Shepherd turned to Calderón. ‘Come on Constanza. Time out. Let’s go outside for lunch. We need some fresh air. Did you think any of that was getting through?’
‘Oh yes,’ Constanza replied. ‘People are always persuaded by you. But most of them are always persuaded by the last person they listened to. The real question is whether any of it sticks.’
‘I think the scepticism…the attitude…sticks and acts as an inoculation. Coleridge divided readers into four categories: sponges who absorb all they read and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied; sand-glasses who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time; strain-bags who retain merely the dregs of what they read; and mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read and enable others to profit by it also.’
‘I have another question before we veer off at a tangent about Romantic Poets. Whenever I hear you talking about climate change you censure any mention of the role of the military and their climate weapon development programmes. But you always include it whenever you write about the risks of climate change. In fact your first strategic bullet point is always ‘We will outlaw the use and development of climate weapons immediately’. What is actually going on?’
Shepherd stopped and turned to Calderón. She held his gaze. ‘The first question is easy to answer. I don’t talk about it because I am uncertain of my facts. Your second question is harder to answer. I need a Deep Throat or a whistleblower. What is actually going on? The quick answer is ‘I don’t know.’ What have you managed to turn up? We have twenty minutes. Perhaps we should compare notes. Let’s sit over there by the herb garden. You go first. Let us try to agree about the background. Not right back to the Armada and the claims that the Wessex witches created the storm that scattered the Spanish fleet. But more recently.’
‘How about starting with Tesla?’ Calderón suggested.
‘Good idea. Tesla filed a bunch of wild patents for an unmanned electrically propelled aircraft that could fly at eighteen thousand miles per hour and could be used as a weapon. He came up with something called teleforce, which was a death ray that could melt airplane engines at a distance of two hundred and fifty miles. He did a lot of work on wireless transmission of electricity. He was fascinated by the possibility of focusing electrical force and amplifying its effect. He even claimed to have once produced an earthquake from his lab. Take it from there.’
‘In a moment. But let’s stay with the Wessex witches. You asked for something more recent. The Great Crash on the London Stock Exchange in 1987 coincided with the Great Storm in the south of England. There were several very puzzling things about this storm of twenty years ago.
For starters the weathermen completely failed to predict the hurricane. In fact the English Weather Service went out of the way to pour scorn on a report from a French weather station because they could see little in the weather conditions prior to the storm to suggest a meteorological horror show was on the way.
But then quite suddenly across southern Britain and on the other side of the channel in northern Brittany, the storm hit with devastating results. In southern England, some fifteen million trees were felled and three million households left without electricity.
Among this devastation, the worst damage was concentrated in a path just thirty miles wide. Why such a narrow zone? This remained a mystery until satellite pictures of the storm were re-examined and an unusual cloud, hooked like a scorpion’s tail, was discovered among the swirling mass of storm clouds. It seems that this scorpion-shaped cloud packed a nasty sting: superfast winds dubbed a ‘sting jet’.
The phenomenon had been spawned some two and a half miles high in the sky. Cold air plunged down through the tops of the storm clouds which were packed with snow and ice. This turned the air drier, colder and so dense that the air accelerated downwards like an avalanche bursting down a mountainside, until it smashed into the ground with winds reaching up to a hundred miles an hour.
Other intense Atlantic storms have been revealed with sting jets, and all have a common feature - an explosive drop in atmospheric pressure. They are not common but have been estimated to cause six hundred million pounds of damage across Europe each year.’
‘Interesting,’ mumbled Shepherd, although he appeared to be only half-listening. ‘Tesla could simply have been ahead of his time as far as ballistics missiles and lasers are concerned.’ He said eventually. ‘His concepts were sound. Indeed his influence upon the electrification of technology cannot be overestimated. Do we have time for a run-through of the work of this Croatian genius? Constanza nodded. 'So, where to start?' Shepherd said, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands. 'Let's go back a hundred years.'
