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CHAPTER 16
“Tesla’s Death Ray” and the Accelerated Particle Beam Weapon
Embedded in the army field reports and air materiel Command
engineering evaluations analyzing the Roswell craft were
descriptions of how the spacecraft might have utilized a form of
energy known as “directed energy, “ powerful beams of excited
electrons that could be precisely directed at any target. We didn’t
know very much about directed energy back in 1947, or more precisely
put, we didn’t know how much we knew because in reality we knew a
lot. But the information that had been readily available since the
1930s was lying sequestered at a public storage facility, under the
authority of the federal government, over on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan in the notes of the mysterious inventor
Nikola Tesla,
whose experiments and reputed discoveries have become the stuff of
bizarre but exciting legend.
The laser surgical cutting tool found in the Roswell wreckage was
one form of directed energy beam device
whose ability to fire rapidly and with precision revealed that the
extraterrestrials had a potential in weaponry far
superior to ours. However, if the craft had been brought down by
lightning, itself a directed energy beam of one
of the highest magnitudes, then it revealed their vulnerability to
bolts of electrons. That stimulated the thinking of
army scientists and researchers into the analysis of the potential
of a directed energy beam weapon.
Today, fifty
years after the crash of the spacecraft at Roswell, these weapons
are far more than the device that the Emperor
Ming aimed at Earth in the Flash Gordon serials; they are a reality
that can be launched on a guided missile, separated from a booster,
aimed by an internal computer guidance system at any incoming
device, whether an ICBM warhead or a space vehicle, and fired with
devastating effect. This weapon has been a true Army R&D success
story.
“The possibilities for benefits to the military are enormous, “ I
wrote to General Trudeau in my 1962 analysis of the potential for
directed energy weapons. “Although, as we have seen, even the most
rudimentary of directed energy products, the microwave oven, has
more than repaid the initial research and development overhead
through consumer product sales, it is the military that will see the
greatest benefits from directed energy and is already seeing the
potential from it in the applications that are being projected for
the laser which is only two years old. “
The concept of a weapon that relied on a
directed energy beam,
whatever the nature of that beam was, was not a completely new
concept to the military community, although its origins were totally
shrouded in secrecy. The first test of a directed energy weapon, a
particle beam accelerator code named Seesaw whose beam was to be
aimed at incoming guided missiles, was first conducted in 1958, two
years before the successful demonstration of the laser, by the
Advanced Research Projects Agency. Although the test took place the
year that I was in Red Canyon, New Mexico, I had known about the
project first when I was on the National Security Council at the
White House and then again after the successful experiments against
a simulated target.
In theory, the particle beam weapon looked like it would work,
assuming the technological development of power generators,
electrical storage apparatus, and the computer software to aim and
fire the weapon. We already had a rough model for the particle beam
weapon in nature: the lightning bolt, a pure, intense beam of
electrons firing between opposite poles and destroying or
incapacitating anything it hit that was not grounded. Scientists
from Benjamin Franklin to Nikola Tesla have tried to chain the force
of lightning as a power source.
Now the Advanced Research Projects
Agency was experimenting with the theory to apply it to a new and
deadly weapon. If they could build the hardware and write the
software, the developers at ARPA decided they would be able to
generate an intense beam of either electrons or neutral hydrogen
atoms, aim it at an incoming target, and fire the particle beam
impulses that would travel near the speed of light and excite the
atoms in the target until they literally blew apart. Whatever didn’t
blow up would be destroyed electronically and rendered useless.
Officially, the project would remain secret until funding could be
acquired and the technological development of the components moved
far enough along to allow us to build working prototypes. The great
fear of the developers at ARPA was that the Soviets, realizing what
we were trying to construct, would maximize their effort to build
one before we did, rendering our newly developed Atlas ICBM obsolete
before it even got to the launching pad.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency was a highly secretive network
of defense scientists, members of the industrial defense contractor
R&D community, and university researchers operating either under the
formula of a government grant or the tacit acknowledgment of the
Defense Department that their research would come under government
control at some point. ARPA was founded in1958, in part, I believed,
because up to then Army R&D had been a disorganized department
barely able to manage the core research necessary to keep us
technologically superior to our enemies. This created a gap in
research that the Advanced Research Projects Agency was created to
fill.
Working on military defense oriented research, many times far
in advance of any concrete proposals for the development of a
weapons system or a product, ARPA often acted as a forward skirmish
line for the development of military weapons or simply facilitated
the basic scholarship necessary for the more concrete items to be
developed. However, too many times it was in conflict with the
military because ARPA had its own separate agenda, especially after
General Trudeau had reorganized the entire military R&D apparatus
and refocused it so that it ran like a machine.
