ISUS Trustee Dave Faust died

[bperet]

David Faust, long-time supporter of the Reciprocal System and ISUS Trustee, died last night from liver failure caused by the chemotherapy treatment he was receiving for cancer. I don't have any other details at this time.

[Djchrismac]

I'm sorry to hear to hear that Bruce, any loss of RS supporters and those with good knowledge of the only theory that makes sense is a big loss.

[bperet]

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October 28, 2014

The David Faust I Knew

When I first met him, he was in his 40’s. A little overweight, pens and pencils in his shirt pocket, bending over a table covered with electronic gadgets, wires strewn everywhere, talking a mile-a-minute with an older oriental man about some kind of electrical discharge apparatus. As he stood up and turned towards me, I saw the fever of excitement burning in his eyes. That moment was the beginning of a friendship and collaboration that lasted twenty years.

David and S-X Jin were in Hal Fox’s lab, still situated in borrowed digs on the south side of the University of Utah research park, where the notorious cold fusion experiments conducted by Pons and Fleischmann had been housed. Even though the building was relatively new, it was painted with a dreadful engineering green that made it seem old and dissipated well beyond its years. Fox was there, on and off, at all hours of the day and night, preaching the gospel of cold fusion, meeting with engineers, pouring over papers and periodicals and journals, and beleaguering everyone with an endless stream of opinions about things that made no sense to me at all.

During the summer of 1993 and for the next ten years I rubbed shoulders with David and a swarm of people from all over the planet who came and went in waves as attention began to focus on a new concept for remediating radioactive emissions propagated by high level nuclear waste. Ken Shoulders came to the lab and worked periodically with Jin and Faust and others while they assembled, tested, disassembled and re-tested various combinations of electrical and electronic equipment in a feverish attempt to produce a working apparatus to treat solid and liquid waste materials.

During that time, David and I created a new company we called Nu Omnicomm Technologies. Our notion at the time was that the work of Akimov, Shipov, and others in torsion field dynamics could be translated into a working apparatus capable of low energy nuclear transmutation and propagating faster-than-light communications packets between fixed points. We knew others were working on similar kinds of equipments – Nimtz in Germany, Gisin in Switzerland, Wang at Princeton, Kovalyuk at the IPMS, the M-2 guys at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Wonfor and Woyka at BAE in Scotland. We tracked everything we could get our hands on to sort out fact from presumption. We built some prototypes of various different kinds. David shared some of the research he had participated in developing at Drexel, where focused concentration had been shown to effectively ‘bend’ laser beams, and in Amsterdam with the Eyring Research Institute, where he and others had filmed consciousness-induced spoon bending exercises under carefully controlled laboratory conditions. The documents he showed me then were still officially classified, but were subsequently released for general public access. The fact that no one outside a few insiders even knew that this work had been conducted meant that no one asked for the reports. As far as I know, the boxes of documents he and I plowed through over the years, that documented these and many other important pieces of original research work, are probably still in the storage lockers he left behind.

The realm of non-local nonlinear space-time took on new meaning when Fox began hosting the INE conferences under the auspices of his one-man peer-reviewed journal called the Journal of New Energy. Faust was a star during those presentations because he had participated in more than 20 years of experimental work in the field before the rest of us even began thinking about it. Moray King was there – he had been involved with David and others at Eyring and elsewhere. Ruggero Santilli, Scott Chubb, Tom Valone, Gary Vesperman, Akimov, Shipov, and dozens of others came together once a year to share their work and engage in the kind of collegial discussions that make good science truly great. It was a heady time for all of us.

Along the way, after nearly seven years work, Faust and Jin succeeded in building a system that demonstrably reduced gamma radiation to background ambient levels in both liquid and solid high level nuclear waste materials. Because they were both disciplined scientists who insisted on applying rigorous testing and reporting standards to their work, we were subsequently able to not only reproduce their system but reported their methodology and results in papers that led to the independent verification of the process by DOE and at least two government-sponsored labs in the US. This could not and would not have been possible without David’s dedicated personal involvement in the process.

The days we spent in Fox’s new lab on 3300 South in Salt Lake City were not without their challenges. We spent months designing a funding mechanism to provide capital support and essential resources for other like-minded researchers with whom we had developed excellent working relationships over the prior six or seven years. The common denominator in the mid to late 90’s was that no one had any money to support the kind of R&D work we were so intently focused on. The early days of the Internet and the subsequent crash of the capital markets affectionately referred to as the DotCom Bubble effectively removed more than $3.6 trillion from the capital markets. What money had been previously supplied by private investment sources almost instantly vanished.

