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Chapter Four
SKYBUSTERS UNDER SECRECY
Dr. Bernard Eastlund chuckles as he tells about the time that the
metaphorical light bulb clicked between his mind and that of Dr.
Simon Ramo.
"He's a big guy in military science," Eastlund explained to Manning
in a telephone interview. "He was the founder of TRW and all these
big companies. They're a big defense contractor. At the time he was
a board member for ARCO (Atlantic Richfield Oil Company)."
When Eastlund walked into the meeting room that day in the 1980's to
give a presentation, he was aware of the senior scientist's
presence. Eastlund had a collection of transparencies ready to slap
onto the audiovisual table, to illustrate his new concept for
focusing a powerful beam of radio-frequency or microwave energy onto
the ionosphere. He had several reasons to expect approval.
For one,
whoever would fire up electrical generators to power his proposed
giant transmitter could be a big paying customer for ARCO's natural
gas fields on the North Slope of Alaska,
"I came in with my viewgraphs," Eastlund recalls. "I showed one
viewgraph on the location of the North Slope of Alaska. Where the
earth's magnetic field is, where Russia is, and everything. Then 1
had another slide where I showed taking the gas, having an antenna
and beaming it up."
Eastlund didn't have to show the next slide. The idea clicked and
the military contractor apparently wanted to just think about it for
a minute.
"(Ramo) basically told me to shut up, and sat there and said, 'such
a great idea!' I didn't have to show any of the detail," Eastlund
said with obvious pride. "It's that kind of a concept. In fact,
dealing with knowledgeable people, I never made it beyond the third
view graph. Then they all started inventing, themselves."
The senior scientist whom Eastlund impressed is an inventor who has
patents on microwave technology, electron optics and guided
missiles. Ramo co-authored the book Fields and Waves in Modern Radio
in 1944, and in general he is a knowledgeable engineer.
Eastlund has been described as a soft-spoken, highly-reputable
physicist, president of a technological company in Houston. "Eastlund
is no wire-haired
madman," Omni magazine once said46, citing his degrees from
Massachusetts institute of Technology and Columbia University. While
working for eight years in the Atomic Energy Commission's fusion
program in the early 1970's, for example, he co-invented a "fusion
torch" that would use plasma leftovers from fusion reactors in
recycling solid waste.
Some time after the meeting where Ramo heard Eastlund's beam
focusing ideas, the two worked together on a patent that they filed
in early 1985.
Their "Method and Apparatus for Creating an
Artificial Electron Cyclotron Heating Region of Plasma" was the
second of a series of three patents that Eastlund assigned to a
subsidiary of ARCO - Arco Power Technologies Inc. (APTI). Ramo's
contribution to the concept was to use a large superconducting coil
on the ground to modify earth's magnetic field at a high altitude,
Eastlund said.
It had been a good time for Eastlund. The controversy over "the
Eastlund patents" had not yet begun. No physicist had yet warned
that experimenting with his patents could turn into "an act of
global vandalism".
Eastlund had been hired by ARCO as a consultant, to come up with
uses for the 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in ARCO's
reserves on the North Slope of Alaska. ARCO's problem was the remote
location of the gas. Building a pipeline and shunting the gas to
industrial centers was no answer; that pipeline megaproject had been
on the oil industry agenda for more than twenty years without
development. The company would get maximum profit if it found a use
for its product right there on the North Slope itself.
In that scarcely-populated stretch of icebound real estate, who
would be the customers for massive amounts of power? Looking at it
in terms of burning the gas on the spot to power a huge generator
and make electricity, Eastlund realized that they were talking
billions of watts of electricity, not just the millions watts put
out by a city's megawatt power plant. What could his boss possibly
do with a few gigawatts?
He rejected every idea that needed smaller amounts of power.
Eventually Eastlund came up with a wild plan - use all that energy to
power the biggest "ionospheric heater" in the world. The equipment
on the ground would beam focused energy up to the ionosphere, where
the beamed radio frequency (RF) waves would interact powerfully with
charged particles that are always trapped there. The heating effect
of the focused beam would then dramatically push a plume - a large
section of the ionosphere - up and outward from Earth.
As it later turned out, the big ionospheric heater in Alaska would
be located far from the North Slope gas fields. But the challenge
had served to spark Eastlund's inventiveness.
