientific illiteracy himself when he stated that power
plants were 60% efficient. The right answer is around 35%, with
40% the highest I have ever seen claimed with conventional
technology today, and that major blunder by Napier took him
entirely out of the running as far as evaluating Dennis’
thermodynamic claims.
The Department of Energy states that about 30% of the
energy that goes into the boilers of the electric companies makes
it into the homes and businesses of America as electricity. And
you can look it up. A few percent goes to line losses, etc.
General Electric says that they hope that innovations in metallurgy
and materials will eventually allow boiler temperatures of 4,000
degrees or so and get that mythical efficiency of 60%, but we are a
long way off, unless you consider stuff like hydraulic heat engines.
And in keeping with Drasin’s teachings, Napier says that he
didn’t see Dennis demonstrate anything new or promising at the
Philadelphia show. Again Napier demonstrated his mastery of the
debunker’s craft. Dennis demonstrated the sublimation of
tungsten for the crowd, demonstrating one of the many anomalous
properties of Brown’s Gas, properties that have been
demonstrated many, many times over the last twenty years. So
Napier demonstrated once again his total ignorance of what he
was observing. But Napier was able to state with such authority
that he saw nothing new in Philadelphia. And the extent of
Napier’s superior investigative and skeptical efforts appeared to
be limited to showing up to a free show in Philadelphia, then going
home and writing his masterpiece. And he ended it all with the
obvious ending that was a foregone conclusion by merely reading
the title of his piece, that it sure looked like a scam to him.
And Tom of course roundly ignored the amazing jack
hammer that makes little noise and virtually no vibration while
outperforming conventional jack hammers, and Dennis’ amazing
heat pump, which should bring up some profound questions to
Tom and Eric about how the real world works and why such
superior products are not on the market today. But Tom had
important debunker work to do, and he couldn’t let little details like
that get in his way.
In Ginenthal’s book on Velikovsky and Sagan, Ginenthal
ended his preface by saying that even if Velikovsky was wrong
about all of his theories, he did not deserve the slanderous,
libelous and mean-spirited treatment that Carl Sagan and his
buddies heaped on him. I have to conclude the same thing about
Eric Krieg’s efforts. Does Dennis have a free electricity machine
up his sleeve? I think so, but I am not entirely sure myself. But
does that merit the treatment that he has received on Eric’s
pages? Not in my opinion, and I know the situation about a
hundred times better than Eric does. Eric, this is friendly advice,
stop your skeptical musings about Dennis, particularly the "is he a
crook?" wonderings until you really know what you are writing
about, because you don’t.
That is all I have to say about the "skeptics" for now.
Addendum #1
This is being written on New Year’s Day, 1997, a little over
a week after I published this piece. I have heard back from the
"skeptical" crowd on this piece, and I am going to write about it. It
should be very educational. First, I am going to deal with Eric
Krieg. Eric has been very civilized and gracious in his dealings
with me, with a minor chortle here and there. My web page began
getting discussed in free energy news groups soon after I
published my pages due to my own advertising, but I have gotten
a fair number of responses from people who hit my pages through
Eric’s pages, so Eric does deserve some gratitude from me, and
he gets it. Thank you, Eric.
Eric has also been out there fishing for critical responses to
my work, and I did get some from those efforts. They weren’t
particularly strong or informed responses, but they were better
than nothing. I have had more astute observations made by the
"free energy" crowd than the "skeptical" crowd. In fact the
responses by the "skeptical" crowd have been kind of a mixed
blessing, as now I read by inference that the "skeptical" crowd has
pretty much "debunked" my writings. Not quite. And I will get into
that a little here.
The first (and only) skeptic up to bat on my physics piece so
far made one astute observation. He questioned the point at
which the high-pressure working fluid got introduced to the Fischer
engine, asking if at that point would the liquid flash into steam
before the valve closed, partially defeating the cycle? I invited the
skeptic to obtain Fischer’s patent, of which I gave number in my
physics piece. Fischer deals with that issue in his patent, and
Fischer engines have been built and run, and if that was an issue
in the early prototypes, I think it was overcome. That was an
astute observation.
Then he launched into some unastute observations. One of
which was he stated that my notion of entropy increasing when
temperature did was "patently false." If you actually study
chemistry, there are tables listing of the entropies of substances.
Diamond, for instance, has the lowest entropy of the known
substances. And what that means is that for every unit of energy
you add to a diamond lattice, more of that energy translates to a
temperature gain than any other known substance, and less goes
towards to entropy, or motion, be it vibrational, rotational, or
translational. And what that means is that the carbon atoms are
so tightly held in their lattice structure that they basically can’t
budge, which is also why diamond is the hardest substance known
to man. At the atomic level, entropy is considered movement.
It is physics 101 that entropy increases as temperature
does. In fact, several years ago, as I was plowing through
thermodynamics textbooks on my own, I tried to find the definition
of temperature, trying to get my hands around the concept. It was
very frustrating. I went through book after book, trying to find any
definition that would help me to understand the concept. For all
the calculus and hard-to-decipher jargon that dominates most
thermodynamics textbooks, temperature was practically never
defined more than the "hotness" of the substance. That sure
sounded scientific. Book after book dealt with it that way. Then I
finally found a book that actually defined temperature. It said that
if you add energy to a substance, the energy which doesn’t go to
entropy goes to a rise in temperature, kind of backing into the
definition. What it came down to in all those textbooks, was "put
your hand on it, and you can feel it." I suppose that is the ultimate
empirical way to describe it, but it kind of left me wanting.
Anyway, the textbooks defined temperature that way, and
temperature is obviously related to entropy in a direct relationship,
something my critic appeared to say was "patently false." And
maybe I misunderstood his criticism. But then I soon saw a
comment that showed me the slipshod nature of his critique, and
betrayed an attitude that Daniel Drasin’s skeptic class taught to
aspiring skeptics so well. The skeptic said that in my Carnot class
I had reversed my heat sinks in my equations, and my numbers
came up with negative C.O.P.’s! My heart skipped a beat when I
read that, thinking that I had made a clerical error in my
presentation. But I went back to my physics page and saw that I
had indeed made my equations correctly, and the skeptic was
guilty of a slipshod critique of my work. And though I could only
read the text, I could almost feel the chortling coming through
cyberspace as the skeptic made his cute remark about my
negative C.O.P.’s. Skeptics love to chortle, in my experience, and
that was one case where one was directed at my work, totally in
error. So I stopped the dialogue.
To date, that is the only critique made by the professional
skeptics of my physics piece, one that failed to make me revise
any of my ideas or what I wrote. But now I read that Dennis has
been debunked "forwards and backwards." As I stated earlier, the
more thoughtful responses to my work have come from the "free
energy" crowd, and my physics work is holding up nicely, so far.
Not bad for a CPA. And I am in the process of fishing for other
scientific responses out there. I am sure I don’t know it all in this
area, but out of necessity have made my own investigations on my
own. I would love to have an actual expert, one that actually
knows what he or she is talking about (many don’t), write a piece
that puts mine to shame. Maybe someday I can coax one out of
somebody. We’ll see.
And then I heard quickly from a skeptic regarding this
"skeptic" piece. And I will respond to it here. I will say right off
that I have had not one response from any skeptic out there,
including Eric, indicating that any of them have read my work any
further than my physics and skeptic pieces. And "skeptical" is
supposed to mean that it leads to investigation. I have this to say
about the "skeptics" I have seen so far in relation to Dennis Lee: I
have witnessed virtually no actual investigation of him or his work
by any of the skeptics, though they represent that Dennis has
been thoroughly debunked by their efforts. Nothing could be
further from the truth, especially in Eric’s case, Dennis’ most vocal
skeptic.
