Tesla's Death Ray

Nikola Tesla patented over 300 inventions. When he died, the US government confiscated 80 trunks of his notes and blueprints… and only returned 60 to his heir. In his lifetime, Tesla tinkered with weather control machines, alien transmission readers, and a “death ray” that would revolutionize society. The missing trunks may be evidence that these inventions worked… and were covered up by the government. Keep up with Conspiracy Theories! YouTube: ⁠⁠@ConspiracyTheoriesPodcast⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@theconspiracypod⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@conspiracy.pod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  10,000 supersonic jets soar through international airspace, poised to start World War III. Each plane carries 100 eager paratroopers with a combined invading force of 1 million soldiers. The squadron crosses the ocean, still 250 miles from their target. White light flashes near the lead jet's noses, so bright it blinds the soldiers inside. It strikes the entire squadron, too fast for even the furthest planes to nose-dive away. The vibrant beam shines through each plane's metal hull, penetrating layers of titanium at the atomic level.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Radiation melts a glowing red circle of sky where chairs and bodies used to be. All at once, the GPS and com scramble, the alarm blares, and yellow oxygen masks spring from the ceilings. Air sucks out of each plane's cabin, replaced with acrid, toxic smoke. But the remaining soldiers are in such excruciating pain they don't notice that they can't breathe. The lethal blast of radiation burns their skin midnight-black. Waves of nausea roll through them as their DNA unspools. They don't even have time to scream before it's over. The waves of irradiated heat hit the fuel chambers

• 1:32Speaker 00

  and 10,000 planes explode into flaming orange smoke, near instant annihilation of a million people. For the squadron's target city, it's a crisis averted. Their top-tier defense system worked, destroying threats on the subatomic level. They call it... "The Death Ray." It's the most powerful weapon in the world. Or would be, if it existed. Officially, Nikola Tesla's death ray never made it out of his notebooks.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  But some people think the US government stole those notebooks to protect this advanced technology, or keep it all to themselves. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday, and check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. And we would love to hear from you, so if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Today, we're talking about Nikola Tesla's death ray. When he died in 1943, the US government illegally confiscated his belongings.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  In the years since, some of what they took has been declassified, but redactions remain. The missing items might include a superpowered death ray, an alien communication system, and advanced technology that could upend society as we know it. This episode contains discussions of weapons and espionage. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. Stay with us. This episode of Conspiracy Theories is presented by AMC+. Anne Rice's immortal universe expands with the gritty spy thriller, Talos Masca: The Secret Order.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  An enemy has infiltrated the shadowy Talos Masca spy agency. To find out who is behind it, secret agent Guy Anatole descends into an underworld of magic, immortality, and superpower. Watch Talos Masca: The Secret Order, Sundays on AMC+. Learn more at AMCplus.com.

• 4:04Speaker 00

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• 5:47Speaker 00

  The conspiracy theories about Nikola Tesla's missing possessions started the day after he died.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  On January 8th, 1943, Tesla's next of kin, his nephew, Sava Kasanovic, followed a housekeeper upstairs inside the New Yorker Hotel. She led him to room 3327, where Tesla had called home for the past few years. For Kasanovic, it felt surreal to enter the room. On one hand, it was the home of a genius inventor. On the other, it was a mess. Books, papers, and boxes were strewn about the suite. Desks were piled with stacks of documents. Kasanovic was there to organize Tesla's work, and the job was clearly a big one.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Kasanovic sifted through diagrams of electric gizmos, remote control devices, and radio towers. Then, he noticed something odd. Some of Tesla's papers had been tampered with. At least one of his notebooks was missing. Plus, Tesla's Edison Medal, the most prestigious scientific award he ever received, was nowhere to be found.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  A chill ran down Kasanovic's spine. Someone had already been here. He couldn't be positive about what else might be missing. It wasn't like his uncle kept an inventory, and they weren't particularly close. But Kasanovic was convinced someone had entered the room before him and stolen Nikola Tesla's belongings. He had a sneaking suspicion that it had been a representative from the US government. They'd never liked his uncle, never accepted him as a citizen. But now the Tesla was gone... They wanted to use his genius for their own gain.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  Okay, now if you're thinking, "Hold on, Carter, who are you talking about? The only Tesla I know is my neighbor's electric car." Don't stress, the car company is named after the inventor Nikola Tesla. He was born in 1856 in Smiljan, Croatia. Family lore says he entered the world during a lightning storm. As an adult, he became an inventor, focusing on ways to use and harness this new-fangled discovery called electricity. This eventually led him to immigrate to the US for better opportunities. And while Tesla sometimes worked directly for companies as an employee, he spent most of his life selling patents for inventions big companies could take wide,

