Terminology
Here I'm going to be talking about two fields of inquiry, cold fusion, and UFO's. Over the past decade or so attempts have been made (with varying degrees of success) to rebrand them at "low energy nuclear reactions" (LENR) and "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAP) respectively. Both of these terms, while not quite popular parlance, I consider to be more accurate in that they reflect the genuine lack of understanding of the nature of the underlying phenomenon.
As such, I will be using LENR and UAP throughout this text.
A Remarkable Symmetry
I've spent time in the LENR field, gone to conferences, spoken to the people involved, and seen their data and labs. I'm less directly involved with the modern UAP field outside of a lifelong interest, reading books, as well as participating in the (very active) subreddit over the years.
However, what I've found is that the two fields of inquiry share remarkable symmetry. Both are multi-decade "pariah" fields being generally considered reputational poison by academic scientists. More broadly, whether it's with scientists or laypeople, LENR and UAP are not considered "serious subjects for serious people." Bring them up at a cocktail party and you'll perhaps get a smirk or a chuckle... but keep talking about it and your conversational partner will start to think they've encountered a "kook" and will be looking for the exits.
The People
However, look closer beyond the surface, and the picture changes. Both LENR and UAP over the decades have had multiple waves of highly qualified researchers, investigators and witnesses who have put their public stamp on the claim that "yes, this is a real phenomenon."
In LENR this has taken the form of career Ph.D researchers, mostly at industrial or military labs, such as Mike McKubre at SRI, Frank Gordon and Pamela Mosier-Boss at SPAWAR (Navy), Yasuhiro Iwamura at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and many others over the past 30 years who have produced compelling evidence of LENR phenomena.
In the contemporary era of UAP inquiry that began with the publication of a bombshell 2017 New York Times article, we have seen Navy pilots David Fravor, Alex Dietrich, and Ryan Graves, in addition to more recent intelligence whistleblowers like David Grusch and Dylan Borland come forward. All decorated, career military professionals, who have either interdicted "impossible" crafts in America's airspace (Fravor, Dietrich and Graves), or have testified to government malfeasance to cover up these phenomena (Grusch and Borland).
It's important to note that the credibility of many of these names is underscored by a sort of reputational "proof of burn." These men and women have followed their calling to publicize their observations, at the cost of exile from their chosen career fields, financial penury, and in the case of Grusch and Borland, active harassment by their former employers. Nobody has gotten rich from LENR/UAP, and certainly neither is anyone "famous" outside of narrow niches of internet message boards.
That being said, these fields are also rife with a Witches' brew of grifters, hangers-on, iconoclastic garage researchers and outright "quacks" who have left the realm of logic and reason. This is the "noise" that can sometimes mask the "signal", but both are present.
The Stakes
Another dimension that links these two fields of study is the massive implications for humanity if practically any of their claims are proven to be true.
Either the reality of LENR or UAP could plausibly redirect $billions if not $trillions in R&D investment in energy, materials, space systems, weapons, and who knows what else.
Assuming the basic principles of LENR can be understood, reproduced, and reasonably scaled up, this could lead to the development of decentralized energy generation at "point of use" rather than having to distribute power from centralized power stations. Imagine your home, phone, computer, appliances, car, all powered by batteries that never "run out," nor emit any harmful radiation. A world of clean, carbon-free energy for everyone.
As for UAP, taking for granted the claim that it represents non-human intelligence (NHI) technology would fundamentally disrupt the entire pursuit of global science. No longer would humans be "the smartest beings on the planet." We would have real, physical examples of technology that was 100's, 1000's, perhaps even millions of years advanced from our own. There would be little practical reason for scientists to study anything else until we "caught up" to whatever we could learn from the NHI tech.
Who knows, perhaps whatever it is that is powering UAP craft is the same phenomenon that produces LENR. We won't know until inquiry advances further in both fields.