But before I get back to Eric, let me deal first with the
skeptic’s response to my skeptical piece. First off, let me say that
the response was fairly well-informed, seemingly sincere, and
made some very good points, and I stand corrected in a few areas.
I asked the question about Gray and what happened to him. I got
back that he was a scam that fled town. Well, maybe he was, I
don’t know. But I have heard more than one researcher wonder
what happened to Gray. I still don’t know and may look into him
more. But Eric’s response to that conjecture was that Gray was
apparently covered in "Suppressed Inventions and Discoveries,"
which made it seem that the book was likely a scan of the tabloids.
Well, the fact of the matter is that Gray is not mentioned in that
book, a book that has had a great depth of research that has gone
into it. But Eric seemed to seize on the idea that it might be a
shoddy work and seemed to be looking for a reason to dismiss it
without ever reading it. That is a typical attitude of the "skeptics"
and one of Drasin’s lessons. And maybe after reading this Eric
will actually get out of his armchair and even get the book
someday.
The skeptic also said that I wasn’t being fair by not
mentioning Eric’s Christian beliefs, which is an anomaly of the
skeptics. That skeptic was right, at least about the anomaly part,
but I did mention Eric’s Christianity. Almost all "skeptics"
subscribe to the dogma of materialism, believing with all their
heart that the soul is an imaginative construct of primitive people
who feared death. So Eric does get some points in my book for
not believing that he is an accident of chemistry and the Big Bang.
And that is likely why he is one of the more civil debunkers.
And the skeptic made a couple of other minor points, like
the Mexico City UFO flap was not really that spectacular, and the
true believers even think so. Well, I have seen some of the
footage, and it didn’t look like nothing, but I will admit that I haven’t
looked into the Mexico City event much, and maybe I shouldn’t
have mentioned it until I had looked into it more thoroughly. Minor
point scored by the skeptic. Thank you for your observations.
But then there were many observations that I strongly
disagreed with, and some cases where the skeptic apparently did
not understand my point, and I will get into a few of them here.
Let me say that the response from the skeptic was very detailed,
too detailed to respond to everything here, and if there is an
important point or two that the skeptics think I have overlooked, I
will gladly go into it in more detail, maybe even in this page, but I
don’t want to bore my readers too much in my an ad infinitum
dialogue.
The skeptics correctly guessed that I was writing about the
Mars and astrology flap that rocked CSICOP about twenty years
ago, so they get some points for doing their homework, and
admitted that CSICOP erred. But then I got back that astrology is
still bogus. Well, I don’t entirely agree. And CSICOP did more
than just error, they betrayed their true feathers with that scandal.
That scandal should have closed their doors, but it didn’t. There
were apparently other scandals percolating under the surface as
the Mars scandal unrolled, but they were apparently covered up in
a good case of damage control. The scandal just took CSICOP
out of the business of doing any real empirical work of their own,
but just "debunking" the work of others.
The skeptic actually did ask me for more on Carl Sagan’s
fraudulent debunking efforts. My response is to read my web
page, particularly the "science and medicine" section of it. After
years of looking into Sagan’s efforts, I feel very justified by calling
him a fraudulent debunker, even though he is now dead. All my
writings on him were made before he died. If Sagan is a real man
(And yes, he survived death, something he likely doesn’t realize
yet. I do say my prayers for him.), he will someday come to realize
all the harm he caused with all his dishonest efforts, and he will
someday, in another life, try to make up for it, probably by battling
the "skeptics" himself, and getting unfairly debunked a few times,
in Sagan’s mud-slinging fashion, to see how it feels.
One of the points the skeptic made was that I said skeptics
weren’t supposed to have beliefs. He said that was impossible
and showed I misunderstood "skepticism." Well, maybe I
misunderstand the skeptics, or haven’t defined them the way the
skeptic would have liked me to, but I stand by my statement. True
skepticism, not what is practiced by the "skeptical" crowd, has the
questioning of beliefs its primary valid feature. Every true
revolution in thought, or "paradigm shift" as coined by Kuhn, has
at its base a rejection of the premises the then intellectual edifice
was built on. And I do know what I am talking about, as I have had
the great privilege to know some of the great minds of the
twentieth century, Victor Fischer and Mr. Researcher among them,
and they have done some paradigm shifting of their own,
revolutionizing whole fields of thought.
And what the paradigm shifters all have in common is
questioning the sacred beliefs the then current intellectual edifice
was built on. Fischer said that where Carnot went wrong was the
"assumption" of an ideal gas in his work, and thermodynamics
marched off in the wrong direction almost two hundred years ago,
and liquid heat engines have been ignored ever since, not even
seen as a possibility in the halls of orthodoxy.
If you take a peek a Newton’s Principia, you will find that he
makes three assumptions in the beginning of his work that he
builds everything on. Those assumptions were also what two
hundred years of physics were also built on. Two of those
assumptions were the assumptions of absolute time and absolute
space. Two hundred years later, as physicists had been wrestling
with the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 for a
generation, an experimental result that failed to find any "ether
drag," along came a pup from the Swiss patent office who
eventually posited two theories, one rejecting Newton’s
"assumption" of absolute time, and the other rejecting Newton’s
"assumption" of absolute space. And the world of physics was
changed forever by that lowly patent clerk named Einstein and his
theories of relativity. So I stand by my words.
Yes, nobody can have no beliefs (that I have yet seen), but
challenging the sacred beliefs that no longer get questioned is
how the paradigms get shifted. And the dogmatic beliefs of the
skeptical crowd are: materialism (the material world is all that
exists), objectivity (reality is out there, not between your ears), and
your consciousness is nothing but an accident of chemistry.
Those are the cherished beliefs, and nearly the whole "skeptical"
movement, from what I have seen, has been increasingly
desperate to defend those sacred beliefs from the increasing, yet
subtle, evidence that those sacred beliefs may have to be
discarded.
So the skeptics prate on about their "investigative" efforts,
and how there is nothing there to find when they do investigate
(Some are more honest than that and say they don’t know, like
Susan Blackmore, yet she has been the exception and not the rule
in my investigation of the skeptical movement, Carl Sagan being
one spectacular example of a debunker showing his true
feathers.), but like in the case of Dennis and my web pages, the
"investigations" are very weak at best.
And that brings me to one of the skeptic’s comments. When
I wrote about James Oberg’s debunking of the NASA footage of an
apparently nimble UFO avoiding a ground based shot aimed at it,
the skeptic wrote me (more than once) that I seemed to take
exception to a mundane attempt to explain the event, and
that I was being as unfair as the fraudulent debunkers were. I
have a real problem with that, and that skeptic has apparently
never seen the footage. I have little problem with Oberg’s
improbable explanation of the turns that the "ice crystals" made,
but for his "mundane" explanation to entirely ignore the
spectacular "shot" obviously ripping through the atmosphere right
where the ice crystal had made its dramatic turns a few instants
before was the kind of "debunking" I have seen a little too often.
Make your "mundane" explanations if you want to, but don’t
do it by ignoring the most spectacular part of the footage. And by
the way, independent researchers (Not on NASA’s payroll like
Oberg is, and not a member of the very suspect CSICOP like
Oberg is.) have now concluded that the "shot" came ripping
through the atmosphere right over the super-secret U.S. military
base at Pine Gap in Australia, which should raise some very
profound questions, questions that the professional skeptic group
apparently cannot fathom, particularly as most of them in America
apparently work for the military-industrial complex, either openly or
clandestinely, either practicing "honest" debunking, or blatantly
dishonest debunking like Sagan regularly engaged in.
