My name is David Hudson. I'm a third generation native Phoenician from an
old family in the Phoenix area. We are an old family. We are very conservative.
I come from an ultra-conservative right wing background.
For those of you who have heard of the John Birch Society, Barry
Goldwater, these ultra right- wing Rush Limbaugh conservatives; that's
the area that I come from. I'm not saying whether it is right or wrong
but that is my ( David Hudson’s) background.
David Hudson had no idea he would be doing this type of work.
" In 1975-76 I was very unhappy with the banking
system here in the United States. I was farming about 70 thousand acres
in the Phoenix area in the Yuma valley. I was a very large,
materialistic person. I was farming this amount of ground. I had a forty
man payroll every week. I had a four million line of credit with the
bank. I was driving Mercedes Benz's. I had a 15,000 square foot home."
David Hudson referred to himself as "Mr. Material Man" during that period
David Hudson Discovery of Monoatomic Elements
In 1975 David Hudson was doing an analysis of natural products in the area
where he was farming. "You have to understand that in agriculture in the state
of Arizona we have a problem with sodium soil. This high sodium soil, whic
h looks like chocolate ice cream on the ground, is just
crunchy black. It crunches when you walk on it. Water will not penetrate
this soil. Water will not leach the sodium out of the ground. It's
called black alkali.
What we were doing was going to the copper mines in the state of
Arizona and buying 93% sulfuric acid. For those of you who don't know,
the battery acid in your car is 40-60% acid. This was 93% sulfuric acid;
very, very high concentration. We were bringing in truck and trailer
loads of this sulfuric acid to my farm and I was injecting thirty tons
to the acre into the soil.
We were putting six inch ribbons on the ground that would penetrate
about three or four inches into the ground. When you irrigate (nothing
will grow in Arizona unless you irrigate) the ground would actually
froth and foam due to the action of the sulfuric acid. What it did was
convert the black alkali to white alkali, which was water soluble. So
within a year and a half to two years you would have a field that could
actually grow crops.
In the work that I was doing with these soils, it is very important that
you have a lot of calcium in the soil in the form of calcium carbonate.
The calcium carbonate would act as a buffer for all the acid that was
being put on the soil. If you don't have enough calcium the acidity of
the soil goes down, you get a pH of 4-4.5 and it ties up all of your
trace nutrients. When you plant your cotton it will only get so tall
then it won't grow any more.
It's very important when you are putting all of these amendments on your
soil that you understand what is in your soil: how much iron is there,
how much calcium is there and so on.
In doing the analysis of these natural products we were coming across
materials that no one seemed to be able to tell us what they were. We
began to trace this material and we found that it seemed to come from a
specific geological feature. Whatever the problem with this material was
we felt that the area where it was in greatest abundance would be the
best place to study it.
David Hudson: The Chemistry of M-state Elements
We took the material into chemistry and we dissolved it and got a
solution that would be blood red. Yet when we precipitated this material
out chemically by using a reductant of powdered zinc the material would
come out as a black precipitant just like it was supposed to be if it
was a noble element. A noble element if you chemically bring it out of
the acid it won't re-dissolve in the acid.
So we precipitated this material out of the black and we took the
material and dried it. In the drying process we took a large porcelain
funnel called a Butiner funnel about this big it had a filter paper on
it. This material was about a quarter of an inch thick on top of the
filter paper. At that time I didn't have a drying furnace or a drying
oven so I just set it out in the Arizona sunshine which was about 115
degrees at 5% humidity so it really dried fast.
What happened was that after the material dried it exploded. It exploded
like no explosion I had ever seen in my life and I've worked with a lot
of explosive materials. There was no explosion and there was no
implosion. It was as if somebody had detonated about fifty thousand
flash bulbs all at one time just poof. All the material was gone, the
filter paper was gone and the funnel was cracked.
So I took a brand new pencil that had never been sharpened and stood it
on end next to the funnel and started drying another sample. When the
material detonated it burned the pencil about 30% in two but did not
knock the pencil over and all the sample was gone. So this was not an
explosion and was not an implosion. It was like a tremendous release of
light.
It was like you set that pencil beside a fire place and after about 20
minutes you saw it was smoking on one side and burning in two. That's
what the pencil looked like immediately after the flash. Now this just
had me baffled. What ever this stuff is it's wild. We found that if we
dried it out of the sunlight it didn't explode but if we dried it in the
sunlight it exploded.
So then we took some of the powder that was dried out of the sunlight
and we decided we were going to put it in what is called a crucible
reduction. A crucible reduction involves taking a crucible (which is
like a big drinking glass made out of porcelain) and you mix your powder
with lead and all this flux and all and you heat it till the lead melts.