Anyone outside the military-industrial-academic complex, watching
Eastlund research the history of other ionospheric heaters, might
wonder - why would anyone want to heat and lift part of the upper
atmosphere?
46 Bill Lawren, "Rediscovering
Tesla", Omni magazine, March 1988.
Was the motive to allow
his country to get a jump ahead of the Soviet Union, which had
experimented with related technology? Only they know for sure, Some
of Eastlund's research was supported by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA)47 under the project title "Alaska
North Slope Electric Missile Shield".
The United States already had smaller antennae in several locations,
for experiments in bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere. With a
bigger tool than anyone else and the ability to focus its beam, the
United States military could fry incoming missiles, disrupt global
communications, change the chemical composition of the upper
atmosphere and even engineer weather by redirecting very high wind
patterns (jet streams).
Other tricks which his invention could do would be debated a few
years later. "Earth-penetrating tomography", (scanning the earth
with radiations bounced off the sky - basically, X-raying the ground
in a search for tunnels and hidden caches) is a use which would show
up in the National Defense Authorization Act for 1995. And there are
possible uses that are more futuristic than the tomography.
In the 1980's it wasn't an easy sell to the patent office, however.
When he applied for the first of several patents on his
ionospheric-heater invention, the patent examiner told Eastlund that
his invention sounded like science fiction. Eastlund replied that
the technology was all known. Step-by-step, he backed up his claims
with paperwork that proved that the technology was possible. Then
the government officials were impressed.
But before the document
moved out into the public literature in 1991, the Navy first slapped
a Secrecy Order on his
U.S. patent number 5,038,664 for a year. That
patent told how to make a "shell of relativistic particles" high in
the sky. "Relativistic" particles travel at near the speed of light.
When Eastlund had the military's attention, the Pentagon opened its
pocketbook and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the initial
study of his claims. Eastlund said in a 1988 radio interview that
the defense department had done a lot of work on his concepts, but
he was not at liberty to give details. He later told Manning that
after he had worked within ARCO for a year and applied for patents,
Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) had combed through
his theories then issued a contract for him to study how to generate
the relativistic electrons in the ionosphere.
After 1986 he was off the ARCO payroll, before the invention drew
much lire in the media. Its first major publicity was in 1988, the
year after one of his patents on the system - how to beam huge
amounts of electromagnetic energy to selected regions of the upper
atmosphere48 - was made public.
The publicized patent was titled "A Method and Apparatus for
Altering a Region of the Earth's Atmosphere, Ionosphere and
Magnetosphere". Eastlund told Alex Chadwick of National Public Radio
that the patent should have been kept under government secrecy. He
said he had been unhappy that it was issued publicly, but, as he
understood it, the patent office does not keep basic "fundamental
information" secret.
46 Bill Lawren, "Rediscovering Tesla", Omni magazine,
March 1988.
47 DARPA Contract No. DAAHDJ-86-C-0420 "Alaska North Slope Electric
Missile Shield.
"You don't get a patent if you don't describe
in enough detail to another person how to use it," he said.
Specifics of military applications of his patent remain proprietary
(secret), he added.
The radio interviewer, Chadwick, confronted Eastlund about aspects
which troubled the interviewer - mainly the enormity of what the
inventor claimed his invention could do. Effects such as changing
the planet's atmosphere sounded like something out of a Jules Verne
novel.
Sounding quite proud of his accomplishments, Eastlund replied that
nothing in the patent was science fiction; it is based on combining
known technologies.
"Many of the applications in here are aimed at
beneficial effects."
Are artificial sunspot-effects beneficial?
Chadwick pointed to page
eleven of the patent, where Eastlund claimed that his invention
could disrupt communications all over the world. With a short laugh,
the inventor acknowledged the claim.
"And obviously that doesn't
sound too beneficial, so I'm contradicting my answer to the last
statement. But in the patent itself is the fact that you can do
that. Sunspots or solar flares will disrupt communications badly.
This would do that through basically the same mechanism."
Eastlund's enthusiasm for planetary-scale engineering came through
just as clearly in an interview with Omni magazine. While
acknowledging that many of the uses of his invention are warlike, he
also talked about "more benign" uses. His view of benign included
using the technology to reroute the high-altitude jet stream, which
is a major player in shaping global weather.
