THE ORIGINAL ELECTRIC CAR - UNPLUGGED?
Perhaps the most notorious
suppressed invention is the General Motors EV1, subject of the
2006 documentary,
Who Killed the Electric Car?
The EV1 was the world’s first
mass-produced electric car, with 800 of them up for lease from
GM in the late ’90s. GM ended the EV1 line in 1999, stating that
consumers weren’t happy with the limited driving range of the
car’s batteries, making it unprofitable to continue production.
Many skeptics, however, believe GM killed the EV1 under pressure
from oil companies, who stand to lose the most if
high-efficiency vehicles conquer the market. It didn’t help that
GM hunted down and destroyed every last EV1, ensuring the
technology would die out.
THE DEATH OF THE AMERICAN STREETCAR
In 1921, if the streetcar industry
wasn’t actually naming streetcars Desire, it was certainly
desiring more streetcars.
They netted $1 billion, causing
General Motors to hemorrhage $65 million in the face of a
thriving industry. GM retaliated by buying and closing hundreds
of independent railway companies, boosting the market for
gas-guzzling GM buses and cars.
While a recent urban movement to
rescue mass transit has been underway, it is unlikely we’ll ever
see streetcars return to their former glory.
THE 99-MPG CAR
The holy grail of automotive
technology is the 99-mpg car. Although the technology has been
available for years, automakers have deliberately withheld it
from the U.S. market.
In 2000, the New York Times reported a
little-known fact, at least to most:
A diesel-powered dynamo
called the
Volkswagen Lupo had driven around the world averaging
higher than 99 mpg.
The Lupo was sold in Europe from
1998 to 2005 but, once again, automakers prevented it from
coming to market; they claimed Americans had no interest in
small, fuel-efficient cars.
FREE ENERGY
Nikola Tesla was more than just the
inspiration for a hair metal band, he was also an undisputed
genius.
In 1899, he figured out a way to
bypass fossil-fuel-burning power plants and power lines, proving
that “free energy” could be harnessed using ionization in the
upper atmosphere to produce electrical vibrations.
J.P. Morgan,
who had been funding Tesla’s research, had a bit of buyer’s
remorse when he realized that free energy for all wasn’t as
profitable as, say, actually charging people for every watt of
energy use.
Morgan then drove another nail in
free energy’s coffin by chasing away other investors, ensuring
Tesla’s dream would die.
MIRACLE CANCER CURE
In 2001, Nova Scotian Rick Simpson
discovered that a cancerous spot on his skin disappeared within
a few days of applying an essential oil made from marijuana.
Since then, Simpson and others have
treated thousands of cancer patients with incredible success.
Researchers in Spain have confirmed that THC, an active compound
in
marijuana, kills brain-tumor cells in human subjects and
shows promise with breast, pancreatic and liver tumors.
The U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, however, classifies marijuana as a Schedule I
drug, meaning that it has no accepted medical use, unlike
Schedule II drugs, like cocaine and methamphetamine, which may
provide medical benefits.
What a buzzkill...
WATER-POWERED VEHICLES
Despite how silly it sounds,
water-fueled vehicles do exist.
The most famous is
Stan Meyer’s dune
buggy, which achieved 100 miles per gallon and might have become
more commonplace had Meyer not succumbed to a suspicious brain
aneurysm at 57.
Insiders have loudly claimed that
Meyer was poisoned after he refused to sell his patents or end
his research. Fearing a conspiracy, his partners have all but
gone underground (or should we say underwater?) and taken his
famed water-powered dune buggy with them.
We just hope someone finally brings
back the amphibious car.
CHRONOVISOR
What if you had a device that could
see into the future and revisit the past? And what if you didn’t
need Christopher Lloyd to help you?
Father
Pellegrino Maria Ernetti, an
Italian priest, claimed in the 1960s to have invented what he
called a
Chronovisor, something that allowed him to witness
Christ’s crucifixion.
The device supposedly enabled viewers to
watch any event in human history by tuning in to remnant
vibrations that are caused by every action. (His team of
researchers and builders included Enrico Fermi, who also worked
on the first atomic bomb).
On his deathbed, Fermi admitted that
he had faked viewings of ancient Greece and Christ’s demise, but
insisted the Chronovisor, which had by then vanished, still
worked.
