...While working with his son sometime around 1980, Shoulders had replicated a phenomenon observed by William Bostick, an atomic physicist at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Shoulders would eventually dub his findings exotic vacuum objects, or EVOs. He described an EVO as a cluster of electrons that channels energy (though the source of that energy was uncertain). Shoulders believed he had used the electrons’ energy to melt microscopic holes in various materials. Church had offered their research to dozens of companies and government agencies, including the Office of the Vice President, but no one was interested.

EVOs break the laws of physics as they are currently understood. Electrons shouldn’t be able to cluster together, as Shoulders claimed, because an electron’s negative charge will repel other electrons. Anyone trying to hold together the north poles of two magnets will get a sense of the problem. And so when Shoulders presented his findings to established scientists, such as Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate physicist at Caltech, he was dismissed outright.

Shoulders’s credibility was not helped by his maverick reputation, his lack of formal education, or the company he kept. Puthoff, his closest friend at SRI, was a former Scientologist who was still convinced that Uri Geller had psychic powers. Shoulders had also become close to John Hutchison, who promotes himself as a lovemaking guru and the inventor of levitation and life-extending devices. These relationships, and many others with more conventional scientists, were the result of Shoulders’s openness to unusual ideas. No matter how outlandish, Shoulders never rejected a new theory before carefully thinking it over and, if appropriate, testing it. He wished others would extend him the same courtesy.

But was there any worthwhile science in Shoulders’s EVO research? After dismissing the inventor’s findings, Feynman became aware of the discovery of similar clusters of charged particles made at the National Bureau of Standards and the work of a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who had noticed the same thing 10 years earlier but had not conducted further research. On January 31, 1986, Feynman mailed an apology letter to Shoulders: “When you were in my office I could not see how 1010 or 1011 electrons could be kept as a ball in a vacuum without ions. . . . I must apologize for it has come to my attention that it is indeed possible.” Feynman confirmed that the electron clusters Shoulders and his son witnessed were feasible, a small victory in the face of mass rejection. But the existence of a physical phenomenon is a far cry from an alternative energy source. Nonetheless, Shoulders declared in his self-published book, EV: A Tale of Discovery, “I believe this gateway will open into one of the greatest industries yet known.” Despite years of filing patents and pitching the research to various companies and government agencies, Shoulders never found a taker.

In following the ideas of “frontier science” Shoulders made a life of taking the harder path. The difficulties he would create for himself, whether based on principle or temperament, are perhaps best exemplified by his decision to turn down a doctoral degree from MIT while he was working there in the 1950s, a formality that could have boosted his credibility with his EVO work. Steve remembers, “[His boss Arthur] von Hippel said, ‘I will get you a PhD; it’s assured.’ [Shoulders] said, ‘It’s not a problem; I’m not interested. I’ll bypass, thank you,’ and continued his work and then left. That’s typical. He just wasn’t interested in following convention.”...