The Scientist Who Was Right. Unfortunately

A Biographical Reference RE: Adam Trombly
By Former Canadian Ambassador James George

June 2009 – It was, I suppose, normal for people to disbelieve the dire predictions of the few brave scientists who were trying to warn us twenty-five years ago of the ecological crisis they saw coming. What is not normal is that one of the most prescient of these early scientific whistle-blowers has narrowly survived several assassination attempts, and is still marginalized even today, without the grudging recognition usually given to those whom time has proved to have been remarkably correct in their forecasting.

This former protégé of the late R. Buckminster Fuller opted, at Fuller’s suggestion, to pursue the practice of science as a comprehensivist and “not to let this global vision with which you are gifted die an overspecialized death.” His name is Adam Douglass Trombly and he has maintained his “global vision”. Indeed, since that conversation with Fuller in 1969, Adam has expanded his focus from astrophysics/cosmology to include those fields of scientific study that are relevant to understanding the Earth and all that humankind has done to her.

Moreover, Adam is not just a scientist. He is also a Tulku, an emanation of the great Tibetan promulgator of the Ecumenical Tradition, Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo. Adam was recognized by another emanation of that same mind stream, H.H. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, when the two men first met. It is his perhaps unique combination of scientific and spiritual insights that has allowed Adam to come to a perspective that is very relevant to this book. Here we see, in one man’s example, the fruit of an awakening that combines rigorous science with rigorous spirituality, practical action in the world along with the contemplation of wholeness. No one has a better track record of predicting, early and accurately, the dire consequences of global warming and telling us what we should do to mitigate them. His cosmological ideas are at the cutting edge of the new paradigm that is emerging—the paradigm that, I believe, will finally reconcile scientific and traditional cosmologies in a new life-sustaining world view for the 21^st. Century. By the time I met Adam in 1987 he had already accomplished a number of noteworthy achievements.

The first was the co-founding of Project Earth™ in 1979 with his friend and mentor, R. Buckminster Fuller, with the goal of comprehending, and then communicating to others, the actual state of the Earth’s environment without the dogmatic and political filters that so often corrupt the clarity of science. One of their founding principles for Project Earth was that they should never draw attention to a problem without, at the same time, having a solution to offer.

The first of these “solutions” was Adam’s co-invention of the Closed Path Homopolar Machine, International Patent Number, WO/1982/002126 with Joseph Kahn. This was another significant milestone— a major breakthrough on the road to escaping from the ecological consequences of our unsustainable fossil fuel economy, since it produced several times more electrical power than it consumed. But the United States government quickly stopped its development with a gag order in 1983 less than two weeks after Adam’s mentor, Buckminster Fuller, died.
The next year, Adam was named an R.J. Reynolds III Scholar. It was this endowment that allowed his work to continue and provided for the survival of Project Earth™ against all the odds.

Then, in 1985, an Indian atomic scientist, Paramahamsa Tewari, who was then the Head of Quality Control at the Tarapore Atomic Power station in Trombay, India, used the description of the art disclosed in the 1982 Patent Document for the Trombly/Kahn Homopolar Generator to build a facsimile in India. Even though this machine was not as advanced as Adam’s had by then become, Tewari reported an output/input ratio of 260% in the March, 1986 issue of the American journal Magnets. It was the first time that claims of power output greater than 100% had ever been physically verified by a bona fide third party working from the description of the art in a patent document.

As a result of the gag order on his generator, Adam spent most of 1986 working as the Director of the Greystone Institute in Evergreen, Colorado, with a Bulgarian ex-pat scientist, who went by the name of Yul Brown. Brown had rediscovered the extraordinary characteristics of the stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gas as derived from water through electrolysis, based on the work of German scientist Vicktor Schauberger in the 1940’s.

After seeing Adam’s demonstration of the perfect combustion/implosive-detonation of hydro-oxy gas, the Chairman of the Board of a major oil company was quoted as saying, “This will be the end of oil.” As we all know, it was not. Instead, Greystone fell into financial difficulty and the hydro-oxy project was sabotaged out of existence.

In spite of these difficulties, by 1987 Adam was in great demand on the international lecture circuit, for he was able to explain and forecast trends in the global atmosphere and geosphere better than anyone else. His controversial approach to global climate modeling had attracted both the praise of some and the ire of many conventional scientists. He did not simply speak about the “greenhouse” effect.