What happens is the metals that are heavier than lead stay in the lead
and all of those that are lighter float out. This is the basic premise
of your fire assays which have been done for hundreds of years.
Now supposedly gold and silver will stay in the lead and all your other
non heavy elements will come out of the lead. This is the tried and true
way of doing metals analysis. Well this material settled to the bottom
of the lead just like it was gold and silver. This material seemed to be
denser than lead. When we poured off the slag it would take everything
but the noble elements, then we poured off the lead and this material
came off as a constituency at the bottom of the molten lead. It was
separated from it. Yet when you take this material and put it on a bone
ash cupel the lead soaks into the cupel and it leaves your bead of gold
and silver. Well we did this and we got a bead that should have been
gold and silver.
We took this bead for analysis to all the commercial laboratories and
they said Dave there is nothing but gold and silver there. Except I
could take that bead and set it on a table and hit it with a hammer and
it shattered like glass. Now there is no known alloy of gold and silver
that is not soft. Gold and silver dissolve in each other perfectly and
they form solid solutions and they are both very soft elements and so
any alloy of gold and silver if that's all that's there is going to be
soft and ductile. You can flatten it out and make a pancake out of it.
Yet this material shattered like glass. I said something's going on here
that we are not understanding. Something unusual is happening.
So what we did is we took these beads of gold and silver and separated
them chemically with the gold and silver out. What we had left is a
whole bunch of black stuff. When I took this black stuff to the
commercial laboratories they told me that it was iron, silica and
aluminum. I said this can't be iron, silica and aluminum. First of all
you can't dissolve it in any acids or any bases once it is totally dry.
It doesn't dissolve in fuming sulfuric acid, it doesn't dissolve in
sulfuric nitric acid, it doesn't dissolve in hydrochloric nitric acid.
Even this dissolves gold yet it won't dissolve this black stuff. I
thought this material is really strange. It just has to have an
explanation. No one could tell me what it was.
Basically I went to Cornell University. I said we are just going to have
to throw some money at this problem. So I went and hired a Ph.D. at
Cornell who considered himself an expert on precious elements. I
suspected we were dealing with precious elements. I said I want to know
what this is. I paid him to come out to Arizona. He looked at the
problem. He said "we have a machine back at Cornell that can analyze
down to parts per billion". He said "you let me take this material back
to Cornell and I'll tell you exactly what you have, exactly". Unless it
is chlorine, bromine or one of the lighter elements, then we can't
analyze it. But if it is anything above iron we will find it. When he
got back there he told me it was iron silica aluminum.
I said "look doctor do you have a chemistry laboratory around here we
could borrow?" He said "yes." I said "let's go to the chemistry
laboratory." We worked in the chemistry laboratory all the rest of that
day and we were able to remove all the silica, all the iron and all the
aluminum. We still had 98% of the sample and that was pure nothing. I
said "look I can hold this in my hand, I can weigh it, I can performs
chemistries with it". "I said that is something". "I know that is
something." "It is not nothing."
He said "the absorption or emissions spectrum does not agree with
anything we have programmed into our instrument." I said "well that is
something and I'm going to find out what." And he said "Mr. Hudson why
don't you give us a $35 0,000 dollar grant and we'll put graduate
students to looking into it." Well I had already paid this man about
$22,000 because he claimed he could analyze anything and he hadn't. He
didn't offer to pay any of my money back. I said "sir, I don't know what
you pay the people around here but we pay minimum wage on the farm where
I work and I can get a lot more out of $350,000 than you can." "So I'm
going to go back and do the work myself."
I came back to Phoenix totally disillusioned with academia. I was not
impressed with the Ph.D's. I was not impressed with the people I had
paid money to. I found out that it is just a big system where they
worked the graduate students to generate paper but they never say
anything but the government pays them for every paper they write so they
get their money based on the number of papers they turned out. They all
say the same thing they just re-word it and turn out another paper. It
really is disillusioning when you find out what academia is doing right
now.
Fortunately I asked around the Phoenix area and I found out about a man
who was a spectroscopist. He had been trained in West Germany at the
institute for spectroscopy. He had been the senior technician for Lab
Test company in Los Angeles which builds spectroscopic equipment. He's
the man who blue printed them, designed them, constructed them then took
them to the field and then made them work. I said here's a good man.
This is not just a technician. Here is a man who knows how the machine
works.
I went to him with a Soviet book that the fire assay man had given me.
It was called The Analytical Chemistry of the Platinum Group Elements by
Ginsberg. It was published by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In this
book, according to the Soviets, you had to do a 300 second burn on these
elements to read them.
