CONSPIRACY: Nikola Tesla

There's something empowering about creating things from scratch, taking a lump of clay and turning it into a beautiful sculpture, or mixing ingredients in just the right way to make some delicious cookies, or even just deciphering those god-awful IKEA directions to build a new bookshelf. For those who don't know, my husband Gino is a renowned cobbler in San Francisco. As I like to call him, my soul man. He is a true craftsman. He specializes in restoring treasured pieces, whether it's a worn pair of your Louis Vuitton shoes, a bag, a belt, or luggage. Basically bringing them back to life with remarkable skill. When you use resources right in front of you to create something that didn't exist before, or bring something old back to life, it feels almost like a form of, well, magic. I'm sure a lot of inventors throughout history felt the same way. Like Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Hetty Lamar, and Steve Jobs, they created life-changing new technology during their lifetimes. But one of the most fascinating and mysterious of them all was Nikola Tesla. He's famous for building one of the world's first and most efficient electric generators for designing automatic motors and lots of the equipment we use in power plants and factories. But he also made some other miraculous discoveries, ones that never really hit the mainstream. Things that were said to be so game-changing, so ahead of their time, that Tesla might have been killed because of them. I'm Rasha Pecorero. And I'm Yvette Gentile, and welcome back to another ingenious episode of So Supernatural! [Music] You can't understand the life of Nikola Tesla unless you have a sense of the world he lived in. He came of age in the mid-1800s, right in the middle of the industrial revolution. This was a time when major cities all over the world were adopting electricity, when Charles Dar when shook the United Kingdom by proposing the concept of evolution. When people in Europe and the United States were laying the first railroad tracks and making the first telephone calls. For a lot of people, this was a time of massive progress, where scientific discoveries were limitless. People were better educated. They had more access to resources than ever before. It felt like anything was possible. That was the world Nikola Tesla was born into on July 9th, 1856. He took his first breath at precisely the stroke of midnight. Seeing that from the very beginning, Nikola existed in a liminal space. He was born right on the boundary between one day and the next. And this may have influenced the way he saw himself and the world around him. Nikola always felt like he was being pulled in opposite directions, even as a child. His father was a minister who preached at an Orthodox Christian church in their home village of Smeyen Croatia. But Nikola's mother was an engineer and an inventor. So he was divided between two very different worlds, one of science and one of religion. A thing his parents agreed on was their love of education. And Nikola took after them. He loved to read. He often stayed up late into the night just devouring books. So much so that his dad actually worried about Nikola's reading habit. He wanted his son to actually go outside, maybe get some exercise. You know, go to bed at a reasonable time. So his dad took all of the candles out of his bedroom. He figured this would force him to either go to sleep or find something else to do after sunset. Instead, Nikola went through the entire house gathering every string and droplet of wax that he could find. And then he made his own candles in secret. So yeah, even as a child, Nikola was an innovator. But he wasn't the only kid in the family with those genes. His brother, Donne, was also incredibly bright and savvy. He was four years older than Nikola, who absolutely idolized Donne. There was just one problem. Their parents wanted one of the boys to follow in their father's footsteps and grew up to serve the church. And since Donne had such a natural knack with mechanics, and he was older, presumably he was the one expected to become the inventor, while Nikola would be the priest. But that didn't stop Nikola's curiosity. All throughout his childhood, Nikola would go to his big brother and ask for advice. Like is, is there a way to damn a nearby river and create a natural pond? Or can we make something to catch the frogs that live there? Or should we design a flying machine? No matter what Nikola asked for, Donne always came up with a way to make it a reality. He turned some old cornstucks into a toy gun, and he and Nikola damned the river. They even built a flying machine together. It was basically a small hang glider made from an old umbrella. But the theory was that if the boys jumped off the roof of their home, it would hold them aloft. And let's just say, do not try this at home. Yeah, it wasn't the most successful contraption they built together. When Nikola tested it, the machine didn't fly. It plummeted straight to the ground. And Nikola actually got badly injured. I don't know the specifics, but it was bad enough that he couldn't get out of bed for six weeks after that happened. Still, a lot of Donne's other experiments were successful, and he dreamed of making more. Speaking of dreams, according to Donne, that's actually where a lot of the ideas and blueprints came from. One day, he told Nikola that he would be thinking of something else entirely when all of a sudden, a vision would appear to him. An image would form right in front of his eyes, showing the inner workings of some device that hadn't been invented yet. It was so clear, Donne could study its layout, then go on to build a thing exactly as he envisioned it. In