In 1899, Nikola Tesla takes notes in his laboratory, as high voltage electricity arcs from his “magnifying transmitter”

When water-powered car inventor Stanley Meyer sat down to lunch, he never expected the unwelcome surprise of death. But just like pregnancy or the IRS tax man, death doesn’t care about your life plans. It was the third Friday in March, the year was 1998. John Travolta was on the cover of Time magazine, made-up to look like Bill Clinton. The Big Lebowski and Wild Things were playing at the multiplex. Will Smith’s track Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It was the #1 song in America. Which makes it very possible that Will Smith’s radio-friendly voice was in the air, perhaps leaking out of the open car windows of a passing sedan, when water-powered car inventor Stanley Meyer exploded from the restaurant.

Meyer was dining with his two Belgian investors and his brother. Just after enjoying a swallow of cranberry juice, he was seized by the grip of panic. He stood up and fled the table. His brother chased him into the parking lot, where he found him on the ground. Stanley Meyer’s life was reduced to dying words. With his last breath, Meyer accused the Belgian investors of assassinating him: “They poisoned me…” And then, the water-powered car inventor died.

The coroner for Franklin County performed an autopsy. The police from Grove City opened an investigation. Once they were done, the state of Ohio ruled that Stanley Meyer was dead from natural causes. The coroner determined the pioneering inventor suffered from high blood pressure. The cause of death: a cerebral aneurysm.

Many diehard supporters of the water-powered car inventor believe his dying words to be gospel truth. To them, clearly, Stanley Meyer was murdered. But why? Was it to suppress the spread of his alternative technologies?

It should be pointed out: there is no known poison that can be used to induce a cerebral aneurysm. But if one already has a developing aneurysm, a blood thinning agent like Warafin (AKA rat poison) can cause a pre-existing aneurysm to bleed out and become fatal. Of course, these sorts of speculations of assassinations and suppression of world-changing technologies by powerful elite figures are built on the shaky sands of What if… and this same question is a constant problem for water-powered cars and their controversial inventors.

What if…?

A water-powered car doesn’t burn water. That’s ridiculous. It also doesn’t run on steam. The name is a misnomer. The water-powered cars we’ll focus on derive their locomotion from electrically splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen gases — the resulting hydrogen gas is burned.

Studies published in scientific journals have shown an H2/gasoline mix increases fuel efficiency in a conventional internal combustion engine. The more surprising part is that you can also burn ionized hydrogen gas such as H2 in the cylinders of your car, directly. All by itself. You can explode hydrogen the same as gasoline. Water-powered car guys call this ionized hydrogen gas: HHO, or ortho-hydroxy.

What exactly is ortho-hydroxy? It’s a molecule of two bonded ionized atoms of hydrogen.

Hydrogen gas split from a water molecule can be processed with pulsed electricity, which ionizes it. One can continue to process/ionize the hydrogen gas until you create an enriched version called deuterium. If you keep going, you can create tritium, which is a radioactive hydrogen gas.

Now you see why water-powered car inventors are ruled suspicious by the feds. In today’s fearful climate, you don’t want to be making radioactive gases in your garage. They have labels for people who do that. But any water-powered car inventor will tell you: they don’t need to create radioactive hydrogen gas to power their cars. They just want to split water. Basic chemistry.

You may be surprised, or skeptical, to learn you can pump hydrogen gas into your Ford’s engine and it’ll work just the same as regular unleaded gasoline. Ready for the weirder part? The engine exhaust is water vapor. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. A torch fueled with ortho-hydroxy gas has a flame that burns hot enough to cut through a steel plate like a lightsaber, but when that same flame cools on contact, unburned hydrogen recombines with oxygen in the atmosphere and turns into water vapor. It’s crazy to see a flame lick the air and then, like magic, become water droplets. Fire isn’t supposed to turn into water.

This may be a water-powered car’s biggest selling point: it’s super clean tech. The biggest drawback for water-powered cars is equally simple: “There’s no such thing as free energy.”

