The FBI and the Missing Tesla Papers Page 474

account of the trail of the papers was "good investigative reporting," and that Bloyce Fitzgerald had taken them to Wright-Patterson to work on them; but he declined comment about any relationship to Fitzgerald or the trail of Tesla's secret papers.

Puharich (1986) had said that the particle beam article had been passed from Bergstresser to a third party and then to the U. S. Psychotronics-Society around 1981, where they were then given to Puharich.

Influence of McCarthy Period.

I think a good case could be made to the effect that a conspiracy of sorts was partially responsible for the general disappearance of Tesla's name from the ranks of the generally well known. It was true that by the time the FBI and Federal Government became actively involved in suppressing Tesla's scientific papers, the inventor had already slipped from the mass consciousness. Nevertheless, an air of secrecy, supported by the taint of ties ot the communists, via his Yugoslavian heritage, further served to bury even further the inventor's work. Cheney (1981) concludes that this had a significant bearing upon how Tesla would be remembered in this country.

The fading of his scientific reputation... [and] the forgetfulness of the Americans in the post war period resulted in large degree from the disappearance of most of his scientific papers behind that new Cold War phenomenon, the Iron Curtain. (p. 263)

Krippner (1985) comments that "Yugoslavia left the 'Iron Curtain' about 1948. Furthermore, it is not a member of the Warsaw Pact." Nevertheless, the general public was probably unaware of this. As the country was communistic, it was most likely perceived of as part of the Iron Curtain. Certainly, this would have been the case in the 1950's, during the McCarthy period.

Tesla's attachment to designing ultimate secret weapons kept him in the news throughout the 1930's as war became more and more inevitable. However, his reluctance to display the death ray, his hermit-like existence, the peculiar habit of feeding his pigeons in his hotel rooms and his subsequent alienation from these residences, his tendency to be a "sun dodger" (his term for preference for the night), and the general caution and paranoia associated with the war years all contributed to his name and contributions being stowed further from the consciousness of the general population. Tesla was now perceived as a somewhat senile oddity, remembered for his once great-