The Morningstar Energy Box, Searl Effect, and Poynting Vortex Gravity

November 8, 2025

In a sealed test room in Wisconsin, a massive machine wound up toward a metallic scream, its laminated rollers chasing a magnetized ring while calibrated load cells watched every newton of apparent weight; for a few uncanny runs, the Morningstar Energy Box—a modified Searl Effect Generator built to turn myth into metrology—seemed to get lighter as it spun, leaving its creators and critics caught between brutal conventional explanations and the unsettling possibility that carefully engineered rotating fields might be reaching into gravity itself.

From Searl’s Dream to Morningstar’s Machine

John R. Searl’s original generator was a storyteller’s dream: concentric rings and rollers made from layered magnetic, conductive, and dielectric materials that, once “conditioned,” were said to spin up spontaneously, run cold, pour out power, and eventually lift into the sky. The tales of levitating SEG craft and runaway generators became permanent fixtures in fringe propulsion lore, even as detailed data, independent replication, and rigorous documentation remained conspicuously thin. For most of mainstream science, the Searl Effect migrated into the same drawer as perpetual motion machines and reactionless drives.

“The Morningstar Energy Box is a derivative of a Searl device modified in a similar fashion used by the Russian scientists Godin and Roschin.” — Paul Murad

In the 1990s, Russian researchers Roschin and Godin reignited interest by building a huge laminated rotor system with magnetized rollers constrained in a cage, claiming a cascade of phenomena: partial self-acceleration, up to double-digit percentage weight loss of a massive assembly, the appearance of discrete “magnetic walls,” and local temperature drops during operation. Their reports were rich in numbers but short on independently verifiable procedures, and no major lab reproduced their headline results. Still, the combination of detailed schematics and audacious claims lodged in the minds of experimenters who suspected there might be a kernel of real physics hiding beneath the drama.

For Paul A. Murad of Morningstar Applied Physics and theoretical plasma physicist Dr. John Brandenburg, this mixture of extravagant narrative and ambiguous evidence was less a warning than a dare. If even a fraction of the Searl and Roschin–Godin claims were grounded in overlooked electromagnetic–gravitational coupling, then the only honest response was to build a machine that could test them without mercy. That meant abandoning charisma and mystique in favor of calibrated load cells, well-documented procedures, and an explicit theoretical framework that could be checked line by line.

The Morningstar Energy Box was conceived as exactly that: a disciplined, modern derivative of the Searl and Roschin–Godin architectures, constructed not to promote legend but to trap it. It arrived loaded with the baggage of decades of antigravity folklore, but it also arrived with a mandate those earlier efforts mostly lacked: to produce data good enough that serious people could argue over physics instead of over personalities and rumors.

Building the Morningstar Energy Box

Physically, the Morningstar Energy Box is imposing—a multi-hundred-pound rotating assembly anchored to precision load cells and encased in industrial safety hardware. At its core sits a laminated main ring, a carefully engineered stack of magnetic alloys, copper, aluminum, dielectrics, and internal cavities, all arranged to sculpt both static and dynamic fields. Around this ring, complex rollers—built from permanent magnets, high-permeability materials, and conductive shells—are guided within a carousel so they track the circumference without flying free, echoing Roschin and Godin’s mechanical discipline while preserving key elements of Searl-inspired geometry.

Spinning this structure to meaningful speeds required real muscle. The team employed robust drive systems capable of pushing the assembly through demanding RPM regimes, with both DC and AC motor configurations explored over the test campaign. The entire rig sat on multiple calibrated load cells for continuous weight monitoring, and it was mounted and shielded in a facility accustomed to handling rocket hardware, not hobbyist curiosities. Costs climbed into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in magnets, machining, bearings, sensors, and lab time—an audacious commitment in a field usually fueled by shoestring budgets and optimism.

Instrumentation formed the nervous system of the Energy Box experiment. In addition to the load cells, magnetometers probed the surrounding fields, thermocouples tracked temperatures at key structural and environmental points, and electrical pickups watched drive power and induced signals. Runs were scripted in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions, at varied speeds, with different roller configurations and lamination states, generating a matrix of conditions under which any claimed anomaly would have to reveal consistent structure rather than sporadic coincidence.

