Great Martian War 1913 To 1917 Nikola Tesla An Alien Intelligence Full Documentary

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The Great Martian War 1913-1917 is an alternate history documentary about the fictional or not a real true history of war between Mars and Earth in 1913. It takes place in an alternate timeline of World War I, when instead of the countries of the world fighting each other, they fought against a vanguard of Martians, who have come to take over our planet, and steal our natural resources. This story was inspired by The War of The Worlds by H.G. Wells, and presents itself as a documentary in that takes place in the story, years after the War.

Combining period archive materials with state-of-the-art special effects, The Great Martian War 1913–1917 features "previously recorded" interviews with now aging or dead war veterans while looking back at the entire sweep of the interplanetary conflict. The war begins in the depths of Germany's Bohemian Forest, following a massive explosion and shock wave that is felt by the rest of Europe. Elements of the German army are sent to investigate and are wiped out. The German government makes a panicked appeal for military assistance in fighting what turns out to be a powerful, non-human invading force thought to be from Mars.

As the conflict unfolds, the film showcases the devastation of Western Europe, where a human alliance digs in against monstrous Martian fighting machines, unaware that deep flaws exist in their military leadership's central battle strategy. Across the Atlantic, the film outlines the political battle for the White House as President Woodrow Wilson struggles to maintain U. S. neutrality, all the while sending aid to the beleaguered European alliance. From the skies over central London, where biplanes battle a towering alien tripod, to the war’s catastrophic final act, the Allies, now standing on the brink of total defeat by the alien invaders, must decide if launching an untested and potentially devastating secret weapon is worth risking the lives of millions and causing a global pandemic.

Exploring the war's events are modern historians with opposing views about the conflict's many controversies. They most especially disagree on an incendiary new discovery by one of them centered around the uncrackable "Martian Code", a vast century old cache of alien documents seized following the conclusion of the war. These documents now appear to contain the direst of warnings that the war may only be paused, with its second act now unfolding in a way no one can anticipate.

https://history.nasa.gov/sp4410.pdf

Ultimate Field Guide 82 Extraterrestrial Species Iceberg Explained Alleged Alien Races

https://rumble.com/v2lb5b8-ultimate-field-guide-82-extraterrestrial-species-iceberg-explained-alleged-.html

In the story of the abduction and encounters with alien beings or humanoids in the history of ufology, there are, as reported by the various reports of the various police and military who are interested in the subject, lists of different types of beings who should represent various civilizations do not belong to the human, who were either vengoino still in touch with people on our planet.
The list presented below does not represent the true variety of aliens existing but only what has been reported in the documents open to the public, so do not give too high a truth to what we present here, but I'll post for the record, just to the fact that the only alien entities of which we are more or less safe, belong only to three species or the alien gray, aliens and high energy blond who have a different origin in order to be absolutely certain.

In the course of past ages, the stories that we read tell us that not all beings from other worlds have the same intentions or inclinations towards our race, but often proved to be too negative to safety, that the respect for life of mankind, even if so far they never had attitudes conquerors because if a race like them should want the planet, it would have already taken without problems, since the scientific divide that distances us: even among them there are conflicts, just like it does for our civilization, some are totally indifferent to us, and if we only dare to approach them might decide that our life has no longer any reason to continue. But we begin to make the necessary distinctions between their hypothetical races:

Here is a brief description about the top 10 different types of aliens that have been spotted on earth.

Type 1 : Zeta Reticulans or Grey Aliens
The most common type of aliens that are being seen across the globe by people of all ages is the zeta reticulan type, which is also commonly referred to as the ‘Greys’. These extraterrestrial beings are typically 3-4 feet tall and have large almond shaped black eyes. Their head is much larger than a regular human’s head and they have no noses, but only nostrils. Their arms are usually longer that has not more than three to four fingers. It is the Zeta reticulans who are thought to be the main culprits behind most human abductions.

Type 2 : Little green men
Another common type of alien is the little green men that have been reported to have been sighted by different people in different places. These types of extraterrestrials are humanoid creatures with a greenish skin color and their bodies are devoid of any hair. Some of the little green men have been reported to have antennas on their heads, which are much larger than a regular human head.

Type 3 : Nordic Aliens
The Nordics would look just like humans and they would have long blonde hair that would be maintained by both male aliens as well as the female ones. These aliens are not identifiable even if they walk among a crowd. The only way to identify them is when they manifest some of their extraterrestrial activities. These aliens usually have angular faces with blue eyes. The females of the Nordic alien type have a high sex appeal.

Type 4 : Pleiadian Aliens
The aliens of the Pleiadian type are characterized by round faces and tall figure and the rest of the features are soft but detailed. The overall appearance of the Pleiadians is a very pleasant one and although they do not have hair usually, but if someone has any hair on the heads, the hair is blonde colored. These aliens are known to be very gentle and peace loving by nature.

Type 5 : Andromedan Aliens
You would mistake the Andromedan aliens to be humans, as they look almost like humans, with the only difference being in their overall size. These aliens are bipedal energy beings who can read the minds of humans by means of telepathy.

Type 6 : Reptilians Aliens
Another very common type of aliens is the reptilians who are tall and have scales over their humanoid body structure. These aliens would have webbed feet and would look more or less like a reptile when you see them for the first time.

Type 7 : Alpha Draconian
The most corrupt, hostile and vicious type of aliens are the alpha draconian. These aliens are believed to have come from Alpha Draconis and are characterized by giant reptilian features. These aliens are about 14 to 22 feet tall and weigh approximately 1800 pounds or more. They believe themselves to be the rightful owners of the humans who are lesser evolved beings as per their standards.

Type 8 : Sirians Aliens
The Sirians are those types of aliens that in spite of having a humanoid structure prefer to live around in the water. These aquatic aliens are mostly found in oceans and lakes where there is huge depth. They are known to have come from Sirius B Star system.