You need an electrical current to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Where do you get that? If you use a battery, any environmentalist worth their vegan bacon will tell you: battery technology is not clean. This is the biggest problem for electric cars being hailed as environmental saviors. Battery production is a very dirty industry. If you use renewable resources like wind and solar to power the batteries used to split the water, that’s about as clean as it gets. But think about it — that’s really not much different from electric cars. So, then why do we need water-powered cars? Plus, isn’t it a bad idea to turn water into the new oil?

The case for a water-powered car is about power, both electrical and socio-political. Devotees of Nikola Tesla think our physics books need to be rewritten. Modern accepted science and Tesla parted ways after Einstein’s Theory of Relativity re-shaped how we imagine the universe that surrounds and exists inside of us. Gone was Tesla’s idea of an ether of energy. Tesla described electricity as a feature of a pervasive field of energy––all part of a vibrating universe, that manifested as a coordinated dance of frequencies. To Tesla, the universe and everything in it could be understood as vibrations.

In the post-Einstein world, Tesla’s alternative theory of energy is now considered scientific heresy. Only the true believers still hold their faith in Tesla's view of the universe. However, following his methods, these garage tinkerers and shade tree physicists seem to work electrical miracles. And they claim this is the real reason why the government won’t let them build water-powered cars. It’s all part of a century-long fight that goes back to Tesla and his former boss, Thomas Edison. Genius versus Industry. And now, a century later, these true believers and electrical outlaws argue that rather than follow the lead of the electric car company named for their hero, we need to make everyone understand how a water-powered car works, and redesign our modern industry according to Tesla’s alternative theory of energy. Imagine everything you know about electricity is wrong. Now ask yourself: why would anyone want to suppress this truth? Who benefits?

I once wrote a story about people who drive slow in the fast lane; while researching it I contacted the California Highway Patrol to get clarification on the law. The officers were surprisingly open and helpful. Two officers sat with me and answered all my questions. Curious about why water-powered cars are not allowed on California’s roads, I sent an email to my contact at the CHP. He politely said he’d look into it and get back to me. After waiting a month, I checked back with him. I still haven’t heard anything.

Since the CHP won’t talk, I checked the law books myself. According to the California vehicle code, all vehicles must be deemed “road-worthy.” Which means you can’t just build a car in your backyard and take it for a spin. There are certain regulations the car must meet. For instance, it must have working headlights and taillights. There are lots more regulations. You can read them all here. But there are no specific regulations about what sort of engine your car must have under the hood — only about how much the engine can pollute. This is why water-powered car inventors cry foul. It’s technically not against the law. So what happens when you take your water-powered car to the CHP to get it certified as “roadworthy?” I wish I could tell you.

The CHP had no official comment.

On blogs and forums, water-powered cars fans claim that inventors and supporters of the technology have been harassed by FBI agents. They claim they’ve been investigated and intimidated and threatened. Some claim that water-powered car inventor and alternative energy genius, Bob Boyce, had cancer-causing agents secretly and forcibly inserted into his body in a small chip. The surgery to remove it is documented here. These are serious claims.

So, I phoned the FBI’s Los Angeles office.

I spoke with Laura Eimiller from Media Relations. I told her I was working on a story about water-powered cars and asked if the FBI has any comment about the rumors of harassment and intimidation, also if there are any ongoing investigations into water-powered cars. She told me she’d look into it and get back to me.

I’m still waiting. Periodically, I call and leave her a voicemail.

On a blog dedicated to the proliferation of alternative energy ideas, I read a story of a water-powered car inventor who gave a demonstration to a colonel from the Department of Defense. They, apparently, drove from Tennessee to Washington together, and then ran a battery of tests, this article claimed. So, I emailed the Pentagon.

Knowing how bureaucracies are, I thought the Department of Defense might have some record of this demonstration, some documentation on the testing of hydroxy as a fuel source. The colonel I spoke with from media relations was very helpful. At first. He phoned me and we chatted briefly. He also told me our conversation was off the record. The retired colonel explained that he was not in the military, but as a spokesperson he did have some big news he could share. The DoD was about to announce a new fleet of all-electric vehicles. It was part of private-public partnership with GM. He said the engineers at TARDEC (Tank Research) were geeked to talk to me about what they’d been building. While it’s good to hear that DoD is switching over to electric vehicles, I explained that I was only interested in water-powered cars and hydroxy fuels. In his friendly way, he told me to write up all my questions and he’d submit them to his supervisor for approval to speak on the record. I submitted my questions to him.