And I’ll finish with the response to the skeptic by writing
about the one part that I was sure would rile up the skeptics, and it
did. I likened the Holocaust Deniers to the professional skeptics.
I am sure I will get many angry e-mails on that in the future. But I
don’t think the skeptic got my point. He seemed to think I was
saying that the professional skeptic crowd were Holocaust Deniers
or approved of them. That was anything but my point. My point
was that the Holocaust Deniers have lifted the professional skeptic
tactics to make their nauseating "theories." Again, the Holocaust
Deniers are united on the point that all the testimony of those who
survived the death camps can be dismissed as being anecdotal
and the product of a feverish imagination that made them bigger
victims than they were. They were all imagining the horrible
treatment they suffered at the hands of the Nazis. The Jews, in
the view of the Holocaust Deniers, were just treated like any other
prisoners of war, and interned in the camps because the Nazis
properly saw them as dangerous, subversive elements of
European society, and the Nazi’s treated them no differently than
the other subversive elements.
In my web pages I tell the readers that they can get a few
issues of The Spotlight and get ahold of the Holocaust Denier
material, like I have. I have actually argued with Holocaust
Deniers, one a close personal relative. Oh, what a disheartening
task that is. Another linchpin in the Holocaust Denier arguments
is that there is little physical evidence that there were actually gas
chambers, and that Zyklon B was actually an insecticide that was
used for delousing the Jews, not to kill them. Well, those tactics
are literally lifted right out of the professional skeptic canon. And
that was my point. How must it feel to be a Holocaust survivor and
hear the Holocaust Denier crowd dismiss your experiences as the
product of your imagination. Oh, the pain that must cause. I can
barely imagine what that feels like. Well, actually I have a very
good idea what that feels like, and here I will segue to Eric Krieg
and his efforts to "debunk" Dennis.
The Holocaust Deniers pull pop psychology out of their hats
to dismiss the testimony of the Holocaust survivors as "anecdotal."
The charm of that angle is that human testimony is practically the
only evidence admissible in a court of law. Even physical
evidence cannot be admitted into evidence unless it is
accompanied by the testimony of the person who first got their
hands on the evidence, or the evidence is disregarded as being
"tainted." But the Holocaust Deniers dismiss the gut-wrenching
testimony of the Holocaust Survivors as being largely imagined.
In the world of the Holocaust Denier, sure the Jews suffered, but
not because the Nazis intended it. The Allies cut the supply lines
and those stacks of bodies we have all seen in those photos taken
at the end of World War II were more the result of the Allies
cutting the supply lines than it was any evil intent by those poor,
beleaguered Nazis. And like all propaganda and disinformation
efforts, there is a grain of truth in those claims. Just a grain
though, enough to plant doubt in people’s heads if they read the
work of the Holocaust Deniers.
So the Holocaust Deniers dismiss the testimony of the
Holocaust Survivors as the product of their imaginations. They
weren’t really victims, but fantasized that they were, the Nazis
were just doing their jobs, and war is hell. Well, guess what? Eric
Krieg pulls the identical pop psychological trick out of his hat to
dismiss my testimony about what I saw in my ride with Dennis.
Apparently watching with my own eyes the corruption I
encountered was all in my head. When Mr. Deputy made faces at
me and chortled as I was testifying (also witnessed by my future
wife and others), or when three people saw the deputies engaging
in theft and espionage before their very eyes, that is all in our
minds. Eric is not a Holocaust Denier, he is a Corruption Denier.
Every time I have given him eyewitness testimony of the CIA
clandestinely attending an International Tesla conference, or what
I saw with my own eyes, he just can’t believe it. Eric the Theorist,
hard at work, ignoring evidence.
If Eric’s Corruption Denial activities were merely identical to
the Holocaust Deniers’ in their dismissal of the testimony of the
victims, that would be one thing, but Eric takes it even further. I
am a victim, that he doesn’t doubt. But I apparently am a victim, of
Dennis (!), but I am currently in denial that I am. I am fantasizing
about the suppression efforts that were directed at our venture,
and the real crook is Dennis. And Eric says that that
psychological phenomenon also applies to all the biggest "victims"
of Dennis. So goes the theory of Eric, we all invested so much
with Dennis, that we can’t admit to ourselves that we have been
taken by the con man of the century. Whew! I do have an idea
how the Holocaust survivors feel when they hear the Holocaust
Deniers dismiss their testimony as "anecdotal."
And Eric even good-naturedly writes he knows I think I lived
through the suppression efforts, but it is likely all in my mind, so
my testimony is suspect. Can any of you readers out there
imagine how that makes me feel? And Eric, who apparently has
read of that psychological phenomena in the work of the
professional debunkers, has decided that my testimony is not
worth reading, tainted as it is by my fantasy of denial, because he
thinks that Bill the Hit Man is Bill Clinton! What kind of
investigator is that? I’ll tell you what kind it is: no kind of
investigator at all. He can’t even be bothered to read the
testimony of the man who saw Dennis the closest for years, even
when it comes to him free through cyberspace. And Eric has
apparently been studying Drasin’s course. Here is an excerpt of it
that I didn’t put in previously. "If somebody claims to have been
impacted emotionally by [an] experience, point out that strong
emotions can alter perceptions. Therefore, the claimant’s
recollections must be entirely untrustworthy."
And there is an agenda to the denier activities. The
Holocaust Deniers are trying to rehabilitate the image of Uncle
Adolf, and again make the world safe for fascism, racism and Anti-
Semitism. The Corruption Deniers (About 99% of the Professional
Skeptic activities I have seen in regard to people getting
hammered by the power structure fall under that category.) as a
group, cannot seem to fathom corruption. Or if they acknowledge
events like Watergate, Iran-Contra or the very peculiar events
attending the JFK assassination and its investigations, those
phenomena of course are never a part of the case they are
debunking.
And here I will insert the observation of a friend to this
originally published piece. He is a professional black man who
has been married to a professional white woman for over thirty
years, and they have professional, mixed-race children. And here
is his observation..
"On the subject of "skepticism" regarding Dennis, may I
offer a personal observation that you may find relevant? Down
through the years, I have experienced racial discrimination.
Because I never have lived in a segregated or single-race setting,
and never will, it was not unusual for me to share some of those
experiences with friends and acquaintances. I was well into my
40s before I realized that some people are perfectly willing to
admit or allow that racism exists, but find 100 reasons why MY
specific experience had some cause other than racism. Either I
was not qualified enough, or not old enough, or not young enough,
or not educated enough, or not experienced enough or simply did
not understand the circumstances. Racism never was the culprit.
Never.
Those people who attack Dennis sound quite similar.
Whatever has happened to Dennis, just as whatever has
happened to me, must be some fault of my own, or there are
factors that Dennis and I just do not understand.
I have a label for "my" folks. You will have to find one for
Dennis'. My solution has been to use their lack of understanding
of who I have become as a person, because of these experiences,
as a yardstick to how much I can trust them. None has survived
as a friend. You seem to have arrived at a similar decision, which
I applaud. They are not worth your time to debate. My favorite
Latin phrase applies here. Non illigetimi carborundum, sometimes
iterated as illegitimi non carborundum est. Loose translation?
"Don't let the bastards grind you down."
