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He bends over a large sink in the corner of a laboratory while a group of prospective investors stands nearby. He is a man of prominent girth, over six feet tall, whose countenance has been likened to that of W.C. Fields. He tinkers with a foot-long, six-inch wide metal cylinder as the group looks on expectantly. He could be a performer or a preacher, knowing just what strings to pull, priming his audience. He calls himself a scientist, though, — a chemist, engineer, physicist, inventor — and those closest to him say he is a genius, a country boy with a rare creativity. But mostly Eugene Anderson is a con man, and a big leaguer at that…
The CRB (Chemical Reactor Block), Anderson says, is the product of years of R&D, but more R&D will be needed before they will be able to manufacture and sell it… He connects one end of a hose to a water faucet, the other end to the hose fitting at the base of the cylinder. It has a hole in its side that allows water to flow through the apparatus. He removes a small wire mesh cage from the top of the cylinder, then holds up a chunk of chalky gray metal. This is the CRB. He carefully puts the precious substance into the cage… He lowers the cage into the cylinder and turns on the water. As water flows through the fitting, a popping sound is heard.
Casually, Anderson strikes a match and moves it over the mouth of the cylinder. With a whoosh, a flame appears…
The beauty of Eugene Anderson’s discovery, the real nut of the magical and mysterious CRB material, is that it can supposedly dissociate the H and O of water without suing outside energy and without being consumed in the process…
It is probably impossible for the CRB to work. The energy to get hydrogen from water has to come from somewhere, and despite Anderson’s claims to the contrary, his critics suspect that it really comes from the dissolution of the CRB material. In fact, Anderson doesn’t seem to have as much of the material at the end of his demonstrations as he does at the beginning….
Explosions In The Garage ~
Anderson and his uncle [Marion McCoy] saw clearly that the basic problem of the CRB was finding a material that would produce hydrogen without exploding at the same time. Sodium had long been known to liberate hydrogen from water — but the process was also highly combustible. McCoy and Anderson set out to moderate the reaction by combining sodium with other ingredients commonly thought to be “unfriendly” to it. When they finally produced an amalgam, it was Anderson’s job to test it in the garage laboratory.
McCoy had acquired a few 4-cylinder5 war surplus engines, which he converted to run on hydrogen. Although Anderson’s working journal shows evidence of difficulties (things kept exploding), it also shows that the amalgam could produce enough gas to run the engines…
In later years, men would examine Anderson’s notes and ponder their authenticity. Knowledgeable observers doubted that Anderson could have run the motors as long as he said he did [7 hours]. But if the notes are authentic, the reactions described characterize a material that even in its unperfected state could be of tremendous value…
Brain Surgery ~
Heading For The Big Time ~
A second major demonstration was arranged in the spring of 1978, this time at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. Anderson brought a chunk of CRB the size of his fist and put it in a sink, placing a funnel over it. The gas passed up the funnel, and he lit it, producing a faintly blue-tinged flame. Most of the scientists at the lab thought Anderson was a phony, but Dr Homer Carhart, who was the chief naval representative there, was not so quick to dismiss him. Carhart wanted to give Anderson a chance, but the portly Texan would not let the navy experts analyze the material. He was so secretive he even wiped out the sink, lest scrapings of the metal be found and their contents analyzed….
Science & Girls At Le Rififi ~
[ Demonstrations, negotiations, &c…]
Patent Magic With James J. Ling ~
Ling was more than mildly disturbed by the developments. By the terms of his agreement with Anderson, he had a six-month option to put up more development funds. After a few weeks a final make-or-break test was arranged at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Hydrogen and oxygen were produced, but the amount of oxygen, according to the Southwest report, was “far below the level one would see if the evolved gases were the result of water dissociation”. That meant that the oxygen probably came from te CRB material itself instead of from the water…
A Fortune In Penny Stocks ~
[ More demonstrations, negotiations, &C…]
In May 1981 Anderson called me at the Dallas TV station where I work as a reporter, saying he had an invention we might be interested in. A photographer and I went to Wills Point, where Anderson greeted us cryptically, then began working under the hood of a weather-beaten 1970 Chrysler, saying he was installing a CRB element. Neither of us knew what he was talking about, but we stayed while he continued. The CRB hydrogen generator allowed the car to achieve 44 miles per gallon, he explained, while reducing pollution and engine wear…
Anderson led us into his laboratory, where he lit CRB-generated gases from a white vertical pipe. “We now have a new energy resource that will replace, basically, the fossil fuels”…
Neither of us suspected that Eugene Anderson was a con man… After a day’s reflection and some checking, we put the story on the air.