Type 9 : Anunnaki Aliens
The ancient Sumerians used to worship the Anunnaki as their god. The Anunnaki is nothing but aliens that had visited the planet of earth around four thousand years ago with the intention of enslaving humans to carry out farm work with them. The Anunnaki aliens look exactly like humans, but they are slightly larger than the aliens, with average height being 8-9 feet. These aliens are believed to have come from Nibiru, the twelfth planet in our solar system, which lies beyond Pluto and is yet to be discovered.

Type 10 : Arcturian Aliens
The arcturians are usually four to five feet tall with large heads and blue skin. The rest of their bodies are highly disproportionate. These types of aliens are believed to be the most ancient race of the entire Milky Way Galaxy and they are considered to be very intelligent, experienced and innovative.

Antarctica is a long way away from where you live, wherever you live. Not many people have been there, it's difficult and expensive to get there, it seems like some sci-fi ice-planet place and really exciting.

It isn't "secret" though, just not well known. What goes on there is largely uninteresting to most people and is mainly very technical, complicated scientific stuff that is not easy to understand.

All of this contributes to numerous conspiracy theories about UFO's, aliens, Nazi bases and other forms of woo-woo. With the advent of the internet and especially of access to satellite images on Google Earth there are plenty of purveyors of snake-oil ready to "interpret" ice-bergs and other ice patterns and structures for the benefit of the gullible, they are never just natural formations, but "clearly" alien or at least secret facilities.

1 - The Forbidden Sector. No-one knows what happens here, no one who has been has ever come back, if you try to take a peek at the border you are grabbed by security penguins and taken in.

2 - The Hole at the Pole. This connects with the Hole at the Other Pole and to the Hollow Earth and those who live there.

3 - The Wall Around the Hole at the Pole. This stops people from the Almost-South-Pole-Station from falling in the hole and keeps out immurgrunts.

4 - The Almost South Pole Station. Because there's a big hole where the actual Pole should be (obvs) you can't build a research station there so instead it's nearby, this means it easy to keep an eye on all the ufo's and other alien technology that comes in and out of the hole.

5 - UFO Base. UFO technology was first established in Antarctica at the end of WW2 by the Nazis who did the obvious thing when they thought they might lose the war and moved to Antarctica to test-fly UFO's. They have been doing it ever since, secretly... 75+ years so far and counting...

6 - Visitors Land. The magnetic fields in Antarctica are manipulated to cause compasses to lead everyone to this area wherever they think they are going and think they might be. This prevents anyone finding out about the secrets in Antarctica "They" don't want you to know about.

7 - Visitor Land Barrier. A big plywood barrier painted to look like distant mountains and icebergs that hides the rest of Antarctica behind it.

8 - Secret Nazi Submarine Base. Established at the end of WW2. A tunnel at the ice edge leads to a base built into a giant ice-cave hundreds of miles inland so submarines can come and go secretly on clandestine missions.

9 - Tropical Area. No-one would expect an area of tropical weather and rainforest in Antarctica, so that's exactly why one has been established and kept secret well away from prying eyes, you wouldn't guess it was here would you? clever eh? <taps side of nose>.

10 - The Pyramids of Antarctica. Built by an ancient and powerful race and hidden under the ice. Every now and then one of them pokes out accidentally and photographs are taken, but by the time anyone looks again, the snow is heaped back over it and it disappears from view. Also, some mountains look a bit pyramid like from some directions.

11- Land of The Ancient Race of Super-Beings With Big Angular Heads. Some of them tried to leave many years ago and made it to Easter Island where their enormous weight made them sink into the ground and a simple common bacterial infection turned them to stone. The bacterium cannot live in Antarctica so they continue their highly sophisticated secret society under the ice.

Astronomers Just Discovered a Morse Code Message in The Dunes of Mars NASA has spotted a series of strange, dark dunes on Mars that look uncannily like the dots and dashes that make up Morse code.

This isn't the first time researchers have spotted this pattern in the sands of Mars, but thanks to its unique topography, this dune field - just south of the planet's north pole - shows them in clearer detail than usual, allowing scientists to translate the message for the first time.

To be clear, this message is naturally formed - just like the dunes here on Earth, the dots and dashes of the dunes were carved out by the direction of the wind. There's no spooky alien stuff at play here, promise.

As a press release from NASA explains, what makes the patterns in this dune so prominent is the fact that it's found inside a natural circular depression, which means there's a limited amount of sand available to be pushed around by the local winds.

The long 'dashes' are formed by bi-directional winds, which means wind that's travelling at right angles to the dune. Over time, wind coming from either direction funnels the material into a long, dark line, as you can see in the close-up.

The Martian 'dots' are officially known as 'barchanoid dunes', and are a little more mysterious.

Geophysicists believe they're formed when something interrupts the production of the linear dunes - but NASA still isn't quite sure what that is, and figuring it out is part of the reason they were photographing the region.

These images were taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, which is on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been photographing the Red Planet for the past decade.

With more observation, geophysicists are hoping that they'll be able to figure out more about how the dunes on the surface of Mars form, and what that can tell us about the potential habitability of the planet.

But while they're figuring that out, NASA planetary scientist Veronica Bray translated the Morse code message for Maddie Stone over at Gizmodo.

So what do the sands of Mars have to tell us? According to Bray: NEE NED ZB 6TNN DEIBEDH SIEFI EBEEE SSIEI ESEE SEEE It's very deep stuff - and not intended as anything other than a bit of geophysial fun.

But reading the sands of Mars might one day help us better understand life on the surface of our potential future outpost, so it's worth paying attention.

Wired tries to defend SETI and Ufology. They argue that there are 3 branches of inquiry exobiology, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the study of UFOs and each has their place in our battery of methods.

Aliens—hypothetical beings from outer space—fall into roughly three categories. They could be far-away microbes or other creatures that don’t use technology humans can detect; they could be far-away creatures that use technology earthlings can identify; or they could be creatures that have used technology to come to Earth.

Each of these categories has a different branch of research dedicated to it, and each one is probably less likely than the last to actually find something: Astrobiologists use telescopes to seek biochemical evidence of microbes on other planets. SETI scientists, on the other hand, use telescopes to look for hints of intelligent beings’ technological signatures as they beam through the cosmos. Investigating the idea that aliens have traveled here and have skimmed the air with spaceships, meanwhile, is the province of pseudoscientists. Or so the narrative goes.