'In 1899, during his experiments with phenomenally-high voltage equipment, Tesla experienced the effects of artificial ball lightning which appears as a glowing spherical mass of incandescent plasma that floats into houses and along telephone or power cables, passing through glass windows without affecting the glass. Tubs of water can be brought swiftly to the boil when ball lightning drops into them. Witnesses to ball lightning include Niels Bohr; the director of MIT, Victor Weisskopf, and even former US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, who reported seeing ball lightning cross the breakfast table aboard the presidential plane. Anything to add?'
'I read an article recently about Hill Airforce Missile Radiographic Facility in Utah,'Calderón said. 'Apparently the phenomenon occurs regularly at some places and during the 1970s ball lightning formed about once a year inside Building 985. A great volleyball-sized ball of blue fire would drop out of space next to the high voltage supply of a linear accelerator, float down to the floor, roll about at random and then suddenly rise again to the power source where it dissipated. On one occasion, lightning struck the building, and at the same moment, an intense sphere of fire about the size of a tennis ball formed above a power conduit on the wall. It moved along the wall for about thirty feet, floated out and around the neck and shoulders of a technician standing nearby, moved back to the wall and continued on its way for several feet until it reached a junction box, where it exploded causing major electrical damage.'
'Just one of many similar stories,' Shepherd said and continued. 'Ball lightning appears to be another form of power transmission, somehow connected with the earth, or in the case of artificial ball lightning, the power source causing it. At his Colorado Springs laboratory, Tesla was working on a related phenomenon, electricity transmission of power without wires. On one occasion he managed to transmit enough power to light up 200 fifty-watt light bulbs twenty six miles away.'
'He then decided to follow up on Benjamin Franklin's investigation of natural lightning by monitoring the movement of lightning during a thunderstorm. To Tesla's surprise he discovered that the lightning organised itself into standing waves and he believed that it should be possible to build a transmitter capable of picking up the energy in these standing lightning wave, pump it into the ground and retrieve the energy again at fixed harmonic distances from the transmitter. It was an audacious idea.'
'Anyway over the next few decades Tesla pushed further and further away from any of the known science of his day in his quest for electricity that would be too cheap to meter. Then on 1st July 1934 he announced to that he had perfected a 'death ray' that spelt the end of war. He had found a way to transmit concentrated beams of particles at tremendous speed through free air.'
'Tesla claimed that the charged particles in the beam could destroy any enemy aircraft and even burn a spot on the moon. Apparently in 1937 he offered his invention to the British government who supposedly turned it down. But the genie was out of the bottle and the Germans got wind of it and immediately put their top scientists to work on Tesla's ideas. And there the trail runs cold. Hitler's Nazis failed to build a weapon capable of deploying Tesla's particle beam technology.'
'Was that the end of the story?' Calderón asked. 'Not quite.' Shepherd replied. 'But the facts have been hidden by the fog of war. In 1936, to mark Tesla's 80th birthday, the government of Yugoslavia founded the Tesla Institute in Belgrade and granted Tesla a pension of $7200 a year. The Tesla Institute had collected together all Tesla's published and unpublished material before his death in 1943 but these were impounded by the Americans at the end of the war. It took ten years for Tesla's relatives to wrest control of these valuable papers from the US authorities.'
'But how did they know it was all there.' Calderón asked. 'They didn't, of course. The Americans would only have released those papers that suited them. But this is only one part of the puzzle. In 1941 Yugoslavia had been overrun by the German army, at which point the Tesla archives fell into the hands of Himmler's SS. Himmler was interested in all forms of power and would have been the last person to miss the significance of this archive.' Shepherd arms fall down to his side. He has come to the end.
'So that is that?' Calderón says. 'The research files disappear into the secret world of government and corporate laboratories, while Tesla becomes some sort of shadowy cult figure.'
'Yes. It has a familiar ring about it. Does it remind you of what happened to Wilhelm Reich experiments with weather control?’