Now for those of you who have never done spectroscopy it involves taking
a carbon electrode that is cupped at the top. You put the powder on that
electrode and you bring the other electrode down above it and you strike
an arc. In about fifteen seconds the carbon at this high temperature
burns away and the electrode's gone and your sample's gone. So all the
laboratories in this country are doing fifteen second burns and giving
you the results. According to the Soviet Academy of Sciences the boiling
temperature of water is to the boiling temperature of iron just like the
boiling temperature of iron is to the boiling temperature of these
elements.
As you know from driving a car as long as there is water in the motor of
your car the temperature of that car engine will never hotter than the
boiling temperature of water until all the water is gone. If you just
heated the water on the stove in a pan you know that pan never gets
hotter than the boiling temperature of the water till all the water is
gone. Once all the water is gone the temperature skyrockets really fast.
As long as there is iron there the temperature of the sample can never
get hotter than the boiling temperature of the iron until all of the
iron is gone so you can then heat this stuff. Now this is hard to fathom
how something with as high a boiling temperature as iron could be just
like water to these elements but it is. So literally we had to design
and build an excitation chamber where argon gas could be put around
this electrode so than no oxygen or air could get in to the carbon electrode
and we could burn it not for fifteen seconds but for three hundred seconds.
According to the Soviet Academy of Sciences this is the length of time we have to burn the sample.
We set up, we got the (PK blenders?), we got the standards, we modified
the machine, we did all the analysis for results, we did all the
spectral lines on this three and a half meter instrument. That's the
spec for how big the prism is which opens up the line spectrum. For
those of you who don't know, most universities have a one point five
meter instrument. This is a three and a half meter instrument. A huge
machine. It took up the whole garage area. It was about thirty feet long
and about eight or nine feet high.
Anyway when we ran this material during the first fifteen seconds we got
iron, silica, aluminum, little traces of calcium, sodium maybe a little
titanium now and then and then it goes quiet and nothing reads. So at
the end of fifteen seconds you are getting nothing. Twenty seconds,
twenty five seconds, thirty seconds, thirty five seconds, forty seconds
still got nothing. Forty five seconds, fifty seconds, fifty five
seconds, sixty seconds, sixty five seconds but if you look in through
the colored glass sitting there on the carbon electrode is this little
ball of white material. There's still something in there.
At seventy seconds, exactly when the Soviet Academy of Science said it
would read, palladium begins to read. And after the palladium platinum
begins to read. And after the platinum I think it was rhodium begins to
read. After rhodium ruthenium begins to read. After ruthenium then
iridium begins to read and after the iridium osmium begins to read.
Now if you're like me I didn't know what these elements were. I had
heard of platinum, platinum jewelry, but what are these other elements.
Well there are six platinum group elements in the periodic table not
just platinum. They didn't find out about them at the same time so they
have been added one at a time. They are all elements just like iron,
cobalt and nickel are three different elements ruthenium, rhodium and
palladium are light platinums and osmium, iridium and platinum are the
heavy platinums.
Well we came to find out that rhodium was selling for about three
thousand dollars per ounce. Gold sells for about four hundred dollars an
ounce. Iridium sells for about eight hundred dollars an ounce and
ruthenium sells for one hundred and fifty dollars an ounce.
Then you say gee these are important materials aren't they. They are
important materials because in the world the best known deposit is now
being mined in South Africa. In this deposit you have to go a half mile
into the ground and mine an 18 inch seam of this stuff. When you bring
it out it contains one third of one ounce per ton of all the precious
elements.
Our analysis, which we ran for two and a half years and we checked over
and over; we checked every spectral line, we checked every potential on
interference, we checked every aspect of this. We created apples and
apples, oranges and oranges, bananas and bananas. We wanted exact
matches.
When we were finished the man was able to do quantitative analysis and
he said "Dave, you have six to eight ounces per ton of palladium, twelve
to thirteen ounces per ton of platinum, one hundred fifty ounces per ton
of osmium, two hundred fifty ounces per ton of ruthenium, six hundred
ounces per ton of iridium, and eight hundred ounces per ton of rhodium.
Or a total of about 2400 ounces per ton when the best known deposit in
the world is one third of one ounce per ton.
As you can see this work wasn't an indicator that these elements were
there; these elements were there and they were there in boucoups
amounts. They were saying hey stupid man pay attention we are trying to
show you something.
If they had been there in little amounts I probably would have contended
with this. But they were there in such huge amounts I said golly, how
can they be there in these quantities and no one knew it. Now you keep
in mind, it wasn't one spectral analysis it was two and a half years of
spectral analysis running this material every day. And the man actually
sent me away when they read because he couldn't believe it either. And
he worked on it another two months before he called me up and apologized
to me and he said "Dave you are right." That is how skeptical he was
about it. He couldn't apologize to me. He is a German researcher with
German pride so he had his wife call and apologize to me.
He was so impressed that he went back to Germany to the Institute of
Spectroscopy. He was actually written up in the spectroscopic j