In 1969, during the era of large main frame computers, under a
contract to develop a network of networks
linking universities, defense contractors, and the military, the
ARPANET was born. And in the 1970s after the
Advanced Research Projects Agency changed its name to the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, or
DARPA, it instituted a project to create an “internetting” of all
the existing computers on its system, instituting the
software protocols that would link networks running on different
operating systems. By1974, the Transmitting
Control Protocol/Internet Protocol was
born and the ARPANET became the Internet. In the late 1980s, the
European laboratory for Particle Physics launched a hypertext
language, originally conceived of by Vannevar Bush, as a search
mechanism on the Internet and by 1990 married it to a graphics user
Interface that combined hypertext and graphics. The World Wide Web
was born.
In 1958, when it was first developing the concepts behind the
particle beam weapon, ARPA was only a year
old. It was formed in1957, when I was still at the White House, in
response to the Soviet Union’s successful launch of
Sputnik because the government realized that the United States
needed an independent research organization
to marshal the resources of the academic, scientific, and industrial
communities. ARPA was formed to fund basic
research, and even though it didn’t have a military orientation at
the outset, it quickly became associated with
military projects because that was where the government saw the
greatest need for basic research into scientific and technical
areas.
There was another reason for the formation of ARPA that, at least in
theory, had a lot to do with the perceived threats facing the United
States and the need for basic research to respond to them. ARPA,
because it was a network deep inside the government and ultimately
the Department of Defense, could engage in research ostensibly far
afield from the immediate needs of the military services whose
research and development organizations were part of the command
structure. ARPA wasn’t. Although it reported to its own higherups in
the Defense Department and at the White House, it was not part of a
command structure and didn’t have to confine itself to the agendas
of the heads of the various special military corps.
ARPA didn’t just come into existence out of nowhere. Its ancestor,
the National Research Council, had been formed under President
Wilson to organize and marshal scientific research for defense
purposes and as a rival to the Naval Consulting Board, which was run
by Thomas Edison, who had gone on record as saying that the country
didn’t need a Naval Consulting Board at all. He invited scientists
he called a bunch of “perfessers” down to his laboratory in New
Jersey to walk around the “scrap heap” to see how real inventions
were created.
University researchers and corporate heads of research and
development were naturally appalled at what
Edison thought about government sponsored research for the war
effort and rallied around the NRC. If there
were government grants to be
handed our for basic defense research, the scientists who worked for
corporations, who needed help in basic research no matter what its
primary purpose was, were anxious to become associated with this new
organization.
University researchers argued, through the prestigious National
Academy of Sciences, that the National Research Council should be an
“arsenal of science” to protect the United States through the
application of its great brain trust in academia and industrial
contractors to issues of national defense through technology.
President Wilson agreed, and the NRC was born. One of the first
tasks given to the National Research Council was the development of
a submarine defense. Aircraft had not yet made a decisive appearance
on the battlefield at the outset of World War I, but the German
U-boats were ravaging the Atlantic fleets.
The navy was desperately
searching for a way to detect submarines, and although Nikola Tesla
had submitted his plans for an energy beam detector that would send
low frequency waves through the water to reflect off any hidden
objects, the National Research Council thought the idea too esoteric
and looked for a more conventional technology. Tesla’s low energy
wave didn’t work well in water anyway, but years later Tesla’s
description of his invention was the basis for one of the most
important devices to come out of World War II, “radar. “
The National Research Council had established a pattern of
government support for basic research when it had an aspect to it
that could be developed for military purposes. It was the first time
that research scientists from the private sector, corporations,
academicians, bureaucrats, and the military were brought together to
solve mutual problems. Therefore, the Advanced Research Projects
Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA,
son of ARPA, were natural outgrowths of an ongoing government
relationship.
The problem with ARPA was that it was political and had its own
agenda. It was not uncommon for conflicts to arise between the
Office of the Chief of Research and Development, General Trudeau,
who was operating within the military command structure, and ARPA
over money and the policy issues that arose between them. The staffs
at ARPA and in the Pentagon crossed swords on a number of occasions,
and more than once ARPA tried to lay the blame for its own
shortcomings and mistakes on the military. During the early years of
the Vietnam War, for example, ARPA tried to blame General Trudeau
for mistakes in the deployment of Agent Orange.
