The Day After Roswell (34 page)

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 Material 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 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 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.

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 re-am 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.