2009 CBS-TV Program Wrongly Reported DARPA LENR Endorsement
May 8, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –
A key document shown in CBS’s “60 Minutes” program “Cold Fusion Is Hot Again” was wrongly attributed, New Energy Times recently learned.
During the 2009 program, CBS said that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency did its “own analysis” of the anomalous heat effect seen in LENRs (low-energy nuclear reactions) and that CBS had obtained an “internal memo” written by DARPA.
“The Pentagon is saying [that LENR is real], too,” CBS said. “The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, did its own analysis, and 60 Minutes obtained an internal memo that concludes there is ‘no doubt that anomalous excess heat is produced in these experiments.'”
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Here’s what CBS displayed on the show as evidence of DARPA’s endorsement:
Sometime after the program aired, New Energy Times obtained the full document. DARPA did not do its own analysis, and it was not an internal memo. The memo was written by a long-standing research partner and collaborator of the subjects of the story.
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The document was written by an NRL employee who managed a LENR research project on behalf of DARPA and then submitted it to DARPA.
New Energy Times contacted the author, Graham Hubler, by e-mail on April 13 and learned more details.
In 2009, Hubler was the head of the Materials and Sensors Branch of the Naval Research Laboratory. He was closely involved in NRL’s own LENR research program from 2002 until he retired Aug. 3, 2012, and went to work in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Missouri. Hubler became the director of the Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance under the direction of Robert Duncan.
Duncan is the vice chancellor of research at the University of Missouri. He was one of the featured experts on the CBS show.
Hubler had been asked by Valerie Browning, a DARPA program manager, to oversee a DARPA contract that funded LENR research. Among his other LENR projects, Hubler was responsible for managing and overseeing the progress of the researchers involved in this contract.
DARPA paid for the research and paid NRL for the analysis. But DARPA did not do “its own analysis” as CBS stated. Moreover, the researchers involved with this DARPA contract (SRI, ENEA and Energetics Technologies) were the same researchers featured on the CBS show.
Hubler was not independent from the researchers featured on the show, according to Michael McKubre of SRI International, one of the researchers funded by that DARPA contract. In 2009, McKubre wrote that he and Hubler had a “significant and long-standing research partnership and collaboration.”
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