PART ONE
The People Wake Up To HAARP

Chapter One
THE SORCERERS APPRENTICES

Lightning flickered and thunder crashed through the mountain air as if cued up to open the International Tesla Society's July 1986 symposium. A woman admired the jagged streaks of light as she walked from downtown Colorado Springs to the College of the Canyon.

The display of light and sound seemed to have a life of its own, and triggered thoughts about Earth's life-protecting layers. The layers appear immensely deep to a human looking up from a sidewalk. But the few hundred miles of depth of the atmospheric layers are, to the planet, as a film of paint is to a student's desk globe.26 Unlike layers of paint, however, the atmospheric veils swirl and flow and interact.

She found comfort in thinking that surely no one could tame Earth's dynamic atmosphere. Granted, nature is under siege elsewhere. Engineers straighten undulating wild rivers and slap them into concrete flood-control channels. They shave Earth's forests and drain unruly tidal marshes. But who is arrogant enough to say that they own the sky?

After a brief downpour, the storm curtain opened to an electric blue sky, and the air sparkled with vitality.

"No wonder Tesla did his most dramatic experiments here," Jeane Manning thought.

As a freelance journalist, she was in Colorado to learn more about the work of some maverick engineers and their hero, the electrical genius Nikola Tesla. In her research into non-conventional energy technologies, she had encountered more than a few books about Tesla, and thought it strange that mainstream textbooks ignore such a historical figure.

In the nineteenth century he patented the alternating current (AC) system now used to generate and send electrical power to every home along this avenue, every building on the campus ahead and factories all over the world. His genius did not stop there, however, and before he died in 1943 he had discovered more radical inventions - apparently more than the tycoons of the early years of the twentieth century wanted to see developed.

Manning was curious about the stories. Did Tesla really send electricity more than twenty miles without wires? There was also the legend that Tesla invented a "space energy receiver" and powered a Pierce-Arrow car in a demonstration of the receiver. Yet he died penniless in 1943.

She expected this conference would give a broader picture of Tesla than her impression of a would-be God of Lightning, a view that came from seeing photographs of Tesla with bolts of light streaming from his fingertips.

26 Hans J. Lugt. Vortex Flow in Nature and Technology, p. 150, John Wiley and Sons, NY 1978.

In front of audiences of New York's cultural elite in his laboratory, he had allowed hundreds of thousands of volts to pass over his body and light up lamps, melt metal and explode small light bulbs. It was a don't try this at home scene, with the slender inventor sprayed with crackling electrical current as he stood stork like on insulated shoes. Manning was fascinated at the thought of the elegant Tesla showing off for his cultured friends, in his laboratory lit with dazzling, pulsating waves of light in unearthly warm hues.27, 28

In the college where the conference was held, she picked up a press pass, then joined two hundred or so spectators in Armstrong auditorium. Onstage, man-made lightning sizzled through the air, zig-zagging from a giant electrical device called a Tesla coil which dwarfed three technicians. Blue light streaked along the paths of fried air and members of the audience covered their ears against the deafening electric buzz.

It looked lethal, but the demonstrator explained that although Tesla used high voltage (electrical pressure) current, it was of such a high-frequency that it danced over his skin instead of zapping his internal organs. A man sat on top of the apparatus before the coil was turned on with a deafening roar, then long sparks jumped from his fingers.

In other meeting rooms, would-be Gods of Lightning told about their research. One of those speakers was Robert Golka, a sturdily built man with the cocky personality of a lone adventurer. He prided himself on making fireballs by whatever means - even from a circuit breaker in a railroad engine when he had slammed the engine into reverse. A fireball, or ball lightning, is a glowing sphere of what looks like gases. The speaker said that Nikola Tesla's "wireless power" experiments near Colorado Springs made 30 second golfball-sized ball lightning in 1899.

Why would anyone want to play with lightning, in any shape?

Golka was explaining; ball lightning might hold the secrets of thermonuclear fusion and eventually cheap power. He had rented an empty hangar in Wendover, Utah - the hangar where the atomic bomb was loaded into a bomber for its death-drop debut and built a Tesla coil that was 51 feet wide for experiments. Golka spoke of voltages of 15 million volts and lightning-like discharges forty feet long. He hinted that the technology could be used as an "ultra-high megavolt source for particle beam weaponry".

