"Welcome to the Future" is a long magazine profile of David Hamel published by Maisonneuve on September 16, 2004, with photographs credited to Carlos and Jason Sanchez. It is a piece of reportage from Hamel's home, not a technical report: the writer records what Hamel says happened to him, describes the household and the people drawn to it, and interviews two long-standing supporters. Its value for this dossier is twofold. It is one of the retellings of Hamel's life and abduction account that the archived Hamel dossier includes, and it records, as of 2004, one supporter who knew of no successful build among the attempts he was aware of and another whose own model was still unfinished.
What Hamel says happened
The profile places the founding event in 1975, in Maple Ridge, British Columbia. Hamel's account, as the magazine tells it, is that two specks of static on his television grew into beings who called themselves "A" and Arkan, from a planet named Kladen, and that he was taken aboard their craft in what he treats as an out-of-body experience. A third figure, an android called On, is said to have explained the propulsion. Hamel reports just one further direct encounter, three months afterwards, when the visitors are said to have come back by car; he says they ignored him and spent three hours communicating with his wife Nora.
Everything about the technology in the article descends from that account. The magazine offers no independent or corroborating witness to either visit. The only other person involved is Hamel's wife Nora, whose account the article does not report directly.
How the motor is said to work
The article gives no dimensions, drawings, field strengths or power figures, so the mechanism exists here only as a verbal sketch that Hamel attributes to On. In that sketch the craft floats in an anti-gravity bubble kept up by charged air circulating between magnetic rings, runs on nothing but the push and pull of its own magnets, and is said to escape gravity once the rings are repositioned to strengthen the swirl. This is the idea developed elsewhere in the dossier as the gravitomagnetic drive claim, with the repelling-magnet arrangement described under Rejection Magnets.
The article also reports the instructions Hamel says came with the ride: to develop the technology in order to rescue humanity from "the Grid", his name for the world's road-and-electrical network, and to build a survival vessel on the model of Noah's Ark.
What the profile documents at Gilmour
The survival vessel, which Hamel calls his Ark of the Covenant, appears in the profile only as plans displayed on a wall inside the house; he hopes to launch it from a granite slab near James Bay. His workshop is a shed in the backyard that he put up himself. The property is in Gilmour, Ontario, where the Hamels have lived since leaving British Columbia in 1980.
Several striking claims are relayed without corroboration: that Hamel launched six forty-five-gallon oil drums using motor prototypes built soon after 1975, that NASA visited as a result, and that his testing still causes local power outages. The article states these in its own voice but cites no record, date or named official for any of them. The same is true of the patent story: Hamel says an application on magnetically aligning atoms within a lattice vanished from the Canadian Patent Office in Gatineau, Quebec, cannot recall when he filed it, and says police removed him after he slammed magnets on the counter. His view of outside scrutiny is captured in one line: "The scientists come here, but they can't accept the magnetic."
No flight, hover or running motor is witnessed or described by the writer. The Hamel Flying Saucer appears here as blueprints, a shed and a story.
What the supporters report
The most checkable material comes from two builders.
Dan LaRochelle, of Wethersfield, California, is presented as a core member of the Hameltech Yahoo group, founded in 2000 and by then holding over six hundred members. He found Hamel through the KeelyNet site in 1997 and, by the article's reckoning, first visited him seven years before it was written. He wrote a booklet, "The Gods Have Returned", distributed at the Tesla Conference in Colorado Springs and the Exotic Research Conference in Phoenix, and concedes it contains many factual errors. More important, he says that even the schematics he copied correctly do not produce working machines, and that he knows of as many as forty people who attempted an oil-drum device from Hamel's design, none successfully. One friend, he says, spent $10,000 and a month at Gilmour.
Steve Hiscock, forty-four, of Belleville, Ontario, is described as a magnet aficionado; the article gives him no scientific credentials. After twelve years of working with Hamel he had spent between $4,000 and $5,000 on an eight-inch model that was still unfinished, and estimated another $5,000 to $7,000 for a two-foot version, which he regards as the smallest size at which the motor could function. He voices concern about Hamel's growing ego, yet still believes the idea has promise. His prescription is the article's clearest statement of what is missing: "we need a mathematical model based on a working device, so people can understand and reproduce the idea."
Hiscock also points to a separate inventor, Mike Brady of Johannesburg, whose company Perendev Power was said to have licensed a twenty-kilowatt fuel-less magnetic generator to German and Australian distributors, with a four-megawatt model on paper. The magazine relays this as Perendev's claim and adds that, absent peer-reviewed publication, such devices stay on the fringe. It is not evidence about Hamel's design.
The wartime epilogue
A closing section gives Hamel's war story: enlistment in 1939 at fifteen, Dieppe, a spinal bullet wound, captivity at Dresden from 1944, and escape during the firebombing of February 13, 1945, slung beneath a train. He says a Russian decoration he received was later stolen. He also says he saw ships join in formation as the corners of a pyramid with, at its apex, what he now takes to be a flying saucer. These are his recollections; the article supplies no service records.
What the profile does and does not establish
The piece is reliable as a record of what Hamel and two associates were saying in 2004, and its tone is sympathetic: the writer treats Hamel as part artist, part engineer, and frames his project as protest against centralised energy. It is frank that the story should alarm sceptics.
It establishes no measurement of any kind. There is no observed lift, no test witnessed by the writer, no documentation for the NASA visit, the drum launches, the outages or the patent filing. The firmest facts it contains about the hardware are negative ones, supplied by believers: as many as forty failed builds, an unfinished model after twelve years, and no mathematical description. The claims-versus-evidence comparison weighs these against the later builder reports.
Source notes & attribution
- https://maisonneuve.org/article/welcome-future