What the encyclopedias cite

Two encyclopedia articles on Grokipedia, "Water fuel cell" and "Stanley Meyer (inventor)", cite fifty-eight sources between them. This page goes through all of them and says, for each, what it is and where it stands in the archive: held in full, catalogued in the reference library, or not worth a record. Read together they are a portrait of how the story is told from outside, and of how thin the sourcing is. Six are primary; the rest are retellings of one another, and several of those are retellings of the two Columbus Dispatch pieces.

Held in full

Sources the archive already holds, or has now transcribed, as the thing itself.

• US 4,936,961, Method for the production of a fuel gas. In the archive, with the office's text and drawings.
• US 5,149,407, Process and apparatus for the production of fuel gas and the enhanced release of thermal energy from such gas. In the archive.
• WO 92/22679, Water fuel injection system. In the archive.
• The Birth of New Technology, the Technical Brief, which the encyclopedia cites from a copy uploaded to viXra in 2008 as paper 0811.0001. The archive's own copy, catalogued numeral by numeral.
• WFC Public Notice to Inform. The encyclopedia cites this site's old address for it; it is here.
• "The car that ran on water", Columbus Dispatch, 8 July 2007. Transcribed.
• "Local inventor's claims inspire others to follow", Columbus Dispatch, 20 September 2010. Transcribed.
• "Stan Meyer's water powered car demonstrated 1986 Channel 6 News, Columbus", a YouTube tape. Indexed as a film and transcribed: it is four reports strung together, and the 1986 one is the earliest television of the buggy the archive has found.

Catalogued in the reference library

Each of these is indexed with its citation, a link to where it lives, and the archive's note on what it is. None is reproduced.

Fact-checks and journalism, 2017 to 2025. Rapier in Forbes, 2019, the thermodynamic objection stated plainly. PolitiFact, 2021 and PolitiFact, 2022, both rated False, both sourced to the Dispatch. CarBuzz, 2025, which Military.com syndicated the next day, so the encyclopedia's two citations are one article. CarThrottle, 2017, SlashGear, 2023, Historic Mysteries, 2023, iCarTea, 2025, The Classic Car Trust, 2020, Alex Exum, 2023, Trussty, 2023, AquaterreX, 2023, MakeUseOf, 2022 cited from a Taiwanese trade-show mirror, Technology.org on the suppression conspiracy in general, a high-school newspaper's conspiracy column, and an Ohio Mysteries podcast episode, cited twice under two addresses.

Not about Meyer at all. NPR on misinformation and renewables, 2022 and FracTracker on the same, 2024, cited for atmosphere. Catalogued so the citations resolve.

Earlier web sources. Bruce Simpson's "Stanley Meyer's bad science" from New Zealand, where Stan spoke in 1989. A short web biography. The Wikipedia article mirrored on chemeurope.com, which means the encyclopedia is citing Wikipedia at one remove.

Compilations and replications. Rex Research's Meyer page, Robert Nelson's compilation of the Electronics World article, Danforth, the news release, Raum & Zeit and the Infinite Energy obituary, most of which the archive holds separately. JLN Labs, 2008. Patrick Kelly's chapter on Dave Lawton's replication, cited from a French forum's copy and again from Scribd. A LinkedIn VIC guide, 2025. An unsigned one-page sheet of builders' diagrams. A ResearchGate build report, 2020. Two replication clips on YouTube, Ravi's of 2007 and Okki Moeljadi's of 2015, are indexed as films under "Replications the encyclopedias cite".

The one contemporary source. New Energy News, December 1996, a paragraph on the fraud judgment that summarises a London Sunday Times report, "End of Road for Car That Ran on Water", which the archive has not yet found. That Sunday Times piece is the one thing on this list worth chasing.

A physicist's slides. Eric Prebys of Fermilab, "Perpetual Motion", a public talk with Meyer among the cases.

Not catalogued

• Justia's inventor pages for "Stanley A. Meyer" and "Stanley Meyer": listings of the patents the archive holds, behind a bot wall.
• Three Facebook group posts, three Quora questions and a Reddit thread. Social media, not works. The Facebook posts cannot be read without an account.
• An eBay listing, item 187375215836, which returns an error page.
• An IMDb biography, nm1942625, which the encyclopedia cites for the inventor's life and which is a user-submitted page.
• A dead link, two addresses on climber.uml.edu.ni for a PDF called StanleyMeyerWaterFuelCell.pdf, neither of which answers.
• Two more YouTube videos: a 2024 short, "They Poisoned Me" Were the Water Powered Car Inventor's Last Words, and a 2025 video by an AI channel, "Meyer's Car That Ran on Water: Science Breakthrough or Greatest Hoax?" Neither is a source; both are retellings, the second by machine.

What the list says

Fifty-eight citations, of which six are Meyer's own documents or the Dispatch. Nothing from the Grove City Record, which covered him for twenty years and which the archive transcribes; nothing from the court file of 1996; nothing from the people who knew him. The encyclopedias' account of the death rests on PolitiFact, which rests on the Dispatch, which rests on the coroner, whose own words are here.