• 8:36Speaker 00

  or seeking investors so he could build proofs of concept, kind of like the contestants on Shark Tank. Some of Tesla's patents included different types of motors, light bulbs, even X-rays. Ah, yes, for every broken bone you've seen, you can thank Nikola Tesla. Well, not for breaking your bones, for being able to see them. But he's most famous for pioneering the use of alternating current electricity. If you have ever plugged anything in at your house, you've used alternating current. Historically, almost the entire US power grid has run on it. And this is the thing about Tesla. Regardless of everything else that you think of him or that we're about to learn about him,

• 9:21Speaker 00

  he essentially invented the power grid that we all live on. It is unbelievable the scope of his impact. And Tesla figured that out when he was only 26. Well, if you're over 26, don't feel too bad, though. Don't think about changing your life to be like him, because Tesla famously had almost no social life. He didn't date, he skipped lunch, he slept maybe five hours a night. The other 19 hours, he spent working. And this led to a mental health condition, which flared up on and off through the course of his life. In the 1890s, Tesla's work attracted the attention of consultants from the Niagara Power Company.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  They were creating a new water-powered electrical generator that drew power from Niagara Falls. Tesla was exactly the man they needed to complete their work, so they offered him a job. Tesla accepted without hesitation. He created a motor that would convert the energy from moving water into electricity, and his invention worked better than anybody could have imagined. After three years of construction, the Niagara Falls power plant opened in the mid-1890s. It lit up the entire city of Buffalo, New York, all using alternating current. It made Tesla famous.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  But not all the attention was good. According to Saba Kasanovic, the US government actively monitored Tesla. And Kasanovic wasn't the only one who thought so. One rumor claimed that government agents had been renting a room at the New Yorker Hotel, right across the hall from the room Tesla lived in during his final years. Allegedly, these tenants were members of the FBI, sent to monitor Tesla's movements. If agents really were living next door, they would have been intimately aware of the inventor's schedule. They could have realized that Tesla had passed away, then broken into his room,

• 11:31Speaker 00

  and stolen his belongings before anyone else even knew he was dead. At the time Kasanovic made this claim, people said it was outlandish, over-inflating Tesla's importance. But the rumors still persisted for decades. Then, in 2017, it turned out to be true! The US government really was monitoring Tesla. Between 2016 and 2018, the CIA released a dossier containing over 200 pages of documents relating to Nikola Tesla. They included notes about the inventor's creations, discoveries, and idiosyncrasies. And one declassified report revealed that one of Tesla's own colleagues was a government informant.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  His name was Blois Fitzgerald. Yeah, you heard that right. Blois. He was an electrician and one of Tesla's most trusted proteges. But he betrayed his mentor for years. He reported nearly all of his and Tesla's private conversations to the FBI. Fitzgerald also told the FBI that Tesla carried 80 trunks of notes with him every time he moved to a new hotel. He clearly knew what kinds of inventions those papers held and how valuable they might be. It's possible Fitzgerald himself snuck into Tesla's room after he died. After all, he already demonstrated he was willing to betray his friend.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Perhaps the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, ordered Fitzgerald to take specific documents from Tesla's room. Because some of Tesla's inventions and ideas were intentionally kept secret by Tesla himself. He chose not to share them, or even to try to sell them. For example, he invented an alternating current motor that would work with just two wires, but chose not to try to sell it. What? Why? Well, apparently, it was based on the electrical systems of the time, and Tesla didn't want to encourage people to stick to old systems. He wanted to create a new, better electrical system. And this exemplifies something really important about Tesla.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  He hoped that one day his inventions would lead to universal peace and prosperity. He believed that someday, all labor would be automated, and no one would want for anything. If this sentiment feels familiar, it's because it is still part of the conversation around cutting-edge technology today, like AI. So to protect his work and hopes for the future, Tesla kept his secrets locked up in his 80 trunks. We only know about the two-wire motor concept because he eventually shared it with a friend. So it makes sense why the government was monitoring Tesla. He'd proven his inventions had the power to change the world.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  He was secretive and his inventions weren't always developed in the interest of public safety. He spent years trying to transmit wireless electricity through the ground at his lab in Colorado Springs, even though his experiments shocked nearby horses and electrocuted local butterflies. But those aren't the only reasons the US government saw Tesla as a possible concern. Leading up to World War II, the FBI kept extensive files on every one Director J. Edgar Hoover considered to be a national security threat.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  And Hoover had a whole folder dedicated to Nikola Tesla. Because Savva Kasanovic wasn't just Tesla's random nephew. He was a foreign diplomat, the ambassador of Yugoslavia. And leading up to Tesla's death, Yugoslavia was controlled by the Axis powers, America's enemies during World War II. The FBI suspected Tesla, an Eastern European immigrant himself, might have ties to the enemy. And the US government couldn't let important inventions fall into enemy hands.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  So to keep Americans safe, they secretly broke the law. And they may have stolen the most dangerous weapon ever created.