other words, it felt like some higher power was showing Donne how and what to make. As soon as Donne told Nikola about these visions, Nikola admitted he'd seen the same thing. Countless times, blueprints had appeared in front of his eyes, fully formed and perfectly designed. Nikola and Donne didn't understand where these visions were coming from, but it seemed the boys had been chosen for some higher purpose. But again, even if they both were talented inventors, it seemed like only one of them would get to fulfill that destiny, because their father was still very firm about his goals. He was only willing to send one of them to engineering school. The other would have to become a priest. But as we know, life doesn't always work out the way that we've planned. In 1863, when Nikola was just seven years old and Donne was 12, Donne went on a horseback ride. At some point, the horse bucked, Donne fell off and he was killed in the fall. As you can imagine, the entire family was shaken by the tragedy. But Nikola took it especially hard. After his brother's death, he ran away from home and hid in the woods to deal with his emotions. He only stayed away for one night, but for months afterward, Nikola had terrible nightmares. And in them, he watched his brother fall off the horse and die again and again. Nikola hadn't actually seen the fatal fall. He'd only heard about it afterward, but the dreams were so vivid, it felt like he'd actually in there. Sadly, this wasn't the only difficult chapter in Nikola's life. All through his teenage years, he was very sick. When he was 14 years old, he came down with multiple life-threatening diseases at once. And for a while, his doctors tried prescribing every different medication and treatment, but nothing helped. Nikola didn't get better. Finally his doctors told his. parents the bad news. They didn't think Nikola was ever going to recover. He had just a few weeks, maybe months to live. The physicians thought the best move was to help Nikola get as comfortable as possible. They didn't want to subject him to unpleasant remedies that weren't going to work anyway. So Nikola dropped out of school and spent his days doing basically whatever he wanted. Since he had always loved reading, he spent hours devouring whatever book he could get a tans on. One day he picked up a book by someone he'd never read before. An author named Mark Twain. By the end of the day, Twain was Nikola's new favorite author. He loved the story and now his goal was to read every single one of Twain's books. When Nikola told his parents about his new found passion, they noticed that he seemed stronger. The color had returned to his cheeks, he was breathing easier and he wasn't even running a fever. It was like his illness had suddenly disappeared after just one day of reading. When Nikola's doctors came to examine him, they asked if he'd done anything that could explain his sudden good health. Nikola wondered if maybe he now had a greater will to live, like he felt he had to survive long enough to get through all of these incredible books. Or maybe he'd been so caught up in what he was reading, he completely forgot that he was sick and it was a placebo effect that had cured him. But his doctors knew none of these explanations made sense. No one ever fully explained it, but Nikola recovered he went back to school and he tried to catch up on what he missed. He even earned his diploma in 1873 at the age of 17 and by then, his father had told him exactly what he wanted to hear. He'd pay for Nikola to go to school and become an inventor rather than a priest. It was almost as if fate had intervened. Nikola was now healthier, stronger, and getting to chase the dreams he'd always wanted, and the world would soon become a different place because of it. The question was would his inventions be for the better or worse? In 1881, when Nikola Tesla was 25 years old, he came down with another strained illness. He spent several days in bed unable to get up, but his symptoms were bizarre and unlike anything else he'd experienced before. It was like all of his senses had been cranked up to 11. If he looked out of his bedroom window, he could see things that were happening miles away, that others couldn't even make out. If a thunderstorm broke out, hundreds of miles away, Tesla said he could hear the rumbling in his room. Everything he smelled, tasted, felt, saw, and heard was extremely intense. And he knew he wasn't imagining these things, because every now and then, he'd see or hear someone approaching from really far off, only for them to eventually show up right at his front door. His doctors diagnosed it as a nervous breakdown, but Tesla never got better. For the rest of his life, he was hypersensitive to everything that went on around him. And he eventually had to learn how to ignore these distracting sensations because his sanity depended upon it. Russia, you remember my friend, Shela? Oh yeah, who I modeled with for years, and she had a similar thing. I mean, she was very intuitive and she could walk by a person, and she could feel the trauma that they had gone through. And it became so hard for her just to function on a daily basis, you know, without having the nervous breakdown. So very similar to Tesla, but, you know, two different type of situations. Also different. Yeah. Tesla's career also depended on ignoring the sensory overload. He was still committed to discovering everything he could about engineering, and he was still having those strange visions he'd first notice during his childhood. On a regular basis, complete blueprint designs would pop into his mind out of nowhere, and Tesla felt driven to bring those blueprints to life. In 1884, when he was 28, Tesla moved