And I never heard from him again.

Perhaps, the alternative energy community was right? Maybe they are being suppressed. One thing’s for sure: no one at any governmental agency will speak with me on the record once they hear or read the words water-powered car.

In the water-powered car community online, you’ll read bitter claims that amateur inventors can never get their designs and inventions patented because that’s another way the US government denies the alternative energy theories and heretical science.

So, I contacted the United States Trademark and Patent Office.

The gentleman I spoke with was extremely friendly and helpful. I asked him why the patent office would deny a patent. He explained that a patent has to demonstrate a workable device or process. Simple enough. But in a circular logic that any conspiracy theorist could make hay with — of course the government would claim the science doesn’t work, that’s how they suppress it. I asked the gentleman from the USTPO, let’s say the science does indeed work, would there be any way to appeal a ruling? He said there is. He also recommended I search the patent database to see if perhaps a water-powered engine had been approved. I asked if he could search from his end. He told me the patent office’s search engine is slow and cumbersome. He confided with a chuckle that’s it more efficient to use Google to search the federal patent database. (There are your tax dollars at work.) So, I did. This is what I found:

There is a water-powered engine that was patented.

Which means nothing at all. Really. Except that it is federally-recognized as a presumably working device. But taken together, what does this all mean for the claims of government suppression? Is the US government denying the potential of water-powered cars just to protect the moribund petrochemical industry? Why won’t anyone speak on the record? Why does everyone I question from the government dummy up like a mob boss looking to avoid self-incrimination?

If the government won’t talk, the only way to get answers is to go check out these electrical outlaws for myself. Go meet one of these alternative energy trailblazers and see if the science works. Or not.

Cayucos, California is a little beach town near San Luis Obispo; it sits at the end of a spit of land. Only one way in and one way out. It’s like the world’s most beautiful ghetto. It’s a sleepy little coastal town that pays its rent with tourist dollars. It’s primarily home to artists and aging baby-boomers. It reminds me of the road trips I took in California as a boy. Time moves slower here in Cayucos. And somewhere here a man in his garage is trying to build the future.

When I phone my contact to tell him I’m close, he instructs me where to park, and then walks out to meet me. I have no idea what to expect. Will he be a squinty-eyed suspicious conspiracy theorist crackpot? Or is he more like the flinty, industrious men who first built planes and barn-stormed a century ago?

Andrew Batty is a tall white guy, a baby-boomer, a man of immense decency, and a kindness that’s as obvious as the fragrance of a well-tended garden. In short, he’s a very nice and honest man. He attributes this to his faith in Jesus. He also credits his obvious decency as the reason why the alternative energy genius Bob Boyce trusted him in the first place. Bob Boyce is the inventor of the best, most efficient, high-powered catalytic hydrogen fuel cells you can find online. He’s a verifiable electrical genius. As a mechanical engineer, he’s exacting. He’s the leading mind in the field of home-built water-powered cars. Although, he would never use that term. He would say he works with electricity and hydroxy power. He’s also the one who leased his designs to Andrew to sell online. And he’s allegedly guided Andrew to a higher understanding of electricity than even Einstein had. (That is, if you believe he’s correct.)

As one of the very few licensees of Bob Boyce designs, Andrew owns and operates Hydrogen Garage. His workshop is, literally, in his garage. That’s where he builds the hydroxy kits he sells online. Mostly, truckers buy his water-splitting machines and use them to increase the fuel efficiency of their diesel trucks. The CHP runs a program in conjunction with CARB (Clear Air Resources Board) to regulate the emissions of diesel trucks in California. The regulations make it illegal for a truck driver to run pure hydroxy. But they can add the hydroxy gas to their engine air intake as a supplement. Andrew tells me truckers can get upwards to 30% more efficiency. Which means, in real terms, they save three dollars for every ten dollars they would’ve spent. That’s huge savings to a cash-strapped trucker.