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• 17:04Speaker 00

  Leading up to his death in 1943, the US government actively monitored Nikola Tesla. According to his nephew, government agents might have even broken into Tesla's hotel room the day he died. And when you hear what happened two days later, it feels increasingly possible. Because they did illegally break into his room. Two days after Tesla died. After Kasanovic had already visited and grown suspicious. On January 9th, 1943, the US government walked out of Tesla's hotel room with 80 trunks worth of documents. Nikola Tesla absolutely had information the US government wanted kept quiet.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  The question is, what that information was? And what they did with it? You see, when the US government confiscated Tesla's belongings, they didn't send the FBI. They sent an agency called the Office of Alien Property Custodian, or the OAPC. The OAPC was a wartime agency. Their job was to confiscate potentially valuable assets from America's foreign enemies. But Tesla was a naturalized US citizen. He'd been one for over 50 years, more than half his life. Naturally, Kasanovic argued that the OAPC had no legal rights to his uncle's work.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  And he was right, they didn't. They only had the power to confiscate items from non-citizens. So Kasanovic appealed the seizure, fighting to regain his inheritance. But the agents weren't exactly keen to listen to him. Remember, Kasanovic was a Yugoslavian ambassador. He'd actually used his famous uncle's name to rise through the ranks of international politics.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  Government agents suspected Kusanovic had ties to Yugoslavia's Communist Party. And as the world moved from World War II to the Cold War, it was imperative to keep technological advances on the American side of the Iron Curtain. So they rejected his requests, keeping the fight in the courts. Meanwhile, the OAPC gave Tesla's papers to a military engineer named Dr. John Trump. Yes, they're related. Within just a few days, Dr. Trump officially concluded that there was nothing dangerous in Tesla's notes. He said, "Tesla's thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily

• 19:45Speaker 00

  of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character, often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power, but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results." Since then, the US government has tried to downplay the significance of the documents. Even so, they engaged in nine years of legal battles with Kusanovic. It wasn't until 1952 that federal judges ruled that Tesla's papers had been wrongly seized and should be returned to Kusanovic. Should have been an immense relief.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  But when Kusanovic counted them, there were only 60 trunks. Kusanovic knew his uncle had kept 80 trunks, which left him wondering where those missing trunks had gone. At the time, the United States claimed that they'd simply consolidated Tesla's work for easier shipping. But 20 whole trunks don't just disappear by rearranging a few notebooks. This implied the officials were hiding pages from Tesla's family and from the rest of the world. And they weren't the only government acting shady. Kasanovic donated his 60 trunks to a museum in Belgrade in modern day Serbia.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  From then on, if anyone in the West requested access to the papers, they were almost always denied. A few scholars got access to select papers over the years, but in general, the Yugoslavians kept Tesla's work to themselves. Seems like they also believed there was something in there worth hiding. And here's where it gets even wilder. According to Kasanovic, it involved blueprints for a super weapon Tesla tried to sell to both countries. It started back in the 1930s, about a decade before Tesla died. He publicly stated he was working on "the most powerful weapon ever created."