to New York after a brief stint in Paris. There were a lot of other inventors living in those cities, and Tesla wanted to work with and learn from them. In the process, he made a lot of incredible breakthroughs, but Tesla is most famous for inventing the transformer, which is a machine that controls how much energy travels through a wire at a given time. Basically, it's why you can plug in your phone, your TV, your coffee maker, and your refrigerator into the same outlet without shorting out your whole home. And this discovery got him a lot of attention. Tesla practically became a celebrity after that. And by the spring of 1894, his favorite author, Mark Twain, had heard Tesla was a devoted fan. So on March 4, Twain paid Tesla a visit in his New York laboratory. And after that, the two started hanging out all the time. At one point, Tesla told Twain about how his novels had cured him as a child. The men began chatting more generally about medical issues and illnesses, and Twain admitted that he had his own uncomfortable condition. He was really constipated. So Tesla told him he could help him. They went back to his lab where Tesla used one of his machines to create vibrations in the air. And he fired those vibrations right into Twain's gut. As soon as he turned the machine off, Twain said he urgently needed to use the bathroom before bolting it right out of the room. Well, most of the time, Tesla focused on inventions that weren't specific to the toilet. For example, around 1896, the 40-year-old was trying to perfect a new machine called an oscillator. In very simple terms, this device generated an electrical current. Then fired beams of energy through the air in whatever direction you pointed it in. Then it gave whatever you pointed at that more power. So imagine you could turn on a machine and instantly charge all of the phones, computers, cameras, and other devices in your room without having to plug them in. That was what the oscillator was supposed to do. The problem was that Tesla hadn't quite worked out all the bugs yet. And one day that year, he turned the oscillator on inside his New York laboratory. Then he got distracted by something else, of course, because he's an inventor. And he wasn't paying attention to the machine when he powered it up. So the electric charge just got stronger and stronger. And finally, it fired a beam of electricity that was a lot more intense than Tesla intended it to be. It made his entire laboratory shake. I mean, we're talking the walls, the floors, the windows, the ceilings. It was like he was causing an earthquake right there in his apartment. That's exactly what he was doing. The tremors swept through a 12 block radius. It was powerful enough to shatter windows across countless buildings. And this isn't just some legend either. The incident was very well documented. The New York Fire Department had to mount an emergency response. Police had to clear out the buildings in the area while they waited to see if they would eventually collapse. Luckily, no one was hurt or killed, but it did leave New Yorkers feeling shaken. Pun intended. And that included one police officer who wondered if somehow the earthquake might have been man-made. And since Tesla Lab was right at the epicenter, he checked in on the adventure to see if he could explain some things. The officer walked into the lab just in time to see Tesla smash his machine with a sledgehammer. Then he admitted he was responsible for the earthquake, and he never wanted anything like that to happen again. So he was basically destroying his device to make sure it couldn't hurt anyone else. At that point, Tesla realized it wasn't the best idea to be testing his inventions in the middle of the nation's bigger city. So the following year, in May 1899, 42-year-old Tesla moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado. He picked his new spot in Colorado because it was at a very high elevation. Tesla wanted to study a lot. electric storms that broke out in the upper atmosphere. He was still trying to perfect his oscillator, and he wanted to see how lightning bolts formed and moved, and maybe use that knowledge to improve his invention. There in Colorado Springs, Tesla built a laboratory. This was one design to capture sounds from the upper atmosphere, where lightning and other electric phenomena formed. And for hours at a time, Tesla would listen to those noises, hoping he'd be able to hear energy, just moving and crackling. Usually, it sounded like ordinary static with occasional pops and hisses, but one night while Tesla was listening to his satellite, he heard something completely unexpected. - That's right, it was three thuds all in a row. And everything went quiet just for a second. And afterwards, the thuds came back. Except this time, it wasn't three in a row. It was a different pattern, which Tesla described in his papers. Unfortunately, those notes have since been lost to time, so we don't know exactly what he heard, but Tesla felt this wasn't random static. Someone was purposefully making these rhythmic noises, as though they were beating on a drum. Tesla thought he couldn't possibly be hearing another human being. His radio dish was pointed basically straight up at the sky. Airplane's hadn't been invented yet, and this didn't sound like anything that would come from a blimp or a balloon. So in Tesla's mind, there was only one possible explanation for what he was picking up. A little while later, he broke the news of his discovery to the local newspapers. In an interview, he said, he heard, and I quote, the greeting of one planet to another. - Yes, you heard it right. Tesla believed he was listening to an alien transmission, specifically one that had come