The current hypothesis for the origin and functioning of the sun is the gravity-driven ‘Thermonuclear’ model.  It is taught in every school on Earth.  It has never been proven.

Montgomery Childs:  "We think we are seeing a new phenomena. We are calling it intense plasma flow discharge.  Plasma double layers.  Here, we are looking through numerous, rotating, translucent plasma spheres."

The film SAFIRE follows the story of the project from its inception, the creation of a team, and through design, development, proof-of-concept building and testing, re-designing and ‘virtual’ testing, final construction, firing-up, and initiation of the first experiments.  It reveals the step-by-step process of the ‘scientific method’, hard core empirical science, employing leading-edge technology and a singular methodology rarely if ever before used in a lab … to test, and falsify or confirm, a uniquely powerful hypothesis.

The results are startling.

SAFIRE is an adventure story.

Montgomery Childs and the SAFIRE team build a machine to test the 'Electric Sun' model – to disprove or ‘falsify’ the hypothesis.  Or even possibly ... to confirm it.

There is another quite different hypothesis, the 'Electric Sun' model, which has been 250 years in the making.  It also has never been proven.

In so doing the door is opened to an entirely new way of seeing the sun, the stars, and the workings of the universe.

Robert Quinn & Ralph Fiorito produced sun-like images working with a Terrella while exploring plasma instability in 1967.

The SAFIRE Phase Two chamber, June 2016

Building on the ideas and work of some of the most illustrious explorers in the history of the sciences, Australian physicist Wal Thornhill has devoted his life to developing and refining an hypothesis called The Electric Universe.

Thornhill can make a very convincing argument for the common-sense evidence-based science of the idea of an Electric Sun.  On paper.

But, as with the current ‘Thermonuclear’ model of the sun, there has never been a way to test the hypothesis.  Until now.

Working with a team of engineers and scientists, Canadian engineer Montgomery Childs builds a machine capable of testing the Electric Sun model.

The SAFIRE story is not about the eternal classic battle – a new theory contesting a long-held and popular incumbent theory.  It is instead the story of how a small group of engineers and scientists test a new idea entirely on its own merits.

The challenge for the SAFIRE team is in adhering to the strictest tenets of the scientific method; and in actually being able to create in a laboratory the types of environment and conditions that allow the Electric Sun model to be authentically tested.

The SAFIRE Phase Two Sollelus, being fired-up for the first time.

The SAFIRE project was created to test a practically unknown scientific hypothesis.

From the very first stages of the project it already appears that the predictions of the Electric Sun model are playing out as predicted.

What was not predicted or expected, was the possibility that the SAFIRE experiments might become the catalyst for a paradigm shift in perception:  the idea, championed by Hannes Alfvén, that the predominant energy in the formation of stars and suns is not gravitational but electrical.  SAFIRE may go on to prove that stars continue to be lit by galactic electricity after their birth.  A whole new way of looking at the universe.

With the Thermonuclear model of the sun everything happens on a monumental scale.  Vast forces are in play.  Gravity coalesces space gas and dust and spirals it into a vortex so crushingly powerful it ignites a continuing thermonuclear reaction.

In SAFIRE’s very first proof-of-concept tests it appears as if the Electric Sun model is not so much the consequence of ‘vast forces’, but more about ‘resonance’:  when certain elements are brought into play - a positive body in a negative environment, plasma, electrical voltage and current, pressure (vacuum) - something happens.  It is as if the whole environment suddenly comes alive.