David Collins, Katie Gatens, Matthew Campbell, Ben Ellery
The Sunday Times
December 16 2023
In a makeshift laboratory in Morocco, Alex Batty, aged eight, punched the air in excitement as a crowd watched a mysterious device switch on 12 lightbulbs without any apparent power source.
The crowd cheered and whistled, among them his mother, Melanie, and grandfather David. They believed they had witnessed a miracle that mainstream science cannot yet explain. The machine, a quantum energy generator (QEG), purports to be based on the theories of Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer and futurist, which some claim can generate endless amounts of energy. This would break the established principles of physics.
It is part of the Batty family’s “off-the-grid” philosophy, based around their beliefs that a homeowner should not have to pay a mortgage, council tax, electricity, gas or water bills, or for a TV licence.
Alex vanished in 2017, aged 11, while on holiday in Malaga, Spain, with Melanie and David. Guardianship via a court order had passed to Melanie’s mother, Susan Caruana, about three years earlier, and she has been searching for Alex since.
Last week the boy, now 17, was discovered by a motorist in France, who spotted him on a road in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, near Toulouse, dehydrated after walking for four days. “My mother is a little crazy,” he said. He was never a prisoner and suffered no physical abuse, according to French prosecutors, apparently choosing to follow his mother’s alternative lifestyle.
Greater Manchester police confirmed on Saturday night that Batty had returned to the UK. “Earlier today Alex met a family member alongside police officers at Toulouse airport before heading back to the UK,” said Assistant Chief Constable Matt Boyle. “We are glad they are able to see each other again after all this time.”
Boyle said officers had yet to obtain a formal statement from Alex. Speaking to the teenager when he feels comfortable would determine whether there was a criminal investigation to pursue, he added. Local agencies would “ensure his wellbeing was looked after and his integration into society was as easy as possible”.
Alex was accompanied on the flight by officials from the British consulate and will return to live with his grandmother in Oldham. He is said to be “in good health” and comes across as a “normal teenager” for his age, according to French prosecutors. His mother’s whereabouts remain unknown.
By speaking to a number of family members and friends of Alex’s mother and grandfather, The Sunday Times has pieced together the family’s journey from living in a mortgaged property in Oldham, Greater Manchester, into a life of fighting against the establishment, the banks and bailiffs, as they became followers of a movement called the One People’s Public Trust.
The group claims to have “legally foreclosed” the system of governments and corporations around the world, meaning that all debt has been erased, including bank debts. Foreclosure is taking back property bought with borrowed money but the One People’s Public Trust argued governments owed the people money because of years of illegal taxation and made financial demands.
Bill-phobic Battys
In 2013 David Batty, who had lost his job due to ill health and gone through a difficult divorce with Susan, Alex’s grandmother, was fighting bailiffs taking possession of his small end-of-terrace house in Oldham. It was the final straw in a difficult number of years.
“He’d been ill and was trying to stop the banks from taking his house,” said a close friend, who helped him out with the legal battle to keep his property and asked not to be named.
Melanie, who was halfway through a law degree and said to be “extremely bright, but quite into conspiracy theories”, was helping her father. Her blond-haired son, Alex, born in 2006, was about seven at the time.
David and Melanie were developing a belief system based around people they were meeting on Facebook, including a sub-community of homeowners fighting eviction. Father and daughter became close to activists from groups who called themselves “Protection from evictions”, and “UK mortgage challengers”. Some supported the idea that residents should not be required to pay mortgages or bills; some used delaying tactics such as paying the mortgage lender £1 a month.
On the day bailiffs were due to arrive, Melanie organised 30 people to come to her father’s home and wait for the bailiffs to arrive, before forming a protective barrier around the house. They succeeded.
“He didn’t like being charged bills,” said David’s close friend. “He lost his home in the end. We told Melanie to appeal the eviction. We said if you want to stop the eviction you should apply to the court to prevent the possession order. But she said, ‘I don’t want to do that because we’re playing their game.’
“That’s what they said. They didn’t want to play ‘the game’ any more. They got fed up with paying council tax, gas, electric, TV licence and mortgage. They decided to go a different way and choose to take Alex down that path.”
It was while mixing with people from the anti-eviction groups from Facebook that they discovered the claims of a free and limitless source of energy. The man making the claims, said to be a divorced father and former IT consultant, invited Melanie and her father to Morocco in 2014 to see the quantum energy generator.
Followers of the flat earth
That year, Melanie took Alex, then aged eight, to live in a commune in Morocco with David. Photographs of them in one of the properties where they lived and socialised show seven people sitting on a sofa around a glass table. There are two candles, a tube of Pringles, a bottle of Baileys, cans of lager and wine and cigarettes. They show David, Melanie and the former IT consultant. Some of the group they were mixing in believed in conspiracy theories such as the Earth being flat.
