Chapter: The Inert Gas Technology
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Chapter: The Inert Gas Technology |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Maurice B Cooke |
| Keywords | Aether, inert gases, channeling, aetheric healing |
| No. of pages | 15 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Perhaps no other scientific-sounding information said to have been paranormally received has had more people experimenting with it in the past 20 years than what has come to be known as the inert gas technology. From the beginning, this information has been distinguished by its balance between a consistent theoretical level, which describes in a totally new way the nature of certain fundamental aspects of physical reality, and a much more nuts-and-bolts engineering level, which explains exactly how to get realworld results. Given the dozens of people over the years who have pursued this inert gas technology and who have claimed success in their experimentation, two of the chief tenets of science seem to have been satisfied: being able to successfully predict and replicate.
Overview
The archived document is not a research paper but a working draft, dated 10/12/06 and signed only "J.K.", of a chapter from a book then in progress under the title Scientific Information from Paranormal Sources. It still carries its editorial scaffolding — footnote markers written as "[f]", a bracketed note to the editor about breaking up long quotations, a placeholder for a Puthoff citation the author has not yet located, and a closing "Still to do" list stating that the conclusion is unwritten. The wiki record attributes the piece to Maurice B Cooke; Cooke is in fact its principal subject and the source of most of its quoted material, alongside the American engineer Jon C. Fox. Read as what it is — a documentary chapter about a body of channeled material and the experimenters who pursued it — it is coherent and carefully sourced to its own primary texts.
The subject is the so-called inert gas technology: a set of claims, said to originate with a non-physical entity named "Hilarion" channeled from 1977 by the Toronto businessman and scientist Maurice B. Cooke and from 1983 by Jon C. Fox, according to which the noble gases (helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon) each conceal a "primary point" — a source of fourth-dimensional vibration in the aether — which can be unmasked by subjecting the gas to pressure, ionisation and a magnetic field, yielding a beam with gravitational and therapeutic effects. The author's framing thesis is explicitly epistemological rather than physical: that here is a case where information from a paranormal source "started with something that just sounded scientific and ended up with people achieving tangible results", so that "two of the chief tenets of science seem to have been satisfied: being able to successfully predict and replicate."
The material
Provenance
The chapter is unusually careful about how the information arrived. Cooke described developing his channeling ability through "certain techniques of mental yoga by which the conscious mind can be stilled", and — to his credit, as the chapter notes — was frank that "in the last analysis one can never be absolutely certain what one is dealing with", explicitly acknowledging that some would say the experimenter "reaches no further than his own subconscious". Cooke proposed two tests of channeled material: whether its tone is one of "spiritual uplift", and, more relevantly here, "the technical verification of statements which relate to the scientific area". Fox's procedure is quoted at length — breathing into the third eye, a prayer of protection invoking Almighty God, the Highest Christ, Babaji Krishna, Mother Mary, Hilarion and Sathya Sai Baba, an empty movie theatre visualisation. The chapter reports that Cooke and Fox once channeled simultaneously in the same room and produced "a kind of identical twin phenomenon", finishing each other's sentences.
The cosmology: aether, primary points, vortex electrons
Hilarion's physics is a thoroughgoing Aether theory. Space is filled by "a tenuous material with properties of elasticity" that can stretch, contract, flow and carry waves, and "all matter of every form is composed of the aether in one of its states of condensation or expansion". The nineteenth-century aetherists, on this account, were right but insufficiently bold; the chapter sets this against a brief and inaccurate summary of the Michelson–Morley experiment (dated to "the beginning of the 20th-century", with the names given as "Michaelson and Morley").
The electron is not a particle but a vortex — a hole in the aether through which aetheric substance spins out into the fourth dimension, arcs across, and re-enters at a neighbouring proton spinning the other way. Magnetic fields, gravity and all other force fields are aether flow. Matter itself forms where the nodes of many four-dimensional standing-wave patterns coincide: if the aether becomes completely stationary at such a location "for even a fraction of a second", it condenses into a proton, with the surrounding rings of high vibration giving rise to electrons. The "primary points" are the transverse oscillators generating those waves, located not in our 3-space but "within the adjacent region of the 4-D matrix through which our space is curved" — and each atom of an inert gas contains one.
The technology
The engineering claim follows directly: since an inert gas atom merely masks its primary point, one need only displace the atom to let the point radiate. Hilarion's prescription is pressure and temperature sufficient to strip outer electrons and ionise the gas, plus a strong magnetic field to force the ions off their natural paths. Cooke's 1983 book Einstein Doesn't Work Here Anymore — which, the chapter notes pointedly, nowhere mentions Hilarion or channeling — supplied fifteen pages of construction drawings. Operating parameters are given concretely: a metal cartridge 4–12 inches long, gas at 200–2000 psi depending on species and mixture, and an average flux density around 200 gauss; Fox reports a threshold of about 250 psi below which nothing is observed, and specifies alnico-five magnets for unidirectional beams, potted alnico for omnidirectional fields and ceramic magnets for "krypton concentrator" beams. Cooke's group reported that the effect could be conducted along an ordinary wire and delivered through a sheathed probe, that the aether's elasticity could be altered by "scrubbing" it through boiling water in a magnetic field, and that the speed of light through it could thereby be varied.
Medicine and thought-forms
The larger part of the chapter is therapeutic. Illness, on Hilarion's account, is caused at the aetheric level: disease agents live in the aether and merely condense the familiar virus or bacterium inside a host whose "many-layered" aetheric sheath has been ruptured. Cooke extended this into a doctrine of "thought-forms" — persistent entities created by our own thinking and "programmed" to act on the body — of three kinds, bacterial, viral, and those that directly attack an organ or system with no microbe involved. Lower excitation phases of the inert gases are said to produce a light-like aetheric wave of complex harmonics "extremely hostile to certain disease agents".
