Joseph Westley Newman

Joseph Westley Newman (July 2, 1936 - March 6, 2015) was an American inventor who devised and sought a patent for an Energy Machine that was described as a perpetual motion device by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Newman filed unsuccessful lawsuits against the USPTO beginning in the mid-1980s when he was denied patent protection for his device, receiving some minor Congressional support and making the television interview rounds (including an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson), and even declared himself a candidate for president in 1987, but to no avail, as the lawsuits were dismissed, appeals dismissed, and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his final appeal.

By the late 1980s, Newman began claiming to receive messages from God and issued warnings of coming catastrophe, in 1989 becoming embroiled in a strange case where he claimed to have entered into a spiritual marriage with his secretary, Annis Mizelle, and her 8-year-old daughter by divine command. During the 1990s, much of the media attention paid to Newman focused on his prophecies of the end, including a claim that the remnants of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 could be redirected by Jupiter's gravitational field and sent on a collision course with Earth, in addition to other warnings of cataclysmic solar flares and subsequent earth changes.

Webpages
Newman ran several internet sites from the mid-1990s onward, as cached by archive.org: