ANGELS DON‘T PLAY THIS HAARP Advances in Tesla Technology

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.
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. 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‖.