While we were working our way through the process, Fox began soliciting investment from the 500 or more people whom he had inveigled into investing in the vestiges of cold fusion research. He widely proclaimed and even announced in his Journal of New Energy that he had obtained the worldwide exclusive licensing rights to low energy nuclear remediation technologies developed by Mesyats in Belorussia, Ken Shoulders in the US, Hal Puthoff at SAIC, George Miley at the University of Illinois, and S-X Jin, among others. Faust and I knew it wasn’t true – we knew because we talked personally with each of the people with whom Fox claimed to have consummated an exclusive arrangement, and were told in no uncertain terms that no such agreements had ever been consummated. Nevertheless, despite David’s concerted efforts to dissuade him, Fox eventually raised nearly $400,000 for LENR research. When he demanded that we accept $100,000 of the money he had raised in exchange for a 25% interest in Nu Omnicomm, we reached an impasse that was never satisfactorily mitigated.

Faust and I categorically refused to allow our own work to be tainted with the money Fox had raised. Fox was so furious that he threw us out of the lab, along with the equipment Faust and Jin had assembled. Fox attempted to further coerce us into complicity with him by naming some of our colleagues - Leonhardt Schroedter, Dick Shamp and others – as officers and directors in a bogus mutual fund he created called Emerging Energy Mutual Fund. This was the name he adopted and which would later become the subject of an SEC probe into his dealings with investors in Trinergy and other companies he claimed to own or control. In a final, outrageous retaliatory attack, Fox threatened to have Jin deported back to China unless we capitulated to his demands. We were able with David’s diligent assistance to obtain Jin’s green card and recover a portion of the social security money Fox had withheld from his paycheck but never remitted to the government.

David objected strenuously to Hal’s intractable insistence on the rightness of his dealings with others and their money, despite the fact that it was unequivocally clear that he had violated all kinds of solicitation rules, misrepresented his claims to exclusivity, and lied about the extent of his involvement in the development of Faust and Jin’s work on HDCC and LENR. It was maddening to watch this conflict evolve because it threatened to taint the validity of the work itself. Eventually, after all was said and done, David and others of us loaded up his equipment and hauled it down to the storage units in Springville, where I assume it is still crated and stored.

I learned during those years what really good engineers and men of integrity are often forced to deal with, particularly when their innovations hold such profound promise for the future. David grieved for years over the way this project ended up. He and I both knew that the long-term consequences would continue to color our own work, and in the Fall of 1997, when I developed a concept for the first scalar communications system, our worst fears came to pass.

In 1997 I co-founded a small company called PVI Telecom. Its mission was to design, develop and ultimately commercialize a series of telecom innovations that we hoped would eventually lead to the development of a genuinely ubiquitous scalar communications system. David’s help during those early days was extraordinary. He and Leonhardt Schroedter spent thousands of hours helping to design and test various implementation strategies that we eventually pulled together to create a fully-functional system. We built two identical stations which incorporated counter-rotating permanent magnets between which we placed a contra-wound toroidal helical antenna. Signals from a notebook computer were transmitted via fiber optic link to the antenna while the magnets were spinning at a carefully controlled rate. The completely assembled unit weighted more than 250 pounds – not exactly the essence of miniaturization.

We placed one in the back of David’s weather-beater Ford Taurus and drove it to Helper, Utah, where we took it down into the bottom of a coal mine. We hand-carried the other into the parking basement of an office building in downtown Salt Lake City that extended more than 30 feet under ground. Using precisely calibrated digitally controlled timers, we triggered the send-receive signals on one computer and were able to link up seamlessly with the packet processing software that was operating on the other one. We demonstrated that we could, indeed, send and receive data via a scalar field effect from one point under ground to another point far removed, instantaneously over a distance of more than 200 miles. The signals were clear, unattenuated, and bi-directional. Thanks to David’s impeccability, the system worked as designed on its first field trial. We celebrated our success but soon learned that we had inadvertently attracted the unwanted attention of people who did not want us to be able to use the system we had independently invented.

After a couple of extremely confrontational visits from two guys who claimed they were from DARPA – they were never willing to show us any verifiable identification – I decided to dismantle the system and disperse the pieces for later reassembly. The pieces are still out there, waiting for someone to take another shot at driving this IP into the marketplace. David knew it worked, I knew it worked, and several others with whom we had worked, who are also now deceased, knew it worked. For now, that has to be good enough. But it would not have been possible at all without David’s direct involvement.

