Chapter Two
TRAIL FROM TESLA TO STAR WARS

After she returned home to Vancouver, Canada, Manning reported to a new friend who wanted to hear about the Tesla conference. He was John Hutchison, an inventor who had discovered an anomalous "anti-gravity" effect some years earlier while he had been restoring antique electrical equipment and building Tesla coils. During the previous years, unofficial delegations from Canadian and United States military groups had visited his laboratory to see the "Hutchison effect".

Now he was working alone; the visitors had apparently learned all that they came to learn. His requests for copies of the videos they filmed in his laboratory were met with "sorry; we destroyed all those videos because there wasn't anything on them."

He didn't believe it.

John Hutchison told Manning some of the amusing twists of his search for reports about his experiments.

"I was phoning the Pentagon and asking for 'John South', because I was told that was the name of one of the guys who were here in my lab. By chance a secretary put me through to the man I described, and it turns out his name was Col. John Alexander."

The name would come up again more than five years later, as Manning gradually found out what else could be done with "Tesla technology" - so-called nonlethal weaponry. John Hutchison described Col. Alexander as a handsome, personable man who was a fun guy to be around throughout the days of the "anti-gravity" experiments in the "Vancouver laboratory.

Hutchison had leisure time to chat with Manning in a now-silent laboratory. He shared Tesla lore about beamed weaponry, and told her that the Soviet Union was mysteriously experimenting with radio-frequency signals, beaming them toward North America. Beginning in late 1976 he had been one of many ham radio operators who began picking up the 10-Hertz (cycles, "beats" or pulses per second) frequencies on radio receivers.

Hams called these signals "the Soviets' Woodpecker" because of the sharp tapping they heard from the extremely low frequency (ELF) waves. Some researchers speculated that the Woodpecker signal was a Tesla-type weapon for mind control, because the ELF was at a frequency which could resonate with neurons in the human brain, and the transmission could be a carrier wave that was modulated (varied in amplitude, frequency or phase) to carry a hidden effect.

"Spoo-kyyy," she joked, dismissing what seemed to be a paranoid speculation,

29 Frederic Jueneman, "Innovative Notebook", Industrial Research magazine, February 1974.

Manning learned more about Nikola Testa two years later, after another symposium in Colorado Springs. One of the papers in the proceedings of that meeting was by a historian and psychology professor, Dr. Marc Seifer. She would recall it years later when learning about unpublicized experiments in lighting up the upper atmosphere.

Seifer gave Tesla credit for inventing fluorescent lights, just as the revered American inventor Thomas Edison is the inventor of the incandescent light bulb. The biographer notes that Tesla and Edison clashed over Edison's insistence that the country should stick to his direct current (DC) technologies for electrical lighting and power distribution. Tesla's AC system was better because AC electricity can travel hundreds of miles over power lines at high voltages, while a wire carrying DC would be unable to light bulbs a mile away from the generating plant.

Strangely, Edison was the one who was lionized in American history books. One of the stories that is told and retold, for example, is how he sent men to the Amazon to look for materials for the best filament for his light bulb. Edison's persistence is highly praised. However, most people today are unaware that Tesla's demonstrations showed the filament to be superfluous - not needed for electric lights. Using very high-frequencies (increased vibrations of the electrical current), he showed that the action of the air was more important than the filament. And thus he out-'Edisoned' Edison, said Dr. Seifer.

Seifer pulled together parts from 53 reference works, in his presentation "Nikola Tesla: The History of Lasers and Particle Beam Weapons".30

For an example of Tesla research, two brothers, both scientists, traveled to the Tesla Museum in Yugoslavia and read materials not available in North America.

They suggested that Testa's particle-beam work evolved from his pioneering experiments with X-rays, as well as from his idea of lighting up the skies with his "magnifying transmitter" by beaming up electrical energy to the stratosphere (a level of the atmosphere above the clouds - about seven to thirty-one miles above the ground).

"That would be some light-up display!" Manning thought as she read the article.

However, she wondered about the wisdom of treating the upper atmosphere as if it were merely gases in a giant fluorescent bulb.

She winced as she read a list of military uses for Tesla's many inventions: earthquake contrivances, world radar, particle beam weapons and brain wave manipulation.

