Nikola Tesla FBI Files - Page 112

me, but since it involved "lightning balls," or "fire balls," I was very curious. Fire balls had always fascinated, and I had read everything I could lay my hands on about them.

        A fire ball is a strange phenomenon associated with lightning. Some of the energy of the lightning stroke appears to become locked into a ball shaped structure which may be of any size from a couple of inches to a foot in diameter. It looks like a perfect sphere, brightly incandescent and floats like a bubble, being easily carried by air currents. They may last for a short time, from a fraction of a second to many seconds. In this interval, during which they stay fairly close to the ground, they may come close to many objects without damaging them or being damaged by them. Suddenly, for no known reason, the ball explodes doing as much damage as a bomb, if close to structures, and no damage if in the open.

        The fire ball looked to me like a gigantically enlarged model of the tiny electron, one of the building blocks of matter, which acts as if it were just a spherical area of space in which an amount of energy was crystallized to give it structure. I felt that if it were possible to discover how a large amount of energy was stored in this fairy bubble structure of a fire ball a new insight might be gained into the structure of the electron and other fundamental particles of matter. Also this method of storing energy could be applied to a thousand useful purposes.

        When I approached Tesla with pleas along this line to develop this possible phase of his discovery he would evade direct reply by indulging in a, not always, tolerant lecture on my gullibility in believing theories about the complex structure of the atom. While he had in earlier years discussed some of his experiences with fire balls in his laboratory at Colorado Springs and explained is theory of their formation, he would not in the later years permit himself to be drawn into a discussion of them as a possible part of his system. This, of course, made me suspicious that the clue was "hot" but I could be completely wrong in my conclusions. Tesla was very quick in detecting my technique when I sought to narrow down a field by trying to get him to deny statements when he was adamant to direct questions.

        Tesla became familiar with the destructive characteristics of fire balls in his experiments at Colorado Springs in 1899. He produced them quite by accident and saw them, more than once, explode and shatter his tall mast and also destroy apparatus within his laboratory. The destructive action accompanying the disintegration of a fire ball, he declared, takes place with inconceivable violence.

        He studied the process by which they were produced, not because he wanted to produce them but in order to eliminate the conditions in which they were created. It is not pleasant, he related, to have a fire ball explode in your vicinity for they will destroy anything they come in contact with.

        It will be necessary to reconstruct his statements from very fragmentary notes and a long distance memory.