One piece of fallout from this episode was that PVI Telecom came under close scrutiny by securities regulators who eventually decided to bring charges against me for violating various securities solicitation regulations. I have always believed that the sequence of events that followed the unsuccessful attempt, by people whose identity we were never able to clearly establish, to confiscate and impound our scalar communications equipment, was used as a pretext to take us both out of the game. Whoever was behind all that madness very nearly succeeded in permanently ruining both our lives. As it was, even though I was indicted and later pled guilty to the charges – I was threatened with permanent incarceration otherwise – David never abandoned my defense. He was so aggressive, so forthright and open in his defense of my own character and the work we had done together, that I have always felt deeply indebted to him. His loyalty never flagged, and he never capitulated to the numerous threats we both received during those years which were clearly intended to disenfranchise us from being able to conduct serious scientific innovation in the field.

In 1999 I was recruited to serve as the CEO of a small, privately-owned R&D company called Primary Technologies, then located in Chicago. A wealthy family whose antecedents had emigrated from Pune, India, to the Midwest, owned four hot-dip steel galvanizing plants in Illinois and Indiana. In the late 90’s the price of energy spiked to an all-time high. The Alreja family asked their eldest son to find a way to offset the energy costs associated with hot-dipped zinc galvanizing by investigating new technologies emerging in the garage invention world.

During the three years we worked together at Primary Technologies, David provided the kind of critical thinking and analytical skills that are normally reserved for the most expensive, well-financed R&D organizations in the world. We evaluated more than 300 separate IP candidates over the first year and a half. We held a series of conferences and winnowed the field to 11 candidates. Eventually, we bought a 15,000 square foot facility in Dixon, Illinois, which we equipped with machine tools, instrumentation, and essential resources dedicated to the development of the seven technologies we ultimately sponsored and funded.

During that process, I learned what real instrumentation engineering is all about. David’s work was assiduous to a fault – he drove me insane by insisting that every last eye had to be dotted and every final T crossed before any data meant anything. We laughed about it, fought about it, complained about it, but in the final analysis discovered that his engineering prowess was fundamental to our ability to determine whether the phenomenological aberrations we had agreed to test were commercially viable or not. During the process, we contracted Bob Rohner, the machinist who built all of the engines demonstrated by Joe Papp – the notorious Noble Gas Engine inventor – to build us a fully configured engine.

Among our contacts were three of the people who had worked personally and directly with Papp for the entire time he had been building and demonstrating the performance of his engines. We had hours of unpublished, privately-owned video tape that recorded dozens of demonstrations conducted between 1976 and 1984. We knew his engines actually worked – how they worked was not known, but several of his close associates were certain they could replicate his work if we could provide an engine for them to work with. So we bought one, fully configured and ready for operation. David was tasked with the assignment of figuring out how to translate Papp’s patent into a combination of gases that would make the engine run. He tried. After 18 months of work and more than $200,000 of expense, he told me the patent information was a red herring and could not be replicated in a way that made any sense. I believe him. It wasn’t until 2013 that I finally figured out what Papp had done – by that time, David’s sands were running out and we no longer had access to any of the resources needed to put our insights to work.

We traveled extensively together around the US and to Scotland, France, Germany and Switzerland. We met with John Woyka, one of the original Enigma Decryption geniuses who had worked at Bletchley Park during WWII. He was by then a national treasure, the developer of the pattern recognition engine named Memex that is the core kernel of the technology employed by NSA to conduct pattern-related data mining. Graham hosted us at his family estate for a week while we talked through the nuances of his subsequent software initiative, a colossally important software encryption routine designed to facilitate semantic search engine functions on the Internet. When Graham demonstrated how his system worked, David threw up his hands and complained that it was impossible. I was astonished at his reaction because it was so uncharacteristic. To this day I still do not understand what tipped him over when he witnessed that demonstration, but I am inclined to believe that it was somehow related to other classified work he had been engaged in but was affirmatively prohibited from discussing with us. We never reconciled this conflict – I wanted to move aggressively to implement the development of it and he refused to have anything to do with it. We never sorted this one out, either.

