Is Russia Causing Our Red Skies at Night?

NIKOLA TESLA carried out some spectacular experiments using electricity at the beginning of the century. Now Soviet scientists seem to be doing tests based on his ideas — and they may be changing our weather in the process ...

by JEREMY CAMPBELL

ONE EVENING last month a strange new kind of lightning in the sky created such a disturbance in the city of Timmins, Ontario, that an official of the Canadian Government was called at home and asked to muster a team of scientists for an immediate investigation.

The lightning was bluish white and made a pattern on the oscilloscopes nobody had ever seen before.

It began at 7.30 p.m. as a few small needles of light, building up until 10.30 into great flaring fireworks which blazed for another hour and then died away. Even those who did not see it heard it. On F.M. radio, normally free of noise, and on television, the lightning sounded like burst of machine-gun fire, each about eight seconds long.

Watson W. Scott, the Government official called by the startled authorities in Timmins, is not in the least bewildered as to who created this sound and light show in a calm spring sky. Since late last summer the Russians have been disrupting worldwide communications with strange and extremely powerful signals which blacked out high frequency radio broadcasts and brought a deluge of protests from several Governments, including four from Britain.

Reluctantly, Moscow provided the vague excuse that certain experiments were being conducted in the high frequency band. In December, the obnoxious noise was reduced to short spasms, 30-second bursts two or three times an hour, making it less of a nuisance but more difficult to monitor.

"That night in Timmins seems to represent some kind of climax or finale," said Mr. Scott, Director of Operations at the Canadian Department of Communications in Ottawa. "Last summer the Russians were like a bull in a china shop, all over the place as if they hardly knew what they were doing. Now it looks very much as if they are accomplishing whatever it is they set out to accomplish."

What goal, then, have the Soviets reached after eight months of radio vandalism and bizarre electrical effects parodying the violent rages of nature?

We know where the disturbances come from. They start at Riga and Gomel, near Minsk. The reasons are still unknown. But nearly all attempts to wrest any explanation from scientists studying the mysterious activity come sooner or later to the name of Nikola Is Russia causing our red skies at night? Tesla, the cranky Yugoslavian-born genius who created the modern age of electrical power.

Tesla invented radar 40 years before the Second World War, developed the idea of radio-controlled rockets in the 1890s, and as early as 1900 began building a world broadcasting station on Long Island with 150,000 dollars of capital from J. P. Morgan. He owned the patents on the first electrical power plant at Niagara Falls.

Tesla was born in Yugoslavia, the son of a Serbian Orthodox Minister, and died poor in a New York hotel in 1943 at the age of 87. He was the pioneer of alternating electric current which was so controversial the New York State Legislature voted to execute criminals by A.C. instead of D.C. so as to give it a bad name.

Tesla became obsessed by the idea that all nature is a process of pulses and waves. He suspected, and proved, that the whole earth is an electrically charged body which can be made to vibrate, can in fact be used to transmit electrical power anywhere without wires.

Tesla has been shamefully neglected since his death, despite the fact that 700 patents were issued to him in his lifetime. Not until 1976 was he elected to the Hall of Fame of Great Inventors. This year the BBC and Hollywood are preparing films on his life.

In part, this neglect is due to his eccentricity and surrealist claims. Tesla lit lamps by passing hundreds of volts through his body. His germ phobia rivalled that of Howard Hughes. He used 18 towels after a bath and cleaned a plate before eating with two dozen napkins.

Round, smooth objects distressed him. A woman in pearls at dinner would put him off his food. He shunned tea and coffee but drank whisky in the belief that it would make him live to be 150. Rigidly celibate, he was nevertheless years ahead of his time in declaring that women would one day "startle civilisation with their progress".

Scorn greeted his announcement that beings on other planets were send- ing him messages and cast a shadow on other boasts which look more plausible today. In 1924 he told the Press of a new invention, a ray which could destroy objects 250 miles away. Beamed from 12 strategic stations the new ray would form a protective curtain around the United States which no enemy could penetrate. Tesla gave no details, but in 1940 he was summoned to Ottawa to discuss it with the Prime Minister of Canada.

But if Tesla has been downgraded in the West, there is strong evidence to suggest the Russians are taking a serious interest in his work. There are newspaper reports that a Soviet electrical engineer, unnamed, spent several months in Quebec interviewing Tesla’s last known living assistant, Arthur Matthews.

Matthews has been approached for information by several people, some with "Russian sounding" names. Many of Tesla’s ideas for unfinished projects are in his notebooks and working models in the Tesla Museum in Belgrade which, Watson Scott says, is now closed to the public.

In May, 1899, Tesla went to Colorado Springs, famous for its spectacular lightning storms, to build a barn-like wooden tower for making artificial lightning. John Jacob Astor gave him 30,000 dollars.

At Colorado Springs, Tesla, wearing a tail coat and formal hat, using his own design of giant high frequency transformers, sent bolts of man made lightning 135ft. long streaking into the sky from the copper ball at the top of a 200ft. mast.

Discharges of such fantastic intensity, Tesla found, can set the earth into electrical vibration, sending waves bouncing off the other side of the planet, rather as a plunger, moving rhythmically up and down, can be made to create a pattern of standing waves in a bowl of water. Bolts of lightning act as such a plunger.

By pumping into the earth vast amounts of electricity, tuned to 150,000 oscillations a second, then pumping them out again, letting them streak up his high mast and issue into the sky as lightning, Tesla was able to charge the planet in one hour with several hundred times as much energy as in one bolt of lightning.

So a source of power to light homes and run factories is created which can be drawn off at any place on the globe by means of a simple device. Tesla himself succeeded in lighting 200 of Edison’s incandescent lamps without wires at a distance of 26 miles.

Tesla was a recluse in later life, stingy and tight-fisted with essential information, committing figures and equations to his capacious memory instead of sharing them with others. He only hinted at some possible further uses for his discovery, among them the control of weather. That could be done by sending pulses into the ionosphere to regulate the movement of electrically charged particles in the upper atmos- phere, causing changes in the jet stream.

"It is quite clear to me that the Russians are doing experiments based on Tesla’s ideas and in doing so have changed the world’s weather, perhaps as an unintentional side effect," said Andrew Michrowski, a scientist who is working with a Canadian senator on a scheme for using Tesla power in Eastern Canada.

"They have heated the ionosphere over Riga, or charged it with electrical particles so that it acts as a capacitor, deflecting westerly winds coming towards the Soviet Union. The weather in Latvia and Leningrad has been so beautiful, farmers were able to have a second crop.

"The effect was to make the weather in the United States abnormally cold because no westerly winds were hitting California. Instead, very cold winds came from Alaska, were deflected down to Virginia and then along the North Atlantic coast.

An attempt will soon be made to discover, once and for all, what the Russians are up to, whether they are in fact, as one consultant to the project puts it, trying to push their cold, arctic air mass towards the United States as, a way of extending agricultural growing seasons.

RCA, the parent company of NBC Television, is to provide special satellites to match up weather patterns with radio and seismic disturbances. The Canadian Government is willing to offer the services of its nine monitor- ing stations on the ground.

"Many theories are circulating about these very, very powerful disturbances," said Watson Scott. "I keep an open mind. But it is clear the Tesla people are in the ascendancy.

"Are these experiments connected with the great drought in Britain, warm weather in Greenland, snow in Miami? Who knows. All I can say is that the lightning in Timmins seems to suggest an important new level of competence has been reached in the handling of very powerful physical forces. One person has told me it may be a pinpointing, at last, of the exact frequencies used by Tesla in his work.

"Those who talk do not necessarily know. Those who know are the sort of people who are paid very good money to say nothing."