The FBI and the Missing Tesla Papers Page 476

it. Although he had met Uncle Nikki in the late 1930's, Terbo simply thought that his relative was an eccentric and once successful electrical inventor (Seifer, 11/1982).

Also, from a personal standpoint, when I first became aware of Tesla and his work in 1975/1976, and began to look for papers on him at the New York Public Library, I remember specifically looking in the card catalogue and finding only one article listed by him on high frequency currents from the year 1918. There was a distinct feeling in me at the time that either a conspiracy of sorts was underfoot or that he simply was a very obscure historical figure. I knew of the inventor because of his ties to the occult and not through conventional means. My introduction to the man had been through authors on flying saucers (Storm, 1956; Matthews, 1971), through Tesla's autobiography printed in the Matthew book whose full title was Wall of Light, Nikola Tesla and the Venusian Space Ship, and through the O'Neill (1944) biography, which, among other things, depicts Tesla as a "super-man."

One can see from this section that there were a number of reason why Tesla's name was driven underground, e.g., the McCarthy period hysteria; the need for military secrecy during World War II; the general fear of the atomic bomb and other ultimate weapons; the need to protect America against invasion by use of any potential super-weapon; Tesla's peculiar hermit-like habit at the end of his life; the inability for a group of Americans to create a major memorial for the man; the intrigue involving the military, FBI, etc.; and the fact that Tesla's most vocal heir was an ambassador from a communist country.

The proposal that Tesla may have also sold his secrets to the U. S. S. R. is also a distinct possibility. There is no doubt that he was loyal to America and valued his citizenship papers even more than his patents, but Tesla was a world figure, and in the 1930's, he did not perceive the Soviet Union in a negative way, nor should he have. He had corresponded with Lenin and probably sent other documents on his polyphase system to the newly developing nation. It is even possible that Tesla visited Russia at that time to negotate various contracts. Victor Adamenko (1986), a well known Soviet scientist and parapsychologist, stated that Seymon Kirlian, inventor of Kirlian photography, "told me [Adamenko] that before the 1917 revolution, Tesla came to Yekaterinograd and gave a public lecture at the circus building. Kirlian [who, like Tesla, experimented with sending high frequencies through biological organisms] was present at the lecture and was very impressed." As this (supposed) trip to Europe has gone unreported by the three major Tesla biographers, perhaps there were others. Tesla may have also visited