But General Trudeau
and R&D weren’t responsible at all for Agent Orange. It was ARPA’s
baby from the start. But when the field reports started coming in on
the casualties Agent Orange was causing among our own troops and
ARPA said that it would testify before Congress that General Trudeau
was responsible, I hit the ceiling. I let the ARPA staff people know
that, protocol be damned, I would storm into the congressional
committees on military and veterans affairs and raise the roof of
the Capitol Building until everyone knew that ARPA was trying to
duck responsibility for negligence in the deployment of a bad
chemical. ARPA backed down, but the bad blood between us remained.
When the concept of an ARPA was first discussed at the White House,
I saw the potential as well as the problem, but I also knew that a
secret agenda driving everything was the policy of the UFO working
group. ARPA was an asset to them because they could network through
the university community and find out who had any information about
UFOs that they weren’t disclosing to the military, what technology
was being developed that had any relation to the problem of UFOs or
EBEs, and who in the academic or scientific community were coming up
with theories about the existence or intentions of EBEs. In other
words, in addition to being a conduit for research and research
grants that fit certain government/military profiles, ARPA was
another intelligence gathering agency, but dedicated to the academic
and scientific communities. If information was out there, ARPA was
going to find it and pay for its development.
Therefore, when the urgency of coming up with a technological
challenge to the Soviet space program arose
in 1957, it was no surprise to anyone who understood the
requirements of a space defense that it would be an
organization like ARPA that would be given the mandate to develop
that military response. And given the challenge posed by the Soviet
satellite program, a particle beam weapon was the logical direction
such a response would take.
The United States had to develop a weapon that theoretically could
knock out the Soviet satellites or blind them so they couldn’t take
any surveillance photos. They had to gather resources in the
academic research community to see whether a talent pool existed for
the development of such a weapon. At the same time they didn’t want
to divert military research into exotic weapons while the military
was still trying to get its own satellites into orbit.
But rather
than putting the plan directly into the hands of the military R&D
organizations, they followed a course probably initially laid out
for them by the protocols of the UFO working group and went outside
the formal military to an adhoc research organization that was not
supposed to be involved in direct military research. When I was at
the White House, I could see the hand of the CIA behind this, which
immediately sent up a red flag for me because I knew that the
government was only creating another budget and research grant
bureaucracy the CIA would ultimately control.
It was also no surprise that the first type of weapon whose mission
was directed against space vehicles and vehicles reentering Earth’s
atmosphere from space was a directed energy weapon, an accelerated
particle beam, because even though it may sound like something out
of a science fiction movie, it had a history that stretched back all
the way to the early twentieth century. It’s original creator was
Nikola Tesla, some of whose papers were still in my own files when I
took over the Foreign Technology desk in 1961.
Tesla was theorizing about directed energy beams, including particle
beam weapons, even before the beginning of the twentieth century.
His now famous “death ray” was essentially a version of a particle
beam weapon that he believed would bring peace to the entire world
because it could destroy entire cities anywhere in the world,
instantly, and render squadrons of airplanes, naval fleets, and even
entire armies completely useless. But even before his announcement
of his death ray, Tesla was making news and a fortune through his
experiments with the wireless transmission of electricity and his
directed beam of electrons, which would strip the electrons of
specimen material inside a light globe.
In the 1890s, Tesla was
experimenting with a device that would become the twentieth-century
cyclotron, another device that would become television, and he
formulated the ideas for what today are the worldwide television and
radio networks. Tesla, his background and his history, are important
to any history of twentieth century science and weapons because his
thinking was well advanced beyond that of any scientist of his day,
including Thomas Edison, and the political implications of what
Tesla discovered mixed in with the furious attempts to manage the
government cover up about UFOs and their technological potential in
the days and months after the Roswell crash.
Nikola Tesla, the son of a Serbian Orthodox minister, came to the
United States from Paris in 1884 to meet and work for the
acknowledged genius of his day, Thomas Edison. Although the two men
would eventually clash like titans over the advantages of
alternating current over direct current, Tesla did manage to get a
job at the Edison offices and laboratory on what is now West
Broadway, south of West Houston Street in New York City.
The two men were also very different in the way they approached
their inventions. Edison was a tinkerer who would come up with an
idea, experiment, build and rebuild, and experiment again until it
worked. Often, as in the case of his incandescent bulb, he would go
through thousands of experiments, discarding each one after it
failed, until he finally succeeded.
This was Edison’s example of
initial inspiration and then lots of perspiration until the thing
worked and he believed he’d gotten it right.