The issue, the article argues, is that the boundaries of legitimate research have shifted over time and are culturally determined, not objective at all. There’s a continuum of legitimacy, and it’s entirely arbitrary that we place UFOs in pseudoscience, and don’t fund SETI, and think exobiology is valid and interesting. That is a good point, except that I think there is a solid criterion that is rooted in how we do science.

Here’s the deal: early in our training, we’re taught to keep an open mind — you use hypotheses to guide a line of research, but we must be prepared to find unexpected results and alternative explanations. We’re adapted to thinking, “My experiment to test my hypothesis should find X, but if it finds Y we’ll have to modify the hypothesis, and if the answer is Z, well, back to the drawing board, but gosh, that would be exciting.” Experiments are designed that give interesting results, and whether the results are compatible with our hypothesis or reject it are equally useful.

Exobiology fits the paradigm. We’re looking at other worlds with they hypothesis that life produces chemical signatures we can detect, and even if we don’t see them, we learn something about that alien planet. We gather data looking for biology, and if we don’t see it, we still have data on extraterrestrial chemistry. That’s the safe bet funding agencies look for, that we’ll learn something even if our preliminary hypothesis fails.

SETI doesn’t work that way. SETI is looking for specific patterns in extraterrestrial signals; they have a pre-set goal, rather than an open inquiry. Not finding a signal they are looking for is a literal failure that tells us nothing. That star isn’t transmitting anything useful? Abandon it, move on, look somewhere else. Over and over again. It also doesn’t help that all their hypotheses look like ad hoc dreck contrived to convince people that there might be someone out there, with infinitely bendable variables.

UFOlogy, on the other hand, is an extreme example of that latter phenomenon. We don’t see what we’re looking for — no little green men, no crashed spaceships — so they invent elaborate and often contradictory rationalizations. The evidence isn’t there, but they are determined to pretend that it is. It’s a kind of anti-empiricism where the accumulated data is irrelevant to the conclusion.

It’s as simple as asking, “What will we learn from doing the observation/experiment?” SETI’s answer is nothing, unless we find a one in a trillion possibility, then it’s the jackpot. UFOlogy’s answer is that they already know little green men exist, so we just have to photograph thrown pie plates until we’ve persuaded the establishment. Neither is good science.

Both SETI and Ufology are strongly susceptible to apophenia as well. They are trying to fit complex data to a prior expectation, so there’s a tendency to impose patterns on noise. Here’s a classic example: NASA has observed complex sand dune formations on Mars.

Cool. What causes it? These are windblown rills shaped by topography and prevailing, but changeable, winds that formed under more or less chaotic pressures, producing lines and bumps and branches.

But, if you’re looking for it, it could be a signal. Perhaps, if we ignore the physical mechanisms that made them, these dunes could be Martian handwriting. Or better yet, a Martian code.

Right. So someone, probably as a bit of lark, tried to interpret them as dots and dashes, and then translated them into Morse code (why ancient Martians would have used a code devised by a 19th century American is left as an exercise for the reader). The Martian dunes therefore announce to the universe these immortal words: NEE NED ZB 6TNN DEIBEDH SIEFI EBEEE SSIEI ESEE SEEE !!

I’m sure that means something profound in the original Martian. Either that, or it’s a compressed recipe for cored cow rectums.

That’s the problem with SETI, though. The universe produces patterns all the time, and human brains strain to impose interpretable derivations on them — SETI will milk that for all the news and attention they can get, even if it is ultimately meaningless.

Meanwhile, Urologists' already know that the aliens are living on Mars, and have trained Bigfoots raking the dunes to send secret messages to the fleet hovering invisibly in our atmosphere, and you ignore it at your peril, you fools.

As NASA’s rover Curiosity continues the quest to find life on Mars, explore five key events that piqued the public interest in the Red Planet.

1. Giovanni Schiaparelli sees 'channels' on the surface of Mars in 1877, and speculation runs rampant that intelligent beings created them.
What a difference a word makes. When Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli peered through his telescope in 1877 to view the surface of Mars in detail, he noticed lines crisscrossing the planet like channels of water. And that is how he described those lines—as “canali,” which in Italian simply means “channels,” in the sense of riverbeds or arroyos. That single, innocent word—canali—was mistranslated into English as “canals,” implying structures built to shunt water in one direction or another. Canals could only be created by intelligent life forms.

Did Schiaparelli’s observation hint that alien canal builders lived on Mars? Bostonian Percival Lowell thought so. He spent his life trying to prove that a utopian society existed on our interplanetary neighbor and published frequently on the subject. Lowell died long before the first photos of Mars would show no manmade canals, or any other signs of an erstwhile utopian civilization. But Lowell’s fanaticism sparked a lingering public love affair with the idea that life could thrive on Mars.

2. Nikola Tesla hears a Martian murmur in 1899.
The current NASA Mars mission owes a debt to Nikola Tesla for his inventions of the robot and radio remote control for guided vehicles. He may also have cemented the public’s belief in life on Mars by announcing that he’d received communications from the planet at his laboratory in Colorado Springs. While conducting experiments on high-frequency electrical transmission in 1899, Tesla picked up cosmic radio waves on his instruments.

Announcing this development, he publicly opined that the messages came from outer space, possibly from inhabitants of Mars. In a Collier’s Weekly article dated February 19, 1901, Tesla wrote, “At the present stage of progress, there would be no insurmountable obstacle in constructing a machine capable of conveying a message to Mars … What a tremendous stir this would make in the world! How soon will it come?” Later discoveries revealed that Tesla had actually picked up common radio waves emitted by interstellar gas clouds.

3. The Martians are coming! Panic ensues in 1938 when a radio drama goes awry.
As a novel, The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells entered the literary scene relatively quietly. Initially serialized in 1897 in Pearson’s Magazine, the novel itself was published in 1898 to critical and public success. The book received renewed interest in 1938 when the young Orson Welles, who would later become an iconic actor and director, chose to adapt the novel into a radio drama to be performed the night before Halloween.