"One or more magnifying transmitters could theoretically send destructive impulses through the earth to any location," said Seifer. "For instance, a well-placed jolt of many millions of volts could theoretically destroy the communications network of any major city."

30 Dr. Marc J. Seifer, "Nikola Tesla: The History of Lasers and Particle Beam Weapons", Proceedings of 1988 International Tesla Symposium.

Seifer had been intrigued by issues that emerged from his investigation:

- Particle beam weaponry was such a high-level secret that President Jimmy Carter, for example, "was screened from vital technical developments by the bureaucracy of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency" (according to General George Keegan, former head of Air Force Intelligence) - Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio, was mentioned, in regard to the air force base's use of bright young geniuses to attempt a breakthrough in Tesla technology

Based on FBI files as well as other literature, Seifer concluded,

"Great support is lent to the hypothesis that Tesla's work and papers were systematically hidden from public view in order to protect the trail of this top secret work, which today is known as Star Wars."

It was a paradox, Nikola Tesla's name was indeed invoked when describing proposed technologies that are as potentially planet-cleansing as "free energy" non-polluting power generation. At the same time he was credited with inventing weapons which could be used for the Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I., popularly known as Star Wars).

And his "wireless power" engineering experiments may have led to a disaster in Siberia, Manning later learned from scientist Oliver Nichelson. Tesla's love of nature seemed to be a contradiction to his desire to arrogantly manipulate it - to light up the sky. Over the next nine years, she had occasions to think about the deep frustration in Gregory's eyes at the Tesla conference as he described the professor's attitude of "We'll just have to try it, and find out."

Meanwhile one would-be god of the elements wasn't pulling any punches. A Texan, Dr. Bernard Eastlund, aimed his sights high-up to the ionosphere. In 1990 Gregory sent Manning a copy of a 1987 patent which cited Nikola Tesla under the heading "prior art". He suggested she send for the audiotape of a National Public Radio interview with Eastlund.

Manning was astonished when she read the patent, titled "A Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region of the Earth's Atmosphere, Ionosphere and Magnetosphere". Whichever way she looked at it, the proposed high-power beaming of radio frequency energy into the upper atmosphere sounded insane. For example, the patent said the technology could manipulate global weather systems. Gregory had been sending her articles which indicated that electric forces do affect the weather, so it came as no surprise.

More horrifying, she remembered what a brilliant physicist by the name of Walter Richmond had written about a possible technology which sounded very much like Eastlund's concept. The late Walter Richmond and anthropologist Leigh Richmond wrote a book titled The Lost Millennium, using the novel format to get their ideas out to the world. A disastrous technology described as a "solar tap" in the book was startlingly similar to aspects of Eastlund's patent.31

31 Walter and Leigh Richmond. The Lost Millennium. Interdimensional Sciences Inc., Lakemont, Georgia 1967.

Although ionospheric heaters beam power from antennae on the ground up to the ionosphere, and the Richmonds' "solar tap" concept goes the other direction, both involve connecting the earth with the ionosphere. The novel described a solar tap that just wouldn't quit. It began from a technology that started on the ground, from which engineers beamed up a pathway for some of the ionospheric electricity to ride back down on.

This planetary short-circuit usually blew out in a fraction of a second, but one day the fictional engineers made a fatal mistake. They kept a solar tap going while a solar flare surged into the ionosphere and then to the ground via the ionized pathway of the tap beam.

"And the surge of power from the tap became an avalanche. An avalanche at the pole in the vertical plane of the planet's magnetic field where the winds of magnetism would not rise to blow it out. One trillion watt-seconds of energy unleashed their fury on the polar cap in the first flash... Even as it discharged, the ionosphere was recharged from the solar furnace.

 

The first flash became a mighty roar that poured an increased and now steady stream... of energy through the now-stabilized short circuit. Kilocubit after square kilocubit of frozen wasteland boiled. Watt after watt of ever-increasing avalanche energy lit the polar cap with a glare that had never before been seen..."

Could such a disaster happen in real life?

Manning reread the introduction to The Lost Millennium. It said that in 1962 Walter Richmond was researching atmospheric electricity and developed the theory of what the couple called the solar tap - a source of abundant power from the electrical current that exists as a "potential" between the ground and the ionosphere.

"The physics is exact. The power is there for the tapping".

