Wizard: the life and times of Nikola Tesla

Marc Seifer
Birch Lane Press, 1996.
£15.95 (plus £2 postage) from Counter Productions, PO Box 556, London SE5 0RL.

In the last 15-20 years the name Nikola Tesla has been one you bump against whilst navigating a mire of (often) unreliable books churned out on the unified field, free energy, HAARP electro-magnetics, and mind control. Defining (a) what Nikola Tesla actually did, and (b) if he can be rescued from the cranks, is one of the great Everests of historical research. Based on this scholarly and readable biography, now in its third edition and recommended by the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, Computing Review and Electronic Engineering Times, a strong case emerges for a major rehabilitation of Tesla. It gives the serious reader 542 pages of photographs, diagrams, footnotes, primary sources, appendices, a vast bibliography and an index on the life and times of the man whose claim to having invented (and patented) most of contemporary electrical technology seems unimpeachable.

Seifer covers Tesla’s life (1856-1943) in voluminous detail. In his prime, roughly 1885 to 1910, he had enormous successes. This included the invention of radio, fluorescent lighting, alternating current as a means of power supply, and, triumphantly (Tesla thought) the use of radio waves to transmit power anywhere in the world without the expense of cabling, power generation facilities etc.(1) This proved his undoing. The US monopolists and financiers who originally funded and encouraged his work (J. P. Morgan, Bernard Baruch, Rockefeller, Astor etc) ditched him at this point.(2) They owned contemporary electrical power generating and distribution facilities, made a lot of money out of them and did not wish to be put out of business. There is a case for saying that if Tesla did not exactly invent ‘free energy’ then he certainly devised very low cost energy only to be blocked by vested interests. After this débacle he had difficulty in enforcing his patents against financially and legally superior rivals such as the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), a conglomerate put together by Marconi and David Sarnoff.(3) (A protracted court battle to reestablish Tesla’s preeminence was decided, in his favour, a few months after his death.)

Post 1920, Tesla developed and refined viable plans for solar power and particle beam weapons (‘death rays’); and investigated human psychic and telepathic capabilities (‘thought transference’) by attaching TV equipment to the retina of the eye.(4) He was also an advocate of electric therapy as a means of increasing human intelligence.(5) Stopped by Marconi, Sarnoff and RCA from commercially exploiting his work in the USA, and elsewhere, Tesla offered his data and inventions to foreign governments. These included the USSR — who bought details of the particle beam weapon from him in 1937. Tesla was kept under FBI surveillance from the 1920s onward.

For an academic work, Seifer’s book bravely treads in areas other more traditional authors would avoid. He shows the interest prominent scientific pioneers had (and still have?) in investigating and trying to measure and define the ‘paranormal’.(6) He also concludes that there is, indeed, a ‘trail of top secret research …… which led to Star Wars’ which can be traced back to Tesla.

Tesla died, aged 86, on 8 January 1943. A representative of RCA (his long standing adversary) was in his apartment within an hour, and, according to a later FBI investigation, removed some important documents. The FBI advised that the US Government should impound the 80 crates of scientific papers that Tesla had amassed. As the documents included plans for a particle beam weapon/death ray being sought by German agents, this was done. Seifer says the instruction was given by Henry Wallace, a friend of Tesla’s, who served as Vice President of the USA 1940-1944.(7)

On 9 January 1943 the Office of Alien Property (Tesla’s next of kin was a Yugoslav citizen — i.e. an alien national), assisted by the FBI, the ONI and Military Intelligence – quite a crowd, really, to fit into a small apartment – took the 80 crates into ‘Government’ custody. The following month they were unpacked and the papers examined by staff from the ‘Microwave Sub-Committee’ of the National Defence Research Committee — which was based, in turn, at the High Voltage Research Laboratory. Publicly their view was that the documents were of little contemporary use. The reader, like Seifer, will find this dubious given that the bulk of the papers remain classified as Top Secret and are not available for public inspection.

In January 1946 they were moved to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Here a team of young scientists worked — presumably for several decades thereafter — on a practical application of the theories. This alone would seem to demonstrate that the papers were not of ‘little contemporary use’ but contained advanced scientific data that would help the US establish a military and technological dominance over potential rivals at the start of the Cold War.