Another way to control
the weather with his technology would be to build "plumes of
atmospheric particles to act as a lens or focusing device" for
sunlight, he told Omni. With this, the people controlling the
antennae could aim in such a way that the return beams would hit a
certain part of the earth. With the heating ability, they could
experiment until they could control wind patterns in a specific
place.
The Omni article explained.
"What this means, he says, is that by
controlling local weather patterns one could, say, bring rain to
Ethiopia or alter the summer storm pattern in the Caribbean. His
device might even help regenerate the depleted ozone layer, patch
the ozone hole over Antarctica, or break up atmospheric industrial
pollutants like carbon monoxide or nitrous oxide."
Not every scientist shared Eastlund's eagerness to experiment with
the ionosphere. Dr. Richard Williams, a physicist with the David
Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, New Jersey, sent a letter to a
scientific journal warning that Eastlund's invention might become a
serious threat to the earth's atmosphere49.
49 Richard Williams,"Atmospheric Threat", Physics and Society Vol.17 No.2 April 1988, page16.
Williams summed up the
contents in Eastlund/APTI's patent for altering the atmosphere,
ionosphere and/or magnetosphere:
"The idea of the invention
is to generate a beam of radio waves of enormous intensity and
direct this toward the upper atmosphere. At certain altitudes,
electron cyclotron resonance heating of existing electrons would
cause further ionization of the neutral particles of the atmosphere.
Among the intended uses of the invention are to 'disrupt microwave
transmissions of satellites' or to cause 'even total disruption of
communications over a very large portion of the earth'. Other
intended uses include weather modification, lifting large regions of
the atmosphere, and intercepting incoming missiles."
Williams came up with a pithy one-word description of the concept
skybusting.
"This 'skybusting' concept may sound like a tall order,
but look at the power levels that will be used
(10-to-the-ninth-power up to 10-to-the-eleventhpower watts)! This is
equivalent to the output of ten to 300 large power generating
stations."
High-energy experiments pose a danger to the upper atmosphere,
Williams said. He then referred to Eastlund's statement in the radio
interview - that a secret military project was already underway to
study and implement the invention.
Williams had a chilling warning.
"Tests of this kind could cause irreversible damage."
Williams reminded his fellow physicists that small changes in the
upper atmosphere, such as mere traces of manmade substances, can
have a profound effect. An example is the destructive effects on the
ozone layer, a protective layer of Earth's atmosphere which absorbs
dangerous ultraviolet radiation. While making it clear that the
ozone layer and ionosphere are separate layers, physicists say the
layers are interconnected as well as separate.
Regarding the ozone
layer, Williams said,
"After long negotiations, the federal
government had joined in an international treaty to protect the
ozone layer. A few tests of the Eastlund invention might undo all
that we have accomplished with the treaty."
Effects in the upper atmosphere cannot be kept in one spot, Williams
noted.
The publicity was apparently not welcomed by ARCO Power Technologies
Inc. In August of 1992, Jeane Manning had confronted the president
of APTI, Ramy Shanny, Ph.D., after a power-beaming workshop at an
International Energy Conversion Engineering Conference. She had come
to the IECEC meeting to further educate herself about energy
alternatives, but one item on the program took her away from the
"advanced and innovative systems" sessions for a morning. The
schedule said that a representative of APTI would be in a workshop
on power-beaming, and she wanted to ask the person whether APTI was
going to build Eastlund's invention.
Manning slipped in the room without needing to point to the press
pass on her suit jacket. The workshop was a rather intimate
gathering of colleagues from national laboratories, the federal
department of energy and universities; the meeting room held less
than thirty people. There was one other woman in the room, also
looking severely professional as befits a senior research scientist
at a national laboratory.
The discussion bounced from topic to topic, as if the participants
were in a hurry to get the formal meeting over and meet informally.
Canada was involved in an experimental aircraft that flew to 150
miles in 1987 from microwave power beamed from the ground, Manning
learned. ARCO, Raytheon, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Japanese
scientists made history in microwave-power beaming. These aircraft
or satellite projects can be used for surveillance, the speakers
bragged. Or to relay power for "development of remote natural
resources".