From the outset, the design philosophy was blunt: give conventional physics every advantage. Any “gravity” effect small enough to hide inside vibration, magnetic coupling, or thermal drift would be treated as unproven; any larger effect would have to survive cross-checks across multiple sensors and configurations. The Morningstar Energy Box was built not as a stage prop for levitation stories, but as a hardware cross-examination of them.

What They Saw When the Box Spun Up

Once testing began, the Energy Box behaved—at first—like what any seasoned engineer would expect from a large, magnetically complex rotor: loud, nonlinear, and unforgiving. Early datasets showed significant vibration coupling into the support structure, transient forces as rollers accelerated and resettled, and complicated field behavior that resisted simple analytical treatment. Apparent weight changes in this regime typically sat within a few percent, exactly where conservative analysts can attribute most shifts to dynamics, mounting nuances, and sensor idiosyncrasies.

As the team refined configurations, they started to see hints of more structured responses. Certain speed bands repeatedly produced more stable load-cell readings than neighboring regimes; some roller arrangements and magnetization states correlated with distinct changes in field patterns and temperature behavior. Rather than random noise, the apparatus appeared to explore a set of operating modes whose signatures depended sensitively on its electromagnetic and mechanical history, a hallmark of hysteretic systems pushed into extreme conditions.

Some of this behavior rhymed with what Roschin and Godin had reported. There were indications of “magnetic walls”—localized regions of enhanced or altered field detected at specific distances and angles from the machine—along with temperature variations that did not track trivially with motor heating. In modest but noteworthy cases, load-cell data suggested apparent weight reductions of around 1–2% in specific, quasi-stable operating windows. Those values live in an uncomfortable middle ground: too large to ignore, too small to accept without ruling out every plausible systematic.

The most provocative data emerged from a limited number of runs later in the campaign. After multiple magnetization cycles and configuration tweaks, the team reported episodes where the apparatus appeared to exhibit roughly 7% sustained weight reduction under steady conditions, and at least one transient event near 20% during a dynamic transition. These excursions were recorded on calibrated instruments under controlled conditions and could not be dismissed out of hand by those who collected them—but nor could they be repeated at will. That tension would define the controversy around what, if anything, the Energy Box had really done.

Magnetic walls

Among the clearer, more repeatable observations was the emergence of “magnetic walls,” spatially distinct zones where measured field intensities rose or shifted abruptly as probes were moved around the running device. These structures did not form a simple monopolar dome; instead they appeared as ridges or shells at specific offsets, reminiscent of the discrete wall-like features Roschin and Godin described in their own SEG-inspired machine. Their recurrence under certain operating conditions suggested that the Box’s rotating laminated fields were organizing themselves into nontrivial spatial patterns.

From a conventional standpoint, such behavior is entirely compatible with the physics of rotating magnets, eddy currents, and saturation effects in nearby structures. A complex magnet assembly can naturally sculpt its near-field into lobes and walls without any need for exotic mechanisms, especially when conductive fixtures, support frames, or subtle asymmetries are involved. In that sense, the appearance of magnetic walls is less a shock than a confirmation that the machine is doing something physically rich enough to map and analyze in detail.

What lent these walls extra interest was their correlation with other observables. In some runs, shifts in wall position or intensity appeared to coincide with changes in apparent weight or localized temperature variations, hinting that the machine’s field configuration, mechanical state, and thermal behavior might be coupled parts of a single nonlinear system. This interplay did not prove new physics, but it did signal that the Box operated in structured regimes where multiple channels moved together, offering a more constrained target for modeling than if each anomaly behaved independently.

Even so, magnetic walls by themselves are not evidence of gravity modification. They are measurable, likely reproducible signatures of the device’s electromagnetic complexity—valuable for validating simulations, tuning configurations, and benchmarking models. Their real importance lies in helping distinguish which aspects of the Energy Box behavior belong firmly to known electromagnetism, and which, if any, stubbornly refuse to fit once those effects are properly accounted for.

Temperature anomalies

Temperature data added another layer of nuance to the Morningstar story. For most operating conditions, readings lined up with mundane expectations: the drive systems and bearings warmed, laminations absorbed losses, and the apparatus developed ordinary thermal gradients consistent with power dissipation. This baseline performance was crucial in demonstrating that the measurement system could resolve expected heating patterns and that nothing inherently “mystical” plagued the sensors.