• 21:57Speaker 00

  This was not one of the secretive ideas he tinkered with alone. He wanted this invention to come to life. It was a particle beam weapon that he called a teleforce gun. Now, according to him, the device could down an airplane from 250 miles away and was so deadly, it would put an end to warfare. It was called the "peace ray" because it would prevent any nation from attacking another. In 1934, Tesla told the New York Times, "The death beam would make war impossible by offering every country an invisible Great Wall of China." And bear in mind, this is happening as the Nazis are invading Eastern Europe and shortly

• 22:40Speaker 00

  before the US greenlights the Manhattan Project to invent the nuclear bomb. Tesla was ahead of his time, thinking about mutually assured destruction before anyone had the capability to enact it. But unlike the nuclear bomb, Tesla wanted everyone to have one. He hoped to install the "peace ray" in every country and create an even playing field. Now, the concept of a massive protective ray gun wasn't completely original. Other American and European inventors in the early 20th century experimented with the idea.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Most of these were planned as essentially giant super lasers, and they all kept running into the same problem: lasers get weaker the further they travel. But Tesla thought he had to solve for this. He wanted to blast tiny electronically-charged particles instead of just light, so something between a taser and a BB gun on a massive scale. Even though Tesla called it "the teleforce gun," when he started shopping it around, the press saw the similarities to the light-ray weapons other inventors were working on, so they labeled it "Tesla's death ray." Which stuck. We can't always choose our names.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  When World War II broke out in 1939, public interest in Tesla's teleforce gun increased. Apparently, Tesla tried to sell the patent to the US and UK governments. One released memo alludes to a batch of "death ray notes" that the US government acquired in 1934. It doesn't say if they were confiscated or if Tesla shared them in hopes of a sale. Either way, neither the US or UK bought the death ray patent, possibly because Tesla was in his 80s and hadn't produced a successful invention in years. So Tesla went looking for another buyer.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  A letter he wrote to Kusanovich in the early 1940s said he'd partnered with AmTorg Trading Corporation, a company based in the Soviet Union. Together, they'd sell Tesla's latest invention to Yugoslavia. A record suggests that AmTorg Trading Corporation intended to pay Tesla $25,000 for a patent.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  But there's no proof this deal went through. Amtoric Trading Corporation didn't mention Nikola Tesla anywhere in their own paperwork, and there's no indication that Tesla received any large sums of money around the time this sale supposedly took place. And of course, well, Yugoslavia never built a death ray. Or if they did, they didn't use it before the nation broke up into the modern day countries of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia. There's been enough instability in the region that if anyone had a death ray, they had ample motive to use it. Even though Tesla couldn't find a buyer for the death ray, the FBI decided to keep tabs

• 25:56Speaker 00

  on it. According to declassified notes, they became intrigued by the death ray as early as 1940, three years before Tesla died. One memo addressed to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover requests that steps be taken to make sure Tesla was not abducted by enemy governments, in case they'd make their hostage build the deadly weapon. You know, kinda like the plot of the first Iron Man movie. This might be part of why the FBI was watching Tesla, not to harm him, but to protect him. Or, I mean, really to protect the death ray design from getting into the wrong hands.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  To be clear, in 2008, the FBI came out and said they never had possession of any of Tesla's papers for prototypes. The Bureau claimed they were misidentified with agents of the Office of Alien Property Custody, who were deeply interested in a possible death ray. Regardless, while Sava Kusanovich was trying to get his uncle's papers back, the US military made use of them. You see, some of the documents that Dr. John Trump reviewed for the OAPC featured notes and sketches that detailed how the death ray would work. The blueprints reportedly showed a large tube mounted at the top of a signal tower.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  This tube focused a beam of electrically charged particles, which could be fired over huge distances. According to Tesla, this beam could destroy an airplane from hundreds of miles away. In 1943, the United States supposedly distributed these death ray blueprints to the FBI and the Department of Defense. They seemed to think their scientists could take Tesla's designs and improve them for mass military production. Allegedly, the project was deemed infeasible and canned.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  But 15 years later, in 1958, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, greenlit Project Seesaw with the goal of creating a particle beam weapon. Officially, after 10 years and $27 million, that project was canned too. Then, in the 1980s, 50 years after Tesla's death, President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as Star Wars because the plan felt like something out of a sci-fi movie. It poured billions of dollars into developing America's nuclear missile defense system. And among the many methods, they explored a particle beam gun to shoot down incoming threats.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Tesla biographer Mark Seifer believes it's possible that Tesla's death ray lent some of its ideas to Reagan's Star Wars program. And if so, that's why they can keep some of Tesla's papers classified today. A Freedom of Information Act request wouldn't trigger the release of anything still classified. Basically, Savva Kasanovitch never got those 20 trunks of documents back because the US military is still using them. There's a possibility the US military has a death ray right now, or has one in the works. At the very least, there's plenty of evidence they want one.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  Which gives even more credence to Kussonovich's claim that government agents secretly robbed Tesla's hotel room the very day he died. They could say anything taken in this initial secret raid was actually taken during the official one two days later. Wouldn't be the first case of "search first, warrant later." And, they might have taken more than the blueprints for the death raid. Nikola Tesla was prolific. For 80 years, he constantly brainstormed new inventions. Tesla's notes included ideas to remake the power grid all over again and fill the streets

