Thomas E. Bearden

Thomas E. Bearden is a retired United States Army lieutenant colonel who styled himself a nuclear engineer and weapons analyst. He is best known not for UFO sightings but for a body of 1980s writing that linked Soviet research into psychic phenomena and exotic electromagnetic fields to a range of unexplained events. His work is rarely cited in mainstream ufology, but it sits at an important intersection: Cold War fears of Soviet mind-control weapons, the rise of free-energy and 'over-unity' enthusiasm, and the speculative UFO-as-weapon theories that circulated in the same period.

Background and career

Bearden says he holds an MS in nuclear engineering from Georgia Tech and spent decades in air defense, technical intelligence, and related fields. He later worked as a senior scientist at Colsa Corp. and ran CTEC, Inc., a private research firm oriented toward 'free energy devices' and electromagnetic effects on biology. He also served as president of the Association of Distinguished American Scientists (ADAS). Skeptoid reports that he often wrote under a Ph.D. obtained from an unaccredited 'life experience' diploma mill, a credential problem that critics have repeatedly raised. He lived in Huntsville, Alabama in later years.

His output is prolific: Excalibur Briefing (1980), FER-DE-LANCE (1986), and AIDS: Biological Warfare (1988) are among the titles cited in biographical profiles. Early public appearances included a January 1977 talk at the Penn State 'Mind Over Matter' conference, and a 1978 article, 'Soviet Psychotronic Weapons,' in the journal Specula.

Soviet superweapons and psychotronics

Bearden's central theme was that the Soviet Union had built, or was building, weapons based on controlling the mind and on 'scalar' electromagnetic effects he associated with Nikola Tesla. In a 1984 paper, 'Star Wars Now!', he argued that Soviet researchers were weaponizing electromagnetic interferometry and related phenomena. A copy of that paper, which credits collaborators Harold Faretto, Jack Dea, and John Bedini, is now in the CIA's reading-room releases, as a declassified CIA document shows. The agency was itself examining Soviet 'superweapon' claims within its psychic research program during this period.

The Anomaly Archives profile of Bearden attributes to him a broader set of Soviet-blamed events: cattle mutilations, UFO abductions, Legionnaires' disease, and the sinking of the USS Thresher. It also records his talk of a collective unconscious he called 'ZARG.' These claims are his own, and no primary evidence supporting them has been produced. The CIA release shows that his paper circulated in government channels; it does not show that its contents were accurate.

Bearden's name is also tied to the ESP-UFO storyline in Ronald McRae's Mind Wars (1984), which said he had been contracted by the Pentagon after retirement to study the 'photonic barrier modulator,' the 'hyperspatial nuclear howitzer,' and a link between ESP and UFOs. The Anomaly Archives notes that McRae later admitted fabricating the ESP-UFO element, though it considers much of the rest verifiable. That distinction matters: the Pentagon-commission claim should be treated as unsubstantiated.

Scientific assessment

Mainstream physicists reject Bearden's scalar-electromagnetic science. Skeptoid, which treats him as the leading public proponent of scalar field theory, calls his science 'largely fantasy based' and notes that the free-energy and over-unity devices he promoted have never shown over-unity performance under rigorous testing. Bearden is credited with linking scalar weapons to Chernobyl, the loss of the space shuttle Challenger, TWA Flight 800, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina. None of these attributions has evidentiary support. Skeptoid's Brian Dunning also describes Bearden as sincere, motivated by a hope that scalar technology will benefit humanity, but says his conspiracy beliefs clouded his judgment. A 'Mind Wars' era comparison with the CIA's own psychic research is instructive: both sides of the Cold War took speculative psychic-weapon claims seriously enough to investigate, and neither produced a validated weapon.

Why he matters

Bearden is a useful case study for how Cold War anxieties about hidden Soviet technology migrated into ufology and free-energy culture. His Soviet-psychotronic framing offered a ready explanation for mysterious events, one that later UFO writers could use without endorsing his physics. For researchers, his work is best read as evidence of how persuasive a 'secret weapon' narrative could be, rather than as a source for claims about UFOs themselves. Credibility is fringe: the science is rejected, the Soviet attributions are unverified, and the most sensational claims about government-funded UFO-ESP research trace to a single author whose account has since been disputed.