Against that backdrop, specific runs associated with more interesting load-cell behavior showed localized cooling signatures that did not map cleanly to input power or obvious airflow. In these segments, certain parts of the apparatus or its immediate environment appeared slightly cooler than comparable points in ostensibly similar conditions, in temporal proximity to reported weight anomalies. The data were subtle, not theatrical “freezing beams,” but they were odd enough to attract careful scrutiny from the team.

Murad and Brandenburg, working within their broader theoretical framework, speculated about links between such cooling patterns and changes in vacuum-interaction conditions—invoking analogies to effects where accelerated frames or structured fields modify perceived radiation backgrounds. In their view, if the Box were successfully generating a structured Poynting vortex that nudged local gravitational coupling, small but correlated thermal signatures might accompany that process, reflecting shifts in how energy and field stress distribute around the device.

A conservative interpretation, however, has plenty to work with: complex airflow induced by the spinning assembly, delayed heating in massive components, thermal shadows cast by shields, and conduction paths altered as the machine flexes under load. Without an environmental chamber and denser sensor arrays, it is difficult to rule these out. Thus, as with the magnetic walls, the temperature anomalies are best understood as intriguing but not decisive; they enrich the phenomenology without yet forcing any departure from well-understood physics.

The weight-loss events

The core of the Morningstar controversy lies in the reported weight-loss events. Under less dramatic conditions, the Energy Box showed apparent weight changes on the order of 1–2% in specific speed ranges and configurations—numbers that start to nibble at the edge of what careful experimentalists are willing to tolerate as “just systematics.” These early results served mainly to justify tighter controls and more aggressive attempts to tease apart mechanical, magnetic, and electronic contributions.

“Where they claimed to lose as much as 35% of the weight of a 375 kg armature, the Energy Box only loses as much as 2% of its 490 pounds at this stage of the test cycle.” — Paul Murad

Later in the program, after repeated cycling and configuration refinement, the team recorded data suggesting a steadier regime with about 7% apparent weight reduction while the apparatus remained securely mounted. In at least one high-profile transient, a sharper dip approaching 20% was captured during a directional or dynamic shift in operation. To those involved, these readings were alarming and exhilarating in equal measure: far beyond what they expected from simple noise, yet occurring in a system complex enough that hidden couplings could not be dismissed.

A key difficulty is that the most extreme anomalies defied easy reproducibility. Attempts to recreate the exact conditions that preceded the strongest events did not always yield the same outcomes, and the Box’s response seemed acutely sensitive to its magnetic and mechanical history. That kind of hysteresis is not surprising in strongly magnetized, heavily loaded rotors, but it complicates the search for a clean, parametric relationship between configuration and effect—exactly what’s needed to climb from anecdote to established result.

For proponents of a genuine gravity-modification effect, those standout events remain tantalizing—and, they argue, at least qualitatively consistent with a scenario where correctly tuned Poynting vortices partially decouple the apparatus from local gravitational “pressure.” For skeptics, they look precisely like the kind of rare, alignment-dependent excursions that intricate machinery can produce when vibration modes, EM interference, and structural flex all temporarily conspire. Morningstar’s own published stance sits uneasily but honestly in between: the anomalies are treated as real data points that survived their internal checks but are not, by themselves, sufficient to claim victory.

The Poynting Vortex Idea: Why Theory People Got Excited

What distinguishes the Morningstar effort from many earlier claims is its explicit tie to a theoretical model that can, at least in principle, be confronted with data. Rather than relying on Searl’s esoteric “conditioning” narrative, Murad and Brandenburg ground their work in standard electromagnetism via the Poynting vector—the E×B energy flux that governs how electromagnetic energy moves through space—and then hypothesize an extended connection between structured Poynting flows and gravity-like effects.

Brandenburg’s broader Gravity–Electromagnetism (GEM) concept draws inspiration from ideas where gravity emerges from vacuum fluctuations or higher-dimensional field structures. In this view, gravitational interaction is not purely geometric but can be influenced by how energy density and stress are arranged in the vacuum, with intense, organized electromagnetic activity acting as a lever. The Murad–Brandenburg formulation emphasizes that when you rewrite Maxwell’s equations in terms of Poynting flux dynamics, you get wave-like behaviors that invite speculation about coupling to spacetime curvature or effective “pressure” on matter.