And are their frauds in the world? Of course. Are there
really scams out there? Yes. I actually go into some of them on
my pages. But the really huge, breathtaking frauds and scams are
the ones perpetrated by the power structure, like fluoridation,
orthodox cancer therapy (cut, nuke, poison), 25 MPG, and we are
alone in the Universe. The huge frauds committed by the rich and
powerful are rarely even hinted at by the professional skeptic
crowd. The "Skeptic" crowd is practicing what is called reality
control, defending the scientistic world view, very similar to the
activities of the Holy Office of the Inquisition of so long ago (An
office finally disbanded very recently, in my lifetime.). Scientism is
a religion in itself. With anomalies like Eric aside, Scientism is the
faith that the "scientific method" is the only valid path to
knowledge, and will come up with every answer worth knowing.
Too bad Einstein, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Plank, De Broglie,
Eddington, Pauli, Jeans and Bohr (The prophets of modern
physics.) didn’t feel that way. And I have enumerated the skeptics’
dogmas earlier.
So while Eric apparently cannot even be bothered to read
my web pages (Oh yes, I am long-winded, but nobody has yet told
me that I was wasting their time.) he calls for the government’s
side of the story on Dennis. To Eric’s credit, he apparently made
an attempt to get Dennis’ book, The Alternative. He contacted
them one day, asking them to give him a free copy of the book,
because he was an "investigator." I’ll tell you what, I have done
more real investigating that it appears Eric has ever done or will
do, and I have never asked somebody to give me free material
because I was an investigator. And Eric is doing it in an out and
out effort to debunk those he is investigating. And for Eric to call
for the government’s side of the story shows me that he never did
cough up that huge sum of $15 and got The Alternative, or he
never read it, because the government’s side of the story is
documented very well in The Alternative.
Is Dennis a fast-talking promoter? Yes. That is something
that I have written about on my web pages more than once. That
doesn’t mean that he is dishonest, it means that he knows it is the
only thing that works, at least in our case. But of course I could be
in denial about that. A number of Dennis’ books I am not
impressed with as far as it convincing the casual observer of what
he is all about, and the technology he is promoting, which is the
biggest reason that I have written this web page, to give the
technology and Dennis’ efforts more credibility. Because they
deserve all the objective credibility they can get. And I know the
situation at least a hundred times better than Eric Krieg does, but
Eric theorizes that I am in denial, without ever having read my
testimony, it appears.
But Eric wants to hear the government’s side of things.
Well, that is a credible request, so I will summarize it here, backed
up by all the documentation in The Alternative, and documentation
and other evidence that didn’t make it into the book. And some of
it you will have to take my word on for now (Which I suppose can
be dismissed because I am a liar too.).
The government vendetta against Dennis began in Seattle,
so that is where I will begin the trail of documentation and other
evidence that supports the position of the government. This won’t
be as dry as Eric would like it, because I will be doing a little
interpolation of the evidence here and there, not enough for any
credible investigator to dismiss out of hand. For any true
investigator, this should be a place to begin the investigation, not
end it.
Just at about the time Dennis had sold 1,000 systems of
The Alternative in the Seattle area, on June 5th, 1985 there was
an article in a Seattle newspaper that hatcheted Dennis’ company.
Up until that time, bankers had treated Dennis like the had the
plague, et cetera. I write about that phenomenon in the other
Dennis sections of my web page. A few months earlier, when the
representative for the bank had told Dennis informally that the
bank had been warned off of Dennis, Dennis had wondered who
could have been saying those things about him.
June 5th was also just about the time that Mr. Financier
committed millions of dollars to Dennis after his intensive checking
of The Alternative’s performance. Eric’s position on the testimony
of Mr. Financier is that it is "tainted" because Mr. Financier
ultimately lost millions of dollars and is still in denial that he is a
victim. Just how Mr. Financier was in denial when he did
prodigious testing of the equipment, flying all over the country,
talking to customers, having experts test systems, looking at all
the data, before he committed millions of dollars to financing the
systems is something that has seemingly escaped the
psychological theories of Eric so far.
In that article of June 5th was some very important
information that would show how the land laid and why the
government began its investigation of Dennis and Conserve. The
article intimated that Dennis’ company was a scam, that the
equipment didn’t work, and that it wouldn’t qualify for the
renewable energy tax credit. That was being quoted right out of
the mouth of a local electric company spokesman. The
spokesman furthermore stated that the electric company was
calling for the Attorney General’s office to investigate all
Washington "solar" companies, particularly one as obviously
fraudulent as Dennis’ was.
The spokesman further stated that Conserve had repeatedly
been asked by the electric companies for information on The
Alternative, and was denied the information every time. That
article was the first official indication on record where the electric
companies accused Dennis of being a fraud, and the first
indication that the government might soon be investigating Dennis.
Just what were the facts with respect to what the electric company
spokesman was saying? To put it kindly, a number of the things
the electric company spokesman stated were out and out lies.
First of all, The Alternative always qualified for the federal
Renewable Energy Tax Credit. Of about two thousand of the
systems installed during the reign of the tax credit, I don’t think
there was one case of the equipment not qualifying. In fact, in
every contract Dennis’ companies ever made for selling The
Alternative, Dennis’ companies guaranteed that the system would
qualify for the credit, or the company would pay the credit directly
to the customer. And that is a little story in itself.
When the Renewable Energy Tax Credit was signed into
law, it specifically applied to technology that took advantage of
renewable energy sources. Well, almost all. While windmills and
direct solar radiant collection devices specifically qualified for the
credit. Heat pumps specifically did not. And there are a few
reasons for that, not all good ones, by the way. For starters, there
was already a heat pump industry at that time, and the credit was
supposedly designed to encourage new technology development,
not give a tax bonanza to an already existing industry. So heat
pumps were specifically excluded, even though in retrospect they
saved more energy from a renewable source than all those "solar"
systems did, except for, of course, The Alternative, the king of
them all.
But the LAMCO device and The Alternative qualified
because they were more than a heat pump. In fact, in those days,
it was pretty much forbidden to call the LAMCO device or The
Alternative a heat pump, and the term "solar refrigeration" was
dreamed up to try keeping The Alternative from getting lumped in
with conventional heat pumps. And that worked, along with other
things.
Before the credit expired in 1985 Dennis actually testified at
congressional and IRS hearings regarding The Alternative, to
make sure the system qualified. That system that I have
mentioned earlier in Minneapolis was used in those hearings. A
large corporation tested that system for months, with Btu and
electric meters. Their data showed that the system got a C.O.P. of
a little over five in January, 1983 and a little under five in
February. The actual weather data for Minneapolis was submitted
into evidence. February was a warmer month than January, but it
was windier in January. The argument was that the wind made
the performance improve, as it increased the heat exchange with
the environment, something obviously true, and we all know about
the "solar gain" the system gets when the sun hits the panels. The
system qualified, and Dennis was even appointed to a committee
of one by the government regarding renewable energy tax credits.
One thing that Dennis had continually complained about
was that there was no performance criteria for the renewable
energy tax credit, leading to widespread fraud in the solar
industry. He called for some performance criteria so the taxpayers
wouldn’t get bilked. It is extremely ironic that Dennis has been so
viciously attacked over the years of being a fraud, but if you find
out how the machinery of our surreal society operates, it is no big
surprise. Dennis tends to believe that the lack of performance
criteria may have been by design all along, in a Machiavellian plot
by the Big Boys to encourage real fraud to discredit the entire
alternative energy field. I don’t know about that, but such a theory
does fit the facts.
The newspaper noted that even though there had been no
complaints from the public, the electric company spokesman was
calling for an Attorney General’s investigation of Conserve and all
solar companies in Washington. Another Big Lie that the
spokesman said was that they had been repeatedly asking
Conserve for information and were rebuffed each time. That was
the first time Dennis had known of their requests. In fact the
opposite was true. Dennis had tried getting the electric companies
interested in his technology, but they uniformly expressed no
interest in it, so he eventually went out and did it himself. Dennis
had even gone so far as to rig up a portable unit and drive to an
electric company parking lot to have them test it right there, and
nobody would deign to come out of the building to test it.
