On March 23, 1989, Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons held a press conference at the University of Utah, and asserted that during electrolysis (electrical splitting) of heavy water they had gained more energy than they had put into the experiment. Both chemists hinted at a nuclear process. Within hours, reports about the "solution of the energy problem" spread around the earth.
But since the Fleischmann/Pons experiments are complex, renowned laboratories failed to reproduce the so-called Fleischmann/Pons Effect in hasty experiments. Most science journals did not report positive reproductions of the effect. The scientific community concluded in 1989 and still believes that Cold Fusion was two lone chemists' dream.
A report requested by the Department of Energy (DoE) concluded in November 1989, "that the present evidence for the discovery of a new nuclear process termed cold fusion is not persuasive" and recommended "against any special funding for the investigation of phenomena attributed to cold fusion." However, the conclusions and recommendations did not account for the fact that, besides the University of Utah, three other universities had reproduced the Fleischmann/Pons Effect and published their results. Additionally, the board knew of eleven other laboratories that had potentially, but not certainly, reproduced the effect.
The Naval Weapons Center of the US Navy should have been named among those groups. Dr. Melvin Miles, the scientist conducting the experiments, confirmed to Steven Krivit of the New Energy Times in late 2003 that he had sent a letter to each member of the advisory board stating that by then his laboratory had observed a Cold Fusion process. "Not a single member of the committee responded to my letter", he recalls. In the Weapon Center's final report of September 1996, Miles reports the measurement of excess heat in 28 out of 94 experiments and the production of Helium-4 as evidence for a real nuclear effect.