April 4, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

This morning, Beverly Barnhart, an analyst with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, contacted New Energy Times with demands to remove portions of a news article in which she was quoted. Barnhart threatened to use the government’s public relations and legal departments against New Energy Times.  

On March 28, we quoted an e-mail from Barnhart in our article about the forthcoming Naval Research Laboratory colloquium on “cold fusion,” featuring Robert Duncan, vice chancellor for research and professor of physics at the University of Missouri. (NRL Will Host Colloquium on “Cold Fusion”)

NRL did not announce the colloquium; nor did Duncan. According to sources who contacted New Energy Times, news of the colloquium spread by personal e-mails and telephone calls from the organizers and their supporters, including Barnhart.

This morning, New Energy Times received the following statements from Barnhart in an e-mail:

“Please take my name off your Web site immediately, or I will ask our public affairs organization to remove it.

“We are not allowed to release information to publications without internal review. My personal emails to my colleagues are not for publication. I have nothing to do with this seminar and only forwarded the notice to colleagues.”

Minutes later, we received a telephone call from Barnhart. After we advised her that the call was being recorded, and after we declined her request to reveal our sources, she repeated and escalated her threat to include potential legal action.

“Take my name off your Web site,” Barnhart said, “or I will have my public affairs people contact you and ask you to remove it.

“If it is on your Web site this afternoon, I’ll go to our general counsel and ask them to contact you. Or we can be nice, and you can take it off voluntarily.”

A few minutes later, we received an e-mail from Tom Mehlhorn, superintendent of the Plasma Physics Division at NRL.

“Please remove this article from your Web site,” Mehlhorn wrote. “This is an internal seminar that is NOT open to the public, and your posting based on a forwarded ‘e-mail chain,’ including attributions of people on the list, is inappropriate.”

Three years ago, in August 2009, Barnhart organized a workshop on “cold fusion” and later published a report based on that workshop. New Energy Times reported that in our 2010 article “Two Decades of ‘Cold Fusion.’ ”

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March 28, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

The Plasma Physics Division of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., will host a colloquium on “cold fusion” on April 10, according to an e-mail and announcement distributed by Beverly Barnhart, an analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency, and obtained by New Energy Times. The e-mail was written by Barnhart, and the announcement was written by Mary Austin at NRL.

Robert Duncan, vice chancellor for research and professor of physics at the University of Missouri, is the featured speaker. In 2009, Duncan endorsed “cold fusion” on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program “Cold Fusion Is Hot Again.” He is the chairman of the 18th International Conference on Cold Fusion, to be held at the University of Missouri this summer.

“Cold fusion is still alive … in the academic world, and hopefully Dr. Duncan will provide an update on what Missouri is doing,” Barnhart wrote. “University of Missouri, along with Purdue University and the University of Illinois as partners, is reportedly hosting this summer’s international conference on cold fusion.”

Last week, New Energy Times asked Nicholas Giordano, the head of the Purdue University Physics Department, in what capacity Purdue was involved in ICCF-18.

“The listing of Purdue University as a Partner of that conference was an error,” Giordano wrote. “Purdue University is not a sponsor or partner of the conference, and that should now be clear on the conference Web site, which I believe was corrected [on March 21]. One of the physics faculty at Purdue [, cold fusion theorist Yeong Kim,] is a co-chair of the conference, but neither the university nor the Physics Department itself is connected.”

Instead, the ICCF-18 Web site now says that Missouri is partnering with the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment and National Instruments Corp. for the conference.

NRL Colloquium Announcement

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