Wright-Patterson was not, of course, merely a place for academic investigations. It was often the first stop in the USA for a number of ex-Nazi specialists, including Alexander Lippisch (the designer of a supersonic flying wing fighter built from synthetic materials that made it invisible to radar)(8) who arrived the same month as the Tesla papers, and General Dornberger (ex-head of the Peenemunde complex) who arrived a year later to work on ‘classified rocketry’. This, presumably, was the same project with which his former deputy Werner von Braun, and around 200 of his former staff, had been busying themselves down in New Mexico from April 1946. The complete secrecy that shrouded the investigations into Tesla’s inventions also extended to Dornberger and von Braun as part of ‘Operation Paperclip’, the importing into the USA of ex-NSDAP technical specialists, many of whom were wanted in Europe for war crimes.

This secrecy was preserved by a number of methods. In the case of Tesla, Seifer provides evidence that his (very) numerous publications and manuscripts were systematically removed from libraries and the public domain throughout the ’40s and ’50s.(9) Tesla became the legendary ‘forgotten man’ and finding out anything about his life and work became exceedingly difficult — unless you worked at Wright-Patterson.

It’s that man again

Seifer says in his introduction that one of the (many) people he consulted in writing his book was Dr Andrija Puharich. Indeed, based on several references to Puharich and his work in the text, a strong case emerges for serious researchers and historians to reevaluate the activities of this elusive individual. From both Seifer and other material it seems that efforts were made post-1945 to keep alive various of the more obscure lines of research initiated by Tesla. This started in 1948 when Puharich set up ‘the Round Table Foundation’, to carry out research into the paranormal, with funding from Henry Wallace.(10) Wallace visited the Foundation frequently during 1949/1950 whilst Puharich carried out experiments with an Irish medium, Eileen Garrett. Other members of the Foundation (which had a sideline carrying out research for the US military into the effects of radiation) included Alice Bouverie and Arthur Young.(11)

Seifer says that in 1951 Puharich and Garrett came to the UK where they visited John Hammond, another former colleague of Tesla’s.(12) Puharich and Hammond rigged up a device to measure the telepathic abilities of Garrett using electro-magnetic waves. The direct connection to Tesla and his work in all of this seems undeniable. The following year Puharich presented a paper to the Essentia Corporation, in New York, on the uses of extra-sensory perception in psychological warfare. From 1953 to 1955 he was recalled to the US military, serving at the US Army Chemical Centre, Edgewood, Maryland. This puts Puharich in the same place, at the same time, as Dr Sidney Gottlieb, the man who ran MK-ULTRA, researching and using radiation, electric shocks, ‘harassment devices’ – a logical, albeit unprincipled, use of many of the techniques and devices established by Tesla.(13) Other MK-ULTRA projects included the development of electromagnetic weapons that could immobilise vehicles — a characteristic often described by those who report a ‘close encounter’ with a UFO. They were tested on ‘involuntary human subjects’ and ‘ethnic minorities’ (Native Americans? Hispanics? Black Americans?).

Puharich’s role in this remains unclear. His work concerned ‘shamanic drugs’ — i.e. altered states of consciousness caused by LSD, hallucinogenics, and various types of mushroom found in Mexico. By 1956 Puharich was in Mexico meeting people who claimed to have been contacted by UFOs. Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, Seifer reminds us, the FBI solemnly kept under surveillance any group that continued to promote Tesla, including the bizarre ‘Space People’.(14)

It is tempting to speculate on Puharich’s role during this period. He clearly had a function in investigating paranormal and extrasensory activities and capabilities for the US military. Though we may argue about the scale of his involvement, he was either part of the MK-ULTRA programme, or at the very least, investigating the same areas for the same people. He also seems to have been in charge, via the Round Table Foundation, of taking forward specific areas of Tesla research and in monitoring the wacky fringes of cults and contemporary fads. This eventually led him to visit Brazil to study ‘faith healing’,(15) to patent many of his own inventions facilitating the use of radio waves, to work for the US Atomic Energy Authority, and, in 1970, to visit Israel, at the request of the CIA, to assess the abilities of Uri Geller. During this time Puharich worked closely with Sir John Whitmore.(16) They visited Warsaw in 1974 where they set up a radio receiver, supposedly to receive signals about an imminent alien invasion of Earth. The Communist bloc took a dim view of this, considering (correctly in the case of Puharich) that they were CIA agents and expelling them.