‘You mean Reich’s cloud-busters [1] that landed him in gaol and got his books burned at the end of the 1940s?’ Calderón responded. ‘Well that’s not the whole story.’ Shepherd said. ‘The official case focused on his orgone accumulator. But Reich’s work is all of a piece. Anyway both Reich and Tesla have attracted attention. But there is a third man, a brilliant electrical engineer from Budapest where Tesla worked in the late eighteen hundreds who picked up on Tesla’s work in the 1930s and concentrated on extra-low-frequency electromagnetic transmission. His name was Lazlo Kovacs. What do you know of him?’
The trouble is that this information comes, not from a scientist or a historian, but from a novelist. And novelists are not accepted as credible sources even though Michael Crichton was the first person to testify before a Senate Committee investigating scientific fraud at the ICPP. As thrillers both State of Fear and Clive Cussler's Polar Shift are marvellous reads, the kind of book I get through in a half a dozen sittings...and then have to catch up on a couple of weeks' sleep. But how good is their research. Peer review is a necessary condition for scientific authenticity and novelists don't do it. Anyway I'm wandering. Perhaps you can take it from here.’
‘What does anyone know about Kovacs? Even if he is the figment of a novelist's imagination, such is the nature of this subject, that there might have been many Kovacs at work all over Europe and America after the war.’ Calderón replied. So it may be instructive to continue with Cussler's character.
‘Kovacs worried about his work. He reckoned that certain transmissions could be used to disrupt the atmosphere and produce severe weather and earthquakes. I read somewhere that he had actually developed a set of frequencies to focus electromagnetic resonance and use the surrounding material to amplify the effects. Apparently his findings were published and can be found in the scientific literature. He refused to make public the complete set of frequencies necessary to build a real device so other scientists were understandably pretty sceptical. But I have never followed any of this up in the literature.’
‘No but some people have. The Nazis were very open to ideas of mysticism, the occult and pseudoscience. Those stories about Nazi archaeologists searching for the Holy Grail are true. They pounced on Kovacs and kidnapped him and his family. After the war ended, it was disclosed that they had put him to work in a secret lab on a project to develop a super-weapon that would win the war.
Papers uncovered after the war suggested that he was on the verge of an electromagnetic warfare breakthrough when the Russians overran his lab in East Prussia. Kovacs had disappeared but the Soviets carried out research based on the Kovacs Theorems, something the US was aware of. The significance of electromagnetic radiation has never been lost on the military. There was a big conference at Los Alamos to talk about applied weapons technology based on his work, which concluded that the manipulation of electromagnetic waves could be more devastating than a nuclear device. The military took Kovacs very seriously.’
‘Are you implying that the Kovacs Theorems were behind the testing of electromagnetic pulse weapons in 1991 in the first Gulf War?
‘The testing definitely took place and there are those who claim the Soviets conducted similar ones that caused earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and weather disturbances. Witnesses report bright light flashes in the sky and an aurora borealis. There’s a great deal of controversy over a project called HAARP, short for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, being carried out by the US. The idea is to shoot a focused electromagnetic beam into the ionosphere. It’s been billed as an academic programme to improve worldwide communications but some people speculate that the goals are military, from Star Wars defence to mind control. Whatever the truth, HAARP’s roots are in Tesla’s coil and Kovacs theorems.’
A young woman and an older man came over and sat down beside Shepherd and Calderón. Shepherd turned to Calderón and introduced her as the ocean geologist Kerstin Henriksson. ‘And my colleague,’ said Henriksson, ‘is the Ukrainian physicist Petrov Goldberg’.
‘Good timing Doctor Henriksson. Nice to meet you Petrov.’ Shepherd said. He turned back to Calderón. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong Kerstin but a Tesla coil is a resonant transformer made up of two coils which transfer pulses of energy between one another until they produce a lightning-like discharge.’
‘Close enough. How much do you know of our latest work? We are through with solid ground and the atmosphere and are now sending transmissions to the bottom of the ocean. Our amplified electromagnetic waves can penetrate deep into the earth’s crust. Our guess is that the transmissions can cause anomalies in the earth’s mantle in roughly the same way the HAARP programme disturbs the atmosphere.’
