My long-time friend, Dr. Eugene Mallove, is dead. The local police have ruled his death a homicide.
At this writing, his killer is (or “killers” are) unknown, and the precise reasons for his brutal killing are equally mysterious.
The timing of Gene’s death – May 14, 2004, just as his 15-year, literal one scientist crusade to force the world’s scientific and political communities to take seriously a revolutionary form of energy that can literally “change the world” was finally about to be vindicated this year, by a reversal of the original negative analysis 15 years ago by the same government agency, the U.S. Department of Energy – makes no sense, regardless of the exact reasons for his murder.
After my initial shock and grief had given way to anger, and then to needing to let those who did not know Gene Mallove as I did what a remarkable man had suddenly been taken from us, I realized that Gene himself had given me the perfect tool to show the world “who they have lost” … and maybe “why.”
Our last conversation took place literally less than 24 hours before Gene’s sudden death. In that phone call, he reminded me that he’s just e-mailed me an “open letter” for posting here at Enterprise, outlining the results of and reasons for his last 15 years in the field of “new energy research.” Those 15 years, I might add, came at considerable personal sacrifice and economic cost to Gene and his own family. But, it was because of that family – and all the other families, all around the world, who desperately need and deserve the technologies for which he ultimately gave his life -- that Gene bore that cost with considerable patience, if not élan.
Thus, it is Gene’s own words -- his unwavering vision of a world that can finally work for all of us, if these fundamental energy discoveries he fought so hard to realize are allowed to come to pass – that make a far more fitting eulogy than I could ever write.
This, then, is the Gene Mallove that I knew ... a colleague and friend whom I, along with all his other friends and colleagues who had the privilege to know him as I did, shall forever miss.
Stay tuned, my friend: your final epitaph is not yet written ….
Richard C. Hoagland
May 18, 2004
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