Tony,

Very simple answer.  All the national laboratories file patents of their own.  Most are rather "greedy" for patents (of course, not OFFICIALLY!). Any inventor attempting to work with them is simply a sacrificial lamb and potential dead meat, unless he is already part of a large and powerful corporation doing business with them and "ingrained" into the ongoing process.

Just ask Larry Fullerton in Time Domain here in Huntsville, what happened to him vis a vis a government lab.  He wound up having to sue them to try to retain his patent, and the crazy courts awarded the government "equal rights" or in other words the ability to use it as they wished, on their own, right around Larry.  Larry finally got the commercial funding he needed after a long struggle, and is well on the way to placing ultrawideband communications systems on the market now, since the FCC has finally (at long last) relaxed the rules to permit it.

Or also take a look at a typical lovely DARPA contract, such as the one they offered Bill Fogal to "help" him get his superluminal communication technology out.  Buried up in the contract is a little ditty of a clause: The government reserves "march-in" rights."  Guess what that means.  A bureaucrat writes a single little memo, stating that the inventor they are "helping" isn't getting the technology out fast enough for the "government's needs".  Therefore the "government" is exercising its "march in" rights and seizing the patent, etc.  They then seize the patent and immediately funnel the work over to a "favored large contractor", who pours lots of GOVERNMENT CONTRACT MONEY and work into it and finishes it, and gets it available and markets it.

Then sometime later, say, the bureaucrat who wrote that memo (and a few others like it) retires early and goes to work with a cushy job as a VP of something or other, and with stock options, etc.  Guess what company he goes to work for!  Instant millionaire.  Piece of cake.

I worked in aerospace for many years, and believe me a certain percentage of government contracts are "tainted" and absolutely fixed for the intended party.  The business is dirty, and it has been for a long time.  I also personally had some very bad experiences with government national labs a long time ago.  I wound up right and they wound up wrong, but guess who paid for it through the nose.  The dispute was over a certain very powerful nuclear effect from nuclear warheads, which the labs all stated was "against the laws on nature" and impossible.  I took a terrible beating for briefing that the Russians had that capability, nevertheless.  "Idiot" was the least of the epithets appended.  Six months later Picatinny Arsenal noted that we had never in our history till then exploded a nuclear weapon built like the Soviets built theirs.  So they put one in an underground test, built like the Russians built them.  Bingo!  There was the capability that was against all the laws of nature and utterly impossible - for which I had been so buffeted and beaten six months before.

Within about three more months, then, the same national labs who had so bitterly opposed it, began heralding a GREAT NEW SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY they themselves had made!  Guess what that "great new discovery" was.  The Chief Scientist of the organization I briefed so catastrophically later tried to hire me to work for him, but that was that and I wanted nothing further to do with such nonsense.

NRL and others also bitterly opposed the ultrawideband radar, and attacked the UWB pioneers with a special vengeance.  Against the laws of nature, impossible, etc.  At the time, one could buy commercially a little UWB radar set, used to detect voids in deep pourings of concrete.  But careers were destroyed, etc. by these cur dog pack attacks.  Today, the very scientists directly responsible for much of the pounding given to the UWB pioneers, pose as experts in ultrawideband radar.  Draw your own conclusions. There are many examples; that is just a few.

There are a great number of fine people working at our national labs, of course, and this is not meant in any way to denigrate them or their excellent performance of duty.  Thank God we have them, or those in the same national labs (about 9%, by the bell-shaped curve) with their own agendas would have long ago taken the country right down the tubes.  It is those "good guys and ladies" in the organizations that keep them going.

The national lab situation desperately needs cleaning up, with a meat axe, and at least some of the work toward that end is now starting.  The contract for running LANL, e.g., is now to be openly competed, breaking the stranglehold and the cycle of problems there that have been in the news media now for some time.  Just read the news for yourself.

So for the small inventor, the national laboratories are NOT a candidate for a financial partner in any shape, form, or fashion unless he has taken leave of his senses.  The exception would be only when the Director and Deputy Director (after all, Directors change too frequently!) both publicly are involved and approve the arrangements.