What that article did do for Dennis, besides libel him, was
give Dennis an idea as to who was behind the strange, frightened
reactions that he was getting from the Seattle banks, and wasn’t it
strange that the article appeared just when Mr. Financier was
about to commit millions of dollars to finance the systems, and
Dennis had sold 1,000 of them in a few short months?
Shortly after that, people (including customers) began
contacting the company, saying that they had been contacted by
the Attorney General’s office. And then customers began
canceling their contracts right and left. When asked why they
were canceling, they told why. As I go into in other parts of my
web page, at that time the WPPSS fiasco was the headline on the
news almost every night, and the electric companies were
constantly running full page ads, encouraging conservation. And
Dennis’ customers were naturally ringing up the new electric
company conservation department phones, and telling those good
people at the electric company that they had contracted to get The
Alternative, and did the electric company think The Alternative was
a good conservation idea?
God bless the naïve Americans who think that Big Business
(particularly monopolies like the electric companies) is their best
friend, selflessly looking out for John Q. Public’s interest. The
answer from those electric company representatives was a
collective hysterical shriek that the company was a scam and was
being investigated by the Attorney General’s office! Imagine that.
At that time, all Dennis knew was that an electric company
spokesman had publicly called for the Attorney General’s office to
investigate him, and now all the electric companies were telling
Dennis’ customers and potential customers that the company was
a scam and was being investigated by the Attorney General’s
office. So what did that crook Dennis do next? He called the
Attorney General’s office, and got ahold of the investigator that the
people said they were contacted by. He said, "I heard that you
were investigating my company, and I want to know why." The
investigator feigned complete ignorance, and said they weren’t
engaging in an investigation. And the investigator said, "If there
was an investigation, why would you be calling me?" And Dennis
said, "So I could invite you to some public events we have
scheduled, so you can see how we are interacting with the public."
Isn’t this sure shaping up like Dennis the Incorrigible Crook?
Dennis even called a meeting where every electric company
in the Northwest was invited to a meeting where Dennis would lay
out his plans and try to get the electric companies to not see him
as a threat, but an ally in the conservation efforts their full page
ads said they were so desperately seeking. That meeting was
scheduled for August 15th. At about the time Dennis called that
meeting, Bill the Hit Man showed up at the company, begging
Dennis to hire him to act as a public relations man with the electric
companies, telling Dennis that he was at that time a "consultant" to
the local electric companies. Dennis’ organization tried very hard
to make the meeting attended by the electric company
representatives, and in fact every electric company was finally
badgered enough that they all agreed to send a representative to
the meeting.
On August 15th the meeting was held and videotaped. I
have seen the tape. The only attendee from the electric
companies was a low-level employee from one electric company,
who attended because he was a personal friend of Mr. Engineer’s.
The other attendees were Bill the Hit Man, in about the only official
duty he ever performed for the company in his ten week tenure (I
erred earlier when I said it was six weeks, it was ten.), and two
people who said they were from the University of Washington and
had heard about the meeting, and some solar company
representatives getting a free lunch, the same people who were
joining in a chorus with the electric companies in calling Dennis a
scam. It turned out that the two "college students" were actually
investigators for the Attorney General’s office, a pair that Dennis
would later call Hansel and Gretel, as the investigators would later
display the maturity of ten year olds as they couldn’t keep from
giggling whenever they were around Dennis, the all-knowing kind
of giggle.
But they were not the hatchet people, they were like Mr.
Investigator, that saint from Ventura who told Mr. Researcher that
he didn’t care if those he prosecuted were innocent or guilty, that
his job was to get convictions, and that he would engage in any
amount of lying necessary to gain that conviction. What a servant
of the public interest!
The hatchet person was a little further up the rungs of the
Attorney General’s office. And here I will begin naming a few
names, so if anybody who can actually call themselves an
investigator (Eric is far from qualifying yet.), can start their own
investigations. The hatchet person was one Betsy Hollingsworth.
That would be the highest-profile case of her career, one she
probably shudders at remembering, because it eventually cost her
her job.
The Attorney General’s office eventually acknowledged that
they were carrying on an investigation of Dennis’ company. They
came on at first like there was really nothing to worry about, that
there were just a few minor things to clear up. While the electric
companies were calling Dennis a crook in hysterical shrieks, when
Dennis faced the actual Attorney General’s investigators, the
investigators themselves said that there were only one or two
minor items to clear up, nothing to get concerned about. Dennis
was called in by Betsy to give a deposition in September. At the
deposition it became obvious to Dennis that they were filling up
their slings with mud.
Dennis then told Betsy what a media attack on the company
would do: make sure the systems wouldn’t get installed by
December 31 when the tax credit expired, the company would then
collapse, and then there really would be some victims. Dennis
made it very clear that the company was very vulnerable to a
media attack at that time, and Dennis wanted to cooperate with the
investigation in every way that he could. Betsy assured Dennis
that there were just a few little things to change in the way the
company operated, then everything would be fine.
At another meeting with Betsy in October, while she was just
"tying up some loose ends," Dennis’ lawyer told Betsy that Dennis
was planning a business trip to Indiana to discuss building a
factory in Fort Wayne, but if there was a scandal brewing or
anything that might affect her investigation, just "Say the word,
Betsy, and Dennis will not go on his trip and continue cooperating
with this investigation." And Betsy said that she had no intentions
of suing the company, but just wanted to negotiate the matter, and
it could wait until the business trip was over. In Indiana the
Governor’s office of Economic Development was making an
amazingly generous offer to have the factory in Seattle (Where
Dennis was busily manufacturing four hundred systems for his
customers.) relocate to Fort Wayne.
Towards the end of Dennis’ stay in Indiana, which was
going exceedingly well, his contact in Indiana approached him in a
panic. "What’s going on in Washington? Indiana’s Attorney
General has been contacted by the Washington State Attorney
General, and our office is ceasing all negotiations." The man said
"Man, you’ve been sued there, and it’s in all the papers." That is
how honorable Betsy was. In fact it was far more cowardly and
dishonest than that. Alison showed up to the factory/office one
morning, and the parking lot was crawling with camera crews and
reporters. On October 9th, 1985, the company was splashed all
over the news in Seattle. A reporter asked Alison if she had a
comment on the lawsuit the Attorney General’s office had filed
against the company, and Alison said "What lawsuit?"
That wasn’t a case of a lawsuit being filed, and then the
reporters picking up on it and reporting it. Betsy and her gangster
buddies contacted the Attorney General’s office in Indiana to
queer that deal, and sicked all the media on the company, and
Dennis and Alison were the last to know! And when Dennis got
back to town, it turned out that the lawsuit hadn’t even been filed
yet! In an unbelievable display of bad faith and corruption, Betsy
did just the thing Dennis had warned would hurt the company the
most, had orchestrated it when Dennis was out of town, had called
the media vultures down on the company, and she hadn’t even
filed the lawsuit.
The stock of Conserve went from two dollars a share to
twenty-five cents overnight. Betsy’s move cost Dennis over $40
million in net worth overnight. I got to see that phenomenon first
hand when I worked for that medical lab that I write about in the
Ralph Hovnanian Quotations section. A media attack can be
much more effective than an actual legal attack, but hand in hand
is the handiest way to destroy a business. Betsy knew exactly
what she was doing, and obviously was just taking orders from her
superiors.