Eschewing a standard storytelling format, Welles opted to structure the story as a series of realistic news bulletins that described an attack on New Jersey by aliens from Mars.

The performance proved so realistic that people literally panicked in the streets. In a New York Times article dated October 31, 1938, Louis Winkler of the Bronx told a reporter, “I didn’t tune in until the program was half over, but when … the ‘Secretary of the Interior’ was introduced, I was convinced it was the McCoy. I ran out into the street with scores of others, and found people running in all directions.” Perhaps more than any other single event, Welles’ broadcast fueled the public’s fascination with the Red Planet and the possibility of detecting intelligent life there.

4. Nothing to see here: In 1965 an unmanned probe sends back the first pictures of Mars, which show no signs of life on the planet.
On November 28, 1964, NASA launched the Mariner 4 unmanned space probe to take “flyby” photos of the Red Planet. On July 14, 1965, those images returned to Earth, showing a pockmarked planetary surface devoid of any structures or other signs of past or present habitation. In 1969 NASA launched the Mariner 6 and Mariner 7 probes to make additional observations of the Martian landscape.

Hundreds of photos revealed a barren, dusty wasteland with no hints of life, quashing fears—and hopes—that aliens populated Mars. Earthlings’ collective obsession with a Martian invasion faded, though debates continued among citizens and scientists alike about whether the planet had previously been inhabited.

5. A meteorite offers tantalizing evidence for life on Mars in 1996.
After the Mariner space probe missions of the 1960s established that Mars harbored no alien marauders poised to attack Earth, interest in the issue of life on Mars died down. The consensus seemed to be not only that Mars didn’t support life in the present, but also that it never had in the past. That philosophy changed in 1996, when the publication of a paper in Science magazine suggested a meteorite from Mars contained the biomarkers of primitive life forms. A group of NASA scientists wrote that their analysis of meteorite ALH84001 showed possible microfossils of primitive bacteria—a finding that would mean life, at least in some form, once existed on Mars.

The report caused a sensation in the popular and scientific press, and the 63rd meeting of the Meteoritical Society in 2000 devoted a pair of special sessions solely to the discussion of ALH84001. Some scientists maintained that the meteorite had been contaminated after landing on Earth, which would account for the hydrocarbons (an indicator of decomposed organic matter) found on it. Others produced evidence supporting the conclusions of the NASA scientists.

At the time the paper was published, the news channel devoted an entire special section of its website to the controversy, which it called “the biggest discovery in the history of science.” Once again, the tantalizing prospect of life on Mars had managed to capture the public’s imagination.

Mars: Evolution of an Earth-Like World
Mars has a unique place in solar system exploration: it holds keys to many compelling planetary science questions, and it is accessible enough to allow rapid, systematic exploration to address and answer these questions. The science objectives for Mars center on understanding the evolution of the planet as a system, focusing on the interplay between the tectonic and climatic cycles and the implications for habitability and life. These objectives are well aligned with the broad crosscutting themes of solar system exploration.

Mars presents an excellent opportunity to investigate the major question of habitability and life in the solar system. Conditions on Mars, particularly early in its history, are thought to have been conducive to the formation of prebiotic compounds and potentially to the origin and continued evolution of life. Mars has also experienced major changes in surface conditions driven by its thermal evolution and its orbital evolution and by changes in solar input and greenhouse gases that have produced a wide range of environments. Of critical significance is the excellent preservation of the geologic record of early Mars, and thus the potential for evidence of prebiotic and biotic processes and how they relate to the evolution of the planet as a system. This crucial early period is when life began on Earth, an epoch largely lost on our own planet. Thus, Mars provides the opportunity to address questions about how and whether life arose elsewhere in the solar system, about planetary evolution processes, and about the potential coupling between biological and geological history. Progress on these questions, important to both the science community and the public, can be made more readily at Mars than anywhere else in the solar system.

The spacecraft exploration of Mars began in 1965 with an exploration strategy of flybys, followed by orbiters, landers, and rovers with kilometers of mobility. This systematic investigation has produced a detailed knowledge of the planet’s character, including global measurements of topography, geologic structure and processes, surface mineralogy and elemental composition, the near-surface distribution of water, the intrinsic and remnant magnetic field, gravity field and crustal structure, and the atmospheric composition and time-varying state. The orbital surveys framed the initial hypotheses and questions and identified the locations where in situ exploration could test them. The surface missions the Viking landers, Pathfinder, and the Mars Exploration Rovers have acquired detailed information on surface morphology, stratigraphy, mineralogy, composition, and atmosphere-surface dynamics and confirmed what was strongly suspected from orbital data: Mars has a long and varied history during which water has played a major role.

A new phase of exploration began with the Mars Express and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which carry improved instrumentation to pursue the questions raised in the earlier cycles of exploration. Among the discoveries is the realization that Mars is a remarkably diverse planet with a wide range of aqueous.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Vision and Voyages for Planetary Science in the Decade 2013-2022. Washington, DC:

Examples of global data sets highlight major accomplishments from multiple recent missions and environments. The role of water and the habitability of the ancient environment will be further investigated by the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), scheduled for launch in the latter part of 2011, which will carry the most advanced suite of instrumentation ever landed on the surface of a planetary object.

The program of Mars exploration over the past 15 years has provided a framework for systematic exploration, allowing hypotheses to be formulated and tested and new discoveries to be pursued rapidly and effectively with follow-up observations. In addition, the program has produced missions that support one another both scientifically and through infrastructure, with orbital reconnaissance and site selection, data relay, and critical event coverage significantly enhancing the quality of the in situ missions. Finally, this program has allowed the Mars science.

After Tesla thought aliens contacted him, he described his 'encounter' to the Red Cross. Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943) completely altered the course of history through his inventions.
The AC system he championed and improved remains the global standard for power transmission. He demonstrated wireless radio communication two years before Guglielmo Marconi and is believed to be the first person to produce an x-ray image.

While Tesla’s scientific discoveries are among the greatest of his generation, the myths surrounding him have turned him into a cult-like figure. Conspiracy theorists believe Tesla created a death ray, a wireless power system that could transmit electricity across the world, and that the government stole all of his research documents after his death.