Such massive amounts of power would be distributed by broadcasting it,

"which Nikola Tesla had proven could be done, before 1911".

The two scientists believed that automobiles, industries and homes could be tuned into broadcast power, just as radios are tuned to certain frequencies. The bad news was that unless carefully handled, broadcast power would resonate with the structural steel of buildings in a destructive way, Richmond said.

Manning's attention was caught by the scientists' own life story. In 1963 the Richmonds' took their research papers on the solar tap to then-President John F. Kennedy's science advisor. They planned to also take them to the United Nations Science Advisory Committee. Instead they received a shock from their government.

"Our papers were placed under the Secrecy label (Secrecy Act legislation) and we were offered a government contract for research, which we refused. It would have placed us under the Secrecy Syndrome, in which we had refused for some years to take part, Leigh wrote. We were told to sit down and shut up, in no uncertain terms."

The vision of the fictional solar tap lingered in Manning's mind. The book described an experiment-gone-wrong that started an unquenchable avalanche of electrons. A character in the book said "the power's there. Enough to blow up the Earth if it's misused."

Is this what the late Walter Richmond knew, that had to be placed under the Secrecy Act? If the electrical power of the ionosphere avalanched onto Earth in a continuous flow, his book's character said, it would,

"burn hell out of the spot where it touched Earth Empty the capacitor that's the ionosphere, and feed directly from the solar wind. Earth's an electrical motor...When the motor began to run wild, it would increase its rotational speed...Eventually the Earth would explode from increased centrifugal stress."

Manning read the novel's description of the fiery, steamy noisy destruction of a planet.

"A shock wave, racing at the speed of sound...toppling great cities..."

Destruction continued for days, and the planet "whipped about on its axis like a thing tortured." The Richmonds' novel vividly raised questions about the wisdom of pulsing a radio-frequency beam which could make an ionized (and therefore electrically-conducting) channel between earth and the ionosphere.

Even if there were no danger of accidentally tapping into the ionospheric powerhouse and getting zapped in return, disrupting a part of the upper atmosphere violently is in itself a dangerous experiment, she later was told by independent scientists.32 Ionospheric heaters were nothing new, Manning had learned from articles sent her from Gregory. However, Eastlund's invention made it possible to stab the ionosphere with a much more powerful and more focused beam.

A few years later Gregory telephoned and said in a choked voice,

"The maniacs are actually going to do it. In Alaska."

The U.S. Navy and Air Force would be paying a contractor, Arco Power Technologies Inc., to build a super-powerful ionospheric heater - an array of antennae - in the Alaskan bush outside of Anchorage. Over the next year Gregory mailed her articles, on ionospheric heaters and related topics, which he found in science journals dating back to the 1970's. He gave her the phone number for a man named Clare Zickuhr in Anchorage.

Gregory became increasingly angry and pessimistic about the state of his planet's health, and eventually sent his entire file on ionospheric heaters to her.

"I give up. I've written to everyone I could think of. You're a journalist; do something with this."

His words and the thought of what he called "mad science in our sky" weighed on her, but she was again employed as a reporter for a daily newspaper in a British Columbia city and had no time for starting any campaign. One day she photocopied excerpts from the file, wrote an introductory page, and gave the packet to the managing editor at the newspaper. He sent it to the newspaper chain's columnist in Ottawa, but the man never published a word about ionospheric experiments.

In early 1994 she telephoned a reporter at the Anchorage paper; Gregory had said the man was writing an article about the project that would beam so much power up to the ionosphere for military experiments.

32 Dr.Richard Williams, Physics and Society and interview with Adam Trombly, physicist.

In a discouraged tone of voice the reporter said that his editor was not interested in art investigative story of any depth about the project; the stance of the paper was that the military's infusion of money would provide jobs. Manning photocopied her now-thick file on the topic of ionospheric heaters and electric weather forces and sent it to the reporter anyway.

Her next call was to Clare Zickuhr. A year later, she would be in Alaska interviewing him and others who were concerned about the "skybuster", as Dr. Richard Williams of Princeton had named the proposed super-powerful ionospheric heater.

The sequence of events that took her to Anchorage began when Dennis Specht, an anti-nuclear activist then living in Alaska, sent a news item to an Australian magazine.

"(HAARP) should be carefully studied by large groups of independent scientists..."
Dr. Patrick Flanagan

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