In 2002 my personal struggle with the securities issues became overwhelming. David was there for me, all the time encouraging and supporting me when it seemed as if my world was coming to an end. In a manner of speaking, if it had not been for his help and the support of Leonhardt Schroedter and others, I probably would not have survived. David’s world became much narrower during the same period. He could not find paying work – none of the agencies, laboratories, universities, or private research groups he had been working with over the years were willing to employ him for any of the kind of work he was so supremely skilled at. He lost his security clearance as a result of his personal bankruptcy and was compelled to take up residence in Leonhardt’s basement. It was a horrible time for all of us. We worked very hard to support each other, but in the end the relentless pressures exerted by poverty and stress finally eroded our relationship to the point of catastrophic failure.

In 2003, with the support of Dick Shamp and the people at Nuclear Remediation Technologies, Inc., a Delaware company that had relocated to DC, we prepared and submitted a series of disclosure documents to the DOE at the invitation of former DOE Secretary Elliott Richardson. The documents we prepared contained all the design and experimental research results related to the High Density Charge Cluster system we had employed to remediate radioactive emissions generated by high level nuclear fuel waste materials. In 1999, Richardson had issued a discretionary grant of $2,600,000 to support our work through Dr. George Miley, a prominent researcher in the field and a tenured professor of nuclear sciences working in a Level-2 lab in Champagne, Illinois. Six months after issuing the grant, Secretary Richardson had been forced to withdraw it because of the intense pressure brought to bear by the high temperature gas cooled nuclear reactor community.

In 2003, under the new Bush Administration and after the 9/11 debacle, the DOE publicly adopted a new set of guidelines – at least the information being published on the DOE web site purported to represent a new policy direction for the agency with respect to neutralizing radioactive waste stock piles. When we submitted our documents, we were led to believe that DOE actually intended to provide funding and resource support to investigate the viability of generalizing the technique Jin and Faust had developed. We later learned that the system described in our submittal documents had been replicated, operated, tested and validated by two government-sponsored laboratories. We knew this was true because we actually received copies of their reports through private sources.

In 2005, Dr. Frank Goldner, DOE’s Director of the Nuclear Remediation Division, called from his office in DC to inform us that our documents were being purged from DOE’s files. We were instructed to withdraw from the field and totally discontinue our research efforts related to remediating radioactive waste materials. We were threatened with arrest and incarceration under FISA terrorist regulations, and prohibited from obtaining research samples of radioactive materials. We were terrified, and justifiably so because we no longer had any direct access to the back channel communications network David had been able to use to obtain information about what was going on behind the scenes. We later discovered that under pressure from the Shaw Group, the people who had been contracted by DOE to build the underground storage facilities under Yucca Mountain, DOE Secretary Spencer Abraham had been instructed by the Bush Administration to cut us off at the pockets. Permanently. For awhile we stayed away from this arena.

During those dark days, when everyone was under such terrible pressure, we were all living from hand to mouth. The financial pressures were so onerous that people began to behave in ways that were incoherent and often irrational. David’s defense strategy was to become even more over-bearing in his pursuit of ever more perfect instrumentation requirements. I tried to work with him between 2004 – 2006 but discovered that his need to impose perfect experimental protocols on even the simplest of projects bordered on the insane. After several terribly uncomfortable encounters, I decided it was time to walk away from the business relationship. I told him how much I loved and appreciated him, explained that it was more important for me to continue to be his friend than his business partner, and told him I was walking away for awhile so I could clear my head.

Over the ensuing nine years we talked infrequently, more as a result of accidental contact than by deliberate design. I attempted to bring him into some of the projects I obtained funding for, but he was unwilling to work in the world I was creating in a way that I could live with. I finally was able to meet with David during the summer of 2013 – Moray invited me to come to a meeting at Rainer’s home, and during that event David and I set up a time to get together for the purpose of reopening the book of our relationship. We were able to talk comfortably after that – he was struggling with cancer, I was struggling with survival issues, we compared notes about the lives we had lived, and were able to close the book on offenses real and imagined.

I love Dave. He was a true friend, one of the finest people I have enjoyed the pleasure and privilege of working with. He taught me valuable lessons about integrity and the price of impeccability. He demonstrated the power of commitment and the value of personal accountability. His later years were filled with frustrations, disappointment, and a sense of unmitigated futility. He shared his feelings with me about these issues. After his cancer surgery and during the time when he was being pumped full of toxic chemicals, he remarked about how grateful he was that he had found a woman who loved and valued his companionship. I never met her but am so thoroughly grateful that he was able to add this experience to his bingo card.

He was a kind, thoughtful, compassionate and generous person. He was the most rare of all men – a true friend who valued his integrity beyond all else. I am grateful that I was privileged to know him. He enriched my life and defended me when I thought all was lost. I will be forever in his debt.

Dave Yurth