Alternative Sources of Clean,
Free Energy Are Available
But We Can't Have It

By James Donahue

A few years back, when I was a young and eager reporter operating a news bureau in Michigan's Sanilac County, I met an interesting man named Vernon Trigger who claimed to have found a source of clean, free energy. Readers of this page may remember I have written about Mr. Trigger before.

As world leaders gather this fall in Copenhagen to talk about the looming crisis of climate change brought on by carbon emissions, we want to remind readers about what Mr. Trigger discovered and how big business interests managed to shut him up.

Trigger was in his twilight years when I knew him. At the time he said he was fighting a losing battle with the big energy companies that were blocking efforts to get his discovery marketed. He was attempting to write a book about his secret. Being careful not to reveal too much, he gave me a limited version of his story. I was surprised after writing his story when my newspaper, a member of the large Gannett chain, refused to print it.

My editor said he could not believe the story and he accused me of wasting my time tracking such a tale.

Although he lacked the title of "Ph.D." in front of his name, I was convinced that Vernon Trigger was not a fake. He was a genius who accomplished more than 20 "specialists" in a variety of fields might achieve in a lifetime.

Trigger grew up during the early years of radio and became deeply interested in this new technology. He experimented with radio and radio transmission and helped develop the first ship-to-shore radio communication system. He later worked with Westinghouse in developing the early commercial radio transmission towers.

During World War II, when gasoline was being rationed, Trigger invented a carburetor that allowed automobile engines to run on methane gas. He studied architecture and designed a few homes (including his own) that rivaled the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Before he retired he worked with the government in the development of nuclear energy.

When I met him, Trigger had a team of people working in a laboratory in the basement of his house. He did not disclose to me the source of his energy discovery, but he assured me that it was readily available all around us. He even gave me a few demonstrations by sending light jolts of energy through my body from across the room. He implied that he had stumbled on a secret that Nikola Tesla knew, and understood why Tesla believed it possible for everybody to have free and natural energy to heat and light their homes without having to buy power delivered on wires.

Of course the problem with this is the word “free.” Big energy companies wanted no part of such an invention. They stopped Tesla and they had little trouble blocking Trigger from disclosing this information to an energy starved world. As Trigger explained it, there was just too much money to be lost if people ever learned Tesla's secret. The world could have all of the natural energy it needed without having to pay for it.

I have a feeling that these sources of energy were known to people like Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan and Thomas Edison during the years when steam, gasoline and electric power systems were being developed. They were kept secret because nobody could find a way to profit from the energy that could be freely captured from the Earth.

Ironically electricity, which for years was an extremely inexpensive form of energy, was made available because Tesla invented the concept of alternating current. Edison had the idea of building electric generating plants and sending juice down wires to houses and industry, but until Tesla came along, he didn't have a workable delivery system.

Now, thanks to the Internet, there are inklings that inventors all over the world are discovering some of the secret things that Tesla and Vernon Trigger knew, but were prevented from making available to the world.

In Cairns, Australia, engineer John Christie and electrician Lou Brits were developing a machine they say will use batteries and magnets to provide years of enough free and non-toxic energy to power a house. Relying on the attraction and repulsion of internal magnets, their machine, called the Lutec 1000, was said to operate continually on a pulse-like current after it is kick started from a battery source.

I am not going to hold my breath on this one. Small businessmen with great inventions like this have either been bought (swallowed up) by the big power interests or driven out of their efforts to market their products for years. The Lutec 1000 came under malicious attack by various web critics in 2007 and this machine still is not available on the open market. Was it a fraud or did these men have a good idea that was pushed under the rug?

Trigger told me about a friend of his that developed a working solar cell during the depression years, sometime in the early 1930s. The patent was bought by a major electric company and never seen again.

My wife's brother, Wayne, once bought a new Ford pickup truck. It had a big V-8 engine, back in the days when gasoline was cheap and trucks averaged about 15 miles to the gallon. Wayne noticed that this particular truck seemed to go a long way on a tank of gasoline so he started calculating the distance he could go on a gallon of fuel. He was shocked to discover this particular truck was averaging about 50 miles on a gallon, something unheard of at the time.

Wayne loved that trick and drove it for several years. He was a back-yard mechanic and did his own maintenance. One day, he said he removed the carburetor for cleaning, and accidentally damaged it. He had to buy a new carburetor. After that, the truck averaged only 15 miles to the gallon, just like everybody else's truck.

What was different about the original carburetor in Wayne's truck? Did he actually buy a truck with one of those fabled "experimental" carburetors mistakenly installed? That I knew a man who could give me a first-hand account of having owned such a vehicle was evidence to me that carburetors existed years ago that were capable of delivering exceptional gas mileage even with those old and powerful V-8 engines we used to love.

The 1970's "fuel crisis" was a scam designed to force fuel prices up and put bigger profits in the pockets of the energy giants. I suspect the move to force automobile manufacturers to shift to smaller, fuel and energy-efficient engines also was part of the scam. The price of cars more than doubled after that and we bought that lie, hook-line-and-sinker.

Some might say that business is business and that we enjoy our cars, electronic devices and comfortable home heating and cooling systems because the people who developed them were motivated by profit.

This is true. But the system we developed, all of it dependent on the burning of fossil fuels, has destroyed the natural ecological balance of nature, poked giant holes in our protective ozone layer, and now threatens the future of life on this planet. In the long run, we may someday have to admit that we took a wrong turn sometime around 1890 and followed an industrial and commercial path into self destruction.