Tesla, on the other hand, laid the entire project out in his brain,
visualizing it in its completeness, and then assembled it from the
vision in his mind. It was unnerving to Edison, who often commented
to his former assistant Charles Batchelor that Tesla’s ability to
build something from what amounted to a set of schematics in his own
mind was unnatural. Tesla was also a fastidious, formally trained
academician who loved to discuss theory while Edison was mostly a
self taught workbench inventor who often worked and slept in the
same clothes for days.
It is ironic that the rivalry between the two men who, by the time
each of them died, had patented inventions upon which most of modern
technological industry is built, spawned two great competing
companies - General Electric and Westinghouse - whose own rivalries
extend to the present day. The rivalry between Edison and Tesla
helped define the nature of the electrical power industry in the
United States, the electrical appliance and entertainment
industries, and sustained itself from the 1890s through the 1930s
when Edison finally died. Tesla himself died in New York in 1943.
Tesla was an acknowledged genius, a prodigy whose predictions and
patents marked him to be a man way
ahead of his time. Even before Czech playwright Karel Capek coined
the word “robot” in his play R.U.R. and
American science fiction writer Isaac Asimov invented the term
“robotics” in his book of short stories I Robot, Nikola
Tesla had created the first “automaton” or mechanical soldier
and a robotically controlled model boat before the turn of the
century. Yet Tesla, a tall, dark, brooding, but
well-educated and cultured Serbian, often times turned out to be his
own worst enemy.
He became a millionaire
when he was only thirty-two but ran through enormous sums of money
put up by some of the great industrialists
and financiers of his day, including George Westinghouse, J.
Pierpont Morgan, A. Stanford White, and John Jacob Astor, only to
die destitute and penniless in his room at the New Yorker Hotel.
This was the man, however, whose ideas the scientists at ARPA turned
to when faced not only with the threat of the first Soviet Sputnik
orbiting the earth, but the even worse threat that the EBEs, seeing
and hearing the Russian satellite, would be convinced that if
colonization of the Earth was their goal, it was the Russians who
would help them accomplish it. What was Tesla’s idea?
Consistently, throughout the 1890s, Tesla wrote and lectured about
his theory of the wireless transmission of electrical current. Like
Marconi’s wireless radio, which revolutionized communication,
Tesla’s wireless electrical power supply would revolutionize the
growth and development of entire cities. Not just as an
extrapolation of wireless power but as a theory in its own right,
Tesla reported that he had experimented with a beam of electrical
energy, directed without wires, that could excite the atoms in a
substance to the point where the substance, even though it could
resist heat in conventional ovens, would break down. Such a beam
weapon, Tesla said, would revolutionize warfare. In theory at least,
it was a very similar device, the laser cutting tool, that the Army
retrieval team picked out of the scrub at the Roswell crash site.
One of the astounding aspects about the life and career of Nikola
Tesla isn’t just that he theorized about these projects, he actually
experimented with them, many times succeeding in very intriguing
ways, and then patented the important inventions that derived from
his experiments. But his ideas were so radical for the time, so far
ahead of anything his contemporaries were thinking, that they were
dismissed as either the uncontrolled ravings of a mad scientist or
so wildly impractical that they amounted to nothing.
Yet, when you
review the patents in his name, his descriptions of the systems he
designed, and actual results of the public experiments or
exhibitions he conducted, you find that even the most lunatic
sounding ideas like his turn of the century plans for a vertical
takeoff and landing bomber actually looked as though they should
work. In some cases, like his atom smasher, they worked better and
more efficiently than the modern equivalents of these machines when
they first appeared.
When I realized that at the turn of the century
Tesla had actually demonstrated a model of a remotely piloted boat
that could be controlled by radio from a distance and deliver
torpedoes right into the heart of an enemy fleet, I was amazed that
the navy hadn’t jumped on the idea in advance of World War I and
even more amazed that we hadn’t ordered the design from Tesla in
World War II when we knew the Germans were already experimenting
with one. Yet today, we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars
to develop remotely piloted vehicle similar in concept to the one
Tesla had designed almost a hundred years ago at less than a
thousandth of today’s cost.