One well-dressed man stood up and asked for cooperation among the
champions of laser beaming and the proponents of microwave beaming,
"...to find out what the stuff can do. Let's get a team together and
solicit money from the folks with the pocketbooks."
A project engineer for a large university's Center for Space Power
was asked about environmental effects of microwave power beaming. He
replied that the biggest challenge for the people in the room was
the public perception of an environmental impact. Studies about
microwave energy and microwave ovens were done in the 1970's and
'80's, he noted, but since then the bulk of the environmental
studies have focused on 60-hz transmission lines.
"But I think, with
the data that's out there, you can show that at the power densities
we're talking about operating, there certainly will not be any
thermal effects, and the power densities where the people will be
going close to the beam will be such that you're not going to have a
problem."
To Manning's surprise, he admitted that,
"the big question is 'what
(when people are exposed to power-beaming) are the effects from
low-density, long-term duration?' There hasn't been any kind of
study on that, and that's going to be such a detailed involved
intensive study that it's not going to be done in the near future.
Because there's no mandate."
Manning swore quietly into her tape recorder.
"Then why in the world
are they asking for money to build their toys before such a study is
done?"
She didn't ask the question aloud, because she wanted to hear
as much as possible from the next speaker - the president of APTI.
Perhaps she could find out if the beaming to ionosphere experiment
had been canceled,
Dr. Shanny was a rather swarthy and large man, dressed in a
well-tailored dark suit, His presentation was brief, with an
audiovisual about ARCO's experiment in beaming microwave power to an
aircraft in Canada, and a few comments. Perhaps being there was more
important than giving a detailed report.
Afterward, Manning waited outside the meeting room door on the
sun-dazzled patio, and stopped Shanny as he came out. She introduced
herself with her business card from Explore! magazine, then asked
him about the status of the Bernard Eastlund patented technology.
Shanny backed away from her, gesturing with his hands and using
facial expressions to convey the impression that Eastland is crazy
and the company was not going to have anything further to do with
Eastlund's futuristic patent.
Momentarily assured that APTI would not be building the
mega-instrument, Manning let him rejoin his group and head for a
restaurant. Then she replayed the scene in her mind and realized he
had not given her a single complete sentence that she could quote.
The message - disavowing Eastlund's work and reassuring her that APTI
would not build such a technology - had cleverly been conveyed
without Shanny having committing to uttering words.
A couple of years later, the giant defense contractor E-Systems
bought Shanny's company, APTI. The trail from Eastlund's schemes was
further buried in 1995, after Raytheon corporation bought the HAARP
contract - and thus the APTI patents - from E-Systems,
Even if the contractors really did completely disown
the
controversial Eastlund patent # 4,686,605, APTI was the assignee on
a dozen others whose technologies were related. APTI, and the larger
defense contractors who later swallowed APTI and its patents,
probably did leave Bernard Eastlund's controversial patents in their
dust50 as they accelerated their power-beaming technology.
Among the
unpublicized patents - also assigned to APTI Inc. - that Nick Begich
uncovered were:
-
5,068,669 "Power Beaming System"
-
5,041,834 "Artificial Ionospheric
Mirror Composed of a Plasma Layer..."
-
4,999,637 "Creation of
Artificial Ionization Clouds Above the Earth"
-
4,817,495 "Defense System for
Discriminating Between Objects in Space"
-
4,873,928 "Nuclear-Sized Explosions Without Radiation"
In the interview with Manning, Eastlund explained why his method for
creating a high-energy missile shield was an improvement over the
current Strategic Defense Initiatives type of beaming - no satellites
needed. The antennae on the ground radiate energy into the areas
high above the Earth without the use of particle beaming from
satellites to accelerate electrons in the ionosphere.
At very high
altitudes, the effects would multiply if a high enough power level
was used.
"I took a factor of about a million steps {increase) in power it
could deliver at, say, 100 kilometers altitude. I took it way beyond
what the slate of the art was at the time...It opened up new things.
As I understand it, that's one of the selling points of HAARP - by
having this massively-greater power, you can do a lot more
interesting things. Basically, what I said in the patents."
