The Lost Pleiad

by Sesh Heri

  “We?” Amelia Earhart asked.

  “Agents of Majestic Seven keep track of the Martians on earth,” Tesla said. “One thing is clear, however, the Nazis have made the re-engineering of the Bell their top military weapons project. They have people like Walter Gerlach working on it, so you can see that they mean business. The very name of the ‘S.S.’ Schwartz Sonne is in reference to their whole program of re-engineering the Bell, for Schwartz Sonne means ‘Black Sun,’ the Galactic Center, and it is the resonate connection between the Galactic Center and the spherical time modulators on earth to which the Bell acts as a key— a key to time itself.”

  “Then the Bell is the key to our human fate,” Amelia Earhart said.

  “Indeed it is,” Tesla said.

  “It’s the most dangerous weapon in the galaxy,” Admiral Nimitz said.

  “The power of the galaxy itself,” Tesla said, ‘enthroned at its dark, occulted center. But to tap that power, the Germans must first find the correct sequence of frequencies at which to electrically pulse the Bell, and it is this they have been attempting to do for the last several years by sampling the frequencies of time around our planet.”

  “Sampling time?” Amelia Earhart asked.

  “Yes,” Tesla said. “They have done this by drawing electricity from selected sites around the globe, and then recording the frequencies of electrical resistance at each site. The frequencies of resistance can then be compared and correlated with the electrical resistance frequencies of other sites, and a comprehensive topology of earth-based time nodes can be mapped in three spatial dimensions and nine non-spatial dimensions. This map will allow them to travel at will through time, space, and several non-spatial dimensions. The Germans have carried out this mapping of time by operating their version of the Bell from an underground installation in the Harz Mountains. From this hidden laboratory they are propagating etheric waves around the world that have disrupted power plants, set off earthquakes, and created storms.

  They now seem to have perfected the operation of their Bell to the point that they are making significant advances in interfacing it with the buried time modulator on Guadalcanal. If they complete this provocative action, they will create the ultimate weapon, and no nation on earth, nor any combination of allied nations, will be able to defend against the power of Nazi Germany.”

  “You say, ‘if they complete this action…’” Amelia Earhart said.

  “No,” Admiral Nimitz said. “We don’t know how far along they are in their project. They may have a ways to go…”

  “Or they may be near gaining complete control of the time modulator,” Tesla said.

  “To know for certain we’d have to get very close to the time modulator on Guadalcanal,” Admiral Nimitz said.

  “Why haven’t you done that?” Amelia Earhart asked.

  “We can’t do it in one of our airships,” Admiral Nimitz said. “That would tip off the Germans that we know what they’re doing and compromise a whole network of our intelligence operatives in Germany. Also, one of our airships has already been destroyed when we attempted to approach the site of a German Bell installation on the coast of Antarctica. We need a secret, almost invisible way to get close to the time modulator on Guadalcanal. We need you, Miss Earhart.”

  “What can I do?” Amelia Earhart asked.

  “We need you to fly over the time modulator on Guadalcanal,” Admiral Nimitz said.

  “I see,” Amelia Earhart said.

  “We’re not asking you to do it in an ordinary plane,” Admiral Nimitz said. “It would be in a specially modified version of the Lockheed Electra. The craft you would fly would be capable of being flown as a conventional airfoil, but it would also be equipped with anti-gravity levitators that would allow you to fly directly around where the time modulator is buried, within 5,000 feet of the actual site.”

  Tesla said, “We believe there are numerous force-fields configured in concentric spheres within this 5,000 feet of air space. We have to probe the edge of that space physically in order to record the precise geometry of the field flucuations. We must— you must— enter the actual edge of the field, penetrate its boundary layer.”

  “You’re asking me to fly directly inside the field,” Amelia Earhart said.

  “Yes,” Admiral Nimitz said without a blink. “It’s dangerous. Damned dangerous. As dangerous as it gets.”

  “I understand that, Admiral,” Amelia Earhart said, breaking into a grin.