In that fashion, there appears to be no funded and staffed effort at any of the national labs to extract EM energy from the vacuum, not even in the entire Department of Energy.  That is crazy, since you never hear the source charge problem discussed there, and the normal EM power system model assumes that every EM field, potential, and joule of EM energy in the universe has been freely created out of nothing at all, by their associated source charges.  No one has to take my word for that; simply check the model itself and draw your own conclusions.  It assumes the fields and potentials and their energy are produced by the source charge, and that is real observable EM energy, usable, that is so produced.  Yet there is no OBSERVABLE input of EM energy to the source charge (easily shown experimentally)!  So either one must totally discard the conservation of energy law (electrical engineering and classical Maxwell-Heaviside theory implicitly assume that it is violated by every charge, field, and potential and joule of EM energy in the universe) or else one must find, accept, and use the NONOBSERVABLE (virtual) energy input from the environment of the charge.  Ugh! Can't be done in the conventional classical EE model; because it mistakenly assumes an inert vacuum (falsified for many decades by particle physics and quantum field theory) and also assumes a flat spacetime (falsified by general relativity since 1916).

So if an inventor who is working in the "supersystem" (the system, its active vacuum, and its curved spacetime) to extract excess energy from the environment (the active vacuum and the curved spacetime) tries to even communicate with the national laboratories, he finds an iron mindset that applies normal electrical engineering!  Communication with such folks -- who ignore general relativity and quantum field theory as far as any electrical power systems are concerned -- is futile.  The inventor will either get castigated and chewed up and spit out, or he may be ripped off if he nonetheless succeeds.

So as you might understand, the five of us who invented the MEG are strongly uninterested in even speaking to the national laboratories, except to those persons in them who we already know and can trust.  Yes, there are quite a few folks in the labs who are indeed interested in EM energy from the vacuum.  At best they may get a small pittance to have a man or two read the literature, go to conferences, etc.  But there is absolutely no "power" commitment in the labs, and it appears none is going to be forthcoming.

A major reason, of course, is that much of the fortunes of the National Labs is dependent on "Big Nuclear" activity.  So they have spent billions and decades on hot fusion, and have not yet added a single watt to the power line over and above what it takes to run their enormous equipments.  Simply look at how they reacted to cold fusion.  It threatened to pull their rice bowl off the table in front of them, and a great knee-jerk reaction ensued, with a vehemence and fury (and lies and cheating and faking experimental results) seldom seen in the scientific community.

The same "folks in power" who love Big Nuke and whose entire life and outlook depend on  it, are also just as adamantly opposed to extraction of useful EM energy from the vacuum.  The same vitriol and vehemence and fury is also directed toward that "threat".

In that climate, you may be able to understand why we avoid the national labs like the plague, except one group we do share considerable information with because they are excellent folks, known to us, and trusted by us.

But in a nutshell, that's what's wrong with the present set-up (particularly those who control things) at the national labs.  And that's why any sane small inventor gives them a wide berth.

Let me put it this way.  If the national labs wish to help on this project, then offer us (with no strings attached at all) the borrowing of a 500 MHz digital sampling scope with eight channels, all on the same time base, with high data rate sampling, and with the software for automatic integration under the curve, etc. and complete with all necessary probes.  That's about a $75,000 package.  Loan us one of those packages for a year, to help the effort.  That would be an enormous help.  So would the loan of some extraordinarily expensive field measurement meters for highly nonlinear situations and power meters for the same.   But that is not going to happen; it isn't the style or intent of the labs.  They really are very poorly set up --- either in organization or mindset -- to deal fairly or helpfully with small inventors.  Big companies, yes.  Small inventors, no.

Best wishes,

Tom Bearden

Are you looking for financing?  If the claim is true, development should be pursued.  I am a mechanical engineer with contacts at Lawrence Livermore and businesses.     

Thank you,   

Larry