James Paul Wight and Good News Productions

James Paul Wight and Good News Productions

This page gathers what the archive has of Jim Wight and adds to it as his papers come in. It is a start, not a biography.

Who he was

James Paul Wight, Jim to Stan, was the man behind the camera. He filmed Meyer's laboratory and demonstrations from the mid-1980s under the name Good News Productions, including a 45-minute video of the lab, the spring 1986 visit of the Canadian investor John Gilvesey, and the 1988 Deer Creek demonstration. He invested in the cell and promoted it on the West Coast from Santa Barbara, and he is probably the "West Coast distributor for Stanley Meyer" Jim Miller remembered in 2019, the one with the idea of an Indy 500 pace car. Online, years later, he posted as "meyerandme". He is in The People Who Knew Stan.

In October 2014 a commenter signing "JW" under Victor Thorn's article said he had been in Meyer's lab in 1989, was a close friend until his death, and had chased down Gary Johnson's paper on explosions in water around 1993. It is very probably Wight, which would put him alive and still defending Meyer in 2014; the archive has found no later trace of him, and no obituary.

The Independent's 1991 profile adds his start: he had run an appliance repair business, and it was in 1978, still living in Colorado, that a Paul Harvey broadcast about students running a car on hydrogen from water got him hooked. He was not a scientist and did not claim to be.

What the archive holds

• "The Water Fuel Cell Will Win At Indy!", an unsigned classified in the Santa Barbara News-Press, 31 January 1988.
• The Wight Stuff, his letter to the Santa Barbara Independent, 22 March 1990.
• Jim Wight: Driving on Water, the Independent's profile of him, 16 May 1991, new in 2026.
• Good News 9, 1989, two and a half minutes at the bench with Stan, from the master GlobalKast publishes; the Good News tapes are his.

His papers, found in 2026

A stash of Wight's Good News Productions material came to light in September 2026: documents, press clippings, and videos still to come. The first photographs show two binders, one labelled "Magazine articles, Stanley Meyer" and one "Family documents and other documents". What has been read so far:

• The Independent's profile of Wight, above.
• Four Griffin papers: the June 1996 seminar paper, "A Paradigm Shift for Energy Technology", "Water as Fuel: Update", and a printed reprint of the 1993 Warsash paper from the symposium proceedings, which the archive had only in draft.
• From the magazine binder: The Electrical Experimenter of June 1917 on a Detroit water car, a magazine visit to a dealership seminar at Deer Creek from about 1991, and Victor Thorn's "The Water-Fueled Car".
• The 1991–92 edition of Who's Who of American Inventors (Hooper Group Publishing, Baton Rouge; ISBN 0-929956-06-0). The entry itself is still to be photographed.
• WFC Newsletter No. 9, Winter/Spring 1992, in the envelope it was mailed to Wight in, postmarked 18 October 1992. The envelope carries the address he had before; the archive keeps it for dating his moves and does not publish it. The newsletter is still to be scanned.

The family documents are held, not published: they are other people's papers.

Still open

• Which magazine ran the Deer Creek seminar piece, and when.
• Where Wight lived between Colorado and Santa Barbara and after, which the newsletter's envelope begins to answer.
• The Good News tapes themselves: which numbers survive, and which of the lab tapes the archive already holds under other names were his.
• The Santa Barbara Independent's pages that name him or Good News Productions and are not yet read here: three issues of February 1988 (the 11th, 18th and 25th) and two of autumn 1989 (28 September and 12 October).