The National Research Council had established a pattern of government support for basic research when it had an aspect to it that could be developed for military purposes. It was the first time that research scientists from the private sector, corporations, academicians, bureaucrats, and the military were brought together to solve mutual problems. Therefore, the Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, son of ARPA, were natural outgrowths of an ongoing government relationship.
The problem with ARPA was that it was political and had its own agenda. It was not uncommon for conflicts to arise between the Office of the Chief of Research and Development, General Trudeau, who was operating within the military command structure, and ARPA over money and the policy issues that arose between them. The staffs at ARPA and in the Pentagon crossed swords on a number of occasions, and more than once ARPA tried to lay the blame for its own shortcomings and mistakes on the military. During the early years of the Vietnam War, for example, ARPA tried to blame General Trudeau for mistakes in the deployment of Agent Orange. But General Trudeau and R&D weren’t responsible at all for Agent Orange. It was ARPA’s baby from the start. But when the field reports started coming in on the casualties Agent Orange was causing among our own troops and ARPA said that it would testify before Congress that General Trudeau was responsible, I hit the ceiling. I let the ARPA staff people know that, protocol be damned, I would storm into the congressional committees on military and veterans affairs and raise the roof of the Capitol Building until everyone knew that ARPA was trying to duck responsibility for negligence in the deployment of a bad chemical. ARPA backed down, but the bad blood between us remained.
When the concept of an ARPA was first discussed at the White House, I saw the potential as well as the problem, but I also knew that a secret agenda driving everything was the policy of the UFO working group. ARPA was an asset to them because they could network through the university community and find out who had any information about UFOs that they weren’t disclosing to the military, what technology was being developed that had any relation to the problem of UFOs or EBEs, and who in the academic or scientific community were coming up with theories about the existence or intentions of EBEs. In other words, in addition to being a conduit for research and research grants that fit certain government/military profiles, ARPA was another intelligence-gathering agency, but dedicated to the academic and scientific communities. If information was out there, ARPA was going to find it and pay for its development.
Therefore, when the urgency of coming up with a technological challenge to the Soviet space program arose in 1957, it was no surprise to anyone who understood the requirements of a space defense that it would be an organization like ARPA that would be given the mandate to develop that military response. And given the challenge posed by the Soviet satellite program, a particle-beam weapon was the logical direction such a response would take.
The United States had to develop a weapon that theoretically could knock out the Soviet satellites or blind them so they couldn’t take any surveillance photos. They had to gather resources in the academic research community to see whether a talent pool existed for the development of such a weapon. At the same time they didn’t want to divert military research into exotic weapons while the military was still trying to get its own satellites into orbit. But rather than putting the plan directly into the hands of the military R&D organizations, they followed a course probably initially laid out for them by the protocols of the UFO working group and went outside the formal military to an ad hoc research organization that was not supposed to be involved in direct military research. When I was at the White House, I could see the hand of the CIA behind this, which immediately sent up a red flag for me because I knew that the government was only creating another budget and research grant bureaucracy the CIA would ultimately control.
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 C apek 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, oftentimes 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 qua 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 a 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 in 1904. 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 horsepower 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 Materiel 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.
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ut 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.
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 early 1950s, 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 microfilmed 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?
The Day After Roswell Page 30