In 1899, Tesla himself thought he contacted aliens. He heard some rhythmic sounds on a radio receiver and was convinced they were extraterrestrial in nature.
The next year, the Red Cross asked Tesla to predict man’s greatest possible achievement in the next century. He replied by admitting he may have already achieved it by receiving a message from “another world.”

Nikola Tesla, An Alien Intelligence The following first appeared as the introduction to the 2011 edition of Nikola Tesla’s My Inventions, from Penguin Classics. Nikola Tesla was born on the stroke of midnight, as July 9th became July 10th, to which we say, happy birthday.

When I first encountered My Inventions it was as a free Internet download, an implausible work titled The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla. I dismissed the text as an invention itself, concocted by a flamboyantly imaginative fan of Tesla’s—a fairly common species. Sentences like, “When I drop little squares of paper in a dish filled with liquid, I always sense a peculiar and awful taste in my mouth,” convinced me that The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla was some sort of Internet hoax. The story it told was too weird to be his. An engineering genius would never draft such an unscientific text; one that reads as if it has been written by a carnival barker. “And now I will tell of one of my feats with this antique implement of war which will strain to the utmost the credulity of the reader.” Indeed.

But The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla is not a fabrication. Though that title was added after his death, the text is in fact Tesla’s work, first published serially in 1919 in the Electrical Experimenter magazine. These essays tell the story of Tesla’s early life, the rotary magnetic field, the Tesla coil and transformer. Each installment is a wondrous hybrid: part autobiography, part science, part ars poetica filled with earnest confessions and self-examinations frank as a child’s. Stories of his boyhood cunning in catching rats, dueling with cornstalks or attempting to fly off a barn roof mingle with sentences like, “It is a resonant transformer with a secondary in which the parts, charged to a high potential, are of considerable area and arranged in space along ideal enveloping surfaces of very large radii of curvature, and at proper distances from one another thereby insuring a small electric surface density everywhere so that no leak can occur even if the conductor is bare.” One paragraph alone traipses through clockworks, guns, and Serbian poetry. Tesla was a true liberal artist; his intelligence was unspecialized; his genius general. Voltaire exists alongside voltage. Engineering is poetry as Tesla would broker no separation between art and science.

Because of this his writing can read like a work of science fiction:

I may mention that only recently an odd looking gentleman called on me with the object of enlisting my services in the construction of world transmitters in some distant land. “We have no money,” he said, “but carloads of solid gold and we will give you a liberal amount.” I told him that I wanted to see first what will be done with my inventions in America, and this ended the interview. But I am satisfied that some dark forces are at work.

The story he makes of his life and ideas is so engaging that it is hard not to ask, Is this real? And then, Does it matter? Tesla was, after all, an inventor and we would never deign to question the reality of one of his patents.

When originally published in the pages of the Electrical Experimenter, My Inventions mingled with an astonishing variety of colorful articles: “Soldiers Ills Cured by Electricity,” “Will Man Freeze the Earth to Death?,” “Women Now Trained as Meter Maids,” “Wood Finishing for the Amateur” and “Home Experiments in Radio-Activity.” One Electrical Experimenter editorial states, “Conditions on Mars we know by direct observation as well as deduction are favorable for life, and we may be certain that it exists there.” Advertisements urge the reader to “Humanize Your Talking Machine” or find the cure for all ills with Violet-Rays. There’s an ad for a nose corset alongside one where Lionel Strongfort and his fitness regimen counsel, “Don’t commit a crime against the woman you love.” Curiosity, self-reliance and naiveté were alive and well in 1919. “My Inventions” and the other essays included in this volume, like the back pages of a comic book, are full of the incredulous. Wonder abounds. No cynics allowed.

Tesla’s world is long gone. The distance between then and now creates a gorgeous atmospheric haze. When he presents the past’s notion of the future, it is hard not to mark how near or far off his predictions landed. There is a sense of nostalgia for a time that has not yet materialized and maybe never will: the future as Tesla imagined it, a place where machines save us all, meals are taken as efficient tiny pills, power and energy travel wirelessly around the globe and world peace is a given.

The Electrical Experimenter, a technical science monthly that would later be absorbed into Popular Mechanics, was edited by a man named Hugo Gernsback who felt that any “real electrical experimenter, worthy of the name” would, of course, be devising a plan for the future. And so Tesla was. Always. Since the only limits in his laboratory were financial, he was happy to entertain the possible, even when ridiculed. Can we speak to beings in outer space? Can we photograph thought or build a stationary ring around the equator? Why don’t we try?

When measured against the cynicism of the 21st century and the corporate, governmental or academic controls now placed on science, Tesla’s open mind and laboratory seem like rarities. Consider the number of painters and writers, playwrights and performance artists working on masterpieces today, all of them dealing with mystery and possibility. But where is the young scientist among them who toils in her garage, trying to mix her DNA with that of a great blue heron’s? Somewhere between Tesla and now, invention has lost its illicitness. Somewhere art and science have parted ways, leaving the world to wonder where Tesla’s descendants, the poet-inventors, are hiding.

In his youth Tesla studied with a staggering appetite, memorizing Faust while compulsively observing the physical environment around him. His father, once concerned for his son’s health, forbid him the use of candles so that he’d not be able to read. Tesla made his own candles and kept on reading. He studied himself into a number of illnesses and nervous conditions including an obsession with germs and the number three. In the latter half of the 19th century, there was so much that needed inventing. What pressure Tesla must have felt as a young man, convinced that he could fashion the most efficient motor for an electrical generator, certain he could build a tower that would wirelessly transmit not only information but power. His passion was a danger to his health. While hoping to solve the problem of alternating current, he left himself open and entirely vulnerable.

Having always enjoyed highly keen senses, in 1881 Tesla was deluged. He writes that he, “could hear the ticking of a watch with three rooms between me and the time-piece. A fly alighting on a table in the room would cause a dull thud in my ear. A carriage passing at a distance of a few miles fairly shook my whole body.” These waves of raw sensitivity proved to be the labor pains of our modern electrical system. In the throes of this condition, a solution came to him. He saw his alternating current motor whirling in the air before his eyes and was certain, without even building it, that it would work.