Unsurprisingly, conspiracy theorists
say
the Vatican is now the likely owner of the original Chronovisor.
RIFE DEVICES
American inventor Royal Rife (his
real name), in 1934,
cured 14 “terminal” cancer patients and
hundreds of animal cancers by aiming his “beam ray” at what he
called the “cancer virus.”
So why isn’t the Rife Ray in use
today?
A 1986 book,
The Cancer Cure That
Worked, Fifty Years of Suppression, by Barry Lynes and
John
Crane, revived the Rife device affair.
The book, written in a style typical
of conspiratorial theorists, cites names, dates, events and
places, giving the appearance of authenticity to a mixture of
historical documents and speculations selectively spun into a
web far too complex to permit verification by any thing short of
a army of investigators with unlimited resources.
The authors claim that Rife
successfully demonstrated his device’s cancer curing ability in
1934, but that,
“all reports describing the cure
were censored by the head of the AMA from the major medical
journals.”
A 1953 U.S. Senate special
investigation concluded that Fishbein and the AMA had conspired
with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to suppress various
alternative cancer treatments that conflicted with the AMA’s
pre-determined view that,
“radium, x-ray therapy and
surgery are the only recognized treatments for cancer.”
CLOUDBUSTER
In 1953, a drought threatened
Maine’s blueberry crop, and several farmers offered to pay
Wilhelm Reich
if he could make it rain.
The weather bureau had reportedly
forecast no rain for several days when Reich began the
experiment at 10 a.m. on July 6, 1953.
The Bangor Daily News
reported on July 24:
Dr. Reich and three assistants
set up their “rain-making” device off the shore of Grand
Lake. The device, a set of hollow tubes, suspended over a
small cylinder, connected by a cable, conducted a “drawing”
operation for about an hour and ten minutes.
According to a reliable source
in Ellsworth the following climatic changes took place in
that city on the night of July 6 and the early morning of
July 7:
“Rain began to fall shortly
after ten o’clock Monday evening, first as a drizzle and
then by midnight as a gentle, steady rain. Rain
continued throughout the night, and a rainfall of 0.24
inches was recorded in Ellsworth the following morning.”
A puzzled witness to the
“rain-making” process said:
“The queerest looking clouds you
ever saw began to form soon after they got the thing
rolling.”
And later the same witness said the
scientists were able to change the course of the wind by
manipulation of the device.
The blueberry crop survived, the farmers declared themselves
satisfied, and Reich received his fee
OVERUNITY GENERATOR
A number of
overunity generators,
which produce more energy than they take to run, have surfaced
in the past century.
Ironically, they have been more
trouble than they were worth. In nearly all cases, a supposedly
working prototype has been unable to make it to commercial
production as a result of various corporate or government forces
working against the technology.
Recently, the
Lutec 1000, an
“electricity amplifier,” has been making steady progress toward
a final commercial version.
Will consumers soon be able to buy
it, or will it too be suppressed?
COLD FUSION
Billions of dollars have been spent
researching how to create energy using controlled “hot fusion,”
a risky and unpredictable line of experimentation.
Meanwhile, garage scientists and a
fringe group of university researchers have been getting closer
to harnessing the power of “cold fusion,” which is much more
stable and controllable, but far less supported by government
and foundation money.
In 1989, Martin Fleischmann and
Stanley Pons announced that they had made a breakthrough and had
observed cold fusion in a glass jar on their lab bench. To say
the reaction they received was chilly would be an
understatement.
CBS’s 60 Minutes described how the
resulting backlash from the well-funded hot-fusion crowd sent
the researchers underground and overseas, where within a few
years their funding dried up, forcing them to drop their pursuit
of clean energy.
HOT FUSION
Cold fusion isn’t the only
technology to get buried by hot-headed scientists.
When two physicists who were working
on the decades-long
Tokamak Hot Fusion project at Los Alamos
Laboratory stumbled across a cheaper, safer method of creating
energy from colliding atoms, they were allegedly forced to
repudiate their own discoveries or be fired; the lab feared
losing the torrent of government money for
Tokamak.
In retaliation, the lead researchers
created the Focus Fusion Society, which raises private money to
fund their research outside of government interference.