Within that framework, the Morningstar Energy Box is engineered to create a controlled Poynting vortex: rotating magnetic structures and conductive laminations are arranged so that energy flow is not random but circulates in a coherent, toroidal pattern. If their GEM-inspired assumptions hold, that vortex might slightly alter the local balance of forces usually attributed to gravity—manifesting as an apparent reduction in weight without requiring thrust in the classical sense. Crucially, this predicts that variations in geometry, spin direction, and field strength should measurably affect any such anomaly.

This moves the conversation, at least partially, into testable territory. A real effect should scale with calculable features of the Poynting vortex and survive comparison with detailed electromagnetic and mechanical models. If future experiments with refined setups and independent teams fail to find such scaling or cannot distinguish observed anomalies from conventional artifacts, the GEM/Poynting hypothesis will suffer. If, on the other hand, robust correlations emerge, Morningstar’s approach would be seen as an early, imperfect but pivotal probe of a new class of interactions.

Could It Really Be Gravity Modification?

For mainstream physicists, any claim of percent-level weight reduction from a tabletop system sets off a cascade of skeptical diagnostics. First among these is vibration: rotating machinery routinely shifts load distributions as imbalances and resonances develop, and load cells, especially under dynamic conditions, can misread oscillatory forces as changes in static weight. Without exhaustive vibration isolation, multi-axis sensing, and spectral analysis, it is perilous to declare that what a scale shows is truly what gravity is doing.

Magnetic coupling is an equally formidable suspect. Strong, moving fields from the Energy Box can interact with ferromagnetic or conductive elements in the stand, floor, or nearby infrastructure, producing vertical Lorentz forces or eddy-current lift. These forces can be configuration-dependent, speed-dependent, and hysteretic—the same qualitative traits touted for more exotic interpretations. Unless every plausible magnetic path is either eliminated or quantitatively modeled, anomalous load-cell readings cannot be uniquely assigned to new physics.

Thermal and geometric effects lurk in the background, capable of mimicking slow drifts and step-changes in apparent load. As components heat and expand, contact points shift, bolts relax or tighten, and the machine’s weight distribution migrates subtly among supports. Even cable motion or electronics warmed unevenly by nearby coils can introduce biases. Each of these is mundane, but together they can produce signals large enough to masquerade as something profound if the experiment is not designed to defeat them.

Morningstar’s team does not ignore these possibilities. Their publications and talks explicitly acknowledge that anything in the low-percent range remains vulnerable to conventional explanations and that the strongest anomalies demand replication under tougher constraints. In this sense, the project stops short of claiming a confirmed gravity-modification breakthrough; instead, it offers a structured anomaly report coupled to a specific theoretical proposal, inviting others to scrutinize, challenge, and, ideally, surpass its methods.

Why The Morningstar Experiment Matters

Even if all of the Energy Box anomalies eventually fall to prosaic explanations, Morningstar has already shifted expectations for how extreme propulsion concepts should be tested. It replaces hand-drawn schematics and uncalibrated bathroom scales with multi-sensor arrays, heavy engineering, and explicit analytical targets. That alone is a cultural pivot in a community where extraordinary claims have too often leaned on charisma and secrecy instead of hard data and open critique.

The project also creates a more mature relationship between theory and experiment in this controversial space. By putting a Poynting-based GEM model on the table, Murad and Brandenburg give observers something concrete to attack or refine, rather than retrofitting vague principles after the fact. Their machine is not just a gadget fishing for anomalies; it is a probe designed to answer specific questions about whether structured rotating fields can produce measurable, reproducible departures from ordinary gravitational behavior.

For the alternative propulsion ecosystem, Morningstar sets a bar: if you want your work to be taken seriously beyond your own followers, it should look more like this—instrumented, documented, and willing to publish all of it, including the awkward parts. That message is quietly subversive in a landscape where many devices are promoted as finished miracles but never survive independent replication. The Energy Box narrative, properly framed, is less “we built antigravity” and more “here’s how hard you have to push before you’re even allowed to ask that question.”

