Hooboy!, the ZPE topics are multiplying around here like little mice.
I knew Haisch. I met with Goldes. Others in our working-group knew Hutchison. And all the rest of them.
Quick summary:
Haisch is an honest scientist who plays by the rules. His theories are reasonable enough, and have met with the usual mix of scepticism & cautious acceptance among his peers. Haisch has never claimed to have a device, or support any claims of anyone else for having a device. He was always interested in theory, and the energy implications were secondary.
Most ZPE inventors are honestly motivated but are inexperienced in relevant fields and therefore make measurement errors that seem to indicate they have something when they don't. There are of course a few scammers out there. I'm not going to comment on the subject of which inventors and companies are honest and which aren't: investor beware, and use your head, and have independent engineers test any claims of working devices.
We did not find a single example of a device that produced a consistent measurable output that could be attributed to ZPE.
If anyone thinks they have one, email me via private message and I'll get the engineering team back together to conduct objective tests. If it passes, we'll endorse. We also play by the rules and we keep our word.
I don't think a viable application is likely any time soon. In the meantime, we have plenty of ambient energy sources we can tap, e.g. wind and sunlight, and plenty of modern physics we can use, e.g. nuclear fission reactors. We ought to be busting our butts to put all of those into full deployment, and then if we get a viable fusion reactor or a viable ZPE device a few decades from now, good for us we've earned it.
As for UFOs: Why is this that people always tend to correlate observations about unknowns? We observe legitimate unknowns in the sky (and by this I do not mean "alien spacecraft," I merely mean "unknowns"), and we discover theories that hint at vast energy supplies, and then we make the immediate psychological inference that these are necessarily related. Nope, sorry, there's no empirical or logical basis to infer a relationship, and prematurely doing so doesn't get us anywhere.
See also my comments at:
http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic9162-0-asc-30.html