  “We’ve taken as many precautions as possible,” Tesla said, “by designing the modified Electra with its own resistant force-field shield, but we have no way of knowing for certain what will happen when the craft actually enters the field of the time modulator.”

  “What about my scheduled air route around the world?” Amelia Earhart asked. “How am I to do all this flying through force-fields and do everything else that I have planned?”

  “Those are details we will certainly work out,” Admiral Nimitz said. “But rest assured, in principle, it can be done. We know you can do it— fly around the world, with the whole world watching you— and somewhere along the way fly through a place where no one could believe you could possibly go. The rest is all planning and training, lots of training in the air for you. What do you say?”

  “It is all much more than incredible,” Amelia Earhart said. “It is more than I could have ever hoped to be given.”

  “Does that mean ‘yes’?” George Ade asked.

  “That means ‘YES’ in ten foot tall letters,” Amelia Earhart said. “Yes, yes! Let’s do it.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Daughter of Atlas

  “The rainy Pleiads wester, Orion plunges prone,

  And midnight strikes and hastens,

  And I lie down alone.”

  — Alfred Edward Housman

  Project Electra had its official beginning in 1927. It was in this year that the U.S. Navy created a war game involving a civilian woman airplane pilot. The “aviatrix” would pretend to become lost during an around-the world flight. This would allow the Navy, during the search for her plane, the opportunity to conduct a secret aerial photographic reconnaissance of the South Pacific. All military strategists agreed that activating the secret Project Electra was an absolute necessity; for without it, the United States would be deaf, dumb, and blind in defending against the military threat of the nation of Japan. The idea of such a secret operation, however, began gestating in several U.S. military minds in 1917, and even at this early stage of project conception, Amelia Earhart, in her work during the Great War for the Red Cross, had been secretly observed and considered as a candidate for the role of the “aviatrix.” Later, in the early 1920s, Earhart would be subtly influenced and encouraged to pursue aviation. A similar secret influence and coaching was also occurring at this same time with Charles Lindbergh. The U.S. military, under the most secret advice of psychological experts, sought to build a subconscious association in the minds of the masses between Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh. Later, this association between the aviator and aviatrix— the idea that Amelia Earhart was a female Charles Lindbergh— would be made explicit by Earhart’s husband G.P. Putnam, but he would only be able to assert this analogy because of all the subtle psychological ground-work that had been laid by the military experts years earlier.

  Amelia Earhart had indeed been chosen for her role as the female Lindbergh, perhaps from birth. Information here is limited. But some textual data suggests that Earhart was descended from a royal bloodline through her mother, a lineage possessed of psychic powers and thus suited to the military role planned for her. It is possible that this genetic lineage was a branch of the line from which Joan of Arc was also descended. Top military experts may have sought to take advantage of the magical powers of this bloodline, and so had kept track of Amelia Earhart throughout her childhood and young adulthood. Earhart’s psychic powers were known to her close friends and relatives. Eventually newspaper columnist Drew Pearson would reveal Earhart�
��s powers in the American press.

  By the time Project Electra had become a war game in 1927, several more layers of strategy had been added to the original idea by the more exoteric and less informed military planners. Some of the military strategists believed that using a woman pilot for the secret reconnaissance played upon oriental chauvinism; it was thought that a civilian woman would less likely be suspected by the Japanese as a spy than would be a male pilot. While there may have been some truth to this view, the real reason the decision had been made to use a woman for the secret reconnaissance of the South Pacific had to do with operant magic: a woman’s female astral energy would more successfully resonate with the dual energies of earth and sky, thus making a female pilot the preferable choice for a successful around-the-world flight. Further, the staging of the pilot’s disappearance, evoked the female energy of the “lost Electra” of Greek myth, and thus suggested a strengthening of magical invocation by making the “lost” pilot a woman. The full extent of this magical invocation was not consciously understood by the military strategists, for the full meaning of Project Electra lay dormant in their subconscious minds. But even the limited, conscious understanding of magic and astral powers was held at only the highest levels of military planning, and thus to justify the choice of a woman pilot to the lower levels of the U.S. military echelon, the explanation of playing upon oriental chauvinism was used as a cover.

