The FBI and the Missing Tesla Papers Page 477

Germany at this time (circa 1913) in order to negotiate with Bergmann for the sale of his turbines.

If Tesla had sold his death ray to the Soviets, as the Trump papers suggest, keeping his name suppressed would be even more important to the communist-phobic J. Edgar Hoover. The chaos of World War II and the Stalin purge could easily have caused the destruction of these documents, so it is quite possible that even if Russia had some blueprints at one time, they may no longer exist.

A Clandestine Legacy From World War I

Puharich (1984) stated that during World War I, Tesla turned over much of his secret work associated to the teleautomaton to industrialist/inventor John Hays Hammond, whose son worked with Tesla for many years, especially on remote control devices. Hammond, Sr., was reported to have experimented with some of this equipment for the Navy. It is doubtful that Tesla's work in particle beam weaponry would have been at a sophisticated level of development at this point in time, but his work in remote control, and detonation devices, as used in submarine torpedoes and aircraft, appears to have been well developed.

Puharich (1986) also noted, in this connection, Col. William House, adviser to President Wilson, created a secret fund for Hammond to advance the Tesla inventions. O'Neill (1944) substantiates much of this by writing that at this time, unmanned airplanes able to fly 100 miles, drop bombs and and return to base were successfully tested. Tesla-type robots were also created by Hammond and Elmer Sperry (pp. 163-164). Thus, we see that much of Tesla's work began to be concealed as far back as 1913-1914. According to Puharich, the Hammond/Tesla documents were removed from the Hammond Museum in Glouster, Massachusetts and classified as top secret sometime after 1965 with the death of Hammond Jr.

Spies and Wireless. When the inventor's Long Island tower was dismantled in 1917, during the height of World War I, rumors were spread that the government was responsible because German spies were using the tower to send and/or receive signals. This supposition was graphically presented by the Electrical Experimenter (9/1917) which reported dramatically, "U. S. Blows Up Tesla Radio Tower" (p. 293), and supported by Literary Digest (9/8/1917, p. 25). Both periodicals left little doubt in the readers' mind as to the