That year Melanie and David attended a number of quantum energy generator “experiments”, one of which is posted on a YouTube video called QEG Resonance in Morocco, OPC: Aouchtam. The experiment, by the One People Community — a new iteration of the One People’s Public Trust, Aouchtam workshop — claims to have produced 500 watts of power. It purports to have used a starting power source, such as a crank, to power the motor, that spins a rotor in the generator core and apparently caused the lights to switch on. The theory is this could then be unplugged from the motor to leave the power on perpetually; an allegedly “fuel-less” power source.
Melanie then went to live in Bali with a new boyfriend, according to Susan, leaving Alex behind in Morocco in 2014. “I was panic-stricken and I paid for a flight home for him,” Susan said in a 2018 interview.
Alex then began living with his grandmother while his mother remained in Bali. He enrolled into a local school and became settled and happy, according to family members. Susan applied to the courts for guardianship of Alex, which Melanie refused to recognise. It is not clear who Alex’s biological father is. “Melanie never talked about him,” said a friend.
“That would fit with her general view of the courts and banks, which are that they have no authority in her view,” said her friend. In September 2017, Alex, aged 11, flew from Oldham with his mother and David on the pre-agreed trip to Malaga. They never returned.
Living off-grid in the Pyrenees
Melanie, David and Alex are known to have spent several years in Morocco before arriving in about 2020 in France, where they moved around an area of the Pyrenees, below Toulouse, in the southwest of the country.
It was reported on Saturday that, in November, Alex had tried to enrol in a school in Quillan in Aude. He was refused as he did not have sufficient paperwork and was returned to his mother.
Last week, the town was deserted, save for a few local people, who are used to seeing “off-grid” nomadic people at the local market, which takes place on Sundays in the nearby village of Espéraza.
“You’ve got the nomadic people; some of them seem to be permanently stoned but they’re perfectly happy; they do their own thing,” said Michelle Vellenoweth, 64, sipping a coffee in the sun outside the Café de Fleuve.
“Most of the Pyrenees is like this; there’s lots of remote spaces and forest. A lot of people go and they live off-grid but it tends to be a lot of people going with their families rather than in groups.”
The Batty family would survive by moving from place to place, eating vegetables grown in allotments while Melanie sold solar panels. David is reported to have died about six months ago, with his friend saying he had not been on social media for some time.
However, in a bizarre twist, neighbours at the last property where Alex was known to have been living claimed David was still alive. At the gite in La Bastide, in Aude, they said he was using the name “Peter”.
“Peter is not dead,” said one neighbour. “I saw him a week ago, maybe ten days. He was mowing the grass in front of the gîte. I know this because my mum’s dog loves him. Peter was a nice person. He was very shy. He would speak with me. I tried to speak to him in English but he was evasive.” He added that “Peter” had been working at the gîte as a handyman.
Returning to Britain
On December 14, Alex, apparently unaware the authorities, including Greater Manchester police, had been searching for him for the past six years, decided to leave his mother who wanted to move to Finland and see the Northern Lights.
He left his commune, which the French authorities are still trying to locate, and walked for four days in the remote countryside, heading towards Toulouse, where he believed he would be able to find help. On a stretch of deserted road, a motorist, Fabien Accidini, 26, a student and delivery driver from Marseilles, spotted Alex and stopped.
“I was in between the two villages, Camon and Chalabre, when I saw Alex,” he said. “It was a dark road with no street lights and very isolated. I’ve seen some people walking by the road at night but they’re never alone … It’s never just one person and such an isolated location. Where Alex was walking was about 20 minutes’ drive from a village.
“The first time I saw him, I think I thought that he was young because of the skateboard and the backpack and his body in general. Then when I passed him again and stopped I could see immediately that he was young.
“It was raining heavily, so he was quite wet. He was wearing normal everyday clothes, not very dirty: a white sweatshirt and black backpack.” Alex told Accidini his name was Zach.
Then he revealed his real name. “He told me his mother had ‘kidnapped’ him and taken him to Morocco,” Accidini said.
“Then he told me about his journey through Spain and France. He had ‘escaped’ his mother when he left, he hadn’t just left her. I don’t know if she willingly let him go. He didn’t seem to want to talk about it and I didn’t press it. I didn’t want to bother him. He said she was a bit crazy.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/aa43d668-0864-44ba-8953-5efa96e0738f?shareToken=70035d64f97ac70440d46ea2892be796
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