Calls came in from around the country; news travels fast when it involves a potential investment. To our surprise, a call came from the Securities and Exchange Commission in Salt Lake City; it was investigating Anderson’s companies. In the next few months I began to realize the impact of having fallen for Anderson’s con. He was using a videotape of the report minus the end — which said the CRB had yet to be proven — to sell his invention.
On To The Pentagon ~
The CRB case, The SEC v. Horizon Energy Corp… was tried early in 1982 in the US district court in Salt Lake City. The SEC took more than two years to prepare and bring it to trial, and for all that, Eugene Anderson’s lawyer engineered an agreement that allowed him to go scot-free before the trial even ended… On the way to that judgment, however, the court found that Anderson’s tests of the CRB had never lasted long enough to prove what he said it would do, that it had never been used in anything except automobiles, and then only in short-term tests, and that the overall invention did not, as Anderson claimed, dissociate water without using an outside source of energy…
Anderson, through the connections of his Washington associates, had been trying for years to interest the Pentagon in the military applications of his invention… To his disappointment, however, the military did not fund the CRB. But it did buy something that came out of his laboratory.
Over the months and years that Anderson and his associates labored behind the storefront in Wills Point, trying to find the correct metallic combinations for th CRB, they noticed something. Their screen door fell apart. Subjected to the exhaust gases from the experiments, the aluminum door simply disintegrated. Anderson connected that to a compound he had used in the production of the CRB, an additive that removed oxides from metals. It became a kind of CRB II, a chemical that had far-reaching strategic implications. The deoxidizer would become the country boy’s link to the Pentagon.
The additive, according to Anderson, “affected the isotopic relationships of the hydrogen and oxygen in water”. Its effect, when applied to metals, was to remove their oxide coating and eventually realign their internal molecular relationships, he said. Whether his explanation is correct or not, the compound can weaken metal without leaving any trace of the destruction on the metal’s surface — or so Anderson led the Pentagon to believe.
The material takes several hours to affect metal, but those effects, when complete, are substantial. Dab it on the wings of an aluminum aircraft, says Anderson, and the plane might fall out of the sky. If poured on parts of a battle tank, the tank could be reduced to scrap by a single bullet, he says…
The Pentagon granted Anderson a top-secret contract in June 1982. He was paid $250,000 for 100 hours of study and testing of CRB II at laboratories in Watertown, MA — a pittance compared to what Anderson thought his idea was worth. He began to tell acquaintances that the contract was for $1 million… Though Anderson thought he was selling cheap, he entered into the contract anyway, hoping that it would lead to ore government work. The Pentagon was not at all sure that CRB II was feasible, but by making Anderson commit to a contract, the government could then legally prevent him from selling to an unfriendly country…
The selling of the Pentagon, Anderson style, is something officials do not talk about, under orders from the Secretary of Defense. Pentagon insiders describe CRB II as on of “the truly nasties”, a development so sinister that if dropped into the wrong hands it could, in military hyperbole, change the course of world history. Is CRB II going to revolutionize modern warfare? Or is the Pentagon trying to cover up an embarrassing mistake?
The Defense Department’s dealings with CRB II fall into a pattern similar to Anderson’s previous arrangements. Anderson received his initial payment from the government but completed only a few days of testing. When he tried to get out of the contract by reimbursing the government for that first payment, the check bounced…
&c…