Although the electrical theory may be alternative, the chemistry employed is actually rather simple. Hydrogen has a negative charge. Oxygen has a positive charge. This mean the gases can easily be separated by their polarity. When Andrew splits out the hydrogen gas, he ionizes it with bursts of electricity. If he does this again and again, he could create deuterium, and he could continue to enrich until he reached tritium. Andrew tells me that would get him in trouble with the government. So, they just ionize the gas to create ortho-hydrogen. To do that, he uses different amperages of electricity. The idea is that certain frequencies of electricity make the hydrogen behave differently. Andrew picks up a fuel cell to explain how it works. He tells me that they’ve discovered that “five amps makes the highest quality ortho.” Andrew and his partner Jerome build their own fuel cells. I do not meet Jerome, but Andrew tells me about how the two of them went into business after they met Bob Boyce in a hotel in Los Angeles, a decade ago.

“It was in a motel in LA in 19… It was 2007. He just wanted to show him, ‘Hey, I made this cell. Do you want to look at it? It’s your seven-plate.’ And he approved it. Right then. And he was just really cool and he goes, ‘Yeah, you can make that. I want ten dollars a sale’ That’s our royalty fee. ‘You guys can have a license. You guys can sell my stuff.’ He said what’s your guys’ PWM like?’

I have to interrupt Andrew. He casually uses terms like “seven plate” and acronyms like PWM like he’s saying NATO or NFL. But I have no idea what PWM is and I’ve been reading up on this stuff for weeks.

“Pulse width modulator. All it is is a circuit that pulses. The modulator is a switch that gets hot and it just switches the electrical current on and off. It’s part of training the molecules.”

What all that means is: to condition the hydrogen gas that’s separated from the water, they use an electrical current that pulses like a strobe light. This causes a differential in the hydrogen gas, causing atoms of hydrogen to pair together into ionized molecules like ortho-hydrogen H+, deuterium, H2, or tritium, H3.

“If you have non-magnetic stainless (steel) which is 304 or 316, you can set the polarity. Now, nickel is non-magnetic, so the more nickel you have in it, the better.”

To keep up with what he’s describing, a person needs a good working knowledge of physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, magnetic metals, nature of polarity, and flow dynamics. Only because I’ve long been a fan of Nikola Tesla does this busy intersection of scientific disciplines make any sense to me. Since Andrew Batty’s guru, the alternative energy genius Bob Boyce, is a recluse living on a mountaintop in Tennessee, I can’t ask Boyce any questions. Instead, I must ask Andrew if Bob ever told him about building a car that works entirely on a water fuel system. Andrew explains it as best he can.

“The first time was in 1990, he had it on jack stands in his driveway, a Duster engine, or a Dodge engine. He had that running at 60 mph. He had the wheels spinning — he was revving the engine — but it was on jack stands. It never got off the driveway. They told him he was driving on the road. Someone came into his place and threw his toroids across the room and broke ’em and stuff.”

He digs around in his garage to find an example. After a minute of looking, he finds one in a drawer, he lifts it out like an excited boy who’s found his old toy. Andrew shows me a toroid. It’s possibly the most important component they build that’s based on Bob Boyce’s designs. It’s iron core wrapped in coils of solid 16-gauge silver-coated copper wire, and it looks like a giant donut that’s been encased in melted candle wax. Looking at the toroid, for a moment, it feels like we stepped out of time. You don’t think anything with this much wax could be high tech. But it is, it very much is, if it works like he says it does.

“It’s a three-phase circuit. It’s a radiant energy device. He says with this thing you could run your whole house. If you had a rack of batteries — when you hook it up to a circuit, it brings longitudinal energy into the center of the toroid — he said it can change the weather and stuff. It could become a weapon. So he didn’t want to put it out there.”

As if he can see me grow skeptical when he claims the toroid could be a longitudinal energy weapon, he brings our conversation back to why I visited his garage. With a slight twinkle in his eye, Andrew asks me if I want to see how hydroxy power works. He sets the toroid aside and we walk back over to his workbench.