And in 1915, Tesla had written the U.S. War Department that in
addition to his remotely piloted boat, they should urgently consider
his remotely piloted “aerial machines devoid of sustaining planes
[wings], ailerons, propellers, and other eternal attachments, which
will be capable of immense speeds, and are very likely to furnish
powerful arguments for peace in the near future. Such a machine,
sustained and propelled entirely by reaction [thrust rocket
engines], can be controlled either mechanically or by wireless
energy [radio controlled]. “
Tesla’s description of the remote
controlled rocket powered guided missile, which was even more
advanced than the German V2, is the forerunner of today’s modern
ICBMs whose targeting information can be relayed to them after
they’re in flight. As a tactical weapon, Tesla had described, over
half a century earlier, the army’s remotely piloted TOW antitank
missile that destroyed Saddam’s armored divisions in the Persian
Gulf.
Tesla’s experiments with particle beam generation and direction were
well under way during the 1890s when he was invited to set up an
experimental station that would prove that he could transmit
electrical power using the earth’s atmosphere as the medium instead
of a heavy cable. If power could be so directed, Tesla’s backers,
who included industrialist George Westinghouse and financier J. P.Morgan, agreed, it would revolutionize the infant electrical power
industry and make whoever controlled the source of power rich beyond
anyone’s imagination. Tesla believed he could control that power
and, with about $60,000 from his backers, traveled to Colorado
Springs, not coincidentally today’s home of the Air Force North
American Air Defense Command (NORAD) and the United States Army’s
Space Command, to build and demonstrate his power transmission
station.
Tesla described his experiments in an article he wrote for the
thirtieth anniversary edition of the Electrical World and Engineer
in1904. He said,
“Not only was it practicable to send telegraphic
messages any distances without wires, as I recognized long ago, but
also able to impress upon the entire globe the faint modulations of
the human voice, far more still, to transmit power, in unlimited
amounts, to any terrestrial distance and almost without any loss. “
In Tesla’s vision, electrical transmission stations would circle the
planet, storing and relaying power from station to station so as to
provide electrical power to the entire planet without the use of
above or below the ground power lines, feeder cables, and
transmission lines. He also saw that a network of relay stations
could receive and retransmit the world’s breaking news stories
instantly around the globe to pocket receivers, “a cheap and simple
device which might be carried in one’s pocket, “ which would record
special messages sent to it.
Tesla had described a modern microwave
cellular telephone and remote pager system. He also said that with
relay stations like this, “ the entire Earth will be converted into
a huge brain, as it were capable of response in every one of its
parts, “ in other words, an Internet. During his time, Tesla truly
made history by showing that energy could be directed as a beam
without wires.
In 1899, it was rumored that Tesla was experimenting with a “death
ray” in Colorado Springs. But Tesla never owned up to it, and in
fact remained uncommunicative about any experiments he had conducted
with rays even when English, German, Russian, and American
scientists in the 1920s were applying for patents on the invention.
In the 1930s, however, Tesla wrote in his monograph that he had made
a new discovery that would make war obsolete because every nation
would have the same power to destroy each other’s military weapons.
It would require a large facility to generate the power, but such a
facility would be able to stop entire armies and their machines as
far away as two hundred miles in all directions.
“It will, “ he
wrote, “provide a wall of power offering an insuperable obstacle
against any effective aggression. “
But it was not at all a death “ray,“ he said, because, as
scientists working as recently as the 1970s realized, rays
tend to diffuse over
distance and something is necessary to maintain the intensity of the
focus. Rather, he said,
“My apparatus projects particles which may
be relatively large or of microscopic dimensions, enabling us to
convey to a small area at a great distance trillions of times more
energy than is possible with rays of any kind. Many thousands of
horse power can thus be transmitted by a stream thinner than a hair,
so that nothing can resist. “
Although Tesla went on to describe how this beam will improve
television transmission and the projection of images, he was really
describing a directed, accelerated particle beam weapon that the
folks at ARPA were struggling to develop over twenty-five years
after Tesla first wrote about it and eleven years after the charred
fragments of a directed-energy apparatus as well as the laser tool
were discovered in the wreckage of the spacecraft at Roswell,
written up by the engineers at the Air Materiel Command, and
sequestered for years in my nut file. We were still trying to
develop a workable beam when I was in the Pentagon in 1962 and only
barely developed a working model in the Reagan administration as
part of the Strategic Defense Initiative program.
But for Tesla, his world in the 1930s rushed toward war. Writing J.
P. Morgan about his vision of an H. G. Wells nightmare of the
destruction of the civilized world through aerial bombardment, Tesla
said that his particle beam weapon could shoot down airplanes in
flight and so protect cities. He made proposals to the Russians to
develop such a weapon because Stalin was afraid of an invasion from
Japan. He also wrote to the British prime minister about the ability
of his beam to protect London from attacks by the Germans. But no
one thought his energy beam weapon practical, not even the
Westinghouse Company, which, if they had advanced him the money to
file for the patents they would probably have controlled, might have
been able to develop the weapon before World War II had Tesla been
able to complete it.
