

A screenshot from the 27 December NewsHour episode. Credit: PBS

On 27 December, PBS’s NewsHour advertised, then aired, a report on claims that electricity can be conjured from water. It called to mind fake science news on the perpetual-motion-machine scale. Quickly the story—though not all references to it—vanished from PBS’s online record.

In a routine email announcing the planned NewsHour slate for that evening, PBS had advertised the energy-from-water segment this way:

Water To Power. In Athens, Greece, one physicist believes he’s found the solution to the world’s energy crisis: water. Petros Zografos has spent 30 years attempting to harness energy from water, by efficiently breaking down the H2O molecule into its component parts. The working model now sits in his house, representing what Zografos believes is the future of energy. Malcolm Brabant reports.

PBS’s online video with the full NewsHour episode omits the fake news segment. The network did post, but then removed, a separate online copy of the segment. Another such separate copy appeared online, posted by others, but only temporarily. That link now reports that the “video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by PBS NewsHour.” In PBS’s misnamed “full episode” posting, a trace of the deleted news report can still be heard at time 23:55 when news anchor Hari Sreenivasan says, “Coming up … a Greek scientist who claims he can transform water to energy.”

However, for anyone interested in details of the incident, an independently generated transcript appears online. It’s nearly completely accurate, with only a handful of trivial departures from the actual audio (as detected by comparing it with a personally held recording of the middle-of-the-night rebroadcast of the 27 December NewsHour, made when it had become apparent that PBS was almost immediately expunging the online record). After the solid line below, five illustrative excerpts appear from the transcript.

On 28 December, the NewsHour posted the following “editor’s note”—a mea culpa statement—online. Sreenivasan read it on the air at the end of that evening’s broadcast.

Dec. 27 story on Greek inventor and clean energy There have been questions raised concerning our report that aired on Dec. 27, 2016 about a Greek inventor who is developing a device that purports to turn water into power without requiring additional energy. Despite a team of Greek scientists praising the research, and the inclusion of an independent scientist dubious of the work, the NewsHour acknowledges that our reporting of this segment should have been more skeptical. Our reporting and research should always ask more questions and seek greater insight. We are examining each step in our process, and we apologize to our audience for the lapses in this report. The PBS NewsHour is dedicated to presenting clear and thorough reporting on developments in science and technology, and we will be following up with more reporting on the important subject of clean energy as soon as possible.

PBS ombudsman Michael Getler also chimed in on the segment. In a 28 December posting, Getler said that the story “struck me as some combination of a Rube Goldberg contraption and a Saturday Night Live skit that didn’t make the cut.” And though he gave NewsHour credit for including a skeptical assessment from an independent researcher, Getler argued that viewers never learned why the segment was done in the first place. He included several letters from unamused viewers.

Excerpts from the NewsHour’s fake news story:

Power from Tap Water HARI SREENIVASAN: Imagine a mini power supply in your house or car that made it possible for you to be off the grid. What if that source of energy was totally clean and powered by simple tap water? Well, a Greek scientist claims to have created a machine that converts water into power. As part of our occasional innovation series, special correspondent Malcolm Brabant traveled to the inventor’s island home. MALCOLM BRABANT: Physicist Petros Zografos spent 30 years trying to work out how, using minimal energy, he could break down the water molecule, H20, into its component parts, hydrogen and oxygen. Now he thinks he’s cracked it, with this, his mini power station, which he hopes will help reverse global pollution. … Colleague Pantelis Kotsianis gave a demonstration. PANTELIS KOTSIANIS, Scientist: We have no wires, no external wires from the grid connected to the system, stand-alone, and reconnect later on to the mains, get off the grid, and then we will put the water from the glass into this tube, and within 40 seconds, we will have the power to power the whole house. … MAN: How much power do you have? How much power do you have? PANTELIS KOTSIANIS: We’re producing right now? It’s about 800 watts. MALCOLM BRABANT: Which was enough to enable the inventor’s wife to prepare lunch. The average American house needs about 30,000 watts per hour. PANTELIS KOTSIANIS: It’s a very brand-new technology, never existed before. We’re using frequencies. And with frequencies, you don’t have to use high power. You don’t need to use excessive energy, or really any energy at all, in order to get the fuel that you need, hydrogen. Every rock or every bridge has a very specific resonance. When you vibrate a system at the specific frequency, which is the system’s frequency, that system would break. So, you don’t need force to do that. MALCOLM BRABANT: It’s similar to the biblical story of trumpets destroying the walls of Jericho. This is the Acropolis in Athens, not Jericho, but the temples date from the same era. It wasn’t a religious miracle that brought down Jericho’s walls, but sound waves from the trumpets. The inventor claims water can be unlocked in the same way. There are three stages to this machine. The first is motion. The act of pouring of the water generates energy to start the resonance process. The second is oscillation. A new compound created by the inventor helps produce the hydrogen. The third is the exhaust system, where the only byproduct is room-temperature water vapor. … MALCOLM BRABANT: The science employed by Zografos has been validated by a committee of Greek physicists. Independent engineer Lampis Tomasis was a skeptic, but is now a believer. LAMPIS TOMASIS, Engineer: I used spectrum analyzers. I used analyzers for the exhaust fumes. I used oscilloscopes and the other instruments as well. And I am convinced now that the instrument is working perfectly, doesn’t produce any dirt to the environment, and the only product produced is hydrogen, which is very clean for the environment. … To obtain an independent assessment, we went to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, named after one of the most important contributors to modern physics and the atomic age. JACOB TRIER FREDERIKSEN, Niels Bohr Institute: I’m extremely skeptical of the way that it allegedly is functioning. I seriously doubt that there is excess energy from this device. MALCOLM BRABANT: Jacob Frederiksen says the invention would be fantastic, if true. But first, he says, the science must be subjected to peer review, and that other experts need to be able to reproduce the results. He believes that using frequencies to split hydrogen and oxygen is valid, but doubts the process can yield sufficient extra power. JACOB TRIER FREDERIKSEN: Let’s assume we have this huge molecule of water, right, oxygen and hydrogen bound together in the water molecule. In order to split this, you really need to pull it apart, I mean, split these atoms apart. Now you have spent quite a lot of energy to split them. You can regain part of that energy by combining them by combustion processes. You already spent the energy to split it, and you only get part of that energy back when you recombine it by burning the hydrogen. And that difference will not be a positive one. MALCOLM BRABANT: In response, the Greeks say they will happily agree to a peer review once they have obtained a worldwide patent. They also insist their system doesn’t conform to the standard rules of electrolysis, or separating of hydrogen and oxygen.

Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today’s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.