from the planet Mars. Not only that, but Tesla believed the thuds contained some kind of hidden message, like an alien version of Morse code, so he dedicated himself to deciphering it. Unfortunately, he never translated the thuds into English. So to this day, we don't know exactly what the message said, or if it was even a message at all, but this wasn't Tesla's only brush with a supernatural. Throughout the 20th century, he continually worked on something that felt like the plot of a sci-fi movie, namely a death ray. - It worked a lot like the oscillator. The death ray was supposed to fire a beam of electricity through the air, but instead of shooting bolts that could charge devices, this would blast a massive amount of energy, enough to disintegrate anything on contact, buildings, objects, people. Tesla said the death ray was powerful enough that nothing could stop it. The energy could even melt diamonds, the hardest mineral on earth, so there was no way to shield yourself from its blast. In fairness, there's no concrete hard evidence that Tesla ever actually built the thing, but he patented a design, and he openly spoke to reporters and colleagues about his giant energy weapon. He said it was powerful enough to wipe out all of humanity with just one shot. - We know it sounds like something and evil super villain would do, but Tesla thought his death ray could actually be used for good. In his mind, it would bring peace on earth, because no world leader, no matter how short-sighted or greedy or how impulsive they were, would be willing to risk total annihilation. So he figured they'd all agree to never go to war or invade one another again. And that may be because government officials all around the world were afraid of what he could do with his technology, so they may have tried to stop the development by silencing him permanently. - During his lifetime, Tesla came up with a lot of inventions that we can only dream of today. He wanted to harness the energy of the earth's rotation and get clean electricity from it. Because even back then, he understood that it was dangerous to pollute the air and the water by burning oil and coal. He also dreamed of inventing solar panels, but never got around to actually building them. In fact, by early 1943, Tesla was slowing down. He no longer had the energy to build every design he came up with. He was 86 years old by then, and he was back living in New York City, but not in a fancy apartment or a house. Instead, he was staying in a budget hotel. And since he was too old to handle a lot of his daily chores, Tesla needed the staff to change his sheets and clean his room. - Then one day, in early January of that year, Tesla went to one of the hotel employees and asked them for a favor. He said he'd just spent several hours catching up over coffee with his old friend Mark Twain, and he wanted to send Twain a letter with some cash inside of it. Then he handed the employee the envelope that was already addressed and sealed. Tesla asked them to put it in the mail. But there were two big problems with that. First, the address on the envelope wasn't a good one. It was for a building that had been torn down a long time ago, so it was undeliverable. Second, Mark Twain had been dead for over 30 years. The hotel employees didn't know if Tesla was very confused. I mean, he was 86, or maybe he'd literally had a conversation with a ghost. - But it did seem like he had some kind of connection with death, because a handful of days later on January 7, 1943, he suffered a sudden intense heart attack. That day, Nikola Tesla passed away in his hotel room and his body was found the next day. As soon as the news broke, his relatives started making decisions about how to handle his estate. Tesla's nephew, Sava Kosonovich lived in New York City. So he offered to go to Tesla's hotel and gather his things on the eighth. The same day his body was found. Sava was familiar with his uncle's work. He expected to find notebooks full of diagrams and observations in his uncle's room. Maybe some paperwork for patents he planned to file or diaries. Except when Sava arrived, he went through Tesla's desks, his drawers, and his bookshelf. Most of his documents were exactly where they were supposed to be, but a handful of them were definitely missing. Sava couldn't figure out where they went. He knew people had been in and out of Tesla's room all day. Employees with a funeral home had come to remove his body earlier, house keeping, but there was no reason for them to touch any of his books or his journals. Sava also didn't believe Tesla would have misplaced them before his death. All he could think of was that someone had come in and stolen the papers. So he called the police to report the theft. And almost immediately, the officers escalated the case up to the FBI. Apparently, they knew about Tesla's designs for a death ray, which he'd been perfecting for the last 40 years. Supposedly, he still hadn't gotten it quite right, but they didn't want that information to fall into the wrong hands, which is why the FBI treated the robbery as a national security threat. So on January 9, the day after Sava reported the theft, government agents descended on Tesla's home and workshops. They seized all of his remaining notes, diaries, and papers. And by the way, this is all 100% confirmed. The agents were operating under the War Powers Act, which basically said the government could do whatever it took to win World War II. Even things that were normally forbidden by the Constitution. In this case, they said they couldn't afford for any more of Tesla's work to go missing. So they were seizing all of it. And then agents supposedly made copies of everything they'd seized. According