As it was, Tesla’s death ray, his accelerated particle beam in which
subatomic particles were excited by an energy field and directed
toward a specific target at speeds close to the speed of light, was
never developed during his lifetime. However, the mere hint that
Tesla’s theories might have found their way to the Germans or the
Russians so concerned the federal government, especially the FBI,
that when Tesla died in January 1943, the FBI immediately seized all
his papers, schematics, writings, and designs and turned them over
to the Office of Alien Property, where they were officially sealed
until released to the Yugoslavian ambassador, who was a
representative of Tesla’s estate.
They remained in storage in
Manhattan until the early1950s, when they were returned to
Yugoslavia. Yet even after their return, the Yugoslavian government
believed that the FBI had rifled through Tesla’s papers when they
were in storage and had micro filmed them or photographed them. J.
Edgar Hoover denied this, but photostatic copies of photographs of
Tesla’s papers were in the possession of the Army R&D’s Foreign
Technology desk when I took over in 1961. How did they get there?
Tesla’s property was officially seized by the U.S. government two
days after his death. Even though the FBI knew that Tesla had
publicly said he’d perfected his death ray - there was no
independent verification of this - no steps had been taken by the
government to prevent him from transferring his plans for the death
ray to a foreign powers. Vice President Henry Wallace, however, told
the FBI that the government had a critical interest in whatever
papers Tesla had and instructed the FBI to seize them any way they
could.
That was why the FBI directed the Office of Alien Property to enter
Tesla’s hotel room on January 9, 1943, and take possession. Tesla’s
other papers that were already in a storage warehouse were seized by
the OAP as well.
Over the next couple of weeks in January 1943, after a flurry of
diplomatic activity between the Yugoslavian embassy and J. Edgar
Hoover’s office, the FBI turned the entire matter over to the Office
of Alien Property, which also wanted to get out from under the
diplomatic tug of war between Belgrade and the State Department. The
OAP, still reacting to the vice president’s instructions that papers
that could give aid to the enemy could not leave the country,
contacted the chairman of what would become the Office of R&D, the
National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific
Research and Development, Dr. John Trump. Dr. Trump examined the
papers, determined that not much of them were useful, but decided to
make photocopies of a number of papers Tesla wrote during the years
preceding his death.
Trump also wrote abstracts of those papers,
which included an undated monograph by Nikola Tesla entitled “New
Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy through Natural
Media, “ Tesla’s description of how he would generate and direct a
high energy beam of electrons at a target. Though dismissed by Trump
as unworkable, the paper nevertheless described Tesla’s latest
thinking about a directed energy weapon, the accelerated particle
beam device.
With the OAP’s making photographs and abstracts of Tesla’s papers,
the entire Tesla property remained in storage until it was sent back
to Belgrade in the 1950s. That should have put an end to the matter.
However, in 1945, just after the war ended, the Air Technical
Service Command at Wright Field outside of Dayton, Ohio, sought
copies of the Tesla papers from the Office of Alien Property in
Washington and sent a military courier to take possession of them
and bring them back to Wright. Although there was some
correspondence between the OAP and the Air Technical Service Command
over the next two years regarding the disposition of the papers, at
least one of Gen.
Nathan Twining’s officers at the Air Materiel
Command contacted the Office of Alien Property in November1947 to
tell them that the AMC at Wright Field had possession of the Tesla
papers and would maintain possession of them at least until after
January 1, 1948. Thereafter, the papers, including Tesla’s own
monograph on his accelerated particle beam weapon, seem to have
completely disappeared - until they appeared in my OCRD files
in1961. But that was only one of the copies.
At least one other copy of Tesla’s monograph had remained in the
possession of the working group under General Twining and had made
its way to the Advanced Research Projects Agency in Washington over
the course of the next ten years. It was pulled out when the working
group realized that upon the launch of Sputnik, the United States
had absolutely no defense against war in space being initiated by
the Russians, nor against the EBEs. We had one vital clue, however,
about the only possible process that could interfere with the
electromagnetic field drive we suspected the aliens were using: a
directed particle energy beam weapon that could disrupt the
electromagnetic wave formation around the spacecraft and penetrate
the antigravity field. And we didn’t even have to microwave the
spacecraft by exciting the molecules in the composite material.
