Marc Seifer and the Unsolved Mysteries of Nikola Tesla Page 9

(soon after, Wright-Patterson) and with a group of Army scientists and professors at MIT, endeavoring to create a working particle beam weapon. At this point, the U.S. does not have the atom bomb and they fear Germany will build one before they do. Let me interrupt the flow here…Did Bergstresser show you supporting documents when you interviewed him? How did you find him?

Seifer: Bergstresser had written a comprehensive paper on Nikola Tesla dating from the 1950s, so it was clear that he knew all about who Tesla was. I literally have to go back about 35 years to remember how I got Bergstresser’s name. I either got it from Andrija Puharich, who I knew quite well, or more likely from Toby Grotz, an IEEE member who headed up the 1984 Tesla conference with physicist Elizabeth Rauscher. In any event, I was able to call Bergstresser and he verified that he did indeed meet with Tesla on a number of occasions in mid-late 1942 and that at that time Tesla gave him key papers to copy and then Bergstresser would return them. I also knew from Toby Grotz that the initial Tesla “paper” he got from Dr. Puharich came from microfilm; this paper is published in the 1984 Proceedings (“The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media”).¹

Macy: You relate that Tesla was working on this weapon for years and, indeed, in 1916 publications such as the Washington Post (p.192) reported that “Tesla had invented an electrical machine that could potentially be placed on airplanes to shoot down hostile craft, sending out a ‘death dealing blow at the speed of 300 miles per second. No person or corporation should be allowed to possess such an invention. The Tesla designs are in the patent office, and should be seized and appropriated by the government for its own uses and defense, or for ending the European war at will.’” You also point to a 1915 New York Times report entitled “Tesla’s New Device Like Bolts of Thor” in which Tesla states that the device could work from the Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island to protect New York. Later, you write fascinatingly about how the particle beam weapon could have been incorporated into the Wardenclyffe Tower utilizing high power transmission. Now…while you point out at this time he was desperately trying to save his tower from being shut down because of his financial troubles, what do you think of this?

Seifer: Tesla had put his entire life’s work into Wardenclyffe, which was planned to be a world telegraphy center, set up to eventually employ many hundreds of workers. In essence, Tesla had conceived back in 1901 of what today we call cell phone technology, the ability to create an unlimited number of wireless channels so that anyone on the planet could talk to anyone else no matter where they were. Tesla even mentions such distances as New York to Australia as if the people were sitting in the same room together.

J.P. Morgan had given Tesla $150,000 to construct this transatlantic wireless station, which was supposed to be 90 feet tall. However, once Tesla found out that Marconi was pirating his apparatus when Tesla had offered Marconi equipment which Marconi turned down, Tesla literally freaked out and doubled the size of the tower. His rationale was that although the costs might be doubled, with such a tall tower he would now be able to not only send messages to England and Europe, but also to the entire world, so that revenues would come in at an exponential rate. When he tried to explain this to Morgan, the Wall Street mogul not only refused all additional funding, but worse than that, Morgan blocked other investors from coming in.

Macy: How do you know that Morgan actually blocked other investors?

Seifer: What we need to keep in mind is that Tesla was living in the Waldorf-Astoria as a veritable millionaire, hobnobbing with the likes of Thomas Fortune Ryan, Jacob Schiff and Henry Clay Frick, each easily worth several hundred million dollars. They were billionaires in today’s dollars. For instance, in the case of Frick, when U.S. Steel was created, Morgan paid Frick $60 million for his share of the original company. (Carnegie got around $200 million.) So for Frick to invest, say, an additional $100,000, this was a miniscule percentage of his total wealth. Tesla set up a meeting between Frick and Morgan and that deal went sour.

What we learned when we made the TV show “The Tesla Files,” when we hired technicians proficient with ground penetrating radar, was that Tesla had constructed four tunnels 70 feet below the tower, three of which were 100 feet long, and also that he had placed a network of grounding rods he called “earth grippers,” which spread out like spokes of a wheel, ten feet above the tunnels about 60 feet below the ground. This was an enormous enterprise that Tesla had constructed, and he didn’t want to lose it. He owed the Waldorf-Astoria nearly $20,000 in back rent, so he transferred the property, he assumed as collateral against what he owed, as he tried to pay them back and also raise the funds to complete the project.

This was during World War I while Tesla was working for Telefunken, the German wireless concern who, ironically, had a contract with the U.S. Navy, via Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was Assistant Secretary of the Navy while America was still neutral. This was 1915, and Marconi, who thought that he had invented the radio, sued both Telefunken and the U.S. Navy and both of them, including FDR in particular, turned to Tesla to testify on their behalf because they both knew that it was his technology that lay at the basis of what became the radio. And meanwhile, the Waldorf-Astoria was threatening to dismantle Wardenclyffe and sell the materials for cash to offset the debt Tesla owed.

It was at this time that Tesla revealed that he had a so-called “death ray,” which was really a particle beam weapon. What I discovered was that Tesla revealed this secret weapon