Tesla soon left for the United States with dreams of fabricating his motor. His journey, as he tells it, was a series of unbelievable events. Though he was robbed while traveling to the port, he did not turn back. He arrived on American shores with four centimes in his pocket. Strolling from Castle Clinton, New York’s early immigration center, north to Edison’s laboratory, he encountered a man cursing a broken machine on the street. Tesla swiftly fixed the gadget and the man paid him 20 dollars, an implausible sum for 1884. When Tesla arrived at Edison’s lab, he was immediately hired by the great inventor, that very day, repairing dynamos and increasing efficiency in the leaky lab. Edison promised to pay Tesla 50,000 dollars once the job was done. Tesla toiled for months: arriving at ten in the morning he worked until five the following morning, going without sleep. When he was finished, Tesla went to collect his pay. Edison began to laugh, claiming that Tesla did not understand the American sense of humor. He refused to pay the 50,000 dollars. Tesla’s dream inventions crashed to the already cluttered floor. He resigned and spent the following year digging ditches, the AC motor spinning in his thoughts all the while. It was a time of such darkness that the inventor rarely spoke of it later in life.

Tesla slowly climbed out of the ditch where Edison had left him. He cobbled together space, money, and investors. While he began to see his visions made manifest, his relationship with money would continue to be contentious. Tesla rarely protected his patents. Like some proto-open source advocate, he believed his inventions belonged to the world, not just him. It is rumored that after Marconi sent the first wireless letter S across the ocean, an engineer working for Tesla chided him, saying, “Looks like Marconi got the jump on you.” Tesla’s answer was surprising. “Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using 17 of my patents.” It was Tesla, not Marconi, who invented radio. Though history books forget it, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a gavel drop no one heard, upheld Tesla’s patent a few months after his death. The well-connected Marconi would go on to win the Nobel Prize for radio. And history gets written in the strangest of ways.

Meanwhile, Edison was trying his best to discredit Tesla’s alternating current. With a campaign of fear, Edison aimed to squash the burgeoning technology because he believed that his light bulbs would not work on it. The War of the Currents roared. Edison electrocuted the animals of Menlo Park and built the first electric chair to be used at Sing-Sing prison in order to demonstrate AC’s dangerous properties. Rather Edison’s machine only demonstrated incompetence. The unfortunate William Kemmler, sentenced to die for murdering Tillie Ziegler, suffered an extended half death until nearly an hour after the process had begun.

The great test of Tesla’s alternating current motor came at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. Edison entered a bid to light the fair with DC power. Tesla and George Westinghouse, working together, entered a bid for AC. The fair would be the first time many Americans would experience the delights of electricity firsthand. AC, able to perform far more efficiently at a far cheaper price, won the bid handily so that when President Cleveland touched a golden lever, firing up Tesla’s dynamos, turning on over 200,000 light bulbs in the White City, America took notice of the gangly Serbian. He and Westinghouse were awarded the contract to harness Niagara Falls and, for better or worse, the age of electricity began.

Aleister Crowley, the influential occultist, asks us to, “Please remember that science is majick.” The trouble Tesla would have with Crowley’s statement is, then why call it magic at all? Why not give the wonders of the world their due by labeling them science? Why do we not simply believe that more is possible? With his inventions often arriving in explosive bursts of vision, it is no surprise that Tesla had an interest in the psychical. In his 1900 essay “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy” he writes:

We are all one. Metaphysical proofs are, however, not the only one which we are able to bring forth in support of this idea. Science too recognizes this connectedness of separate individuals, though not quite in the same sense as it admits that the suns, planets and moons of a constellation are one body, and there can be no doubt that it will be experimentally confirmed in times to come, when our means and methods for investigating psychical and other states and phenomena shall have been brought to great perfection.

This furthers an idea from his lecture “The Action of the Eye” where he contemplates mind-reading in terms both scientific and poetic. Though he makes some egregious statements about eye luminosity equaling creativity, his question stands: If thought is electrical why can’t we record it and measure it?

From all that seems beautiful and strange in Tesla’s writings, there is a theme that emerges: science vs. the supernatural. Extraordinary things happened to Tesla because he had extraordinary powers of observation. The supernatural is super, yes, but more importantly, it is natural.

Tesla’s open mind sometimes lands him in trouble as his legacy often gets claimed by a lunatic fringe. This does little to aid his assimilation into history books. One biography, queerly printed in Kelly green ink, asserts, “Nikola Tesla was not an Earth man. The space people have stated that a male child was born on board a space ship which was on a flight from Venus to the Earth in July, 1856. The little boy was called Nikola.”

I suppose it is a compliment to believe he is so far above us that he comes from Venus but why not instead demand that such brilliance is human?

While Tesla might have been the darling of the Chicago fair, the new century was not kind to him. Westinghouse, facing pressure from J.P. Morgan, had asked Tesla to tear up their contract, the one that gave Tesla a percentage of every horsepower of AC-generated electricity ever sold. Westinghouse claimed that alternating current would not survive the crucible of Morgan’s capitalism with Tesla’s contract in place. So Tesla, in order to see his invention live, tore up the contract.

He spent the last ten years of his life at the Hotel New Yorker. When it opened in 1930 it was the tallest building in New York City, a monument to the ambition and decadence of the jazz age. At 43 stories high, it had its own power generator. The kitchen was an entire acre. There were five restaurants, ten private dining rooms, two ballrooms and an indoor ice skating rink. Conveyor belts whisked dirty dishes through secret passageways down to fully automated dishwashers. Four stories below ground bed sheets and tablecloths were miraculously laundered, dried, ironed and folded without ever touching a human hand. Everything about the hotel was efficient, futuristic. It was perfect for Tesla except that by the time he arrived at the New Yorker in 1933, he was destitute.

I check myself into the Hotel. I request his room, 3327, and am twice surprised. First, little marks the room as his and, second, the chamber is quite modest. I take a bath in what was once his tub, trying to soak up his materiality. Nikola Tesla sat alone in this room for ten years. He opened this door, breathed this air, saw this view. He walked all over the island of Manhattan. The hotel hums with power and yet I don’t find him there. Instead, I find the same question. Why has he been so forgotten?