Because the accelerated particle weapon carried with it a powerful
electromagnetic pulse, the effect of this EMP - the same effect that EMPs have on any electrical equipment -
was to disrupt the antigravity gravity field by
destroying the integrity of the electromagnetic wave of the
spacecraft. In this way, without exploding the
spacecraft, the particle beam could force it to crash by destroying
its ability to counter gravity. In its role as a
more conventional weapon against
incoming warheads or enemy satellites, besides destroying any
electronics within the weapon through its electromagnetic pulse, the
particle beam excites the atoms in the target, causes them to
disperse, and the target explodes. In this way the particle beam has
a dual destructive capability.
Tesla understood that the particle beam weapon was just like a bolt
of lightning, with very much the same destructive power only much
more controlled. A lightning bolt is a massive beam of electrons.
Scientists have theorized that you can achieve the same destructive
force with a beam of protons. Still other scientists have argued
that because electrons carry a negative charge and protons a
positive charge, they are vulnerable to distortion within the
earth’s magnetic field because the beam will either be attracted to
the opposite charge or repelled by the same charge. In addition, a
beam of like particles will contain a natural dispersive force
because the like charges in the beam will repel each other.
Entire
hydrogen atoms are electrically neutral, however, and make a
workable beam for any weapon designed to be used outside of the
earth’s atmosphere because neutral beams can be directed over the
very long distances that the beam from a space weapon will have to
travel. Also, a neutral beam doesn’t require the energy overhead to
control dispersion because within a neutral beam the particles are
not charged and will not repel each other.
Research and experiments on prototype models of a particle beam
weapon conducted after 1980 defined two basic types of weapons :
those that would be used exclusively in space, or exo-atmospheric
weapons, and those that would be deployed on Earth against targets
like incoming missile warheads. These are called endo-atmospheric
weapons. Each has enough different characteristics to make them
separate weapons, but the similarities of a particle beam weapon are
common to both types. For example, as I began work on the
development of basic research into particle beam weapons, my
scientists told me that the weapon has to have six basic
characteristics that allow it to kill the target.
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First, the beam must travel at such a high velocity - near the speed
of light - that targets cannot evade it. Even UFOs travel slower
than the speed of light so that in a chase, the particle beam will
always win. At the same time, the faster the beam travels, the
shorter the burst you have to have in order for it to disrupt the
target.
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Second, the beam has to stay on the target long enough for it to do
its damage. We estimated that if we were bringing down an incoming
enemy warhead, a powerful beam would disrupt the warhead’s ability
to detonate almost immediately and destroy it within a few seconds.
In space, where distances are greater, the beam would have to stay
on the target for a longer period of time, but it, too, would
disrupt the wave propagation of the spacecraft after a very short
interval. Even if it didn’t destroy the spacecraft, it would
certainly render it incapable of carrying out any offensive mission.
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Third, you have to be able to aim the beam immediately for it to
have any effectiveness, especially if you’re
targeting an incoming multiple reentry warhead vehicle such as the
type deployed by the Russians and us. Unless
you took out the bus, the vehicle that carries and aims the separate
warheads while still in orbit, you’d have to fire
the beam at each of the separate vehicles very quickly in succession
after they’ve split up in orbit and begun
their separate reentry trajectories. Thus, you’d have to aim and
fire, aim and fire, aim and fire, all within a matter
of seconds and making sure each target was destroyed.
A single
fifty-kiloton detonation over New York City, for example, would
paralyze the entire American financial industry and immediately
change life as we know it for a considerable period of time. A
multiple reentry vehicle launching four 60-kiloton warheads from
orbit on separate trajectories for detonation over Boston, New York,
Washington, and Miami would cripple the United States for the
ensuing five to seven years. And the Russians wouldn’t have to
launch such a missile; it could easily come from China, North Korea,
or even one of the Middle East fanatic terrorist countries like
Libya with lots of oil money to spend. A particle beam weapon that
could rapidly aim and fire to take out all four warheads either
before or immediately upon reentry would effectively protect the
United States and deter any country or terrorist group.
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Fourth, the beam must penetrate the surface of the target in order
for it to cause any real damage to the mechanism inside the warhead.
Therefore, once the beam lands on the skin of the target, its
excitation of the target’s molecules must take place not just on the
outer hull or skin but deep inside the vehicle’s electronics.
Therefore, even if it doesn’t explode, it may either break apart
into larger pieces or simply seize up and fall to earth as a dud.
