Dean Stockwell, known for his role on Quantum Leap, also hosted a series from ’98 called Phenomenon: The Lost Archives, now available for streaming. This show delves into a myriad of intriguing topics, including a fascinating exploration of cold fusion in episode 6, ‘Heavy Watergate: The War Against Cold Fusion.’

After just a few episodes, it becomes clear that Stockwell’s character in the series is not one to shy away from controversy. His unapologetic disdain for coverups and corruption, even at the risk of offending powerful institutions, is both refreshing and thought-provoking. And many of the topics may come as both a surprise and a rude awakening, even for the most cynical among us.

Here’s how The Archive TV aptly described the series:

“Hosted by Dean Stockwell, this series examines our greatest mysteries. Governments, corporations, and religious groups have secretly wielded vast power by suppressing critical data or spreading misinformation to further their aims. Why hide the truth about great discoveries, disasters, or interstellar visits? Who does this serve?”

Heavy Watergate: The War Against Cold Fusion

In our day and age, it’s obvious we must move to cleaner energy sources ASAP. Shouldn’t scientists continue looking into cold fusion? As we will see, they are. But similar to Tesla’s’ ideas about free energy, such ideas face enormous resistance. (To put it quite mildly.)

The Quantum Leap to ‘Cold Fusion’ Fizzled Out

The same year that Stockwell appeared in Quantum Leap, a show about time travel, two chemists announced (before they were ready) that they could achieve significant heat energy from heavy water without producing radiation. Even better, the process took place at room temperature, unlike solar fusion.

Like Tesla, respected chemists Dr. Stanley Pons and Dr. Martin Fleishman dared to challenge science and the energy industry. If their experiments had worked out, an inexpensive process could have replaced the need for hazardous nuclear reactors and millions in costs.

Others called the discovery Cold Fusion, but that wasn’t the scientists’ intention.

“We didn’t call it Cold Fusion at all. That was a term which was wished on us, but we never called it that,” said Dr. Martin Fleischmann

A Smear Campaign and Widespread Criticism

Despite their insistence that they were indeed onto something, the chemists faced “an unprecedented smear campaign” from “powerful physicists, heavily reliant upon government funding for their hot fusion research.” Not only that, but mainstream publications like Nature joined in widespread criticism (see the video below at 5:25).

Ultimately, Nature Magazine editor John Maddox declared the idea “dead” (scene starts at 5:40).

After watching the show, it’s sobering to see what happened to the chemists and the potential for so-called ‘Cold Fusion.’ Yet, for the millions of people who now respect Nikola Tesla for being so ahead of his time, it won’t be surprising to see such a backlash to revolutionary ideas.

“In a world where corruption, greed, and political maneuvering often win out over the virtues of the human spirit, we believed, perhaps naively, that an exception might exist in the experimental sciences,” Stockwell said.

You can watch a clip of the show below via Grapevine Documentaries:

Whatever Happened to Cold Fusion Anyway?

One question we’re left with is, ‘What happened to the idea of Cold Fusion?’ As Phenomenon: The Lost Archives describes in detail, the chemists faced backlash on so many fronts. Further testing pointed to unconvincing results and it looked like it would all fizzle out.

Yet it never really went away, with studies quietly continuing, including by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego. In 2004, a second review of the field by the DOE once again found “intriguing but not convincing” results. The review panel was “split approximately evenly” as to whether the research was successful.

“Most scientists think that cold fusion is laughable, but when the dust settled, the researchers reviewing our work were evenly split. David Nagel , cold fusion researcher at George Washington University in Washington DC” states a 2004 article in Nature.

Cold Fusion Is Now Called Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR)

More recently, the concept has returned anew. However, now it’s funded by the government and has a new name: Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR).

After people endlessly created greenhouse gases for decades, the world is facing extreme climate change. Therefore, the pressure is on like never before for a better energy source. Necessity is the mother of invention, as the old saying goes.

“With the current climate crisis, interest in LENR has grown,” shared the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC).

Last year, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, announced a $10 million award to revisit Cold Fusion or LENR. So it seems there is quite a lot of potential there, after all.

‘Exciting’ Potential For a Huge Payoff?

Dr. Benjamin Barrowes, a research electrical engineer at ERDC-CRREL in Hanover, New Hampshire, has already received funding through the Department of Defense. For several years, he’s been conducting research. Rather than expecting it to fizzle out like decades before, he’s calling it “exciting” and “big news” with the potential for a huge payoff.

As the ERDC article describes it, the process sounds similar to what Fleischmann and Pons were doing. They passed a current through an electrochemical cell containing deuterium oxide (heavy water). One electrode was made of palladium.

As Barrowes described, he is also using lasers.

“Palladium has a very special property in that it absorbs a lot of hydrogen or deuterium, which is hydrogen with an extra neutron,” he said. “When palladium absorbs this hydrogen, it’s theorized that under the right conditions, those hydrogen or deuterium atoms get close enough to fuse — that’s our cold fusion.”

The Mysteries Continue

Curiously, Barrowes described how a triangular patch of silicon mysteriously appeared in the area of the lasers.

“There is a triangular patch of silicon located in the general area of where we positioned the red laser,” he said. “It’s about a 1-millimeter square area of silicon, and it’s thick in terms of these things — like 50 microns thick — and it’s ridged and brittle. I don’t know how it got there, but if I can show that it’s from a nuclear process, that would be big news.”

Video via Solid-State Fusion with Benjamin Barrowes describes Cold Fusion, aka LENR: