JOINT STATEMENT

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 68, 20 March 1936, Page 10

JOINT STATEMENT

INVESTIGATION MADE

"NO GROUNDS FOR ACTION"

A joint official statement dealing with the Penny case was issued today by the Minister of Defence (the Hon. F Jones) and the Minister in Charge of Police (the Hon. P. Fraser>, under whose notice the matter was officially first brought in January last.

The statement reads: — "After preliminary inquiries which, revealed the fact that reports had appeared in both the daily and weekly Press in June of last year in connection with Mr. Penny and his alleged discovery and, subsequently, his alleged assault, the Ministers decided to investigate the matter. They accordingly perused the relevant files and, accompanied by Mr. J. A. Lee, Parliamentary Under-Sccre-tary, visited Mr. Penny personally and interviewed him at Fort Dorset. "The Ministerial investigation showed that the attention of the Defence and Police authorities had been directed in June of last year to certain experiments alleged to have been made by Mr. Penny and to the results claimed for them. "Early in July, after a consultation between representatives of these Departments, and with the knowledge of the Minister concerned, it was decided that it would be unwise to ignore Mr. Penny's claims without proper investigation, and that, in order to give him an opportunity of developing and demonstrating what he claimed to be able to produce, he should be brought to Wellington and placed under the protection of the Defence authorities. This was done first on Somes Island and then at Fort Dorset.

"The investigation undertaken by the Minister of Defence, the Minister of Police, and the Parliamentary Un-der-Secretary involved an examination of the files concerned, a visit to Mr. Penny at Fort Dorset, and a report furnished by competent scientific authorities upon the alleged discoveries of Mr. Penny, and upon his methods of approach to the scientific problems involved.

"As a result a report was presented to Cabinet in February to the effect ! that, as far as was asccrtainablc, there was a complete lack of corroborative evidence as to the authenticity of the alleged discoveries and the claims made for them, and that there had been no sound or adequate grounds for the action taken in respect to Mr. Penny.

"On receiving this report Cabinet decided that Mr. Penny's services, under the existing conditions of employment, should be terminated as from the end of February."