to a historian and biographer, named Mark Cypher, they gave duplicates of Tesla's death ray designs to engineers at the Wright Patterson area. Air Force Base in Ohio. And they asked these scientists if it would be possible to actually build Tesla's energy weapon. We don't know how, or even if the operation turned out, because the Air Force never declassified their results. On top of that, those copies of Tesla's designs mysteriously went missing right after the engineers tried to build the weapon. And according to SAVA, the FBI also seized files that had nothing to do with his inventions, including Tesla's notes on that supposed transmission from outer space. And apparently, there are other files that were so secret even SAVA didn't know what they said. In 1952, federal officials told SAVA they wanted to return Tesla's notes. Then they shipped 60 trunks full of his documents to his home. The problem was, SAVA was expecting 80 trucks, not 60. And for the rest of his life, he argued that the US government was withholding those additional missing files. For what it's worth, US officials deny that they stole Tesla's work, but they also refused to explain what happened to those other 20 trunks. So to this day, it's impossible to say if the FBI kept them, if they misplaced them, or if they somehow packed 80 trunks worth of paper into 60 trunks. As for the copies that they made, many were kept secret until 2016 when the federal government declassified some of them. A few more were released in 2018, but the rest of the files are still treated as top secret even to this day. No one knows what Tesla's files say or if they'll ever be released. But why would the FBI keep these files a secret? Do they pose a threat to national security? Or do they contain information that humanity isn't ready for? Or maybe they implicate the US government in a serious crime? Like murder. Because you see, a lot of people think Tesla didn't die of a simple heart attack. Instead, the theory goes that federal agents killed him, staged his death to look natural, and then stole those papers that Savah realized were missing. And apparently, they did this because Tesla's work was just too dangerous. They were afraid that if he completed his death rate designs, he'd change the balance of power across the globe and not for the better. I have to say, this theory really raises doubts for me because Tesla died while World War 2 was still raging, and he was working on weapons and defense systems that would have helped the United States. The Americans had no reason to want Tesla dead or to steal from him. However, some people believe Tesla was killed by a German agent who then stole his most sensitive paperwork. That would explain why the FBI was so quick to confiscate everything that was left behind, because they knew Tesla's death was a huge blow to the war effort. But there are also allegations that Tesla was murdered for reasons that had nothing to do with the war. And everything to do with corporate profits. After all, his oscillator had the potential to be a game changer. If he'd managed to get it working right, he could have provided free wireless electricity to everyone in New York City. Then he could have installed oscillators in every major city across the world. Just imagine if electric power was as accessible, plentiful, and free just like fresh air or sunlight. It would be great for people, basically like you and me, Russia, but terrible for electrical power companies that wouldn't be able to make money off their customers anymore. So as the theory goes, these multi-million dollar corporations insured this could never happen by killing Tesla and stealing his notes. The truth is Tesla was so prolific in his lifetime. He inevitably ended up with a lot of enemies. It's impossible to say who may have wanted him dead or what became of his work. And we haven't even touched on some of the wilder theories about Tesla. Like how some people say he was actually an alien from outer space who pretended to be human in order to share advanced technology with us, the whole world. Or that he was actually a time traveler from the future. After all, he was very interested in green energy and wireless communications, neither of which became mainstream until decades after his death. All we can say for sure is that with Tesla's passing, the world lost a genius and a visionary inventor. And since his death, lots of historians, reporters, and engineers have been trying to make sense of Tesla's legacy. Ultimately, we don't know if Tesla had supernatural powers, if he was chosen for a special purpose at birth, or if he was simply a phenomenal inventor. But we know what Tesla believed. For his whole life, he said there's actually no difference between magic and science. He often claimed that ESP, mind reading, visions of the future and other supernatural phenomena were real. But they had grounded scientific explanations. He didn't know what those explanations were, but he figured someday we'd be able to measure, classify, and quantify all sorts of paranormal incidents. All to say, we can't currently explain how he did what he did. But who's to say maybe that'll be different in a few decades or even a few years? Which is why it's always important to keep asking questions, to keep exploring, and to always have an open mind. Because you never know where your next spark of creativity will come from. And it's possible, it could ultimately change the world. This is So Supernatural, an audio chuck original produced by CrimeHouse. You can connect with us on Instagram at SoSupernaturalPod and visit our website at SoSupernaturalPodcast.com. Join Rochet Meenex Friday for an all new episode. I think Chuck would approve.