Who was Lt. Col. Thomas E. Bearden?

Bearden books now available via USPA.

Dissenters made science possible, back when religions described the universe and then free-thinkers realized they wanted descriptions that were more in line with physical evidence.

I’m not the first one to view that fact as ironic.

Which leads me to reflect on Thomas Eugene Bearden (1930-2022) who retired as a Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army. Yet in the sector of his life regarding the engineering of energy converters, he was a big dissenter.

Bearden was a scientist who didn’t adopt the standard dismissive attitude toward what he called engineering the “vacuum energy.”

It’s also termed zero-point energy. And aether. Ether.

Tom Bearden believed in the possibility of tapping into that universal “sea of energy” for powering a civilization without using carbon fuels. He used an analogy of dipping a paddle-wheel into a river.

Therefore he had to endure a heretic’s fate of being marginalized. Further, his improvisation with language when describing novel concepts made his writings difficult to follow, and easy for science critics to scorn.

Tom Bearden, center, at energy conference, 1990s. ©JeaneManning

He wrote books and essays prolifically.

And he helped inventors to consider unorthodox theories for explaining “impossible” (more power output than the operator puts in) results of their experimental devices.

Privately, he talked about a deep concern, that his country might wait too long before letting go of dependency on oil and gas for its power source.

He worried that the manufacturing sector would no longer be ready, when the time comes for making “free energy” devices that he believed people will need.

After the following, I’ll offer other reasons why Bearden was such an independent thinker.

Educational group’s announcement

Tom and Doris Bearden’s daughter, Dana, has opened her private stash of her father’s books to be sold by an organization that hosted his presentations for decades, the United States Psychotronics Association, USPA.

The USPA newsletter says two volumes of his books are ready for sale, and the organization’s volunteers will add more books soon.

It’s a better option than buying from eBay, Amazon, Alibris, because you’d get a good price and provide a commission for an excellent educational organization. See the ending of this post for details.

Glimpses of his life

I’m glad that I interviewed Tom Bearden most extensively when he turned 80 in 2010, because he remained bodily in our world less than ten years after his beloved wife Doris died in 2013.

When I had asked him for stories from his life, he shared some that helped me understand the source of his endurance.

I incorporated those stories into a tribute, which Atlantis Rising magazine published, to honor Bearden’s dedication to the breakthrough-energy field. I’ll send to paid subscribers if I find it.

Today’s Substack post is a shorter read than that tribute article.

An early influence on Tom Bearden’s life was “hard times” during the economic Great Depression.

His family was “dirt-poor.” He explained that the phrase was coined when some people were so desperate that they ingested clay or dirt to ease their hunger pangs.

When Tom was barely two years old, his mother died when his father’s “rickety T-model car” overturned on their dark, winding road when the couple drove home one night.

Tom’s grief-stricken father, “screaming and crying,” carried her broken and bloody body into the lamplight of their house.

It was a deeply traumatic sight for their toddler. “I went into profound shock without anyone knowing it.”

His first step-mother for some reason didn’t want to care for the youngest Bearden. When he was only four years old, she tried to drown him in a well. Tom’s brother took a gun down from the wall and forced her to pull Tom back up.

His father took the children to live with kindly grandparents while his job in the timber industry kept him away from home much of the time.

So at a young age, Tom learned to chop wood and garden. By his early teens, he was hunting for wild game in nearby swamps, appreciating nature’s wonders while creatively avoiding alligators and snakes.

The home situation changed when his father wasn’t finding work and turned to alcohol...

Tom had to leave. He then struggled to earn a living while finding resources for getting an academic education.

Later, he played guitar with the band known as Louisiana Hayride. Tom finally found peace around the trauma he’d been too young to understand, the shadowy haunting memory of when his mother left his life.

Well-known country singer Jim Reeves recorded Tom’s recitation, “Mother Went A’Walkin.”

Throughout Tom Bearden’s career, no matter how heavy the ridicule and how exhausting was his effort to change entrenched concepts in physics and engineering, it was easier than surviving depression-era poverty.

And I think those kind grandparents contributed much to Tom Bearden’s becoming such a considerate, caring man.

For struggling experimenters, Tom was generous with his time. He even helped this writer by faxing many pages of information when I was first learning about breakthrough energy devices.

While answering my many questions in 2010, Bearden replied at length about how his military career had helped him as a researcher. That, and some of his concepts about tapping into the invisible sea of energy, will be a topic for a further post.

How to contact new supplier for his books

Currently, USPA prices for Bearden’s books include shipping within the United States only, but the organization’s volunteers are open to working on an individual basis with people outside the US who are willing to pay the extra shipping, duties and taxes based on location.

So if you’re outside the US you can get a shipping quote by emailing gailinvermont(at)outlook(dot)com.

“This is a very new project, for Dana and the USPA,” Gail wrote in the newsletter, “so keep checking. We’ll add more Bearden titles as soon as we can.”

You can find them on the Books section of the USPA website.