Adam was the first to use the terms “global climate destabilization and global climate change” along with several other terms that are now in general use. In lectures and radio and television interviews throughout the world, he revealed the reality and the causes of global climate change and global ozone depletion beyond the narrow focus on the Antarctic “ozone hole.”

In 1987, the year that I met Adam, he traveled one hundred and sixty thousand miles disseminating the messages of Project Earth™. One could hardly question his commitment or determination.

So the Adam Douglass Trombly I met in New York was already familiar with the intrigues and sorrows of this troubled planet. He was articulate, incisive, and at times too outspoken for his own good. During an early conversation with Adam, I suggested that he should learn to be more diplomatic. Since then, he has taught me to be less diplomatic.

Not long after our first meeting Adam introduced me to a remarkable phenomenon in physics, which he claimed was quite possibly the source of the disproportionate output/input ratios of some of the technologies he invented or co-invented.

This field of energy, he told me, pervades everything, everywhere. In physics, it is called the Zero Point Vacuum Fluctuation Background Field. In 1962 the legendary physicist, the late John Archibald Wheeler, wrote in the annual Review of Modern Physics that the mass equivalent energy potential of this field is 10⁹³ grams per cm3. However, the thought that the energy of this field is accessible in any practical way is antithetical to the way reality is still understood by most physicists.

Even in his teens, Adam had seen a direct link between the zero point field and all manifest existence. Rather than being an empty void, space is, as he puts it, “pervaded by unfathomable energy, which is not the artifact of a ‘big bang’ but the field in which the implosion that preceded something like a ‘big bang’ or ‘grand inflation’ was originally potentiated.”

In Adam’s cosmology, “Infinity, which is infinitely present everywhere…ultimately overwhelms or outshines any and all gravitationally bound masses or (for that matter) subjective psychophysical phenomena.”

“In the midst of Infinity, all worlds and all modifications of the all pervading field relax back into our true source and substance. This universe is increasingly no longer gravitationally bound. The expansion of this universe will continue to accelerate until the illusion of separation from the Infinite will simply not be supported on any level whatsoever. Levity overwhelms gravity. Scientists on this planet are just beginning to glimpse the reality of this Field and realize that this Presence is inescapable.”

“The Infinite cannot be left out of the equation. The Infinite is the ultimate equilibrating Force. The Infinite is not properly describable by a shadow cast in time and space referred to by some scientific humorists as ‘dark energy.’ The Field of our appearance here is not subject to abstraction or being intrinsically broken into singularities. Being is seamless. Phenomena come and go… arise and dissolve. Ultimately, we come to realize that the ‘dark energy’ is anything but dark.”

“Most of my colleagues find it disconcerting when I refer to the ‘Boundless Luminosity of Infinite Space’ as acting upon or directly impacting all temporal/phenomenal modifications of this Presence/Field in a manner that is ultimately liberating and is at the root of existence itself. However, the data do not lie. This universe is transforming/resolving in an accelerating momentum in the midst of Infinity and this undeniable fact stands as a stark testimony to the non-intrinsic nature of separation. You see, there is nothing the scientific ego or any other assertion of singularity can do about it!”

These challenging enigmatic statements about the nature of reality are more likely to resonate with spiritual practitioners than with most conventional scientists. But Adam has to his credit too many practical scientific accomplishments to be easily dismissed. I have already mentioned his zero point energy generator. Another of his endeavors is earthquake prediction, a less esoteric example.

In September/October of 1987, Adam, with colleagues Elizabeth Rauscher and Bill Van Bise, accurately forecast the Whittier earthquake in Los Angeles, California, using extremely low frequency signal analyzers to observe pre-seismic disturbances in the earth’s resonant magnet field. More than a week prior to the quake, Adam had been interviewed by ABC radio news in that same city and had predicted that a major earthquake would soon hit the city. Officials at UCLA, where he was scheduled to do a major public lecture, were so upset by his prediction that they cancelled his talks. However, after the quake actually happened, Adam was invited back and proceeded to teach packed auditoriums about this new seismic forecasting technology and the broader ecological issues addressed by Project Earth™.

I have personally observed the fact that Adam and his colleagues have accurately forecast several major earthquakes using this approach, notably the Loma Prieta/San Francisco Quake of 1989, the Scotts Mill/Portland Oregon quake of 1993 and the Northridge quake of 1994.

