Dr. Thomas F. Valone

Background and credentials

Thomas F. Valone is an American engineering physicist, former patent examiner and the founder of the Integrity Research Institute (IRI), a small Maryland-based nonprofit devoted to what he calls "future energy" technologies. In UFO circles he is known chiefly as the editor of Electrogravitics Systems: Reports on a New Propulsion Methodology, a compilation about the electrically driven "gravity control" experiments associated with T. Townsend Brown, and for later arguing that a related effect he calls electrokinetics could one day yield propellantless propulsion.

According to his Lifeboat Foundation biography, Valone holds B.S. degrees in physics and in electrical engineering and an M.A. in physics, all from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His doctorate is in general engineering from Kennedy-Western University, a distance-learning institution since renamed Warren National University. He is a licensed Professional Engineer in New York. The biography gives no birth date or birthplace, so this entry does not state one.

Career

His early career was in teaching and industry. From 1976 to 1981 he was a professor at Erie Community College in Buffalo, where he taught physics, electricity, electronics, digital logic and microprocessors. He also taught SUNY-contract microprocessor courses at a Chevrolet plant in Tonawanda, ran the engineering department at a firm called Integrity Electronics, and served as Director of Research and Development at Scott Aviation. There he worked on a gas-detection circuit and on a feasibility study for a zeolite oxygen tank for firefighters. The same biography credits him with several instruments, among them a powerline gaussmeter, an ELF spectrum analyzer and a geomagnetometer.

He then became a patent examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, working in the physics, measuring and testing class 324 as a GS-12, and in 1999 he was elected to the board of the PTO Society. The patent-office vantage matters to his later work: much of what he publishes is a survey of patents, declassified reports and inventors' claims that most engineers have never read.

Integrity Research Institute

Valone founded IRI in the Washington, D.C. area (Beltsville, Maryland) as an educational and research nonprofit. Its catalogue runs from zero-point energy and homopolar generators to bioelectromagnetic healing, and he edits its Future Energy newsletter. He also organized conferences on future energy in the late 1990s. His own account, repeated in later podcast interviews, is that these meetings, and a planned talk on cold fusion at one of them, provoked press controversy.

His publications, as listed by Lifeboat, include eight authored books: Zero Point Energy, The Fuel of the Future; Bioelectromagnetic Healing: A Rationale for its Use; Practical Conversion of Zero-Point Energy; The Homopolar Handbook; Modern Meditation: Science and Shortcuts; Bush-Cheney Energy Study; Electrogravitics Systems; and Electrogravitics II. He also edited Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature, a collection on Nikola Tesla's science of energy, and the proceedings of the first International Conference on Future Energy. The breadth is notable: a single imprint covers meditation, medical electrotherapy and exotic propulsion.

Electrogravitics and the UFO connection

The electrogravitics story begins with Thomas Townsend Brown, who in the 1920s observed that a high-voltage capacitor seemed to move toward its positive electrode, and who patented devices based on it in 1928 and afterwards. Brown and his collaborators (the effect is often called the Biefeld-Brown effect) argued that this was a coupling between electric fields and gravity. Mainstream physics has generally attributed the observed thrust to ionic wind, the momentum of ionized air molecules, an effect that vanishes in vacuum.

Valone's contribution was to gather the surviving paper trail. Electrogravitics Systems (first published in the 1990s; the later Electrogravitics II extended it) reprints and discusses 1950s aerospace-industry material, much of it from the period when companies in Britain and the United States were publicly flirting with the idea of "gravity control." Within the UFO community the compilation is cited as evidence that serious defense contractors once took antigravity seriously and that the work may have continued under classification. Writers such as journalist Nick Cook, author of The Hunt for Zero Point, and physicist Paul LaViolette drew on this literature when claiming that the B-2 bomber uses electrogravitic principles. That claim is not supported by public evidence.

Electrokinetics

In later years Valone shifted from the historical to the theoretical. In "Electrokinetics as a Propellantless Propulsion Source" (Physics Procedia 38, 2012, pp. 87–98) he proposed that a force arises not from gravity coupling but from a transient term in a source-based description of the electric field, building on the work of the physicist Oleg Jefimenko. As summarized in a January 2026 Alternative Science Network article by Tim Ventura, the force is directed along the current and exists only while the current is changing, so the faster the rate of change, the larger the force, which favors pulsed high-voltage inputs. Valone suggests "creative waveshaping" to prevent the falling part of a pulse from cancelling the useful part.

The same summary is careful with its hedging. The effect is described as unproven; results may depend heavily on waveform details; and Valone himself acknowledges that claims of unbalanced force raise an unresolved momentum-accounting problem, since a closed system is not supposed to push itself. The article does not address the ion-wind explanation at all. Proposed tests include varying rise time and using symmetric waveforms as null controls, which would at least make the idea falsifiable.

Reception and criticism

Reception has been split along familiar lines. Within alternative-propulsion circles he is a respected archivist; Tim Ventura's Alternative Propulsion Engineering Conference profiles him as a presenter. His books are available from specialist publishers, and he has appeared in mass media, including CNN's Lou Dobbs Moneyline on 25 July 2002 and the Discovery Channel's Strangest Stories on 2 March 2006.

Among mainstream physicists he has been criticized. Robert L. Park of the University of Maryland, in his weekly What's New column of 2 August 2002, called IRI "really Tom Valone, a former patent examiner who lost his job in the fallout from the Conference on Free Energy," said Valone had recruited LaViolette, who claims the B-2 uses antigravity, and labeled IRI's circle "fringe scientists." The column is polemical and Park does not cite documentation for the employment claim, so it should be read as one critic's characterization, not an established fact. Valone's own side of this episode is, as far as this entry's sources show, available only through his interviews. Lifeboat's biography says nothing about it, stating only that he was a former examiner.

A second criticism is structural: the Biefeld-Brown effect has a conventional explanation, and neither electrogravitics nor electrokinetics has produced an independently replicated, vacuum-tested demonstration of net thrust. A reader should therefore treat Valone's propulsion work as a hypothesis in search of decisive experiment, not as established engineering.

Legacy

Valone's lasting role is that of an organizer of a literature. Electrogravitics Systems gave UFO and fringe-propulsion writers a citable body of 1950s documents, and his work links the history of Brown's capacitors to modern "UAP propulsion" speculation. Whether any of it explains reported anomalous craft is unknown; no evidence connects his experiments to any specific sighting. His credibility is best described as contested: his credentials and publication record are documented, and he has had a peer-reviewed conference-proceedings paper, but his central physical claims remain outside mainstream acceptance.