Cracks in the Dam: A Story of Two Papers
In the past few years, two papers published in the journal Scientific Reports -- a high impact factor publication by Nature Publishing Group -- symbolize the increasing pressure that the empirical claims of LENR and UAP are bringing to bear against the orthodox dismissal of these fields.
These reports, written by serious scientists with extensive documentation, controls and proof points, demand attention and discussion by mainstream science.
LENR in 2024
In early 2024, Sci Rep published a bombshell report entitled "Water can trigger nuclear reaction to produce energy and isotope gases." This report, by a team of mostly Taiwanese researchers led by B.-J. Huang, reported the observation of anomalous gaseous isotopes, most notably Neon-22, from water that had been boiled under high pressure in a particular multiple-tube heat exchange setup.
The results are backed up with extensive controls and other data showing the probability of the effect. The authors wisely don't speculate much on an underlying mechanism, reflecting and acknowledging the lack of theoretical understanding of the fundamental process of LENR.
But the observation of an anomalous effect shouldn't be discounted just because a theory isn't immediately available to explain it. If this were the case, we would never have made progress in understanding quantum mechanics, high-temperature superconductivity, or any number of other fields where experimental reality outpaced established theory.
While not yet independently replicated, neither has the Huang 2024 work been retracted, refuted, or really publicly challenged in any significant fashion. The relative simplicity of the setup should be a clarion call for scientists around the world to attempt to replicate this result, but so far, there's no evidence anyone outside of the LENR bubble has even noticed.
UAP in 2025
The report entitled "Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) may be associated with nuclear testing and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena," published by Stephen Bruehl and Beatriz Villarroel, describes the observation of "transient" light signatures appearing on photographic plates taken of the night sky. These are bright lights that are observed to move with certain defined patterns and are not correlated with any known astronomical phenomena.
The real kicker of the study is that these observations were made prior to the launch of Sputnik, the first known man-made satellite. So we now have definitive evidence that something was flying around in orbit long before the 1st Satellite, or indeed the presence of any human-made object in space.
And not just one "something", but many things; roughly 300 observations over the course of the 8 year period studied between 1949 and 1957.
Beachheads
What these reports do collectively is "raise the bar" for skeptics of LENR and UAP. These can't just be dismissed as the ramblings of madmen, "pathological science", or other facile rhetorical brush-offs. If science and scientists want to dismiss these results, there needs to be a "put up or shut up" to either disprove the study results by showing some kind of data error, or (in the case of the LENR work) failing to replicate. That's the bar now.
These reports are now something of "beachhead outposts" on the beach of a hostile scientific establishment, but at the risk of mixing metaphors, they are both just the "tip of the iceberg" for their respective fields. This LENR paper is, depending on one's quality cutoff, one of perhaps 10's if not 100's of high-quality experimental reports. To be understood both LENR and UAP need to be viewed in the full context of claims that span multiple decades and a global research community.
"We're gonna have to science the shit out of this."
In summary: I'm not declaring either cold fusion (LENR) or UFO's (UAP) are, in fact, 100% real and reflect true aspects of nature. Neither have sufficient evidence to say that at present.
But what I do think is reasonable to say is that the evidence for both is compelling enough that large swaths of Academic Science need to get off their cushy swivel chairs and start to take this seriously. LENR has multiple high-quality claims, reasonably well-documented and likely sitting in your University's library right now, for you to test. Disprove it and publish, and your colleagues will love you. Prove it and you've started a new revolution in Physics. Either way, you win! All you have to do is try.
And like motorcycles, scientists need to "start seeing UAP's." I'm not suggesting every unknown smudge on a telescope is an alien, but at least create the space in your mind for the possibility. It shouldn't be an unacceptably laughable question to ask during (say) an astronomy seminar, after all sources of error and conventional explanations for a stubbornly anomalous set of data are ruled out, "hey what if this has something to do with UAP?"
We need scientists to take this seriously, even in order to aggressively question these results with the scientific rigor deserving of the subject. To quote Matt Damon's character in The Martian, "we need to science the shit out of this."
[Cover Image Source]