Manning wondered what the engineer on stage really wanted to do - send electrical energy without wires or get a grant from the military. Or both. As if in answer to her question, Golka began to talk about wireless power transmission. Nikola Tesla had claimed to be able to send electrical energy without wires before the turn of the century, and he envisioned people all around the globe sticking rods into the earth to extract that energy - free. He didn't get to send power to the people, however.

After Tesla admitted to financier J.P. Morgan that an experimental tower on Long Island was meant to send power as well as messages, his public career ended.

27 Hesearch by Dr. Marc J. Seifer, p. 1-33, Proceedings of 1988 International Tesla Symposium, available from International Tesla Society, PO Box 5636, Colorado Springs, CO 80931.
28 SUPPRESSEDINVENTIONS,editedbyJonEisen,AucklandInstituteofTechnologyPress1994.

Although he continued to invent and to learn, he was kicked out of the spotlight. Corporate moguls who were interested in creating monopolies and metering electrical power blackballed him.

Golka spoke about his own "Project Tesla", which involved building a 122-foot resonating tower high in the mountains. Manning struggled to understand what he meant by his efforts to get "earth resonance". She could visualize the more familiar resonance in musical instruments, and that helped to picture the earth vibrating as if its note was struck, If someone strikes a piano key of the same pitch as a string on her violin nearby, for example, the string will vibrate.

The pitch of a note comes from how many times per second the sound vibrates. Similarly, the earth may have a resonant frequency; if electrical oscillations pound through the earth at a certain rate for a long enough time, the small periodic input may build up to a large vibration. Could Tesla's knowledge about resonance really be used for advanced technologies?

"We're losing to the Japanese," Golka insisted. "We have the technology and we're sleeping on it,"

Another short, lively speaker, an engineering professor, said there is "definite evidence that Nikola Tesla did excite the Schumann cavity in 1899". (This cavity is the area between the earth and the electrically-charged ionosphere.)

A man from Albuquerque, New Mexico, brought the talk down to earth again with a demonstration of a squat piece of equipment called The Tesla Earthquake Oscillator. Stroking his beard - a trim gray goatee - he assured onlookers that the oscillator would not be coupled to the earth during the demonstration and therefore would not cause any earthquakes.

The mechanical device had a frictionless piston in a heavy casing.

"This oscillator pounds the earth and impresses on it rhythmic vibrations of certain controllable frequencies," he said. The sound vibrations would bounce back and forth "in a reflection pattern which produces standing wave overlappings, or nodes, which act as lenses to propagate waves which set up a resonance condition."

There was that word "resonance" again. The electrical engineers talked about a buildup of ever more powerful effects. Manning may have had a puzzled expression on her face, because one man turned to her and offered to further explain resonance. He gave the example of a child pushing a larger person on a swing. Small pushes, correctly timed, gradually increase the distance through which the swing speeds.

In other words, small input at regular intervals can produce big effects. Resonance would turn out to be an important concept, used deliberately or inadvertently by men who try to tame the sky and in the process accidentally interfere with our weather, health and minds. But Manning wouldn't encounter the skybusters until five years later.

In another meeting room, a graduate student from Montana State University, Kyle Klicker, talked about the hypothesis of William Hooper, who gave new twists on magnetic theory. In the early 1970's, Hooper had been showing that not all electrical fields are the same. What he called a "motional electric field" was different from the well-known electrostatic fields; the motional electric field results in a force that passes through lead. In other words, the field is unshieldable.

Electricity of a different quality?

Manning wasn't ready for that; she was still studying beginner-level books about standard electricity whenever she went to a library. Over the previous few years she had realized that there was a shortage of journalists looking into this scene. Engineering lectures were a long way from her university training as a social-worker and job experience as a reporter, but she would look back on this 1986 conference, and more than a dozen other energy conferences to follow, as an introduction to the scene.

They introduced her to the fast growing field of study called "non-conventional energy technologies". Even the William Hooper patent would turn up in her life again later, quoted in a "skybuster" document that would frighten some otherwise-unflappable scientists.

In the 1986 meeting, however, she tried to narrow down what she was learning in order to make sense of it. History; she could easily grasp history. Next on the Tesla program was a man with a craggy face and the erect posture of a military officer. Dr. Bill Jones of Los Angeles was a physicist, retired naval officer and former Top Gun pilot, who spoke about Nikola Testa's place in history. Fortunately, Jones ran through his talk at a much slower pace than the Mach 2 speed at which he had flown fighter planes.

