1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,000 Halloween and horror movies just naturally go together. 2 00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:07,000 And if you've ever rented an old black and white horror movie, 3 00:00:07,000 --> 00:00:10,000 you've seen the wild-eyed, wild-haired mad scientist 4 00:00:10,000 --> 00:00:14,000 hunched over a weird contraption spewing electricity. 5 00:00:14,000 --> 00:00:19,000 But did you know that that character is based on a real-life American scientist? 6 00:00:19,000 --> 00:00:21,000 His name was Nikola Tesla, 7 00:00:21,000 --> 00:00:24,000 and there are those who believe that he was mad. 8 00:00:24,000 --> 00:00:28,000 The night he inadvertently blew up part of Siberia. 9 00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:35,000 The Night of the Dead 10 00:00:35,000 --> 00:00:39,000 On June 30, 1908, 11 00:00:39,000 --> 00:00:42,000 a remote area of Siberia known as Tunguska 12 00:00:42,000 --> 00:00:45,000 is devastated by a mysterious force 13 00:00:45,000 --> 00:00:49,000 2,000 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. 14 00:00:49,000 --> 00:00:51,000 It left no crater or residue, 15 00:00:51,000 --> 00:00:54,000 the usual calling card of a meteor. 16 00:00:54,000 --> 00:00:57,000 Russian investigators who found metal fragments of the site 17 00:00:57,000 --> 00:01:00,000 suggested the blast had been caused by an alien spacecraft 18 00:01:00,000 --> 00:01:02,000 colliding with Earth. 19 00:01:02,000 --> 00:01:05,000 But a new, compelling theory about the Tunguska incident 20 00:01:05,000 --> 00:01:09,000 suggests that a highly concentrated beam of electrical energy 21 00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:12,000 caused the total devastation in this region, 22 00:01:12,000 --> 00:01:16,000 and that only one man had the scientific knowledge to pull it off. 23 00:01:16,000 --> 00:01:22,000 Nikola Tesla, I feel he's the greatest inventor of the past 500 years. 24 00:01:22,000 --> 00:01:24,000 He is a Michelangelo. 25 00:01:24,000 --> 00:01:27,000 He is a Leonardo da Vinci of science. 26 00:01:27,000 --> 00:01:31,000 He gave us AC power, the fluorescent light, radio, robotics. 27 00:01:31,000 --> 00:01:35,000 By 1900, he was the emperor of invention. 28 00:01:35,000 --> 00:01:37,000 He had eclipsed Edison. 29 00:01:37,000 --> 00:01:41,000 He was one of the half-dozen most famous men in the world. 30 00:01:41,000 --> 00:01:44,000 And he prays for a man we seem to know so little about. 31 00:01:44,000 --> 00:01:49,000 When Tesla emigrated to the United States from Croatia in 1884, 32 00:01:49,000 --> 00:01:53,000 his dream of working for his hero, Thomas Edison, became a reality. 33 00:01:53,000 --> 00:01:56,000 But Tesla's development of a more efficient form of electricity 34 00:01:56,000 --> 00:01:58,000 called AC, alternating current, 35 00:01:58,000 --> 00:02:00,000 couldn't sit well with his new boss, 36 00:02:00,000 --> 00:02:05,000 who had already developed the more cumbersome director, or DC. 37 00:02:05,000 --> 00:02:07,000 Edison just shut him down. 38 00:02:07,000 --> 00:02:10,000 He said, it's DC here. 39 00:02:10,000 --> 00:02:13,000 America, Washington, DC. 40 00:02:13,000 --> 00:02:15,000 Forget this AC stuff. 41 00:02:15,000 --> 00:02:18,000 You're working for me. I don't want to hear another word of it. 42 00:02:18,000 --> 00:02:23,000 But AC was superior, as Tesla's biographer Ted Wise points out. 43 00:02:23,000 --> 00:02:28,000 DC is like a fine wine that doesn't travel well. 44 00:02:28,000 --> 00:02:32,000 It's a power that cannot be stepped up to extremely high frequencies, 45 00:02:32,000 --> 00:02:38,000 whereas AC can be transported in these extremely high voltages 46 00:02:38,000 --> 00:02:44,000 and then stepped down very safely to be used in a home or school or a factory. 47 00:02:45,000 --> 00:02:50,000 Tesla's brilliant discovery so impressed industrialist George Westinghouse 48 00:02:50,000 --> 00:02:55,000 that he enlisted Tesla in his bid to harness the hydroelectric power of Niagara Falls. 49 00:02:55,000 --> 00:03:00,000 Finally, the movers and shakers of the day were noticing Tesla. 50 00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:04,000 He met Kipling, he became a good friend of Mark Twain's, 51 00:03:04,000 --> 00:03:05,000 and he met all the millionaires. 52 00:03:05,000 --> 00:03:08,000 He made a point of meeting all the millionaires. 53 00:03:08,000 --> 00:03:11,000 One of those millionaires was J.P. Morgan. 54 00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:15,000 And J.P. Morgan was the fellow that gave him $150,000, 55 00:03:15,000 --> 00:03:20,000 probably the equivalent of $10 million or better today, to build Wharton Cliff. 56 00:03:20,000 --> 00:03:27,000 Wharton Cliff was the name Tesla chose for what he believed would be his greatest contribution, 57 00:03:27,000 --> 00:03:34,000 a huge transmitter that would provide electrical power to the world without the use of wires. 