  As the 1920s drew to a close in one, last, wild roar, military planners were preparing for the next World War— World War II, and among the seeds they were planting at this time in their preparations were those for Project Electra. This took the form of behind-the-scenes support for women aviators in general and for Amelia Earhart in particular. The most overt act of support was the secret military encouragement— through a number of civilian intermediaries— of Mrs. Fredrick Guest’s plan to sponsor a flight across the Atlantic in which she would participate as one of the crew. After Mrs. Guest’s plan was well under way, influence was brought to bear upon her through her family to allow another woman to make the flight. Mrs. Guest bowed to pressure from her family, and the military strategist’s network of operatives was called into action to find a woman pilot to fly as a passenger across the Atlantic— a “Lady Lindbergh.” The search for the right candidate was itself a staged publicity stunt. “Lady Lindbergh” had already been chosen; she was Amelia Earhart, and the strategists knew exactly where to find her: she was teaching English to immigrant children at Boston’s Denison House. Publisher George Palmer Putnam II was given the task of casting the “Lady Lindbergh” because of his already secret clearance involving Admiral Byrd’s expedition to Baffin Island to locate the original geographic North Pole of the earth. Putnam assigned his friend Hilton Railey the task of actually meeting with Earhart and interviewing her.

  Thus, Project Electra formed the very basis of the acquaintance of George Palmer Putnam II and Amelia Earhart, and would loom over them for the rest of their lives together, for Amelia Earhart’s destiny lay in playing out the ancient myth of the daughter of Atlas who in the course of being hunted and pursued became lost in the starry skies.

  Now the myth was becoming a reality as Project Electra passed through several pre-arranged stages of development. As the year 1935 passed into history and the year 1936 became the present reality, George Palmer Putnam II, now Amelia Earhart’s husband, approached the U.S. Navy to ask them to conduct an air-to-air refueling operation over the South Pacific during Earhart’s World Flight. This request was entirely a ruse to create a semi-public record that Earhart’s World Flight was such a private, self-initiated undertaking that Putnam had to go hat in hand to the Navy to beg for assistance in refueling. Although the lower echelon of the Navy reluctantly agreed to Putnam’s request, the air-to-air refueling plan would never be carried out. Earhart was not properly trained in the extremely difficult maneuver of air-to-air refueling, and there was no time for her to be trained before the World Flight. But the request for refueling assistance and the Navy’s reluctant agreement to give the assistance was meant to be noticed by the spying networks of Germany and Japan. Meanwhile, the financing of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra was secretly channeled from Majestic Seven to the Purdue Foundation.

  Throughout the last half of 1936 Amelia Earhart trained in both the Lockheed Model 10E Electra and the Lockheed Model 12 Electra. She began training with the Model 10E on July 31st, 1936 in Los Angeles. In Burbank, Earhart spent time in a Link trainer under the supervision of Paul Mantz in an attempt to learn instrument flying under simulated conditions. Two months later she would be introduced to the Model 12 during a classified training flight. Both Earhart’s Model 10E and Model 12 had been secretly modified at the Lockheed plant in Burbank, California to be capable of being switched to an anti-gravity levitation flight mode. This modification work was done through a secret U.S. Navy contract under the supervision of Navy Lieutenant Thomas Townsend Brown, a specialist in field physics on loan from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Inside the leading edges of the wings of both of the Electra models were installed a series of small electrical capacitors designed to discharge direct current electricity at a specific frequency. Two coils of wire were embedded inside the bulkhead of the fuselage of both planes. The exact principles of operation of the anti-gravity devices engineered into the Electra planes were only known to Lt. Brown, Tesla, and two U.S. Navy technicians. Several other Lockheed technicians had some limited knowledge of the anti-gravity devices. At March Army Air Base in California, Earhart required several weeks to familiarize herself with the anti-gravity controls which had been cleverly camouflaged inside the cockpits of both planes. She required many hours of flight training to be able to smoothly switch from air-supported flight to anti-gravity flight. When switching back to air-supported flight from the anti-gravity mode, Earhart found that she encountered difficulties with return of mass, inertia, and wind resistance, difficulties that often caused a downward spiral of the plane. The most extreme of these problems was solved by Brown who devised a rheostat switch that allowed a gradual diminishment of the anti-gravity force as Earhart returned to air-supported flight. Even with the rheostat switch, it took calm nerves and complete mental focus to control the bucking forces produced by a return of the plane to normal mass. In early October, Earhart mastered the technique of switching at will from air-supported flight to the anti-gravity mode and back again. Then, on October 10th, 1936 at March Army Air Base, Amelia Earhart was secretly sworn into military service as a major, USAAF.