And then Bill the Hit Man made his move. I write much more
about Bill in the "Short Course on Dennis" section. For Bill’s ten
week tenure at the company, he didn’t do one productive thing for
the company, like smooth things between Conserve and the
electric companies, like he solicited to the company. Instead he
used all his dark arts of persuasion to try befriending all the key
people in the company. As the parking lot was filling up with
camera crews and reporters, Bill went around to all the employees
he could talk to, and tried inciting mutiny. He took off his mask.
What Bill was telling everybody that if the employees mutinied,
they could kick Dennis out of his own company, and then Bill could
run it, with the electric companies’ blessings.
Dennis took a long, dark flight home from Indiana. He felt a
tremendous act of betrayal by the "guardians of the public interest"
and began to realize just how the land laid in Seattle. On the
plane flight back he hastily wrote a reply to what Betsy and her
cronies had done. He ran a full page ad in the Seattle Times,
where he got lucky. It somehow got through the editing
(censoring) process of the Seattle Times and ran in the paper on
Friday, October 18th, 1985. It is reproduced in the book The
Alternative, Exhibit 1C. If you read it, you will see that Dennis had
his grand, over-the-top style way back then. It is not a timid ad.
You might read it and call it a diatribe of the first order. I’ll tell you
the impact it had in the world: the Attorney General’s phones were
ringing off the hook, and they got bags full of mail. They were
inundated with public protest about what they had done to Dennis’
company. I would eventually hear that the Attorney General
himself turned several shades of crimson while reading it.
Cowards are dismayed when their victims fight back, and it was no
exception there.
And one reason that Betsy had not yet filed the lawsuit
was that it was complete legal garbage. It was a civil suit that had
over 40 counts in it, and the mud and lies were thrown far and
wide. Many of the "charges" were manufactured out the thin
air. One of the innumerable, groundless charges was that there
was no factory where The Alternative was being built. When the
company was finally served the lawsuit, guess where they were
served it? At the factory where they were building The Alternative.
Until you have actually lived through such events, it can be hard to
believe that they occur. I fortunately missed most of the Seattle
fireworks, but I got to see a much more escalated version of it in
Ventura a few years later.
And here I will get into what the company was actually
doing, so you can see the true nature of the attack on the
company. I go into the whole dynamic more fully in other parts of
the web page, but here I provide new details. Dennis was
stacking up contracts, trying to find a financier and manufacturer
for them. That was the Seattle strategy.
The sales strategy had a few brilliant angles, the kind
Dennis could practically never get a businessman to comprehend.
The first was that the potential customer would get a telemarketing
call, asking about how big their energy bills were, did they own
their home, and was their federal income tax big enough to take a
$4,000 tax credit on? If they answered appropriately, they were
then asked if they would like to watch a video on how they maybe
could reduce their energy bills without spending a dime of their
own money. If they said yes (who wouldn’t?), then somebody was
scheduled to come over to their house with a video tape and VCR
in their hands. The person would set up the tape (VCRs weren’t
as ubiquitous then). The tape was a very professionally-done
video on The Alternative, with Dennis doing the pitching.
The program was that Conserve would sell to the customer
The Alternative with no money coming out of the customer’s
pockets, and the customer would just pay to Conserve all the
energy savings the system provided until the system was paid for.
The price was $10,000 under that program, with the customer
being able to take a $4,000 tax credit on the next year’s income
tax bill. And the company asked the customer for a $4,000 loan of
that tax credit as money down. And if the customer had faith the
system worked, it was $8,000 cash. Dennis ended his video pitch
with the statement of "You might say that your energy supplier is
paying for this conservation." If the customer was interested, they
would tell the video operator, and they would set up an
appointment for a salesman to come over and get the contracts
signed.
Who wouldn’t go for that deal? The fact of the matter was
that everybody went for that deal. How on earth could the
consumer lose? And Dennis’ salesmen had closing ratios on
selling the system that the world has never before seen. His
salesmen had a 70% closing ratio, and many of them had never
sold anything before in their lives. If you know the sales game and
selling to homeowners, you know those numbers are astronomical.
How could anybody compete with that deal? How could the
electric companies prevent the whole Puget Sound area and its
hundreds of thousands of all electric customers from en masse
converting over to The Alternative, and ultimately costing the
electric companies many billions of dollars in lost revenues? The
program was unstoppable on its business merits. So, like exists in
every industry (And the bigger and more monopolistic they are,
the more you find that phenomenon, something that Eric cannot
seem to comprehend.), the electric industry had to call in its favors
and have its owned public officials stop the company another way,
ergo the media attack, phony lawsuit, Bill the Hit Man, etc.
The only way you could possibly call it a scam was if Dennis
would skip to South America with the loans of the tax credits, and
didn’t ever intend to deliver the systems, particularly by December
31, 1985 when the tax credits expired.
And so every conceivable fantasy that Betsy could possibly
throw into the lawsuit was dreamed up. Get the lawsuit sometime,
it is public record. With all the huge media splash, every customer
who hadn’t actually put up a deposit took off for the hills. The four
hundred people who had put up money were the ones who were
going to be the real losers if the splash succeeded in destroying
the company. Mr. Financier had already funded a bunch of the
systems, and was going to take a million dollar bath if the
company got destroyed at that late hour. There came from the
customers and Mr. Financier a lot of pressure to settle Betsy’s
fantasy lawsuit. With the avalanche of public outcry in the wake of
the full page ad Dennis ran, Betsy suddenly wanted to settle the
case also.
But she had to find something that she could hang her hat
on, to justify the cowardly attacks and make them "legal." And she
found it. In a letter that she sent to Dennis one day, in the middle
of all the pandemonium, she gave the evidence that said she had
Dennis dead to rights. Her case-making piece of evidence was a
letter she had received from a man who had watched the video in
his home of Dennis’ pitch. The man said that he thought, after
watching the tape, that Dennis had said that the electric company
was going to mail the man a check every month if he bought the
system! That was Betsy’s case-making piece of evidence. She
even took a big green highlighter and highlighted that sentence
the man had written. That was Dennis’ crime!
Betsy then proceeded to enumerate all the "consumer
protection" laws that she could use that evidence for to "get"
Dennis. And here is where it begins getting surreal, and you find
out that legislators all probably went to the Orwell School of Law.
In the laws and cases Betsy stated, she made her case clear. The
fact that one person in the state had misunderstood the sales pitch
was a violation of the law. And the fact that the seller had not
intended to deceive the customer was irrelevant. The pertinent
text of that letter is reproduced in The Alternative, Exhibit 1B.
Dennis by that time was ready to kill with his bare hands,
and the last thing he wanted to was "settle" the phony case with
the Attorney General’s office. But Mr. Financier and the 400
customers were going to be the victims if he didn’t. So Dennis had
the customers take a vote whether to settle or not with the AG’s
office. The customers and Mr. Financier voted to settle, and
though it will gall Dennis to the end of his days, he settled with
Betsy and her gangster buddies. The consent decree Dennis
signed was done under extreme duress, a form of blackmail
actually. Betsy and her buddies took Mr. Financier and Dennis’
400 customers hostage, and unless Dennis signed the decree, the
AG would ruin them. What a great bunch of public servants.
The consent decree is not reproduced in The Alternative,
but the Washington Attorney General’s office to this day is more
than happy to provide a copy of it. Read it. It doesn’t admit to one
thing. Not even one. And it says that Dennis’ company would do
the things it always had done. But over the years that has
somehow been transformed into the hard evidence that so many
(Mr. Deputy even tried to use it on me on the day of the raid.)
have used to help them believe that Dennis is a hardened crook.