Andrew connects leads from a marine battery. The deep cycle of a marine battery is a good source for steady power. He sets the rate of the current at 5 amps. The water starts to bubble. Gases indeed separate in the clear cylinders. He connects a small grade rubber hose, and with a flick of a flame he lights the stream of gas on fire like an acetylene torch.

A tiny flame spits from the metal nozzle at the end of the rubber hose. He focuses the flame on a plate of metal and slices through it like a jedi. Andrew explains that hydrogen flame behaves differently than other gases like propane or butane. For instance the jet nozzle is cool to the touch. Andrew lets me hold the nozzle and even though I can see the blue flame less than an inch from my fingers, the metal is cool enough to hold.

I ask Andrew how dangerous it would be if his hydrogen-splitting machine becomes unstable. Like, could it explode? Would his whole garage burn up like the Hindenburg? Andrew laughs at my question. And then explains that although the doomed zeppelin used hydrogen gas, the Hindenburg was working with a very different set of circumstances. Andrew assures me that if there is a problem his system just sort of pops from back pressure. A hose will disconnect, or a tube might rupture its seal. But it never explodes. It won’t catch fire like the famous fireball airship. He connects the torch to a set of welded metal tubes that separate the warmed air into shafts, aimed in different directions, Andrew says he uses this as a homemade area heater to warm his garage in the winter. Within minutes you can feel the warmth surround us.

Amateur alternative energy inventors like Bob Boyce and Andrew Batty, and it could certainly be said of Nikola Tesla, tend to suffer from the same fate. Few people understand them. This makes it easy for mainstream science to dismiss them. As a counterpoint, when thinking about amateur inventors it helps to remember that two years before the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk, Rear Admiral George W Melville wrote a book, “The Engineer and the Problem of Aerial Navigation,” and he lampooned the kooky dream of flying machines:

“…there is no basis for the ardent hopes and positive statements made as to the safety and successful use of the dirigible balloon or flying machine, or both, for commercial transportation or as weapons of war, and that, therefore, it would be a wrong, whether willful or unknowing, to lead the people and perhaps governments at this time to believe the contrary…”

Occasionally, accepted science and respected members of the US government can be wrong.

The man who gave us our electrical grid never intended for our world to be choked with wires. To Nikola Tesla, electricity wasn’t something that flows like water in pipes to your home. To imagine it that way may confuse you and hides the true nature of electricity. Electricity doesn’t flow to your house as a stream of electrons. It’s more like waves in the ocean. Only, in this case, the ocean is high tension power lines. The electrical waves pass a charge through the field of electrons in the wires. To Tesla, everything is electrical. Bound together by a pervasive field of energy. We call that vibrating field: the Universe.

Tesla saw energy in the air, in the stars, and in the soil. Tesla called it etheric energy. Like the Force in Star Wars, it surrounds and penetrates everything, binding everything together. And scientifically, etheric energy can be expressed as oscillations in polarity that we call electricity and/or magnetism. To Tesla’s way of thinking everything is vibrating energy expressed at different frequencies. The Universe is like an electric symphony. And this cosmic opus we call our Universe works best when frequencies meet in harmonic convergences, at intersections of frictionless existences. Presently, we only play with half of Tesla’s electric symphony.

You may have heard that our modern digital world is pretty much built upon Tesla’s understanding of electricity and energy. Yet, our accepted scientific community balks at some of Tesla’s far-out ideas, things like zero point energy and scalar longitudinal electromagnetic fields that emanate from black holes. But if Tesla was right about lasers and radio, could he also be right about etheric energy?

Other than cold fusion, if you want to kill an otherwise promising career in physics, start to earnestly use the term “zero point energy.” In the physics community, it’s practically a slur. It’s how you dismiss a theory as ridiculous. Only rubes, fools, and crackpots believe in such things. All good and true working scientists point to Newton and Einstein and warn anyone, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch! You can’t make a perpetual motion machine!”

Meanwhile, Tesla’s scientific adherents, like desert hermits, secret themselves away, tinkering in garages across the country, and they rely on their “crackpot” theories and equations to make machines that seemingly manipulate longitudinal energy.