‘What sort of anomalies?’ Calderón asked.
‘Whirlpools and eddies.’
‘And then?’
‘The swirling molten layer under the earth's crust is what creates the magnetic field that surrounds the earth. Any disruption of the field has the potential to cause all sorts of disturbances. Of course on the face of it power from the Tesla-Kovacs spark plug will be puny compared to the mass of the earth. So you don’t deploy it this way. Instead you have perhaps a dozen of these devices spread out and concentrating their power on a small area. We think that might work and produce something a bit more than waves in a bathtub.’
Shepherd was looking grim. ‘So this is where Einstein’s letter to the President comes in.’
‘Einstein!’ exclaimed Calderón. ‘But his letter to Roosevelt was about nuclear weapons.’
‘You are half right,’ Shepherd responded. ‘His other letter was to Harry Truman. This one has never been published. In it he warned of the dangers of electromagnetic war based on Kovacs. Presidents do not ignore Einstein. Truman appointed a committee to look into it. Out of it came a research effort similar to the Manhattan Project.
‘We’ve heard that the Russians were pursuing the same line of research,’ Henriksson said.
‘That’s right. By the mid-sixties the US and the Russians were neck and neck. The Russians concentrated on the land rather than the sky and created some earthquakes. After the big Alaskan quake the US retaliated and caused some floods and droughts in Russia. But this was only the warm-up. Scientists from both countries discovered about the same time that the combined force from their experiments could cause major changes in the earth’s electromagnetic field. A top secret meeting between the two countries was held on a remote island in the Bering Sea. Scientists and government officials attended. Both countries were presented with evidence showing the serious consequences of further experimentation using the Kovacs Theorems.’
‘How do you two know all this if it was so secret? Calderón asked.
‘Kerstin was one of the participants,’ Shepherd replied. ‘And I have friends at Draper Labs in the heart of the MIT campus. We talk regularly and share our concerns.’
‘We agreed to end research and get back to lesser evils such as nuclear warfare.’ Henriksson added with a wry smile. ‘Hard to believe isn’t it. A nuclear holocaust as a lesser evil.’
‘Believe it.’ Shepherd leaned forward and lowered his voice as if the low railings around the herb garden were bugged. ‘Keeping the secret was considered of such consequence that a security apparatus was set up in each country. Anyone who became too inquisitive or knowledgeable about Kovacs and his work was discouraged or eliminated.’
‘A Kovacs Society was established as part of the set-up,’ Henriksson remarked. ‘The reasoning was that it would be a first stop for someone interested in Kovacs’ work. Before the Berlin Wall came down one telephone call would get rid of anyone who got too curious. But nowadays disinformation and half-truths are placed on conspiracy websites instead which is just as effective and a lot less messy.’
‘But of course this does nothing for the threat itself which cannot be eliminated quite so easily,’ Shepherd added. ‘What scared everyone was the possibility that the electromagnetic manipulation would cause a shift of the earth’s poles. Constanza, you’re up on this. Explain how it could happen.’
‘The earth’s electromagnetic field is created by the spinning of the outer crust around the solid part of the inner core. Scientists at Leipzig University developed a model that showed the earth as a gigantic dynamo. The heavy metals and liquid magma of the inner core electromagnet are the clutch. The lighter metals at the crust are the windings. The planet’s poles are determined by the electromagnetic charge. The magnetic poles tend to wander. Navigators take this phenomenon into account all the time. If one pole declines in strength, you might see an actual reversal of the magnetic north and south poles.’
‘Right,’ broke in Henriksson. ‘The effect would be disruptive but not catastrophic. Power grids would be knocked out, satellites rendered useless, compasses confused and atmospheric holes punched in the ozone allowing bursts of solar radiation to get through. You’d see the aurora borealis farther south and migrating birds would be disoriented. But this would be nothing compared to the effects of a geological polar shift. Deep-ocean geologist know the effect of the earth’s crust moving over the inner core - the solid part moving over the liquid part - because it has happened before when a comet passed close to the earth.’