MAGNETOFUNK AND HIMMELKOMPASS
Nazi scientists spent much of World
War II hidden in a covert military base somewhere in the arctic,
creating the Magnetofunk.
This alleged invention was designed
to deflect the compasses of Allied aircraft that might be
searching for Point 103, as the base was known. The aircraft
pilots would think they were flying in a straight line, but
would gradually curve around Point 103 without ever knowing they
were deceived.
The Himmelkompass allowed German
navigators to orient themselves to the position of the sun,
rather than magnetic forces, so they could find Point 103
despite the effects of the Magnetofunk.
According to Wilhelm Landig, a former SS officer, these two devices were closely
guarded secrets of the Third Reich.
So closely guarded were they that
neither device apparently survived the collapse of Hitler’s
Germany, although the real tragedy is that no one has ever named
their band Magnetofunk.
A SAFER CIGARETTE?
In the 1960s, the
Liggett & Myers
tobacco company created a product called the XA, a cigarette in
which most of the stick’s carcinogens had been eliminated.
Dr. James Mold, Liggett’s Research
Director, reported in court documents in the case of “The City
and County of San Francisco vs. Phillip Morris, Inc.,” that
Phillip Morris threatened to “clobber” Liggett if they did not
adhere to an industry agreement never to reveal information
about the negative health effects of smoking.
By advertising a “safer”
alternative, they would be admitting the dangers of tobacco use.
The lawsuit was dismissed on a technicality and Phillip Morris
never addressed the accusations.
Despite their own scientists’
publication of research that showed less cancer in mice exposed
to smoke from the XA, Liggett & Myers issued a press released
denying evidence of cancer in humans as a result of tobacco use,
and the XA never saw the light of day.
TENS
The Transcutaneous Electric Nerve
Stimulation (TENS) device was created to alleviate pain impulses
from the body without the use of drugs.
In 1974, Johnson & Johnson bought
StimTech, one of the first companies to sell the machine, and
proceeded to starve the TENS division of money, causing it to
flounder. StimTech sued, alleging that Johnson & Johnson
purposely stifled the TENS technology to protect sales of its
flagship drug, Tylenol.
Johnson & Johnson responded that the
device never performed as well as was claimed and that it was
not profitable. StimTech’s founders won $170 Million, although
the ruling was appealed and overturned on a technicality.
The court’s finding that the
corporation suppressed the
TENS device was never overturned.
THE PHOEBUS CARTEL
Phillips, GE and Osram engaged in a
conspiracy from 1924 to 1939 with the goal of controlling the
fledgling light-bulb industry, according to a report published
in Time magazine six years later.
The alleged cartel set prices and
suppressed competing technologies that would have produced
longer-lasting and more efficient light bulbs.
By the time the
cabal dissolved, the industry-standard incandescent bulb was
established as the dominant source of artificial light across
Europe and North America.
Not until the late 1990s did compact
fluorescent bulbs begin to edge into the worldwide lighting
market as an alternative.
THE CORAL CASTLE
How did Ed Leedskalnin build
the
massive Coral Castle in Homestead, Florida, out of giant chunks
of coral weighing up to 30 tons each with no heavy equipment and
no outside help?
Theories abound, including
anti-gravity devices, magnetic resonance and alien technology,
but the answer may never be known.
Leedskalnin died in 1951
without any written plans or clues as to his techniques. The
centerpiece of the castle, which is now a museum open to the
public, is a nine-ton gate that used to move with light pressure
from one finger.
After the gate’s bearings wore out
in the 1980s, a crew of five took more than two weeks to fix it,
although they never did get it to work as effortlessly as
Leedskalnin’s original masterpiece.
HEMP BIO-FUEL
The father of our country, George
Washington, who is rumored to have said “I cannot tell a lie,”
was a proud supporter of the hemp seed.
Of course, the only thing more
suppressed in this country than an honest politician
is hemp,
which is often mistakenly for marijuana and therefore unfairly
maligned.
Governmental roadblocks, meanwhile,
prevent hemp from becoming the leader in extracting ethanol,
allowing environmentally damaging sources like corn to take over
the ethanol industry. Despite the fact that it requires fewer
chemicals, less water and less processing to do the same job,
hemp has never caught on.
Experts also lay the blame at the
feet of (who else?) Presidential candidates, who kiss up to Iowa
corn growers for votes.
