Abbadon, Recovering Yuppie - several years ago I did my best to track down Mills's "licensing/tech transfer" results. As I recall, two were indeed shells, but the others were not.
BLP's web site contains 3 press releases about these licensing agreements, for some reason not touting the other three. The second announcement,
https://brilliantlightpower.com/news-release-january-6-2009/ dealt with Farmer's Electrical Cooperative in New Mexico. I believe that I was able to track down at least one more announcement at the time, but that was also a holding company with no easy way to contact them.
When I tried to track things down, the first (Estecado Energy Services) and the 6th (Akridge, LLC) had folded, and the New Mexico cooperative was the only one I could locate.
All of this was made irrelevant by my being able to contact one of the licensees, Farmer's Electrical, where I was able to talk to the guy who actually did the deal. The agreement was not what you might think. There was no money exchanged, nor was there IP exchanged. Instead, there was an agreement that if Mills provided the tech at some time in the future, the power company would have the right to use it to produce up to 250 MW. This is not remotely the same as thinking that Mills had committed to actually, you know,
providing it within any specific period. Like within our lifetimes.
The power company never heard from Mills again (5 years later), and the only thing that happened was the BLP put out a press release touting their "technology licensing agreement". It was a splendid example of gaming the system by BLP. The guy I talked to said that he checked the web about once a year to see what BLP was up to, but had no hope of ever hearing from them.
Since Mills/BLP has been scrupulous about sanitizing their web site, and protected it from being archived, there is now, so far as I can tell, no way to conduct the sort of verification you are arguing about. it's a moot point. At this point it's fruitless to ask for documented proof about the companies involved.