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Fifth, the particle beam must also be able to kill through its
electromagnetic pulse, which will render the
target’s electronics inoperable by either throwing off its
navigation or destroying its
detonation program and turning it into a dud. Used as a space
weapon, the electromagnetic pulse will have a similar effect on
enemy satellites, killing their control programs and rendering their
computer guidance and orientation programs inoperable and blinding
them completely. Upon enemy spaceships, the pulse would act as a
purely defensive weapon that forces the ship to withdraw because its
wave propagation device is rendered inoperable.
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And sixth, a particle beam, unlike a laser, can operate in any
weather and under any atmospheric conditions. Lasers bounce off
clouds and fog and are weakened by anything less than perfectly
clear weather. Particle beams penetrate and can operate under all
conditions.
As the scientists back in the 1950s evaluated what they would have
to do to develop a working prototype, they understood the need for a
huge power generator to accelerate the particles necessary to
generate the beam, some form of target painting capability not only
to acquire the target quickly and aim the weapon but to reaim in
case the first shot is a miss. After I left the Pentagon, work
continued on the theory underlying this type of weapon but not much
was done to assemble the very expensive supporting technologies such
as the atomic particle accelerators, targeting computers, high
energy lasers, and a way to make the whole thing portable.
Today, however, low energy versions of these directed energy
weapons, partly the great-grandchildren of the
Tesla beam and partly the descendant of the directed energy
apparatus from the Roswell craft, are currently on
the market for installation in police cars as a weapon against
fleeing vehicles as a way to shut down a high
speed chase before it even starts. The police officer in the
pursuing vehicle aims his directed energy particle
beam at the fleeing vehicle and turns it on. The electromagnetic
pulse from the stream of electrons interferes with
the target’s ignition system in the engine, and the car, deprived of
a flow of electrical power to fire the cylinders,
rolls to a stop.
No more high speed chases on the 11:00 p.m. news
but a more effective and safer way to catch
fleeing suspects in their cars. This was a device developed by the
military initially and, now deployed out of the
Army’s Space Command as a missile mounted kinetic energy beam for
destroying enemy satellites, turned over
to the law enforcement community. But its roots go back to the
vision of Nikola Tesla and to what scientists
believed to be actual pieces of directed energy technology that we
pulled out of the crashed space
vehicle at Roswell, reports about which turned up in the nut file
carted into my office in the Pentagon in 1961 from the Pentagon
basement.
For me the irony has always been in the confluence between the
historic work and discoveries of Nikola Tesla and the technology we
ascertained the extraterrestrials had developed from our evaluation
of the Roswell wreckage. Tesla had experimented with wireless
transmission of energy, and the extraterrestrials seemed to have
employed a type of wireless transmission of energy for navigational
and defensive purposes. Tesla wrote about the theories behind the
distortion or manipulation of a gravitational field through the
propagation of electromagnetic waves, and the extraterrestrials
seemed to have employed just that kind of technology for a
propulsion system.
And Tesla’s descriptions of the theories behind
the death ray he claimed to have perfected ultimately became the
basis for the defensive weapons we deployed to challenge the hostile
intrusions of our airspace by the extraterrestrials. What posed a
threat to us at Roswell and what we eventually learned from Tesla’s
writings became two confluent streams of scientific theory that
eventually became the basis of the Strategic Defense Initiative, an
antiballistic missile and space vehicle weapon.
While scientists from the 1950s through the 1970s argued over the
cost of such a weapon and whether an
antiballistic missile weapon would destabilize the otherwise stable
world of mutual nuclear deterrence, others
who understood the real threat from outer space argued that there
were enemies besides the Soviet Union who
might someday acquire the technology to launch nuclear missiles
against the United States. No one would dare
say that we had to defend ourselves against flying saucers. In fact,
it wasn’t until the election of Ronald Reagan in
1980 that the particle beam weapon received another pulse of life as
part of the hotly debated but ultimately successful strategy of the
Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars.“
Amid the guffaws from
some political quarters and the hand wringing from people who
thought the thing simply cost too much money, President Reagan
managed to prevail. Just the strategy of Star Wars itself and the
limited deployment and testing of some of the components were enough
to put the United States on a wartime footing with the EBEs and show
the Soviets that we finally had a real nuclear deterrent.
The full story behind the SDI and the way it changed the Cold War
and forced the extraterrestrials to change the strategies for this
planet is a story that’s never been told. But as spectacular and
fantastic as it may sound, the story behind the limited deployment
of the SDI is the story of how humanity won its first victory
against a more powerful and technologically superior enemy who
discovered, to whatever version of shock it experiences, that there
was real trouble down on its farm.
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