Seifer does not dwell on these aspects, concluding instead with a review of developments in the Tesla area since the ’80s. After Watergate and the demise of Nixon, the US political and military establishment tried to distance itself from some of the wilder aspects of its activities during the Cold War. In 1975 President Ford appointed Nelson Rockefeller(17) to investigate the CIA’s abuses of human rights via MK-ULTRA and related activities. By the time Carter became President (1976) other areas were also subjected to scrutiny: the use of Nazi war criminals, a whole range of psy-ops, the Kennedy assassinations etc. In 1978 things became too tricky even for Puharich. His home (where he was training 20 or so young people in ESP/’Remote Viewing’) was destroyed in an arson attack. He moved to Mexico.

The Reagan years finally brought Tesla concepts back into the public domain (though without his name being mentioned) with the abortive Star Wars project — the siting of large numbers of beam weapons in space to defend the US from a Communist nuclear strike — as well as the suspected use, at RAF Greenham Common, of electromagnetic weaponry to harass women anti-nuclear protesters.(18) We could also note — as something of a diversion — the coincidental (?) appearance of a large number of increasingly bizarre and unverifiable science fiction-style stories in the US, and world media post 1980.(19) In this congenial atmosphere Puharich returned to the US. He spent his final years working with Whitmore at the Esalen Institute, in California, on personal development programmes for ex-Communist public figures from the old Soviet bloc……helping them make a smooth transition from the bad old days of the command economy etc. to the new era of world markets, information technology and so on. The Esalen Institute runs the US wing of the Gorbachev Foundation for this purpose.

After reading Seifer’s book and having pieced together research done in the same area by a number of other authors and periodicals in recent years, this reader is struck by the possibility of two further lines of enquiry. Firstly, if we accept the case of Tesla as the major technological/electrical innovator of the last hundred years, then we ought to review how much of his power generation through radio waves/ground signals is feasible, irrespective of the cost to the corporations that now run our largely privatised public utilities. It would clearly be to the benefit of everyone, and the planet with regard to fossil fuel consumption, if it were possible to transmit electrical power this way. Secondly, a full investigation of the extent (and effect) of the general disinformation about Tesla projects should be undertaken including a study of how and why the disinformation, rather than the facts, was kept so much in the public eye. Seifer’s book provides a firm basis for both making these claims and carrying out these enquiries — a fascinating read.