  On one of these October days, during the last of Earhart’s anti-gravity flight training, Nikola Tesla stood on the tarmac of March Army Air Base. At his side stood Lt. Thomas Townsend Brown, George Ade, Bernard Baruch, and George Palmer Putnam II. Putnam watched through field glasses as Earhart in her Model 12 Electra approached in the distant sky and then banked into a turn. Putnam had no security clearance for the Electra’s anti-gravity technology, but had been allowed to watch this final maneuver of the day where Earhart would switch from air-supported flight to the anti-gravity mode.

  “Something’s wrong,” Putnam said, looking through the field glasses.

  “Everything looks fine to me,” Lt. Brown said.

  “Here,” Putnam said, thrusting the field glasses at Lt. Brown. “Look. Something’s wrong.”

  Lt. Brown took the glasses and looked through them.

  “She’s doing fine,” Lt. Brown said.

  “She’s not doing fine!” Putnam barked. “Can’t you see? The plane— it’s— it’s making hiccups in the sky!”

  “Making what?” Lt. Brown asked.

  “Hiccups— jerks! Give me that!” Putnam shouted, snatching the field glasses from Lt. Brown’s hand. “I thought you were an expert engineer.”

  “He’s our best, G.P.,” Bernard Baruch said.

  “Then why can’t he see the obvious?” Putnam growled. He put the field glasses back up to his eyes. “Something’s wrong with that plane, damn it! Any idio
t could see it! Something’s wrong! Somebody’s got to do something!”

  “G.P.,” Bernard Baruch said. “G.P.!” Suddenly Baruch tore the field glasses away from Putnam’s face and hands.

  “What are you doing?” Putnam roared. “She’s up there, damn it! She’s up there!”

  “We know she’s up there,” Bernard Baruch said calmly, as if he were speaking to a child. “And she’s perfectly all right. She’s perfectly all right. Isn’t that so, Mr. Tesla?”

  “That is so,” Tesla said. “You are only observing desert turbulence— the very same kind of turbulence she will encounter in Africa. She is handling it quite well.”

  “Hear that?” Bernard Baruch said to Putnam. “She’s handling it quite well. She’s doing fine. You know she’ doing fine…don’t you…G.P.”

  Putnam was staring at Bernard Baruch, his confident façade broken, his mouth twisted open in fear.

  “It’s just turbulence, G.P.” Bernard Baruch said, putting his hand on Putnam’s shoulder. “She’s going to be A-O.K.— right?”

  Putnam closed his mouth.

  “Right?” Bernard Baruch asked again.

  “Right,” Putnam said. “She’s going to be…she’s going to be…A-O.K.”

  “Right,” Bernard Baruch said, his fingers kneading the muscles of Putnam’s shoulder. “You need to relax, G.P. You know A.E. can do this. She’s done a lot more than this.”

  “I know,” Putnam said.

  “Look,” Lt. Brown said. “She’s coming in for the landing.”

  They all turned to see the Lockheed Model 12 Electra descend smoothly toward the landing field.