Of the alternative energy proponents out there today, there is one man, in particular, who stands out. His name is Eric Dollard. Imagine that Santa Claus had a very skinny little brother who became a mad scientist and you’re pretty close. Dollard is a bearded, charmingly honest, fussily short-tempered scientific genius. He doesn’t care if you think what he says works or not. He knows it works. He understands the math and mechanics and polarity that prove to him it works. And to explain how it works, he’s reached back to mathematicians before Einstein, electricians who helped found our modern world, and he borrowed their work to invent new math to explain his theories of alternative energy.

You can find his PowerPoint presentations online. He speaks extemporaneously, at length, about the most arcane minutiae of the history of our understanding of electricity. He gives whiteboard talks that can last for hours. His YouTube videos aren’t for the casual observer. He’s no salesman for alternative energy. He’s also no prophet. He doesn’t want to make you believe. He wants to show the whole world exactly how and why his Tesla-based understanding of longitudinal energy works. The harder Dollard tries to explain it all, the more he looks like a nutty old kook. To understand what Dollard says in his lectures, it helps if you throw out your textbook understanding of electricity.

Here, let’s have Dollard explain:

“You build Tesla’s devices as he describes in his writings and you will get all these effects. I’ve duplicated just about every Tesla experiment. In fact, actually, I’m very famous for being possibly the only person that has ever duplicated Tesla in an experiment. And it’s not because I’m smart or I talk to space aliens. What it is is I don’t make any improvements on the historic study. It’s that simple. I just do exactly as instructed. And it all works exactly as described.”

He’s being humble. He’s very smart. Even if he sees it as due diligence, that he’s just following a path set forth by a genius before him, there are few people who can understand Tesla’s work. And fewer still who are willing to risk their career to follow his path. But Dollard has no career to throw away. He’s an autodidact. He’s a garage tinkerer. Just like Tesla.

To summarize the science down to the essential difference that separates Tesla and Dollard from our modern accepted understanding of physics/chemistry, Tesla found a way to escape the law of Newtonian physics that states every action has an equal and opposite reaction. As Dollard puts it, “Tesla found a way to give a push without having to lean against anything.”

That’s revolutionary. That’s also why mainstream science rejects it. You can’t just escape Newtonian physics. But Dollard says Tesla did. And that he did it both electro-magnetically, and mechanically. The secret is the use of frequencies.

“Tesla’s aim was to produce a worldwide power system that was based on this principle and the power system would be tuned to the natural resonant frequency of the Earth. And you could just simply disconnect all the generating stations, cause the solar system would run the electrical plant. It would be one with the electrical system of the Earth.”

That sounds like free energy nonsense to anyone in the accepted scientific community. But Tesla claimed to have performed an experiment wherein he conducted electricity through the center of the planet as oscillating frequencies.

“As wireless (radio) progressed, Tesla established the system where he could transmit longitudinally through the earth electrical power at a velocity of 291,000 miles/sec. That’s Pi over two, times the velocity of light,” Eric Dollard lectures.

Wait, did Dollard just claim Tesla got an electrical signal to propagate faster than the speed of light? “Impossible! That can’t be true,” screams the accepted scientific community. That violates all of modern physics. Newtonian and Einsteinian physics. Tesla must be wrong if he argues with Einstein and Newton. But what if they’re all correct? What if it’s all slightly stranger than we think?

Dollard and Tesla describe fields of electricity that move backwards and forwards in time. That’s very different than what we imagine in high tension lines stretched high above us. Tesla and his disciple Dollard propose that there are eight forms of electricity. Together, these eight forms operate as a unit, one bound by the duality of polarity. Confused? Welcome to the realm of longitudinal energy.

According to Dollard, and Tesla, we presently use only one half of the electrical magnetic frequencies available to us. We use the ones that are choppy, scratchy, and inefficient but very easy to detect because of friction. Evidence of this antagonistic energy is measured in the resistance found in our transmission wires. In physical terms, think of resistance as the friction in the flow of our electrical grid, and if we design a system with electrical resonance in mind, where friction is reduced to zero, just think of all the energy that wouldn’t be lost in transmission. Thus, it also wouldn’t need to be generated, or stored in a battery. In monetary and environmental terms, the savings would be colossal.