Perhaps Tesla’s ideas were too terrific, too far before his time. He tinkered with a number of dreamily ingenious schemes, some realized, some still dreams: control objects remotely, light the oceans, photograph thoughts, communicate with life in outer space, harvest free energy from the Earth’s atmosphere, control the weather with electricity, build a ring about the equator that, by remaining stationary while the planet rotates, would make it possible to travel around the entire world in one day. He was an environmentalist in the age of robber barons. “It is our duty to coming generations to leave this store of energy intact for them, or at least not touch it until we have perfected processes for burning coal more efficiently.” Tesla, who died two years before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, spoke frequently of his plans to build a death ray that, in presenting the threat of our total annihilation, would guarantee world peace. Innocently he writes, “ Not even the most war-crazed power ever would venture such an immeasurable and unpardonable outrage against mankind, involving as it would the burning of helpless women and children and noncombatants.”

He goes on to write that rather than holding peace through the stasis of fear, his wireless technology would expose our undeniable connections and assure a real peace.

If we were to release the energy of atoms or discover some other way of developing cheap and unlimited power at any point of the globe this accomplishment, instead of being a blessing, might bring disaster to mankind in giving rise to dissension and anarchy which would ultimately result in the enthronement of the hated regime of force. The greatest good will comes from technical improvements tending to unification and harmony, and my wireless transmitter is preeminently such. By its means the human voice and likeness will be reproduced everywhere.

Racism certainly plays a role in Tesla having been forgotten in America. Edison once, unable to locate Smiljan on a map, asked him in all sincerity if he had ever eaten human flesh. It was difficult for a vanilla, American public, reeling from war, to lionize a foreign eccentric, an eternal bachelor whose best friends were the pigeons of Bryant Park. Edison, the master marketer, released, “The Edison Polka,” a tune commissioned to sell his phonographs. He gave the people something to dance to while Tesla, with talk of death rays, lightening bolts and extra-terrestrials, gave a war-wearied nation the creeps.

And so his feeling towards humans are understandably complicated. Though he was happy to house the sickliest of New York’s pigeons, he couldn’t bear the touch of human hair or the sight of a woman wearing pearl earrings. He believed that inventors, to stay true to their calling, should never marry. His life was marked by a series of episodes where trust was betrayed. It is no wonder he retreated to the solitude of his hotel rooms, studying humankind from afar.

He had few friends and was often torn, feeling both wonder and disgust towards other people. In “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy” he reduces humans to the phrase, “units of higher value.” Tesla is a paradox. While guilty of writing, “When I am all but used up I simply do as the darkies, who ‘naturally fall asleep while white folks worry,’” he also states: “Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment and merging of races, and we are still far from this blissful realization.” For all his love of humanity, it seems Tesla did not much care for humans.

In 1915, a New York Times reporter phoned Tesla to inform him that he and Edison were to share that year’s Nobel Prize. Tesla was concerned about splitting the award with his rival but he so clearly deserved the prize that his initial fears never could have presaged what was to come next. The report was erroneous. The 1915 Nobel Prize in physics went to Sir William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg “for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays.” Tesla was never recognized by the Nobel.

I am unwilling to accord to some smallminded and jealous individuals the satisfaction of having thwarted my efforts. These men are to me nothing more than microbes of a nasty disease. My project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time. But the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.

When he was a boy, Tesla climbed to the top of a barn and, holding onto nothing more than an umbrella, he jumped off. Did he fly? No. But he demonstrated an epic fearlessness in the face of failure. Tesla tried the impossible. Sometimes he failed. Sometimes he didn’t.

I try to write this in the dark, working in rooms without lights or heat, without a computer. Every misstep I make casts me back further in time, closer to Tesla and the world he experienced as a young man. If I sit like this long enough, I’ll start to forget what I now know too well so that next time I’m well-lit and warm, all marvel and magnificence will be restored to the technology I take for granted. I’ll be flush with awe again each time my fingertip brushes a light switch. Perhaps then I’ll be able to conjure a dark New York City, 1884, the day he stepped off the S.S. Saturnia.

My house is filled with tiny lights. At night red, green, and white flashes glow from the modem, the cell phone charger, the wireless baby monitor, the computer, coffee maker, DVD player, even the switch on the surge protector. And there is a general hum, a sound I’ve grown so accustomed to. It is the sound of a house alive and breathing.

Darkness makes me think of Tesla, particularly that specific pain experienced when a black out brings our rolling, connected world to a disconnected halt.

Eventually I have to turn on the light. This simple gesture doesn’t quite bring the flood of renewed disbelief and awe I’d hoped. But it does have me wondering again what electricity is exactly. Not even Tesla could say. “The day when we shall know exactly what ‘electricity’ is will chronicle an event probably greater and more important than any other recorded in the history of human race.”

Outside my window there is a conjunction of power lines. I follow the route of these wires as far as my eye can. I close my eyes and follow it even further, making a road back to him, wirelessly. The road passes through the Hotel New Yorker and the Waldorf. It passes through the Saturnia that took weeks to get to America. Men in suits, men in hats. Soon the road is so long it becomes a black and white road, a road before color. A road without tarmac or cars or power lines that goes all the way back to the tiny village of Smiljian where, somewhere in Croatia, a Serbian boy was born at the stroke of midnight to a minister and his wife. There on the road is a tall and handsome man. Nikola Tesla, inventor. He looks up, surprised, after so many years, to be recognized.

Tesla Promises Radio Communication with Mars

As the 20th century began, interest in the potential of life on Mars and the possible civilizations there lead to a search for signals. Could we communicate with another planet? How might we look for signals and messages from other worlds?