Shepherd took up the story. ‘A comet is one thing but man-made machinations causing physical changes is something else. Electromagnetism runs the universe. The earth is charged up like a huge electromagnet. Changes in the field can cause a shift in polarity. But it can also do something much worse than this. And this is what Kovacs homed in on in his research. Kerstin?’
‘We know two things about matter.’ Henriksson explained. ‘We know there could be twenty times more matter in the universe than we know about. And we know that matter oscillates between the matter and the energy state. Hollywood directors have figured out the consequences. By changing the electromagnetic field of the planet, the location of matter on the earth’s surface could change. The forces of inertia would react to this shift of matter.’
Calderón could keep still no longer. She jumped up and paced back and forth gesticulating energetically.
‘My God! The waters in the world’s oceans and lakes would be jerked around like water in a cooking basin, pounding the coastlines. All electrical devices would fail. We’d have hurricanes and tornadoes of unheard-of force. The earth’s crust would break open causing huge earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and massive lava flows. Climate changes, radiation sickness, millions - billions - would die. Stalin and Hitler, Hiroshima and PolPot would pale by comparison. This is monstrous. Evil in its purest form. How dare…’
Shepherd interrupted her. ‘Time we went back in Constanza. Have I answered your question? What happened to your Catholic faith? Forgive them for they know not what they do might be more appropriate?’
Shepherd turned to Goldberg and Henriksson. ‘Petrov, what part do you play in all this?’
Petrov pondered the question for a moment. ‘Did you ever hear of the Russian Woodpecker Project? It was an effort to control weather for military purposes using electromagnetic radiation. The US were following a similar line of research. And the Chinese are probably not far behind. And where China go Japan and Taiwan are sure to follow.’
‘How successful were these projects?’ Calderón asked.
‘Over a period of time, there was a series of unusual weather events in both countries. They ranged from high winds and torrential rains to drought. Even earthquakes. I have been told on good authority that the research ended with the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union. But it seems unlikely. Some disruption to budgets under Yeltsin. Sure. But Russian President Putin will have restored the programmes. The Russian military is skilled at defending its budgets and protecting its weapon programmes.’
‘We really must get back,’ Shepherd said. ‘I am sorry to rush you Petrov. I assume you are, or were, KGB. We have quite a lot to talk about. But if I understand where you are heading, you suspect that today’s climate effects, if they turn out to be real, could be a hangover from Woodpecker?’
‘Yes but there is something else. Many years ago Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s Security Adviser, predicted that an elite class would arise, using modern technology to influence public behaviour and keep society under close surveillance and control. They would use social crises and the mass media to achieve their ends through secret warfare including weather modification. At the KGB we concluded that such plotters would not advertise the fact but would instead lead people to believe that they opposed such an elite. My concern is that you might be looking the wrong way.’
Endnotes
[1] Tom Graves discusses Reich’s experiments with cloud control (and UFO dispersal) in Needles of Stone (see pages 101-104 in the 30th Anniversary Edition published by Grey House in the Woods in 2008; ISBN 0-9540531-X). Graves remarks that ‘…Reich’s persecution by the American authorities led to his death in prison in 1957, following a questionable legal action against Reich by the Federal Food and Drugs Administration’ who destroyed most of Reich’s equipment and research records on the ‘unproven and largely untested grounds that his work was fraudulent’. Many of his works are still banned in the United States today. In an endnote to the 2008 edition, Graves expands on his original comments. ‘The Administration based its charge of fraud on the grounds that its scientists had found that Reich’s accumulators could not work with any of the physical energies they knew and understood,’ (something with which Reich agreed) ‘and therefore could not work at all’. (a rather unscientific deduction that according to Reich flew in the face of the facts as available in his experimental data). [Ed]
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