To understand how harmonic convergences in frequencies work, think of how music resonates and shatters a wine glass. That’s the sort of sudden increase in power that occurs when one reaches resonance and one matches frequencies — things can explode. That’s how Dollard and Tesla treat electromagnetic fields, they manipulate frequencies. To believers in alternative energy, we’ve just begun to use electricity to its fullest potential. As they say, everything that’s old is new again. Perhaps, working with electrical energy will soon be more futuristic than nuclear energy.

Tesla even said as much in his book My Inventions (pg. 26):

I am unwilling to accord to some small-minded and jealous individuals the satisfaction of having thwarted my efforts. These men are to me nothing more than microbes of a nasty disease. My project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time. But the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.

Out there in the Silicon Valley, tucked away in cozy Palo Alto, somewhere in a building on the Stanford campus, there’s a professor who’s working with these very same ideas. Only, Dr. Hongjie Dai isn’t researching longitudinal energy. He would likely shake his head at such alternative energy terms. Instead, he’s applied nanoparticles onto graphene and onto nickel plates to create cheap efficient hydroxy gas.

As you now know, you must introduce electricity to split the water and derive oxygen and hydrogen gases. This is the most impressive part: Dr. Dai’s latest research into electrolysis created a water-splitter that can be powered by a single AAA battery. That’s huge. That means you could convert renewable resources into electricity, store it in tiny batteries, and then use those batteries to split the water. Dr. Dai envisions his process being used to create cheap hydrogen for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and not as a source to create HHO/hydroxy gas for water-powered cars.

In recent years, there have been a few water-powered cars to make it into mainstream news cycle. In 2002, a company called Genesis World Energy/United Fuel Cell Technology announced they patented a process that split water into HHO gas, and then mixed it together again to create a fuel. Four years later, in 2006, after raising nearly three million dollars from investors, the owner of the company, Patrick Kelly, was convicted in New Jersey of theft.

There’s also Genepax, a Japanese company that announced in 2008 they created a car that runs on water. But the company and its technology was roundly savaged by Popular Mechanics magazine. Eight years later, the company is still around, and was recently touting its new world-changing water-powered car that runs on two cans of soda. Their claims remain doubtful.

There was also Filipino inventor, Daniel Dingel, who claimed to have created a water-powered car. He even filed a patent application with the USTPO. In 2000, he convinced Formosa Plastics Group to partner with him. And a mere short eight years later, in 2008, they were suing him for fraud. Formosa Plastics Group won. Dingel was imprisoned for twenty years. Sadly, he passed away in 2011.

Most recently, in 2015, a Swiss-French company, nanoFlowcell AG, unveiled its water-powered car line. And, unlike the others to come before it, they’ve stayed open for business and aren’t being sued for fraud or theft. Despite initial criticism and skepticism from journalists who assured the Tesla car company they had nothing to fear from this French-Swiss water-powered upstart, this year, the company offered multiple models of their water-powered fuel cell vehicle. They don’t burn HHO gas, instead, it’s a flow system that runs on electrolysis to power a fuel cell. It’s still essentially, a water-powered electric car.

Is this the beginning of a tech revolution? One that dark forces have attempted to suppress and were willing to kill inventors in order to keep their inventions from seeing the light of day? Who knows? These sorts of questions are rarely truly answered until everyone involved is dead.

The more important questions to answer: Are alternative energy geniuses like Eric Dollard and Bob Boyce right? Does Tesla still have a lot more to teach us if we follow his understanding of electricity? Can Tesla’s ideas of oscillating electrical fields and dielectric effects mix with Dr. Dai’s nanoparticles to create new materials?

Perhaps a water-powered car is a foolish dream.

But it’s equally clear: we don’t yet fully understand electricity. Yes, Elon Musk is a genius. No doubt. But there is a big difference between his Tesla motor company and Tesla the man. This distinction may be key to the path humanity takes. Or drives.