The Day After Roswell (33 page)

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 Material 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.