In doing so, the Box helps separate signal from noise. If future experiments inspired by its architecture consistently fail to reproduce large weight anomalies, then a substantial chunk of the Searl-derived mythology will have been constrained by real hardware. If, conversely, refined rigs start to see clear, model-consistent effects, Morningstar will be recognized as a necessary, if messy, first step. Either way, the field moves forward.

Replication: What a Smoking-Gun Experiment Would Look Like

If the Morningstar story is going to move beyond informed suspense, the next step is clear: a purpose-built replication campaign designed from the ground up to strangle mundane explanations before they touch the data. That means mechanically decoupling the rotating assembly from its metrology platform, using multiple, redundant load paths, and logging high-frequency vibration, acoustic, and motion data alongside weight, field, and temperature. Any claimed gravity effect must survive cross-correlation against all of these channels; if an anomaly rises and falls in sync with a resonance, a structural flex, or a wiring twitch, it goes straight into the conventional bin.

A smoking-gun experiment would also go on the offensive against magnetic and thermal systematics. The test stand and immediate surroundings should be built from nonmagnetic materials, with every remaining ferromagnetic component mapped and modeled. Eddy-current forces and Lorentz interactions must be quantitatively predicted and subtracted, not hand-waved away. Environmental control—or even full thermal enclosure—would reduce slow drifts, while dense temperature sensing on supports and fixtures would expose subtle expansions that might shuffle loads between sensors. Parallel runs with an inert “null rotor” of similar mass and inertia but no exotic field geometry would reveal how much apparent weight change a misbehaving machine can fake all by itself.

On the electrical side, shielded instrumentation, independent power analyzers, and disciplined grounding are essential, less to hunt for free energy than to prevent the apparatus from bullying its own sensors. Synchronizing all channels to a common timebase allows detailed phase and spectral analysis: does any observed weight change correlate with drive harmonics, switching events, or EMI bursts, or does it present a distinct, configuration-tuned signature? Releasing raw datasets, not just curated plots, would let outside analysts stress-test both the anomaly and any theoretical claim that rides on it.

Finally, credibility demands more than one lab. The most valuable legacy of Morningstar may be that it defined a recognizable experimental architecture others can now refine instead of reinventing. A small network of independent teams running variations on the same core geometry—with stricter isolation, better modeling, and shared protocols—could rapidly distinguish fluke from phenomenon. If those groups see nothing beyond clever machinery impersonating miracles, that negative result will still be powerful. If, under such scrutiny, multiple labs report reproducible, configuration-dependent weight changes that resist conventional modeling, the conversation about engineered gravity will shift overnight from speculation to obligation.

The Box as a Signpost, Not a Breakthrough

For now, the Morningstar Energy Box sits in an ambiguous but important place: too instrumented and earnest to dismiss as mere spectacle, too nonlinear and non-repeatable to claim as a definitive gravity device. That ambiguity is frustrating to anyone hoping for a clean narrative—either triumphant or debunking—but it is also typical of early work in genuinely hard experimental territory, where apparatuses double as both probes and puzzles.

What makes the Box worth remembering is the combination of boldness and restraint embedded in its story. Building a massive laminated rotor to test speculative unified-field ideas is bold by any reasonable standard; publishing results that mix modest correlations, puzzling outliers, and candid admissions of uncertainty is a form of restraint often missing from grandiose “new physics” announcements. Morningstar neither declares victory nor quietly buries awkward data; instead, it places its anomalies on the table and dares others to do better science.

The project also serves as a template for how to engage with radical ideas without surrendering rigor. It shows that you can take legends like the Searl Effect seriously enough to test them, without importing their mythology wholesale; that you can propose an adventurous theory like a Poynting-vortex GEM model, while accepting that hard experiments may yet prove you wrong. In other words, it models a path where frontier research is accountable to the same standards as everything else that hopes to call itself physics.

In the long view, history will likely judge the Morningstar Energy Box not by whether it “discovered antigravity,” but by whether it helped drag the question of engineered gravity out of rumor and into reproducible hardware tests. As a signpost, it already points in the right direction: toward heavier machines, sharper measurements, cleaner models, and a community willing to let reality—not hope—have the final word.