Mr. Financier attended the meeting where the consent
decree was signed. His statement is reproduced in The
Alternative, Exhibit 1J. Read that statement of the man who paid
more dearly than anybody else in Washington did (If you don’t
count the employee who was murdered by Bill the Hit Man (The
man Eric still thinks is Bill Clinton.), which I cover in great detail in
The Short Course on Dennis section.). Then you will know that I
am not making any of this up.
And of course the surreal thing about it all was that the
electric companies were at the very same time pulling off a huge
swindle of the people, the kind that Eric doesn’t seem to think
possible. Exhibit 1G in The Alternative is an example of what the
electric companies were doing at exactly the same time as Dennis
was being hatcheted in the paper. How about this for a fraudulent
headline "We’ll pay you not to use electricity, (are we crazy?)" I
go into the fraudulent weatherization programs the electric
companies engaged in at that time in other parts of my web page.
The very same people who were shrieking that Dennis was fraud,
were pulling off the really big fraud. And guess who gets
prosecuted for his crooked ways, and guess who is touted as the
best friend of the consumer?
And when Dennis settled the case, that was far from the end
of the death blows that were being rained on the company, and I
go into it in great detail in the Short Course on Dennis section. It
culminated with the phony bankruptcy suit, the murder of one of
Dennis employees, and the eventual theft of Dennis company, in a
move that Mr. Financier thinks was related by conspiracy to the
theft of his company a few weeks before the theft of Dennis’
company. In retrospect, even though Dennis ended up having a
body guard because of all the death threats he received, it is
surprising that Dennis left the state alive. There was what
appeared to be one murder attempt on Dennis during that period.
When Betsy’s evidence files miraculously ended up
containing documents that Bill the Hit Man had stolen from the
company, she coughed them up in an instant when threatened
with an FBI probe by Dennis’ lawyer, and the items she returned to
the company are reproduced in Exhibit 1F in The Alternative. I
could go on and on about Seattle, but I’m about to leave it for now.
In closing let me say that the case ended Betsy’s career
with the Attorney General’s office. Less than two weeks after the
final confrontation with Dennis, Betsy left the Attorney General’s
office to go teach law school. It is hard to know what exactly went
on in the smoke-filled rooms. A part of me wishes that Betsy’s
conscience eventually got the best of her, and she left her high
profile job because she couldn’t take working for such gangsters
anymore. But I think I am being too optimistic. I tend to believe
that her job was to eviscerate the company, and she failed. The
company survived her assaults, though barely, and that likely
didn’t bode well for her career. The hatchet lady’s ax wasn’t sharp
enough.
And who were the "victims" of what happened in Seattle? I
personally watched it destroy lives there. Of course the woman
who Bill the Hit Man murdered suffered the greatest. All the four
hundred Conserve employees lost their jobs, including me. Of the
four hundred customers that were left after the attacks, eighty
percent of them were on the System for Savings plan, and even
though most of the systems didn’t work well, due to the many
problems which I go into in the "problems" section, they didn’t lose
one dime, none of them. About eighty customers went for the
cash deal, and you can call many of them victims, though many of
their systems were more than limping along when the death blow
was finally delivered to the company. And in the almost
incomprehensible way the world works, they are now "Dennis’
victims", not the electric companies’ or the Attorney General’s, or
Bill the Hit Man’s, on the tally sheets of people like Eric.
Mr. Financier lost millions of dollars and the company he
spent a lifetime building, and you can see how he felt about it all
by reading his statement, the statement Eric so blithely dismisses
with his pop psychology. My wife happens to have a doctorate in
psychology, and I’m afraid she doesn’t side with Eric’s amazing
psychological theories. In fact she is positively intrigued by what
kind of pathology may be motivating Eric. And the biggest
financial victim of all was Dennis himself, going from a net worth of
$50 million dollars to zero in less than a year. That wraps up the
first great attack by the government.
So Dennis went from a net worth of $50 million to leaving
Washington with nothing but the clothes on his back, like he came
to the state a few years earlier. He first tried going to Chicago and
rebuilding the company with a dealer of his. By that time I had
entered the picture, and the subsequent events are covered in
great detail in the "My Experiences" section of my web page. And
the Attorney General’s office kept up the malice, spewing out their
lies continually, even to the present day.
After Betsy lost her job, the next up to the plate for the
Attorney General was one Paula Selis, hatchet lady number two.
Every place Dennis found himself in for the next few years, the
footsteps of Paula were not far behind. And if it was possible, the
electric companies’ hysterical shrieks of what a bad man Dennis
was were made pale by the rantings of Paula Selis. For anybody
that wanted to call her, they got both barrels of Paula’s venting
about Dennis, a man she had never met. Paula apparently had a
bottomless well of funds to send out endless overnight packages
to anybody who called about Dennis. The package was filled with
the "dirt" on Dennis. Too bad all of it stuck to Paula’s fingers.
Over the years I got to see Paula in action in print a number
of times. To be calling her slanderous statements a bunch of
shameful lies would be putting it generously. I have seen the
shock people have had after talking to Paula, and the absolutely
hysterical venom she would spray at Dennis. It apparently was
breathtaking, and I have even seen an affidavit to that effect, by
somebody who was not our friend. Paula eventually left the AG’s
office to be a close aide to the AG as he made a failed bid for the
governor’s office back in 1992. I don’t think the people of
Washington know how close they came to having a gangster
running the state government. It was a close election. Dennis
eventually met Paula, and it was obvious why she had become a
trusted aide of the AG, likely not due to her astute lawyering skills,
but the fact that she was tall, blond, buxom and attractive. I am
not surprised.
There was nothing in Paula’s gift packages to impress
anybody who actually knew what was going on. But, and this is
how people like Eric are convinced, you tell a lie often enough,
and people believe it, and you may even end up believing it
yourself. Somehow if Dennis is attacked enough times by the
power structure, it somehow turns Dennis into a crook just by their
efforts, if you believe the things Eric and his buddies have to say
on the matter. Similar logic makes Mohandas K. Gandhi a very
bad man.
After a fruitless month in Chicago, Dennis moved to Boston,
with another one of his dealers. And Paula was breathing down
his neck. She ended up talking to Robert Jackson of the
Middlesex County District Attorney’s office, in Massachusetts.
Dennis had barely hit town when Mr. Jackson swaggered into the
office of Dennis’ dealer, throwing out threats like they were candy.
Paula had told him there was a terrible crook in his back yard, and
like the dutiful protector of the public good he was, one of the
many threats that Mr. Jackson spewed out in his visit to the
dealer’s office was that he was going to be the man who put
Dennis Lee away for a long time. Who were the victims in
Massachusetts? How many people had been complaining that
Dennis had ripped them off in Massachusetts? Well, actually,
nobody at all. But Mr. Jackson had been tipped off by that
guardian of the public interest, Paula Selis, and he was going to
get his man.
Dennis has seen that one many times over the years, and
so have I. People like Mr. Jackson have their eyes about half an
inch apart. And when an authority figure tells them that somebody
like Dennis is a "bad man, get him!" that is all somebody like Mr.
Jackson needs to start gnashing his teeth, straining on his leash,
protecting society. It is like sicking a rabid dog on an "intruder."
And many people like Mr. Jackson are very sincere in their efforts.
You just tell them who the "bad guys" are, and they will take care
of them. There is a code of ethics there, it’s just that it is like the
Neanderthal Man code of ethics.
Mr. Jackson tried and tried, but he wasn’t able to find
anything wrong with what Dennis was doing! How disappointing
and frustrating that must have been. And in one of the most telling
documents that has ever surfaced in Dennis’ story, Mr. Jackson, in
responding to Mr. Deputy, in a letter that is in The Alternative,
Exhibit 1N, which accompanied the investigative files that Jackson
sent along to McDowell, stated the following:
"Mr. Lee was attempting to duplicate his Washington operation in
our state. We were attempting to proceed criminally against Mr.
