Did a clean-energy era just slip into our lives, unnoticed by mainstream news cameras? Its arrival may coincide with the recent success of an unpretentious cold fusion device, reported to put out a thousand times more energy than it takes to run it, at the world's largest trade show for electric power producers.

(Cold fusion is the popular term for what the Japanese more accurately call New Hydrogen Energy Technology. See David Lewis' introduction to cold fusion in Atlantis Rising # 2. In 1989 Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons were first to claim to have produced nuclear reactions by putting palladium rods in water cells and getting excess energy out. They are now in a million-dollar laboratory in France, funded by Japanese money.)

Clean Energy Technologies Inc. (CETI) of Texas is a small company that doesn't hesitate to walk among giants of the fossil fuel and nuclear industries. CETI booked a booth at the Power-Gen '95 Americas conference in Anaheim, California, and demonstrated their breakthrough nonpolluting energy device, invented by James Patterson, Ph.D. Earlier, at fusion conferences, they proved that the Patterson cold fusion cell, the size of your thumb, outperforms fusion reactors the size of factories by putting out eighty times more energy, in the form of heat, than the electricity that runs it. While the Tokomaks of the megabucks worldÑhuge donut-shaped structures pervaded by high-intensity magnetic fieldsÑattempt fusion of atoms and are rewarded with brief bursts of less-power-out-than-in accompanied by dangerous radiation, CETI's and other room-temperature cold fusion experiments quietly and cleanly put out more power than it takes to run them and they keep this up for weeks at a time.

Meanwhile, as if in a parallel but outdated universe, a physics professor at the University of British Columbia sputters when I ask about cold fusion. There is no such thing! That has been proven to be just bad science!

In the Anaheim conference, where more than 15,000 engineers and other visitors showed up from 75 countries, foot traffic was heavy at the CETI booth. The company's most impressive demonstrations, however, took place in their hotel room for select groups. Scientists who witnessed or knew firsthand witnesses of various tests of the device at the power-generating meeting gave me varying reports on CETI's demonstrations. The most conservative report was sixteen to one (more output than input), and other witnesses said one thousand times more power out than went in.

No matter which numbers we look at, the fact remains that a four-inch long (by one-inch in diameter) tube of metal-coated beads and ordinary water, put out a kilowatt (a thousand watts) of power in equivalent heat with only about one watt of electricity going in. Water flowed through it and out into coils of plastic tubing while an electric fan blew the room's air past the coils.

My colleague was there and could feel the hot air coming out, says Eugene Mallove, Ph.D., editor of Infinite Energy Magazine.

Why didn't the company make a bigger splash by keeping the device running day and night on the floor of the convention center? Mallove says he believes CETI came to the conference to nail down a contract with a multi-billion-annual-sales corporation, so the hotel room was the site of high-level negotiations. They went there to give further encouragement to this very large, Fortune 500 company or maybe even Fortune 100 company in the United States. Mallove said in December that the corporation either has already, or probably will shortly, make a deal with Clean Energy Technologies to license the technology for manufacturing and production of these reactors. Who is the mysterious giant? It is not an energy company per se. It is a very high-tech, instantly recognizable corpor-ation.

Mallove is expected to reveal more in the next issue of Infinite Energy, promising details on the testing of the CETI cell at the PowerGen 95 convention.

Mallove reports that CETI representatives ran their tiny cell for five hours with only about 1.4 watts going in but 1,344 watts were coming out. It was able to heat a room; in fact, the CETI crew had to call the hotel desk and have room service increase the air conditioning for the room.

They reduced the output power at one point to about 470 watts, for safety reasons, but the input power at that point was .1 watt (one-tenth of a watt). So the ratio at that point was 4700 to one. We're talking about some gigantic ratiosÑfor all practical purposes, no input power, and it will be shown ultimately, of course, that input power if needed at all can be generated easily thermoelectrically and just fed back. So the whole thing, for all practical purposes, is a self-sustaining unit to heat anything you want!

This working prototype of a cold fusion heating unit shows more performance than glitz. Frankly, the whole apparatus looks like a science fair project, Mallove told me. Of course, most of the important inventions in history looked like that in their prototypes. And it wasn't designed to be a commercial heating unit; it was a demonstration unit.

It may not look like much, but if someone made multiples of the unit and put it in your basement, Mallove says, they could heat the whole house for a fraction of the cost of an electric light bulb. In theory, if I wanted to have something like that and CETI was willing to sell units to me, they could heat this house in New Hampshire even in the bitter cold.

Is it reliable? This is not the old days of cold fusion where you do some finicky experiment and hope and pray that it works, replies Mallove. It works every time.

The CETI process starts very rapidly. First, you apply a heater to it, equivalent to an automobile electric starter. You have to get it to proper temperature first. Then you remove the heater... and the thing just goes.

But can it replace internal combustion engines? Mallove is optimistic. Since there is no known upper limit to the pressure under which it can operate, there is every indication that fairly quickly, people will develop this for steam production. And I fully expect that in 1996 a vehicle will be powered by this process.

Mallove is of course not predicting it will be in the stores next year, but we do know researchers who want to be first to put a new-energy device into a small vehicle and drive across the country.

CETI is more interested in getting into production than getting into newspapers. The company is not returning phone calls from journalists; it is bombarded by would-be purchasers. Their marketing strategy is to sell distributors' licenses to a relatively small set of serious groups and businesses.

Paralleling the dramatic improvements in cold fusion are advances in magnetic motor technologies. Mallove says he strongly suspects they are closely related. I've interviewed additional scientists who speculate that cold fusion processes, and magnets, tap into a free energy universally present in the space around us.

For example, even though as a mainstream engineer/physicist he shuns the word overunity (meaning he is not publicly claiming more-power-output-than-input), Yasunori Takahashi from Japan is stirring up the new-energy scene with his magnetic motor. He claims to have the world's most powerful permanent magnets and is looking for business partners in the U.S. and England to produce the motor. New-energy researcher Christopher Tinsley rode a motor scooter powered by Takahashi's Self-Generating Motor throughout London for about a half hour and reports that the motor remained cool, which is highly unusual for a motor. Although it does need four 12-volt batteries to spin the motor up to speed for startup, a professor from London University said the motor seems to go 500 miles without fuel. New Energy News, monthly publication of the Institute for New Energy based in Salt Lake City, reports that Takahashi also invented an extremely powerful small capacitor (energy storage unit) and a Battery Doubler which promises to extend the running time of laptop computers, cellular phones and camcorders.

These are among many promising new-energy technologies emerging around the world.

Mallove sees the irony in the recent scene at Anaheim Convention Center. There were a thousand exhibitor booths, all sorts of megaproject technologies from oil, coal, gas and nuclear fissionÑ"all this stuff that's going to die completely, with this one (CETI) booth being the most important booth at the entire meeting. But you know the story. The dinosaurs did not realize their demise.

Jeane Manning is co-author of several books including Angels Don't Play This Haarp (distributed by Book People). Her first solo book, The Coming Energy Revolution will be out in spring, 1996, from Avery Publishing Group.

For anyone who wants to learn about the emerging scene, the International Association for New Science is planning a conference on new energy technologies for April 25-28, 1996 in Denver. The IANS office is in Fort Collins, Colorado, phone (970) 482-3731.