An 1896 newspaper article titled "A Signal from Mars" offered one example of how we might receive communications from the planet. In noting "a luminous projection on the southern edge of the planet", the article suggests that this might be because "the inhabitants of Mars were flashing messages" to Earth. We can find this same idea in a piece of music. The 1901 piece, "A Signal From Mars, March and Two Step" offers music that Martians might be playing for us. From the cover illustration, it would appear that one rather civilized Martian is using a spotlight to communicate the tune while the other watches Earth with a telescope, likely waiting to see if we have the same taste in marches and two steps. Soon, the development of radio technology would provide a much more powerful way to listen for and send messages to other worlds.

Tesla Promises Radio Communication with Mars
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the idea and development of wireless telegraphy, sending and receiving electromagnetic waves through the air, offered new method of searching for communications from space. In 1901, engineer Nicola Tesla made the astonishing claim that he was receiving radio communications from Mars. His story was picked up and reported on broadly in the press.

An article from the Richmond Times offered an extensive description and commentary on his alleged discovery. "As he sat beside his instrument on the hillside in Colorado, in the deep silence of that austere, inspiring region, where you plant your feet in gold and your head brushes the constellations — as he sat there one evening, alone, his attention, exquisitely alive at that juncture, was arrested by a faint sound from the receiver — three fairy taps, one after the other, at a fixed interval. What man who has ever lived on this earth would not envy Tesla that moment!" While Tesla's alleged communications with Mars captured media attention, it did not capture much serious interest from scientists.

Hello Earth!
As radio took off, so did stories of communicating with Mars. One such article from 1920, Hello, Earth! Hello! Marconi believes he is receiving signals from the planets provides extensive commentary on similar signals observed by the Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi. Aside from describing this discovery, the article quotes Thomas Edison as saying Marconi's work offers "good grounds for the theory that inhabitants of other planets are trying to signal to us." As radio developed as a medium for communications in the early 20th century it was also positioned for listening for contact from other worlds. While it would quickly become clear that there weren't signals from Mars, radio would play a critical role in the search for life on worlds outside our solar system.

In the 1930s and 40s radio became an invaluable instrument for observing the heavens. As astronomers began developing radio telescopes they made discoveries of various sources of electromagnetic waves in the heavens and these became useful sources of observational data about the space.

Intergalactic Contact & The Drake Equation
In the 1960s Frank Drake, Carl Sagan and a number of other scientists began searching for signals indicating the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. As it became increasingly clear that there was no intelligent life on other planets in the solar system, it became possible to detect signals from much further away. The Drake Equation was a way to estimate the number of civilizations out in the galaxy that could be sending out radio signals we could detect.

likelihood of physical contact with intelligent extraterrestrial communities
Here at the top of a draft of an paper from the early 1960s Carl Sagan presents and interprets the Drake equation, a equation for estimating the number of extraterrestrial civilizations that might be able to contact us. In this particular essay, he explores the likelihood of physical contact, that is, visits to earth by extraterrestrial civilizations. Draft of Direct Contact Among Galactic Civilizations by Relativistic Interstellar Spaceflight. 1960-1962. Manuscript Division
The goal of this equation is to define the parameters for figuring out the possible number of civilizations in our galaxy that we might be able to communicate with. Each of the variables after the equals sign are multiplied together to get the result. R is the rate of star formation, fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets, ne is the average number of planets that could, in theory, support life, fℓ would be the fraction of planets that could support life that, at some point, do in fact support life, fi is the fraction of those planets that actually develop intelligent life, fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space, and L is an estimate for the length of time for which such civilizations would last for. All together the Drake equation looks like this N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L.

In general, Sagan and Drake were excited about the possibility of contacting intelligent life in the universe because of their own ideas about the progressive value of technology and science. Those civilizations, which possibly could have existed longer than ours, would have, in their minds, likely gotten past petty things like war, violence and conquest.

Voyager's Message "To Future Times & Beings"
What do you say to a super intelligent alien race on behalf of all the inhabitants of Earth? Or at least, how would you sum up humanity to the universe just in case someone was listening? This was the question posed to Carl Sagan and a team he assembled who developed the content for the Voyager record.

In a letter to Alan Lomax, Carl Sagan called the Voyager Record "a cosmic greeting card." Both of the Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, carry copies of these records. Earlier, Sagan had been involved in crafting a message placed on Pioneer 10 and 11, the first NASA missions that would leave our solar system. The plans for messages to travel with the Voyager missions were set out on a much grander scale.

The records contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. To illustrate the diversity of its image content it contains; an X-ray of a human hand, a street scene from Pakistan, an image of a violin next to a music score, images of the planets Mercury and Mars, diagrams of the structure of DNA, and the definitions of a range of units of measure. For audio recordings, each record contains greetings from earth in 55 languages and 90 minutes of music, including recordings as diverse as; "Johnny B. Goode," written and performed by Chuck Berry, a selection from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and ethnographic recordings of music from the Solomon Islands, Peru, China and India. After the launch of the Voyager probes, in a birthday message to Chuck Berry, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan suggest that his music is now "quite literally out of this world." As these images and recordings now leave our solar system they collectively represent the furthest reach of humanity into our universe.

In selecting audio recordings to include, Carl Sagan found a collaborator in folklorist Alan Lomax. In this letter to Lomax, Sagan describes the Voyager mission and explains that the record has "a probable lifetime of a billion years" noting that "it is unlikely that many other artifacts of humanity will survive for so prodigious a period of time; it is clear, for example, that most of the present continents will be ground down and dissipated by then." In this respect, Sagan suggests, "Inclusion of the musical selections on the Voyager Record ensures for them a kind of immortality which could not be achieved in any other way." It's unlikely that the voyager records now at the edge of our solar system will ever be found by alien life forms. Just like the ideas about life on the moon, intelligent alien life, civilization on Mars and preoccupations with UFOs the Voyager records tells us a lot about how we see ourselves in a cosmic context. Reflecting on the ideas behind the record offers an opportunity to consider how we have presented ourselves on an artifact Sagan insisted would outlast nearly everything else humanity produces.

At the dawn of the 20th century, many looked to find signals from Mars in patterns in light. The advent of radio greatly expanded that search beyond our solar system. While scientists have yet to find signals from another world they haven't stopped looking. In fact we took it upon ourselves to reach out first and have tried to compose literally universal messages for the ages.

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