Far from disengaging from the media and quietly skulking away into obscurity, Sean McCarthy gave a fairly in-depth interview to the technology site Engadget that was published today. Much of it is an elaboration of what we have heard already: the reasons for the failure of the demo and Steorn’s plans moving forward. Sean directly addresses the notion that the Orbo technology works only in the confines of his own mind, and confidently asserts that a successful demo will occur in the near future. Some excerpts follow:

So we will be doing a demo, again. Obviously people will believe it when they see it and I can understand the skepticism about that. It is a deferral, our guys are currently in the process of rebuilding some more robust systems and changing some parts to prevent the engineering thing from happening again and we’ll be back out in the near future with it.

Regarding DrMike’s opinion that Orbo is no more than a delusion on the part of Sean:

How can I criticize. We invited the guy to come from Canada to see something. He didn’t see it. It’s his opinion. He has no other basis, he has nothing else to work on, other than sitting and having a chat with us. I can’t possibly criticize, Doctor Mike for what he said. It’s exactly what I would have said, I probably would have been harsher if I had been in his shoes.

Again, obviously if I’m delusional, whatever answer I give is going to be based on my own delusions. The only thing that I can say — I can say a couple of things about it. First thing is that the answer that anybody looking at us and wants to know will ultimately be delivered contractually. It’s going to happen whenever it happens from a bunch of scientists. So unless they’re delusional as well, if they agree with us then we deal with that at the time. If you stand back from the failed demo and say ok, I don’t think anybody should believe this — I wouldn’t believe this in the circumstances, demo or no demo — there is a process that’s in place that’s a real process where real scientists are going to draw a conclusion and that conclusion will be made public.

The other side of it which I think is why people have taken the delusional route is because an awful lot of people had expected us to rig the demo. They expected us to have a hidden battery or whatever it is. If we were in that business, believe me, there would have been a spinning wheel. But we’re just not in that business, the business of scamming people or rigging demos. It failed, it’s prototype technology. Huge disappointment to us. We’ll redo it. But the answers to the question — the demo doesn’t answer the question, it provides some thoughts from supporting evidence when it happens. But the answer to the question will be done by professionals and then we’re either be found to be delusional or not.

On Steorn’s plans going forward:

Obviously we are going to have to redo the demo. There is no question that we are not going to do the demo. We will, as I said before, not pre-announce it this time. We will get it set up properly, but the ground rules will be identical. The ground rules will be physical public access to the device, online webcams so it will be as open as possible. If anybody has seen the intended device and then realizes that it’s, well, not impossible obviously to hide a certain energy source, it becomes quite a convoluted process. So we are going to try and demonstrate the technology in it’s simplest, simplest format in a place with public access where people can watch online and talk to people there.

That will be one thing we have — and to invite skeptics along. We have to do that. We have to embrace the skepticism. But equally to understand, these are not intended to be slam dunk results, because they won’t be. There will always be issues and rightfully so. A simple demo, no matter how long it lasts, isn’t proof of the claim. Proof of the claim is scientific analysis. But we are going to have to do other things as well. I won’t go into details, but the biggest mistake that we’ve made and obviously we have to learn from our mistakes was to pre-announce the London demo. We’ve paid the price for that, we won’t do it again. But we will be doing probably an awful lot more than we had intended. Basically when it happens we’ll be letting people know. It will not be that far away.

A final word:

I’ve met an awful lot of disappointed people. People who came, who believed, who wanted to see history made. Disappointed skeptics, people like Doctor Mike who we dragged half way around the world — and all I can do is apologize to them and say look it didn’t work, but we are going to do it again. It’s not the end of the Steorn story. Unfortunately, I’m sure that many people wish they’ve never heard of us again but we’ll be back and we’ll be back in the not too distant future.

To read the full interview, click here.