The Scotts Mill quake happened during Adam’s work with the first Clinton Administration on Vice President Gore’s National Performance Review. Adam interacted on a daily basis with the then Head of Strategic Planning for the United States Coast Guard, Captain Michael Egan. Egan was so impressed with the accuracy of Adam’s forecasts that he took the matter to the press. However, even though Adam and his colleagues received very positive international press coverage regarding this and other successful forecasts, his method is still not used for the benefit of the public to this day. I am still asking: “Why not?”

In June of 1989, I found myself in New York again with Adam and his colleague David Farnsworth. After Adam’s gag order had been dropped, he and David had further developed yet another type of novel zero point energy technology called the Piezo Ringing Resonance Generator. They had brought a small version of this remarkable device to New York where we demonstrated it at the United Nations.

After the demonstration and his speech that followed in Dag Hammarskjöld Auditorium at the United Nations, Adam received a sustained standing ovation from an international audience. During his speech Adam asked a senior engineer from the Boeing Corporation to either confirm or deny the 54-1 output/input ratio of the device. The Boeing engineer responded: “The device that was just demonstrated today actually works as claimed. There are no tricks and I do know what tricks to look for. I have spent several hours alone with this technology and all I can say is that it works. There is in fact nearly 54 times more electrical output than input. I don’t know how it works but I have no doubt that it works.”

That evening I felt uplifted, as I am sure did many others, with a new infusion of hope. We imagined that the world might change for the better from that day forward. It wasn’t just the energy technology itself but the energy that so obviously pervaded us all on that day that opened our eyes, our minds and our hearts to the very real possibility of a much kinder and better world in the future.

The next Monday, Adam, David and I once again demonstrated the same device in the United States Senate Banking and Finance Committee hearing room in Washington. Once again it functioned superbly. However, only Senator Carl Levin and a handful of staff people actually attended. At the last minute, President George H. W. Bush, or someone close to him, had apparently ordered members of his National Security Council to call the nearly two hundred Senators, Congressional Representatives and members of their staffs who had already accepted our invitation and that of our sponsor, Senator Timothy Worth. Suddenly they were invited to the White House for an “off the cuff discussion of the new Clean Air Act” with the President during the exact same time slot which we had scheduled for our demonstration that Monday morning. Naturally, they went to hear the President. We were denied the headlines we needed and had anticipated. Indeed, I must say sadly, we were intentionally pre-empted by the President of the United States!

What a pity! Our clean technology could provide clean air for the whole Earth and all her people. It consumes no fuel. It requires no radioactive source material. It does not rely on the variable power of the sun or the wind. And it produces no greenhouse gases!

I have seen this technology work with my own eyes and I have also heard first hand the testimony of highly qualified, independent engineers who have lauded its performance! For the last twenty years I have been asking: “Why is this technology not powering the entire world today?” Instead of embracing this chance for an abundant and clean future, the world continued its descent into chaos. The next step was the Gulf War of 1991.

Immediately after that Gulf War, executives from Friends of the Earth International in Washington, D.C., who knew that I had once been the Canadian Ambassador to Iran and Kuwait, contacted me. They asked me to head a scientific mission to assess and document the environmental damage done to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf as a direct consequence of that war. Sir Paul McCartney had generously funded the mission.

I contacted Adam and he agreed to participate in the international team of scientists from Italy, Turkey, and the United States that was assembling. When several members of my team still had no visas for Saudi Arabia on the day of our departure, Adam was able to make a last minute request to his friend, the Saudi Ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. He graciously obliged, and we were off.

While in the Gulf, Adam played a major role, investigating and filming the incredible damage done by Saddam Hussein’s incendiary demolition of more than 700 Kuwaiti oil wells. He also studied and filmed the unbelievable 11 million barrel oil spill in the Persian Gulf while our entire team flew on a large Saudi civil air patrol helicopter which we no doubt owed to Prince Bandar and the endorsement he had given us, along with our visas.

Adam’s videotapes of the fires and the oil spill became a matter of some controversy with one official of the Meteorological Environmental Protection Agency of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. On the night before Adam’s scheduled departure from the Kingdom, this Saudi official threatened him with immediate beheading “for espionage” if he did not turn over “the master copy of the tape.” Adam walked down the hall of the building, accompanied by that official, to the Bechtel Corporation offices, which were housed there. There he asked a senior Bechtel employee (to whom he had turned over his “master copy” earlier that day) to please hand the tape over to the official. After also being threatened with decapitation, the Bechtel employee did so. Then the official took Adam back to his personal office and threw the tape into the trash. When Adam protested that this was his scientific data, the official replied: “I will send you away with whatever I feel is appropriate.”