Lee, but, without clear cut violations of the law, we could only
proceed in the manner in which we did."
Isn’t that neat? They were pursuing Dennis criminally on
the amazingly honest word of Paula Selis and her boss, but
unfortunately they couldn’t find any laws he was breaking. Dear
reader, I pray that if you ever face a prosecutor trying to throw you
in jail for no reason, I hope they just don’t make one up like Mr.
Deputy eventually did. So those were the incredibly criminal
actions of Dennis in two states.
And here is also a very telling conversation a banker from
Massachusetts had with a man from the conservation department
of the BPA, the ringleader of the Washington electric companies
and Bill the Hit Man’s employer. The banker was checking up on
us. The man from the BPA said that all the entire conservation
department thought about for a few months was Dennis Lee. That
was from the same organization that said "Dennis Who?"
And now comes the state where the long arm of the law
finally caught up with Dennis. And that is a story I know all too
well, and is chronicled ad nauseum in the "My Experiences"
section of this web page.
But Eric has dismissed all of it uniformly as the anecdotal
recollections of a man in denial of what a crook he has been taken
by. What is the documentary evidence? Here we will see a
pattern that you will find familiar. When the rocket ship started
taking off in the autumn of 1987, I was trying to just hang on, as
we went from five people to forty employees in a couple of months.
One of the employees we hired was a man named Clarence
Cabell, a man I have to say is one I admire. Some in the
organization didn’t treat Clarence too well before it was all over,
something that I regretted happened when I heard of it. It seems
that some people were suspicious of Clarence from day one, and
never got over it. Why were they suspicious of Clarence, who
went by the name of Cab? Well, because he had spent almost his
whole career in law enforcement, a few of them as a deputy sheriff
for Los Angeles County.
In late December of 1987 Cab was working in our customer
service department when he got a call from a prospective kit
buyer. They had one serious question about us, and then they
would buy the kit. Their questions was "Why is the Better
Business Bureau in Ventura referring calls to them to Mr. Deputy
of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department?" Cab said he didn’t
know, and he called Mr. Deputy himself, asking if there was
anything the company was doing wrong. Cab had been in law
enforcement himself for over ten years before he came to work for
us, so you might say that he knew what he was doing when he
called up Mr. Deputy. If the company was doing anything wrong,
Mr. Deputy was under an obligation to tell Cab if there was
something wrong. Otherwise Mr. Deputy was guilty of entrapment.
Mr. Deputy asked some questions about the business, which Cab
answered, and when the conversation was over, in the words of
Cab, Mr. Deputy said "Everything you’re doing is fine. Well, I’ll
guess I’ll stop doing your job for you now and have the Better
Business Bureau stop referring calls to me, and I’ll tell the DA’s
office that everything is fine."
It turned out that was the first crime that Mr. Deputy
committed, as three weeks later he led the raid against the
company, as I watched him spring out of his car at 10:00 A.M. on
January 14th, 1988 (I earlier said it was 9:00, it was actually
10:00. My memory is not perfect all the time.). Read Cab’s
affidavit in The Alternative, Exhibit 1P.
And the raid was a day that shall live in infamy, and is
already passing into legend. In the "My Experiences" section of
this web page, I go into a fair amount of detail about the events of
that day. And what of the legendary theft that took place when
they were "raiding" the offices? Their theft and espionage
exercise in Mr. Researcher’s office is documented by the affidavits
of Mr. Professor, the machinist, and Mr. Researcher in Exhibits
2B, 2C and 2D in the Alternative. And if you actually begin looking
at the affidavits, you will see that my story is actually a lot bigger
than I have been intimating on my web pages so far. And maybe
someday I will be able to tell the story in full.
I have in my possession a copy of the receipt for seized
materials that had to be left in every room they searched in their
search. I have a copy of the "official" search receipt they left
in Mr. Researcher’s office, the last office they searched in their
official search, at about midnight. The receipt says "2 sheets
describing parts for "The Alternative" 11G #1 and 11G #2." That
was what they took in the official search, partly because that was
about all that was left in the office after they ransacked it over
twelve hours earlier in the "unofficial search" that the machinist,
Victor Fisher and Mr. Researcher witnessed.
Mr. Researcher eventually testified to that in court,
heroically, after being threatened by Mr. Deputy to not show up in
court unless it was for the prosecution, or else he would be in the
cell next to Dennis’. Now there was a crime. In fact the whole
deal will likely go down as one of the greater acts against the well
being of humanity ever perpetrated. Of course if we all come to an
obscure end in jail or some grim fate soon, it may not. And I have
faint hope for this planet if it does turn out that way. But if we
make it, it will go down with other infamous acts of corrupt officials.
So there is how the events in Ventura began, but Eric the Skeptic
is still convinced that Dennis is one of the great cons of the
century, and those relentless attacks of the legal system seem to
be completely justified.
And what was the charge that justified such a raid? It
turned out that Mr. Deputy, I’m sure with legal help somewhere
along the line, dug up one of the most obscure laws in California
legal history. I go into that stuff in great detail in the "My
Experiences" section, once again. The prosecution of Dennis
under those laws was the second in California history, and not one
in a thousand lawyers has ever heard of it, and in the end Dennis’
"crime" turned out to be that he hadn’t heard about the law, and
hadn’t filed a one page form and paid a fifty dollar fee. That sure
justified two years behind bars.
The first time we knew about the California law was when
thirteen armed deputies stormed the building. How does the State
of California usually respond to the "violation" of the law that
Dennis supposedly committed? Exhibit 2E in The Alternative
documents the typical response. It is a letter from the California
Attorney General’s office, notifying the recipient that his business
may have violated the law in question, and to file the form
promptly, then all would be well. Boy, that sure would have been
nice if Mr. Deputy would have said something like that, which he
was legally required to do when he talked to Cab.
So Dennis ended up spending two years behind bars for
"violating" a civil code by not filling out a form. How many people
should have joined Dennis in jail for committing the "crime" that
Dennis did? Eventually we ended up talking to the legislator who
wrote the laws in question. The legislator estimated that perhaps
over 100,000 businesses in California could come under the
umbrella of the very nebulous and virtually untested law, as
Dennis was the second prosecution under those laws in the fifteen
year history of the laws.
And how many businesses had complied with the law and
filed the one page form? See Exhibit 4F in The Alternative. It is
an affidavit from Albert Norman Shelden, the lawyer who literally
wrote the law. They had 250 filings under the law. 250 out of
100,000, what that does that work out to? My calculator comes up
with the fact that one quarter of one percent of the companies that
were supposed to file, did file. Whew! that would really fill up the
prison system if the law applied to Dennis was applied uniformly
across the whole state, and there wouldn’t be any businesses left.
In Washington state the investigation began at the public
behest of the electric companies. In Massachusetts it began
because they had been contacted by the Washington State
Attorney General’s office. And what was the event that got the
investigation going in Ventura? Well, we can read Mr. Deputy’s
version of how he got involved, if we can believe it, which I’m not
sure I do. In Mr. Deputy’s original investigative report, he cites the
event that got him involved. It seems that Mr. Deputy was
contacted by a Victor Burnstein who said he attended one of the
Saturday shows that we put on every week, and he was
"bedazzled by the caffeine in the coffee, the sugar in the donuts
and the speaker’s presentation and wasn’t really sure what you
would get for the money." See Exhibit 4C in The Alternative for
that text. That was supposedly the event that put Mr.