The Coast to Coast Am late night radio talk show, hosted nowadays by George Noory, often lends a sympathetic ear to those with a bizarre tale to tell or folks making outlandish claims. After being deluged with calls and emails to the show asking about assertions made of increasing gas mileage using kits such as those sold by Water4gas, (they claim to break water down into HHO and burn it along with your gasoline) George decided to try a "real life" experiment to see if it actually worked. With his producer's car.

It took some time for the results to come in but last night, after an update on the latest in alien implants, producer Tom Danheiser came on the air to let the audience of millions hear the result. Before installing the device under the hood of his Mustang, Danheiser calculated his gas mileage to be 17.99 mpg. After driving around with the device for a week his mileage went down to 16.56 mpg. To add insult to HHO hoax injury, he had to have his car serviced. Twice. The bottom line can be summed up with a pair of truisms; there is no free lunch and the laws of physics just aren't made to be broken.

[Source: Coast to Coast AM]

Thanks to our reader Mike, we have an update to share about the troubled history of Michael Papp electric vehicle company. Regular readers will remember that Papp is the man behind Spark EV, a company that has been accused more than once of shady dealings. It looks like the New Jersey law officials agree, and have decided to step in to put a stop to Papp's scam.

According to the Express Times, Papp was arrested Friday after failing to deliver 14 electric vehicles to Electric Cars of Houston (which had ordered 10) and Electric Transportation of Arkansas (four). Papp is charged with bilking them for almost $100,000, according to court records. The EVs were paid for in January and February, and Papp told the payers the vehicles would be delivered March 14. They weren't. After trying to track down what happened, the companies asked for a refund. Papp answered that he was filing for bankruptcy, so no go. Apparently, Papp is in Northampton County Prison and being held on $20,000 bail. We'll have more on this as things move forward, I can guarantee you that.

[Source: The Express Times]

Remember a while back when a company tried and failed to show off their "free energy" machine? For the purposes of this post, we'll simply refer to that event as the "Stoern debacle." That company claims that their machine is capable of giving off more energy than it takes to run it. In fact, 285 times more energy! Yeah, but it turns out that the last time that they tried to show off their wares, the machine failed to work.

Now, there is another company making claims of free energy. Simply put, nobody is really expecting this machine to work either. The company is called EcoWatts, and they claim that their machine gives off hot water containing twice the energy that it took to produce the hot water. Call us skeptical. Click here for more.

Related:

• Whoops. Steorn perpetual motion machine not ready for prime time

[Source: Daily Mail via Engadget]