Two case reports are given in detail. Subject C, a girl of 13 with mononucleosis, was treated supine with her head north under argon at ~1400 psi and ~150 gauss for 40 minutes, followed by krypton at ~700 psi for 20 minutes, and is reported to have got up and eaten with the family immediately afterwards, her doctor expressing surprise five days later. Subject F, a man of 35 with severe degenerative disease of the right hip dating from 1974, was treated from 1977 with krypton, then two multi-gas mixtures at 500 psi and 200 gauss weekly through a probe, plus a weaker xenon-rich generator aimed at his bed overnight; after nine months an x-ray is said to have shown "75 percent regeneration of the hip joint". Incidental effects are reported too, including a wife sleeping beside a treated husband whose cauterised fallopian tubes are said to have regenerated, resulting in a pregnancy. Clairvoyants were employed to observe the thought-forms directly, and Cooke concluded that the devices only dissipated them temporarily: "the only lasting cure... lay in retraining the subconscious of the patient".
Fox's section adds homeopathic "elixirs" made by pointing a device into pure water and then diluting to 3X with succussion, and a list of gas mixtures paired with outcomes: regrowing teeth, headaches, insomnia, "awakening higher consciousness", destruction of negative thought-forms, developing psychic functioning. Anecdotes follow for joint pain, digestion and the root chakra, chronic fatigue, a cervical cancer reported clear on biopsy after four months of neon, and two epilepsy cases in which Dilantin was halved or discontinued. Fox is repeatedly careful to say "I am an engineer, not a medical doctor... I'm not making any medical or therapeutic claims." Third-party results — plants grown in bare sand, in-vitro cell growth, a UV spectral shift in helium-exposed water — are reported at second hand, with the hope "these researchers will publish these studies soon."
Assessment
The chapter's real strengths are documentary. It is scrupulous about attribution, quotes its sources at length rather than paraphrasing them into agreement, gives operating parameters specific enough to be reproduced, and does not hide the awkward facts — that Cooke stripped all mention of the channeled origin from his technical book to get a hearing, that roughly 30% of people exposed to the devices report feeling nothing at all, that the therapeutic effects reportedly relapse unless the patient does psychological work. The author also flags his own gaps honestly, and states an intention to send the draft to credentialed physicists and biomedical scientists "for their reaction, critical analysis and speculation" and to build a response section from it. That is the right instinct, and the chapter would be a substantially different document if it had been carried out; as archived, it has not been.
But the paper's own criterion — Cooke's "technical verification of statements which relate to the scientific area", and the claim that prediction and replication have been satisfied — is precisely where the material fails, and it fails on its own terms. Nothing reported here is a measurement. There is no instrument reading anywhere in the chapter: no force, torque or weight change demonstrating the claimed gravitational beam, no spectrum, no calorimetry, no dosimetry, only sensations reported by observers who knew what they were exposed to. The two Canadian cases are uncontrolled single-subject anecdotes in conditions notorious for spontaneous variation — mononucleosis is self-limiting within weeks, and the reported 75% radiographic regeneration of a degenerated hip joint over nine months has no counterpart in the orthopaedic literature and is reported only as a physician's remark relayed at third hand, with no images, no radiologist's report and no identification of the doctor. The plant, cell-culture and spectroscopic results are attributed to unnamed researchers whose publication is merely hoped for. Where the chapter says two chief tenets of science "seem to have been satisfied", what is actually offered is testimony from people committed to the framework, which is what replication is designed to exclude.
The physics is in conflict with well-established measurement at several points, and the conflicts are not marginal. The claim that each noble gas atom contains a "primary point" whose unmasking produces gravity implies a species-specific gravitational anomaly; torsion-balance and free-fall composition tests constrain any such composition-dependent force to below one part in 1013 of gravity, and Eötvös-type experiments have specifically included samples of differing atomic composition. The claim that a magnetic field of ~200 gauss and pressures of a few hundred psi alter the local speed of light is contradicted by the null results of high-precision optical cavity and Michelson–Morley successor experiments at sensitivities many orders of magnitude beyond that. The identification of the noble gases as uniquely inert is itself out of date: xenon and krypton form genuine compounds, so the "no naturally occurring compounds" framing on which the specialness argument leans is weaker than stated. And the account of the electron as a purely rotational aether vortex, whatever its intuitive appeal within the vortex-atom tradition, must contend with electron diffraction, the measured anomalous magnetic moment agreeing with Quantum Electrodynamics to twelve significant figures, and the absence of any measured electron substructure down to 10−18 m.
Finally, the medical claims carry a weight the evidence cannot bear. Reports that a cervical cancer cleared, that an epileptic discontinued phenytoin, or that fallopian tubes regenerated, are the kind of claim that requires documentation, controls and follow-up precisely because the consequences of believing them wrongly are severe. Fox's repeated disclaimer that he makes no therapeutic claims sits uneasily beside a list pairing specific gas mixtures with specific cures. The doctrine that illness originates in self-generated "thought-forms" also carries an unexamined implication — that the sick have caused their own disease — which the chapter neither notices nor addresses. As a record of an unusual episode in the history of fringe research, and of how a channeled cosmology acquired a workshop practice, the chapter has genuine documentary value. As the demonstration of paranormally sourced scientific knowledge that its opening paragraph announces, it does not establish its case.