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organization like ARPA that would be given the mandate to develop that military response. And given the challenge posed by the Soviet satellite program, a particle beam weapon was the logical direction such a response would take. The United States had to develop a weapon that theoretically could knock out the Soviet satellites or blind them so they couldn't take any surveillance photos. They had to gather resources in the academic research community to see whether a talent pool existed for the development of such a weapon. At the same time they didn't want to divert military research into exotic weapons while the military was still trying to get its own satellites into orbit. But rather than putting the plan directly into the hands of the military R&D organizations, they followed a course probably initially laid out for them by the protocols of the UFO working group and went outside the formal military to an adhoc research organization that was not supposed to be involved in direct military research. When | was at the White House, | could see the hand of the CIA behind this, which immediately sent up a red flag for me because | knew that the government was only creating another budget and research grant bureaucracy the CIA would ultimately control. It was also no surprise that the first type of weapon whose mission was directed against space vehicles and vehicles reentering Earth's atmosphere from space was a directed energy weapon, an accelerated particle beam, because even though it may sound like something out of a science fiction movie, it had a history that stretched back all the way to the early twentieth century. It's original creator was Nikola Tesla, some of whose papers were still in my own files when | took over the Foreign Technology desk in 1961. Tesla was theorizing about directed energy beams, including particle beam weapons, even before the beginning of the twentieth century. His now famous "death ray" was essentially a version of a particle beam weapon that he believed would bring peace to the entire world because it could destroy entire cities anywhere in the world, instantly, and render squadrons of airplanes, naval fleets, and even entire armies completely useless. But even before his announcement of his death ray, Tesla was making news and a fortune through his experiments with the wireless transmission of electricity and his directed beam of electrons, which would strip the electrons of specimen material inside a light globe. In the 1890s, Tesla was experimenting with a device that would become the twentieth-century cyclotron, another device that would become television, and he formulated the ideas for what today are the worldwide television and radio networks. Tesla, his background and his history, are important to any history of twentieth century science and weapons because his thinking was well advanced beyond that of any scientist of his day, including Thomas Edison, and the political implications of what Tesla discovered mixed in with the furious attempts to manage the government cover up about UFOs and their technological potential in the days and months after the Roswell crash. Nikola Tesla, the son of a Serbian Orthodox minister, came to the United States from Paris in 1884 to meet and work for the acknowledged genius of his day, Thomas Edison. Although the two men would eventually clash like titans over the advantages of alternating current over direct current, Tesla did manage to get a job at the Edison offices and laboratory on what is now West Broadway, south of West Houston Street in New York City. The two men were also very different in the way they approached their inventions. Edison was a tinkerer who would come up with an idea, experiment, build and rebuild, and experiment again until it worked. Often, as in the case of his incandescent bulb, he would go through thousands of experiments, discarding each one after it failed, until he finally succeeded. This was Edison's example of initial inspiration and then lots of perspiration until the thing worked and he believed he'd gotten it right. Tesla, on the other hand, laid the entire project out in his brain, visualizing it in its completeness, and then assembled it from the vision in his mind. It was unnerving to Edison, who often commented to his former assistant Charles Batchelor that Tesla's ability to build something from what amounted to a set of schematics in his own mind was unnatural. Tesla was also a fastidious, formally trained academician who loved to discuss theory while Edison was mostly a self taught workbench inventor who often worked and slept in the same clothes for days. It is ironic that the rivalry between the two men who, by the time each of them died, had patented inventions upon which most of modern technological industry is built, soawned two great competing companies - General Electric and Westinghouse - whose own rivalries extend to the present day. The rivalry between Edison and Tesla helped define the nature of the electrical power industry in the United States, the electrical appliance and entertainment industries, and sustained itself from the 1890s through the 1930s when Edison finally died. Tesla himself died in New York in 1943. Tesla was an acknowledged genius, a prodigy whose predictions and patents marked him to be a man way ahead of his time. Even before Czech playwright Karel Capek coined the word "robot" in his play R.U.R. and American science fiction writer lsaac Asimov invented the term "robotics" in his book of short stories | Robot, Nikola Tesla had created the first "automaton" or mechanical soldier and a robotically controlled model boat before the turn of the century. Yet Tesla, a tall, dark, brooding, but well-educated and cultured Serbian, often times turned out to be his own worst enemy. He became a millionaire when he was only thirty-two but ran through enormous sums of money put up by some of the great industrialists 102