58 00:03:35,000 --> 00:03:43,000 What he didn't tell Morgan was that he wanted to send power to the world for free. 59 00:03:44,000 --> 00:03:49,000 Journalist Ellen Sherman believes this was the beginning of the end for Wharton Cliff. 60 00:03:49,000 --> 00:03:54,000 J.P. Morgan did not want to back something that was going to give free energy to people 61 00:03:54,000 --> 00:04:00,000 who he could put no meter on, he could not get any money from it whatsoever. 62 00:04:00,000 --> 00:04:11,000 When Morgan pulled his support, he not only ended Tesla's career as the major scientist of his day, 63 00:04:11,000 --> 00:04:17,000 but he made laughing stock of it in the eyes of his scientific peers. 64 00:04:17,000 --> 00:04:24,000 When that was all pulled away from him, he was a desperate man on any number of fronts. 65 00:04:24,000 --> 00:04:29,000 And that desperation may have led him to use the partially constructed tower 66 00:04:29,000 --> 00:04:32,000 to conduct a fateful experiment in the summer of 1908. 67 00:04:32,000 --> 00:04:39,000 Tesla was something of a showman. He had lost the backing of his principal financial supporters, 68 00:04:39,000 --> 00:04:48,000 and he was the kind of person who might try a large public event that would bring attention to his work. 69 00:04:48,000 --> 00:04:55,000 Oliver Nicholson has found evidence that Nicola Tesla may have been planning to aim his electrical beam at the North Pole 70 00:04:55,000 --> 00:05:02,000 in order to put on a dramatic light show for Admiral Perry, who was in the midst of his historic expedition. 71 00:05:02,000 --> 00:05:06,000 A small miscalculation in distance could have had devastating results. 72 00:05:06,000 --> 00:05:13,000 There was Tesla's research station in Long Island, and I drew the line to Tinduska in Russia. 73 00:05:13,000 --> 00:05:22,000 Then interestingly enough, that line crossed right near the North Pole and came very close to Ellesmere Island 74 00:05:22,000 --> 00:05:26,000 where Perry would be camping over for the winter. 75 00:05:26,000 --> 00:05:35,000 Nicholson and others theorized that Tesla's aim was true, but he grossly underestimated the effect gravity would have on his electrical energy beam. 76 00:05:35,000 --> 00:05:43,000 Instead of this operating as he thought it was going to, there is a tremendous explosion in the Siberian region. 77 00:05:43,000 --> 00:05:50,000 Forest are laid flat, reindeer herds disappeared, small towns are completely gone. 78 00:05:50,000 --> 00:05:58,000 J.W. McGinnis of the International Tesla Society is convinced that the Tunguska tragedy is linked to Tesla. 79 00:05:58,000 --> 00:06:06,000 He disagrees with those who believe Tesla was purposely building a weapon of mass destruction on a global scale. 80 00:06:06,000 --> 00:06:14,000 Of all of the great scientists of this country that went to work for the Manhattan Project, there was one scientist that refused to do that, 81 00:06:14,000 --> 00:06:27,000 and that was Nikola Tesla. He did not believe in a general destructive weapon and wanted to introduce something that was a lot more incisive and certainly indefensible, and that was his death ray. 82 00:06:27,000 --> 00:06:36,000 This thing was so powerful, it would deliver 50 million volts into an area that was one-tenth of a millionth of an inch in diameter. 83 00:06:36,000 --> 00:06:43,000 If you put that much pressure in that smallest space, there is nothing that can stand up to it. You could cut a ship in half. 84 00:06:43,000 --> 00:06:54,000 While the U.S. government went ahead with its atomic bomb strategy, a secretive interest in Tesla's work seemed to be at work shortly after his death in 1943. 85 00:06:54,000 --> 00:07:08,000 The day following his death, the FBI under the auspices of the OAP, which is the Office of Alien Protection, broke into his apartment, broke into his safe and stole, or confiscated, all of his papers and effects. 86 00:07:08,000 --> 00:07:19,000 Now, the OAP had no business being there. He had been a citizen of the United States since the previous century. So this was a ruse. They needed to get in there somehow. 87 00:07:19,000 --> 00:07:26,000 Recently, declassified documents only hinted at the great discoveries that may have been hidden in Tesla's safe. 88 00:07:26,000 --> 00:07:39,000 He had developed a sophisticated particle beam death ray, and he had to know how to successfully transmit an enormously powerful wave of electrical current through the atmosphere and halfway across the world. 89 00:07:39,000 --> 00:07:50,000 Could it be that through his Perloin papers, our government gained knowledge that should, by rights, make Nikola Tesla the father of Star Wars technology? 90 00:07:50,000 --> 00:07:54,000 They realized that Tesla was always ahead of his time. 91 00:07:55,000 --> 00:08:02,000 What amazing discoveries did the FBI find inside Tesla's safe at the Hotel New Yorker? We may never know. 92 00:08:02,000 --> 00:08:10,000 Shortly after their retrieval, the files disappeared and have not been seen, at least not publicly, since then.