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In 1899, it was rumored that Tesla was experimenting with a "death ray" in Colorado Springs. But Tesla never owned up to it, and in fact remained uncommunicative about any experiments he had conducted with rays even when English, German, Russian, and American scientists in the 1920s were applying for patents on the invention. In the 1930s, however, Tesla wrote in his monograph that he had made a new discovery that would make war obsolete because every nation would have the same power to destroy each other's military weapons. It would require a large facility to generate the power, but such a facility would be able to stop entire armies and their machines as far away as two hundred miles in all directions. "It will, " he wrote, "provide a wall of power offering an insuperable obstacle against any effective aggression. " But it was not at all a death "ray, " he said, because, as scientists working as recently as the 1970s realized, rays tend to diffuse over distance and something is necessary to maintain the intensity of the focus. Rather, he said, "My apparatus projects particles which may be relatively large or of microscopic dimensions, enabling us to convey to a small area at a great distance trillions of times more energy than is possible with rays of any kind. Many thousands of horse power can thus be transmitted by a stream thinner than a hair, so that nothing can resist. " Although Tesla went on to describe how this beam will improve television transmission and the projection of images, he was really describing a directed, accelerated particle beam weapon that the folks at ARPA were struggling to develop over twenty-five years after Tesla first wrote about it and eleven years after the charred fragments of a directed-energy apparatus as well as the laser tool were discovered in the wreckage of the spacecraft at Roswell, written up by the engineers at the Air Materiel Command, and sequestered for years in my nut file. We were still trying to develop a workable beam when | was in the Pentagon in 1962 and only barely developed a working model in the Reagan administration as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative program. But for Tesla, his world in the 1930s rushed toward war. Writing J. P. Morgan about his vision of an H. G. Wells nightmare of the destruction of the civilized world through aerial bombardment, Tesla said that his particle beam weapon could shoot down airplanes in flight and so protect cities. He made proposals to the Russians to develop such a weapon because Stalin was afraid of an invasion from Japan. He also wrote to the British prime minister about the ability of his beam to protect London from attacks by the Germans. But no one thought his energy beam weapon practical, not even the Westinghouse Company, which, if they had advanced him the money to file for the patents they would probably have controlled, might have been able to develop the weapon before World War II had Tesla been able to complete it. As it was, Tesla's death ray, his accelerated particle beam in which subatomic particles were excited by an energy field and directed toward a specific target at speeds close to the speed of light, was never developed during his lifetime. However, the mere hint that Tesla's theories might have found their way to the Germans or the Russians so concerned the federal government, especially the FBI, that when Tesla died in January 1943, the FBI immediately seized all his papers, schematics, writings, and designs and turned them over to the Office of Alien Property, where they were officially sealed until released to the Yugoslavian ambassador, who was a representative of Tesla's estate. They remained in storage in Manhattan until the early1950s, when they were returned to Yugoslavia. Yet even after their return, the Yugoslavian government believed that the FBI had rifled through Tesla's papers when they were in storage and had micro filmed them or photographed them. J. Edgar Hoover denied this, but photostatic copies of photographs of Tesla's papers were in the possession of the Army R&D's Foreign Technology desk when | took over in 1961. How did they get there? Tesla's property was officially seized by the U.S. government two days after his death. Even though the FBI knew that Tesla had publicly said he'd perfected his death ray - there was no independent verification of this - no steps had been taken by the government to prevent him from transferring his plans for the death ray to a foreign powers. Vice President Henry Wallace, however, told the FBI that the government had a critical interest in whatever papers Tesla had and instructed the FBI to seize them any way they could. That was why the FBI directed the Office of Alien Property to enter Tesla's hotel room on January 9, 1943, and take possession. Tesla's other papers that were already in a storage warehouse were seized by the OAP as well. Over the next couple of weeks in January 1943, after a flurry of diplomatic activity between the Yugoslavian embassy and J. Edgar Hoover's office, the FBI turned the entire matter over to the Office of Alien Property, which also wanted to get out from under the diplomatic tug of war between Belgrade and the State Department. The OAP, still reacting to the vice president's instructions that papers that could give aid to the enemy could not leave the country, contacted the chairman of what would become the Office of R&D, the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. John Trump. Dr. Trump examined the papers, determined that not much of them were useful, but decided to make photocopies of a number of papers Tesla wrote during the years preceding his death. Trump also wrote abstracts of those papers, which included an undated monograph by Nikola Tesla entitled "New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy through Natural Media, " Tesla's description of how he would generate and direct a high energy beam of electrons at a target. Though dismissed by Trump as unworkable, the paper nevertheless described Tesla's latest thinking about a directed energy weapon, the accelerated particle beam device. 104