Notes

1. Tesla’s way of achieving this was to transmit electrical impulses via ground signals…..a similar technique to that now being evaluated by the secret HAARP project.
2. Morgan, Rockefeller and Astor were great financial moguls of their time. Baruch (1870-1965) is a somewhat more interesting figure, serving as an economic adviser to the Versailles Peace Commission in 1919 and going on, in old age, to be US representative to the UN Atomic Energy Commission, in 1946. In Seifer’s book Andrija Puharich attributes the withdrawal of funding for Tesla’s power generation scheme to Baruch, who advised Morgan to cease involvement in the project in 1903, on the grounds that Tesla would destroy capitalist monopolies, if successful.
3. David Sarnoff (1891-1972) established both RCA and its subsidiary NBC. Like Baruch he also worked on political projects, in his case the Young Plan for German reparations (1929). In 1939 Sarnoff inaugurated US television transmission, in 1944/1946 he served in the US Army as a special adviser to Eisenhower. In this capacity he visited Stockholm in August 1946 to study and report on the Ghost Rockets ‘that had been sighted over Sweden and Finland…..the beginning of the post-war UFO craze’. In the ’50s he supported various UN initiatives including the ‘Freedom to Listen’ and ‘Crusade for Freedom’ campaigns. As a young man Sarnoff knew Tesla well.
4. Tesla filed his patents for a ‘particle beam weapon’ in 1915 and built a working model — that he reputedly stored in his hotel room — in 1933/1934.
5. Tesla carried out an experiment, in 1894, at the request of the New York City School Board. It involved the use of electrical impulses inside a classroom used by ‘backward’ children aimed at raising their intelligence. The experiment was, apparently, successful.
6. Seifer gives the example of Edison who spent a great deal of time and money on trying to design a telephone that could contact the dead.
7. Sacked from Truman’s cabinet in September 1946 after a major disagreement over foreign policy (i.e. he didn’t support the escalation of the ‘Cold War’) he ran, disastrously, as an Independent candidate in the 1948 Presidential elections. Tesla wrote the forward for Wallace’s essay ‘The Future of the Common Man’ (1940).
8. This was the Lippisch Delta V1V2, a glider prototype of which was captured by US forces in 1945.
9. Seifer’s source is Ralph Bergstresser, an ex-RCA employee, who says that Tesla gave him some of his research papers in 1941/1942. Bergstresser later worked in the OSS.
10. There is an interesting chapter on the life and work of Puharich in the otherwise unfathomable Stargate Conspiracy by Picknett & Prince (London, 1999).
11. Bouverie (née Astor) was the daughter of William Waldorf Astor, the owner of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York where Tesla lived 1897-1920. Young was a major shareholder of the Bell Telephone Co and also funded similar areas of research to Wallace and Puharich.
12. John Hammond (1888-1965) invented various remote control devices and also ‘a new high speed method of transmitting intelligence over TV channels’. He knew and worked with Tesla pre-1930.
13. Sidney Gottlieb (1918-1999) had quite an obituary in The Times of 12 March 1999 ……. flirted with almost every religion …… enthusiastic user of LSD …..head of the CIA technical services division from ’53 to ’76 organising various assassination plots…. running a brothel in San Francisco in the ’60’s ….. and conducting horrendous medical experiments.
14. ‘The Space People’, active in the ’50s, were linked to an Arthur Matthews who had corresponded with Tesla 20 years previously. Very much the other end of the Tesla spectrum, they advocated a weird mixture of Theosophy and anti-Communism, maintaining the inventor had really come to Earth from Venus in a flying saucer etc etc. Seifer says their group contained a number of FBI informers.
15. Puharich was invited to Brazil by John Laurance (a former RCA employee) who worked for NASA.
16. It is fascinating comparing the current and 1975 Who’s Who entries on Whitmore. The basics are the same in both: born 1937, educated at Eton and Sandhurst, later a successful racing car driver. In ’75 he was living in Switzerland and listed his occupation as ‘tax exile’. His current address is Tonbridge, Kent (he stopped being a ‘tax exile’ during the Thatcher years) and is ‘active in personal development and social change’. Currently a Senior Partner of Performance Consultants Ltd., he has written a number of books including The Winning Mind (1987), Need, Greed or Freedom (1997) and Mind Games (1998). What we have here is a chain linking Tesla, advanced technology, psychic research, corporate management and western military intelligence. Whitmore was supposedly the conduit for CIA funds to Puharich in the ’70s.
17. Rockefeller’s father had a direct involvement with Tesla and it seems reasonable that Rockefeller Jnr may have known the origin of many of the techniques used by MK ULTRA.
18. Recently declassified FBI documents — from 1945 — state that the reason for both appropriating and continuing secret research on Tesla’s particle beam weapon was that it offered the only known defence against atomic weapons. (Star Wars in 1945? Apparently so. Given that any atom bomb in the ’40s and early ’50s would have had to be dropped by an aircraft, the object would have been to develop a laser that could shoot down the aircraft carrying the bomb at a distance of 30-40 miles, or even greater, thus defending target areas from Nagasaki/Hiroshima style devastation).
19. The Roswell case was first extensively publicised in 1980 by Berlitz and Moore. Stories appeared about alien bodies and crashed UFO’s being stored at Wright-Patterson AFB in 1981/ 1982, followed by the alleged ‘Majestic 12’ documents (1985). Whilst there is no reliable evidence of any of this, there is, of course, evidence of Tesla’s papers being stored at Wright-Patterson and diligently worked on.