This physicist made it clear that he wanted Tesla reinstated in a place of honor in history. For example, Jones said, Guglielmo Marconi got recognition for radio, but Tesla had demonstrated a remote-control boat in Madison Square Gardens several years before Marconi's announcement. Dr. Jones also told about incidents such as the time in 1911 when Tesla described how radar could work. Tesla was too far ahead of his time to be heard. Six years later Tesla had offered his invention of a particle-beam weapon to the U.S. Department of War, and was laughed out of the war office. Again, he was too early in the century to be believed.

With a reporter's habit of taking notes, Manning penned the speaker's words in a notebook.

"What do we really know about magnetism?....What do we really know about electrostatics?"

Dr. Jones talked about something described as,

"force potential manifested by stress, and not necessarily in the presence of mass."

Some researchers looked at this force potential as being "scalar electromechanics". Mainstream scientists are reluctant to accept these new and revolutionary ideas, Dr. Jones said, but the ideas hold promise for clean energy technology.

On the last day of the conference as people flowed out of the auditorium, the crowd eddied around a man of wiry build, probably in his late thirties, who was speaking in an abrupt insistent voice that could be heard at the end of the hall.

"I object to this deliberate build-up of a cult around Tesla - referring to things he never invented, never said, as Tesla science'!"

The agitator was having a negative effect on the men arguing with him about power-beaming inventions. He appeared to feed on their annoyance. Later in the afternoon Manning again wandered out of the meeting hall for a mid-lecture break, head throbbing with new concepts. The same loud-voiced man, whom we will call Gregory Jones, was talking to another man and the two drew her into conversation. Gregory had the bouncy energy of someone who was looking for a quick laugh as well as an argument.

Asked why he insults Nikola Tesla at a Tesla symposium, he replied, "I like deflating idols."

This iconoclast was a full-time researcher regarding what he said is a subtle, powerful but little-known dynamic energy which resides in the atmosphere and nearly everywhere. He said a number of experiments have proven that a dynamic non-material energy exists in all living forms.

Manning had enough of wild concepts for one day. However, at a gut level she felt that it was true. Living people, animals, plants and even the atmosphere seemed to exude some type of electricity or vitality when in a healthy state and when free from the effects of pollution. Was it possible that official science really doesn't know much about something so basic, because the measuring instruments hadn't yet been invented to detect it?

Gregory was saying that the coarse form of electricity used in nineteenth and twentieth-century technologies is an irritant to the primal form of energy in the air. According to that worldview, if Tesla had been able to send electricity wirelessly all over the world, it would have been an ecological disaster.

"Humans. My least-favorite species!" Gregory bellowed, following the embarrassed journalist toward the door to the meeting hall. "Listen to this. I just about got myself kicked out of the meeting. I went up to the speaker; you heard his talk?"

The electrical engineering professor with a Ph.D. that Gregory mentioned had seemed highly respected by the audience. The scientist had done much experimenting toward the goal of repeating Tesla's wireless electricity experiments. He had talked about wanting to "resonate the Schumann cavity".

But Gregory was no respecter of academic degrees; he apparently had caused another commotion in the hallway by confronting this professor.

"I told him that if he tried to be another Tesla, he could cause the biggest ecological disaster we've ever had."

In Gregory's view, it was fortunate for the planet that Tesla's tower on Long Island - intended to broadcast power around the earth - was never completed. After the banker J .P. Morgan withdrew funding, no other financier would touch the project. It was just as well; the project would have been insane, Gregory insisted.

Whether they send their electrical power through the air or through the earth, he said, these experimenters would be playing with our planet on a big scale.

"So what did the professor say?"

"He said 'well, we'll just have to try it and find out'."

Hearing this, Manning stood in silence. Gregory's concern for his planet's natural systems felt sincere. He asked for her business card. To her surprise, he would telephone her occasionally for about six years, and he would turn out to be ferociously intelligent, and the most relentless information-seeker she would meet in the coming years of travels to conferences of inventors and other energy researchers.

She was careful to pass on to him only non-confidential information from published sources, never fully trusting Gregory because of his extremism. But she did appreciate the long-distance calls over the next few years to educate her about what he called "mad science".

"If Tesla's resonance effects, as shown by the Stanford team, can control enormous energies by minuscule triggering signals, then... with Godlike arrogance, we someday may yet direct the stars in their courses. "29

Frederic Jueneman, 1974.

Back to Contents