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 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 November 1947 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 in 1961. 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 exoatmospheric weapons, and those that would be deployed on Earth against targets like incoming missile warheads. These are called endoatmospheric 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.
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.
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.
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 cou
ntries 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.
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.
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.
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 their 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.
CHAPTER 17
Star Wars
Toward the spring of 1962, General Trudeau told me of his intention to retire. He was not going to be the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, he’d been told. The old man had charged up too many hills during his years in the army, rifle in hand, and fired back in the face of the enemy. Whatever he felt inside him, and General Trudeau was only human and nothing more, he never showed fear. He was unrelenting in the execution of his orders, unyielding when people opposed him, and he never ducked away from a fight. Those who knew him either respected or feared him, but they never discounted him. A West Point graduate, he was born into a generation of U.S. military officers who had absolutely no doubts about what was right and what was wrong, and he marched through two wars and a series of commands, including the head of U.S. Army Intelligence, secure in the knowledge that he was on the right side.
These were great qualities in a wartime commander, but, as both General Trudeau and I found out, they could be the very things that make you vulnerable in a Cold War army of politicians angling for power as they fought an enemy who could not be seen and whose presence was only indirectly felt.
“There are no more Pork Chop Hills, Phil,” General Trudeau told me after he had learned that General Maxwell Taylor with the support of the army leadership had passed him over for the South Vietnam command. It meant that this was his last command and that he would retire as lieutenant general. “And I’m afraid this is a war the army’s going to fight by means of a political process instead of on the killing field.”
“We would win it if we were going there, General,” I said, fury welling up in my chest. “You and I know what we learned in Korea.”
Maybe the general could see my face getting flushed because he said, “No, we probably would have gotten court-martialed because of what we learned in Korea. Just think what they would do to us if we were to win the war.” Then he laughed in a way that told me he was looking forward to his retirement. “We would have made the Communists look bad. You know you can’t do that, Phil.”
Even as we were speaking that afternoon toward th
e end of the summer, another Soviet trawler was heaving to at the entrance to the port of Havana, awaiting instructions for the off-loading of its cargo while another one of our surveillance planes was circling high overhead snapping away its photos of the tarpaulins coming off the IRBMs laid out on the ship’s afterdeck. I didn’t know it yet, but a sequence of events was unfolding that would swirl me into one of the biggest controversies of my life just as the chilling truth about the attempts to colonize our planet and the harvesting of human beings and animals that were still going on made itself all too clear. A showdown was coming. It was just over the horizon. No one could see it, but a handful of us knew that something was stirring the waters just below the surface.
General Trudeau was saying his good-byes and started counting the days until he would change his uniform for civilian clothes and his office in the Pentagon for a corporate executive suite that befitted his experience as the commanding officer of some of our military’s most important divisions. He had been at the helm of R&D for six years after having commanded Army Intelligence for three years before that. Although the general didn’t explicitly comment much on the incredible facts we had uncovered in the Roswell file because he considered it just part of his job, he did joke about it from time to time with his old friend Senator Strom Thurmond. More than once, I would take the back door into his inner office only to find Senator Thurmond and General Trudeau sitting on his couch and looking me up and down as I walked in.
“Art,” Senator Thurmond would drawl, barely hiding his Cheshire cat smile, “what spooky things you think old Phil’s been into?”
The Day After Roswell Page 31