Nikola Tesla Books
IN SEARCH OF NIKOLA TESLA forward by Tesla himself seemed incorrect. He said that the tower at Wendover had been built to generate very high voltages for a series of experiments. Project Tesla was in fact an investigation of stable plasmas and ball lightning. The idea of experiments on ball lightning struck me as ironic. Ten or twenty years earlier Dr Golka himself would have been dubbed a crank by orthodox scientists and the U.S. Air Force called fools for encouraging him. Ball lightning, also known as 'fireballs', has been observed since prehistoric times but is a relatively new phenomenon for scientific study. A fireball should not be confused with flashes of lightning which are the normal manifestations of electrical storms. It is generally described as a 'ball of fire' which falls from the sky and moves about on earth, causing fires and frightening simple folk before it suddenly disappears. I even remember as a child being very frightened by a particular violent thunderstorm and afterwards being told that a fireball had been responsible for the explosion I had heard. The neighbours said that it had come out of the sky and damaged the roof of a nearby house. Anecdotal reports of balls of fire were rejected by scientists as folk stories, old wives' tales, confused reports or even hallucinations. In short, no respectable scientist believed that such things could exist. It seems that only within the last ten years have fireballs had the sense to present themselves to 'reliable witnesses' so that they can be taken seriously. Several well-documented sightings have since occurred: a fireball which appeared inside an aircraft, ball lightning which ended up in a butt of water and boiled the contents dry. Meteorologists were at last forced to agree that the evidence for their existence was pretty strong. The general conclusion was that fireballs contain a great deal of energy, are stable for several minutes and appear to be electrical in origin. Several theories were put forward to account for the phenomenon. One school of thought argued that very high temperatures could be produced in a natural electrical discharge, high enough for a nuclear reaction involving the atoms in the air to occur. Others thought that a fireball consisted of a stable electrical plasma which existed at very high temperatures. Both theories would have sounded as exotic as flying saucers in the first half of the century. I began to see why Project Tesla had the support of the 81