Adam had had an intuition that things might get rough and had arranged for early passage that night out of the Kingdom. He flew back to London and then on to the Netherlands to meet me and provide both his testimony and an edit of his videotapes for an international press conference that Friends of the Earth International hosted in Amsterdam. Thankfully he not only got himself out of a serious predicament but also managed to get his original videotapes out of Saudi Arabia, having given the Saudi official a copy, not the master tape!

When I was preparing for our press conference in Amsterdam, little did I realize that Adam had stayed up very late the night before with some wonderful employees of the National Radio and Television Studios of the Netherlands who helped him re-edit the video footage and make copies for the international press corps the next day. The evidence exposed by our tape dramatically contradicted the official position of the Bush Administration in Washington that nothing serious was happening as a result of the oil fires and helped to persuade many other countries of the importance of getting them out as quickly as possible.

I have since learned that by the time Adam and I were flying back to the Unites States a few days later, nearly two billion people had seen some portion of our tape. Our message had found its way into Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, China, India, Japan and Australia. The proverbial cat was out of the bag.

When Adam and I arrived at Dulles International Airport, two officials from the US State Department approached us. When they requested that Adam turn over his tapes, Adam responded simply by saying, “Fine; you can have them but the contents of these tapes have already been seen by people all over the world. Only the United States and Canada have yet to view some portion of them.” The senior official uttered an expletive, and walked away.

You may by now be wondering why both American and Saudi officials would be so upset by Adam’s tape that they would do everything they could to prevent it from being shown. The answer to this and so many other Middle Eastern mysteries lies in one word: oil. Adam had filmed the black plume from the oil fires rising to nearly 20,000 feet, while on the ground U.S. and Saudi officials were insisting that it was not going above 2,000 feet and was therefore not likely to do more than local damage around Kuwait. But any scientist could see that if the plume was rising to 20,000 feet only 200 kilometers South of Kuwait, the environmental consequences to the entire world could not be tolerated for the five years which the Americans were saying it would take their four teams of fire-fighters to get all the oil fires under control. In addition, the major oil companies of the world, the “Seven Sisters,” were heavily invested in Saudi Arabia and not averse to seeing the Kuwait oil fires burn off the substantial commercial advantage they had over the Saudis due to the extraordinary gas pressures that made Kuwait oil so much cheaper to extract.

We released the tape to the United States press corps at our press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the next day. As a result, portions of the tape were transmitted by every major broadcast and cable network, as well as by many specialty and local stations. Subsequently, National Geographic included some of Adams’ footage in their film about the oil fires of Kuwait.

That same videotape (with Adam’s narration) became a centerpiece for our testimony before the U.S. Congress. As a result of our testimony, and the plan for remediation that we presented to Senators and Congressional Representatives from both sides of the aisle, there was a six-fold increase in the number of teams who worked valiantly to put out the fires, which were actually extinguished in six months—not the five years that the original four American fire fighting teams had testified that it would take them. Thus, untold damage to the atmosphere and the people of this planet was avoided.

Nevertheless, there was much suffering. In Bangladesh 143,000 people died in a monster typhoon that was catastrophically exacerbated by the dense effluent from the oil fires of Kuwait. The loss of those poor souls would have only been the tip of the iceberg, in terms of the disaster which could have befallen our planet if the oil fires had been left to burn for five years. We must also remember with gratitude the incredible bravery of more than 18,000 men from many different countries who successfully battled those fires. Those men truly deserve to be called heroes.

Our mission had in fact catalyzed the largest cooperative international environmental remedial action in history, though it was insignificant compared to the scale of international cooperation that is now required to mitigate the effects of global climate change.

Next, I turn to another subject in which Adam has had a major role in my education. I have gradually become convinced that there are probably life forms other than us through whom Consciousness is making its presence known. To put it another way, God may have helpers from other planets in actualizing the plan. It seems to me altogether possible that there are more intelligent, more spiritually and technologically advanced cultures than our own, on other planets that we know not of, probably closer in actual realization to the Great Intelligence that pervades our Universe. In this perspective, we can take comfort in the fact that humanity is not facing this daunting crisis alone.

If what I said seems to you so outrageous that you are ready to stop reading, please don’t. Let me make my case. It is a case based on my personal experience with an “unidentified flying object” (or UFO) that I have kept to myself until now for obvious reasons.

Copyright 2009© Reprinted with permission of Fmr. Canadian Ambassador James George