50- Eastlund/APTI patent #4,686,605"Method and Apparatus for Altering
a Region in the Earth's
Atmosphere, Ionosphere and Magnetosphere"; #
5,038,664 "Method for
Producing a Shell of
Relativistic Particles, held up one year by Navy secrecy order; and
#
4,712,155 "Method and
Apparatus for Creating an Artificial Electron Cyclotron".
Is it possible that the
HAARP scientists could have miniaturized the technology so that they
don't need such a large area of land and electrical power as called
for in Eastlund's patents? Manning asked him.
"It's entirely
possible," he replied. "They have had a lot of good engineers
working on it for some time. I would hope they have improved it."
In 1994 Eastlund wrote to an Australian who was concerned about
HAARPs impact on New Zealand and Australia, David White.51
"As we
discussed, this (HAARP) antenna may be a first step toward
determining if some of the applications discussed in my patents
could be accomplished. Most of the military applications require
generation of relativistic electrons in the ionosphere. It is my
understanding that one of the purposes of the HAARP antenna is to
study the generation of relativistic electrons."
The speeded-up electrons would travel along Earth's magnetic field
lines and could either "bounce" on a field line over Australia and
return to the north, or "be lost and fall into the atmosphere".
"Don't panic," Eastlund wrote, "this happens very high in the
atmosphere."
"It is... years in the future that enough electrons might be
generated to merit concern in the Southern hemisphere, and that only
if it can be proven that such electrons can be created with the
antenna."
In the meantime, Eastlund said,
"since I stopped working for ARCO, I
have spent some time investigating uses of the antenna for possible
replenishment of the ozone holes, and for steering the jet stream
for weather modification."
When the ionizing beams make some ozone by a breakdown in the
atmosphere, he later told Manning, they also increase nitrogen
compounds up there.
"The problem is, it takes a lot of energy to
make a lot of ozone."
The scientist planned to continue to work on
the problem.
He would like recognition for his part in inventing the HAARP
advanced ionospheric heater.
"They own it, but they can't take
credit for it," he said. "I was upset, because 'internal politics'
is why I was let go. I went to my patent lawyer, and he said 'Ben,
don't worry about it. It's a far out idea... If it works, the United
States government says you invented it. And they can't take that
away.' "
As evidence that HAARP was based on Eastlund-type technology, he
said,
"...In the RFP (Request for Proposal) for the project, for
example, they stated that generation of relativistic electrons was
one of the objectives of the program."
Eastlund gave a vivid picture of how energetic those electrons are.
"The electron that hits your TV screen is moving at 25,000
electron-volts. When it gets more than a half-a-million, that's when
you call it relativistic. The ones (HAARP) is talking about are one
to three million electron-volts."
51 March 26, 1994, letter from Bernard Eastlund to David White
of Production Technologies Inc.,
quoted with permission from Dr. Eastlund.
The patent he wrote with Simon Ramo dealt with the how-to.
"How you
turn the knobs on your antennae and beam things and make things
happen."
Since the Earth's magnetic field is barely strong enough to
turn the needle on a compass, Ramo added the concept of using a very
large ground-based superconducting coil to modify the amount of the
earth's magnetic field at a certain altitude, Eastlund told Manning,
"To give you a little more ability to control things...It would
allow you to more effectively do things up at the high altitude."
The reporter asked,
"Has anyone raised the thought of things getting
out of control?"
Eastlund didn't seem to notice the anger behind her question, and he
gave an enthusiastic technical answer.
"I don't mean control in that
sense," he said, "Let's say you want electrons to get hot. You send
your waves through and they get hot, but only use up one per cent of
what you sent... So you have to use a huge antenna.... Control in
terms of doing what you want."
The physicist emphasized that he is in favor of HAARP.
"If ten per
cent of any of these things work out, it's going to be a very neat
thing."
A growing number of people don't agree. Before we meet
Clare Zickuhr
and "the guys in the bush", the next chapter will look back at the
history of attempts to do "neat things" in the upper atmosphere.
"When the Earth came alive it began constructing its own membrane,
for the general
purpose of editing the sun... The sky is a miraculous achievement.
"52
Lewis Thomas,
1973
52 Lewis
Thomas, "The World's Biggest Membrane, The Live sofa Cell", Massachusetts Medical
Society 1973.
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