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dirt roads. A quarter-mile from home, the car lights shorted out and the car slid off the road. As it flipped over, the door flew open and the car came down and crushed the young mother. Tom’s father lifted the car off, picked her body up, and ran home screaming and crying. Two-year old Tom woke up to hear the pandemonium as his father burst in the door into lamplight with Mother in his arms. “I went into profound shock without anyone knowing it and afterwards was haunted by just recalling seeing red blood and horror as a toddler.”
Years later, Tom Bearden found a way to come to terms with that trauma and loss of his mother. We’ll get to that. After Tom’s father remarried, work in the timber business still took him away. As the smallest son, Tom bore the brunt of stepmother cruelty. “When I was almost four, my oldest brother James at ten years old took down the deer gun from the wall and threw down on her and made her pull me back out of the well where she had lowered me down into the water to drown me.” His father took the boys back to their grandmother and his sister Lou Audrey, then sent money when he could. Young Tom sawed wood, gar- dened and raised chickens and a hog. When his brothers went back to their father and stepmother in Mississippi, Tom alone gathered food for Grand- mother and Auntie. He roamed the swamps nearby, fishing or shooting squirrels for food.
On one lake, alligators raised their young. The fishing was best there, so Tom fished those dangerous waters at age 12. Another hazard was escaped im- ported boars who interbred with the smaller native wild pigs; you could meet a 500-pound wild boar in the woods. Poisonous snakes slithered around the homestead— copperhead moccasins, cotton-mouth moc- casins and a few rattlers. Tom had to kill countless chicken snakes to protect the family’s eggs and small chicks.
He also learned how energy supplies af- fect basic needs. With an axe and a bucksaw he cut wood for the family’s fireplace, heater and wood-burning kitchen stove. There was no running water, only a well. They had no electricity and lit the home with kerosene lamps.
I can see how harsh circumstances pro- duced the “sheer grit” needed for his mis- sion. On the other hand, his grandmother and aunt treated the boys tenderly despite the poverty, so I assume that’s what nurtured his own kind heart. The women taught some reading and writing before he entered Che- niere’s one-room elementary school; there he read everything available. Meanwhile his father’s second marriage ended in divorce.
58 ATLANTIS RISING • Number 85
His father left it with only a truck for hauling pulpwood. Tom continued cleaning yards and planting gardens for the few em- ployed neighbors.
Tom’s life took another turn when he bought his first guitar for $2.50. In high school, he and two friends formed a trio, the Rhythm Harmoneers, and were hired by groups such as the Kiwanis Club for special events.
Although resourceful, teenage Tom Bearden never expected to be able to afford college, so in his last two years in high school he earned a certificate as aircraft en- gine mechanic. Unexpectedly, in his senior year he won a four-year Pepsi Cola college scholarship. Now he could stay with Grand- mother, ride buses to a junior college for at least two years, and still help the family. The Rhythm Harmoneers continued,
Bearden (left) and The Rythym Harmoneers (circa. 1951)
Bearden transformed his grandmother into a kindly grandfather consoling the grieving two-year-old. It reconciled why his mother had gone away.
Since I’m running out of word-space, we’ll have to fast-forward the story of Tom Bearden’s life so far, racing past the Army ca- reer which immersed him in fields such as computers, guided missiles, classified tech- nical information, and Russian superwea- pons; his advanced education in nuclear en- gineering at Georgia Tech; his years as an aerospace engineer; his
books...After learning intelligence-collection and analysis methods in the military, he later applied them to in- vestigating free-energy-from-the-vacuum systems.
Pausing to look back, I’m wondering— were the gators, boars and snakes a prepara- tion for hazards faced as an adult and sur- viving attempts on his life? Bearden rarely talks about those but has de- scribed one incident when quick thinking and fast action saved him and his friend from a directed-energy attack in an airport. If they had not immedi- ately escaped through an emergency exit door, Bearden figures, the weapon he glimpsed under a stranger’s suit jacket and the resulting disruptive beam they bodily experienced would have induced heart attacks within sec- onds.
playing on the Louisiana Hayride in Shreve- port, famed in country music and broadcast worldwide in its heyday. Tom also played and sang with other bands in night clubs and honky tonks—for desperately-needed money. He got a break when the Junior Col- lege he’d attended changed to a four-year college. Again he could help the family and continue his schooling. He joined ROTC, so when he graduated in 1953 he received a commission as Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army.
His call to active duty was postponed a year. He had married, so he got a day job at a steel company while his band played at night. Bearden also played rhythm guitar on record sessions for country music’s big names. The stars recorded some of Bearden’s tunes. On his own, he later had a recording contract and a few records. While on the Louisiana Hayride in the early 1950s, he fi- nally expressed his deep feelings about his mother and healed some of the trauma by writing the recitation “Mother Went A’ Walkin’,” which Jim Reeves recorded. In it
Unfortunately the product of weapons research of another type at- tacked him so stealthily that he couldn’t escape damage. When he was stationed in Canada while in the mili- tary he was exposed to a mycoplasma, modified for biological warfare, that eventually hardened his hemoglobin and reduced his ability to take in ox- ygen. Mycoplasma resurgence caused his heart attack in 2001. His family doctor then tested for it and prescribed antibiotics. The mycoplasma had al- ready damaged Bearden’s throat, so he can no longer sing as he used to, but he can still enjoy listening to classic country and western songs. “One has to accept one’s limi- tations and go on anyway, as best one can,” he says cheerfully.
Bearden still reads physics and science journals, but his main concern is caring for his beloved wife Doris who, after operations, stroke, and heart failures is the more seri- ously disabled. He considers himself lucky that she is slowly recovering.
I imagine there’ll be a private birthday party in their home with Doris and perhaps long-time friends such as Kenneth D. Moore who is also a retired Army Lt. Colonel and one of five co-inventors of the Motionless Electromagnetic Generator. Moore said re- cently that it will generate usable power without any moving parts when fully devel- oped and tested. “With the MEG and other devices currently under development by other inventors and with Tom’s detailed ex- planations of how and why such systems can succeed, we feel certain that a viable solution to the energy crisis is at hand!”
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