Welcome to this forum, Joel.
As Smudge said very well, I am of the opinion that "we do not have FE devices in our hands all the past claims are either scams or false claims based on incorrect or misunderstood data".
I obviously can't believe that statistically out of the hundreds of claims of them, not one could emerge, so I apply Occam's razor, they couldn't for the good reason that they didn't work. There may be one exception, which Smudge knows well, and that is the Coler device, but that remains to be demonstrated.
You mentioned two people, Bedini and Bearden, whose disappearance affected you. Humanly speaking, I regret it too, I would rather face people who are wrong or deceive us, and contradict them, than for them to disappear. But their disappearance is not a loss for FE research, quite the contrary.
The motor of the first one was never overunity but Bedini became for many a kind of FE expert and played on this position, while in fact nothing ever came of it. The FE is full of these so-called experts who have produced nothing but bluster and hype.
Bearden's theoretical ideas were completely incoherent, without logic, without formalism, the worst being the MEG for the obvious reason that a magnetic flux is not a flow. He is regarded as a crackpot by competent people,
producing gibberish, and he did worse, invoking cancer therapies or finding virtues of psychic force over matter, to another charlatan, Uri Geller.
As I have said elsewhere, the free energy research done here should not try to follow the screwed up ideas of these pseudo-experts or the setups from FE claims without any evidence, like Kapanadze, Ruslan, Akula and all the others. One can only lose by following all these clowns without stature and with false ideas or intended to deceive us. Even becoming a blind fan of a great inventor like Tesla is counterproductive.
The only method is, from what is known and works, science, to generate our own new ideas and go beyond. It is by
standing on the shoulders of giants, the geniuses of physics who have gone before us, that we can see further and build something. No one today is a specialist in FE, no one has the secrets because no one has it. Those who claim it are always unable to demonstrate it. So I can only advise you to have more confidence in yourself than in these charlatans.
73
François