• 30:10Speaker 00

  with electric cars. Officially, those ideas never left his notebooks. But is that because they weren't possible in the 1940s? Or because someone stole the technology and intentionally suppressed it from the public? And was that someone the US government, or a business rival?

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• 31:07Speaker 00

  If you've heard much about Nikola Tesla before, you might be aware of his rivalry with Thomas Edison. Edison's best known for inventing the modern lightbulb, though Tesla also invented a lightbulb with a different mechanism. A long time listeners might also recall our episode on the theory that Edison had one of his competitors murdered, Louis Le Prince, who invented the motion picture camera. Which is to say, Edison had a reputation for playing dirty. Tesla and Edison first met when Tesla worked for Edison's company, but Tesla quickly moved on to work for himself and then started selling patents to Edison's main competitor, Westinghouse.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  Westinghouse helped bring Tesla's concept of alternating current electricity to life, which directly competed with Edison's bread and butter, direct current electricity. Okay, a little science fair here. At the time, America was using Edison's system, making him rich. But Tesla and Westinghouse's system was both cheaper and better. So Edison launched a massive PR war to save his company. He even went as far as convincing the state of New York to use a Westinghouse alternating current generator for a death row execution. And when the execution was botched, they blamed Tesla's invention.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  But in the end, alternating current was simply a better system, so it won out. Now, Edison died years before Tesla, but perhaps someone from Edison Electric broke into Tesla's hotel room to prevent another Tesla invention from jeopardizing their business. And maybe they stole Tesla's Edison Award too, the one Kussonovich noted was missing. What exactly would they have been looking for? Ideas that would disrupt their business model. For example, Tesla tinkered with a concept he called free energy that powered an ambient

• 33:15Speaker 00

  air device that took heat from its surroundings and converted that into electricity, exactly like a solar panel. Now, Tesla never built a working solar panel, but he had notes about it. And as we've seen, solar panels have begun to disrupt the electricity industry. Instead of paying for electricity, some people are able to harvest their own or even sell it to their local power company. We know Edison and his team did everything in their power to suppress alternating current because it went against their business interests. They were and are currently an electricity company. So might they have suppressed better technology again with solar panels?

• 34:01Speaker 00

  And that's not the only alternative means of electricity Tesla was investigating. He spent his final months tinkering with a lifelong obsession: wireless electricity. Years before, he'd invented the Tesla coil, which transfers power through the air. To put it simply, two Tesla coils form an electrical circuit and generate a magnetic field. At his lab, Tesla used these coils on a small scale to power lights and remote-controlled automatons. But he hoped to bring wireless power to the whole world via massive towers, like cellphone towers. Now, Tesla's wireless electricity dream wasn't possible in his

• 34:46Speaker 00

  time. But in January 2021, students at Georgia Tech proved that the millimeter waves in 5G phone signals could be harnessed and converted into small amounts of electric power. And as of 2025, a company called Reach Power is building out long-distance wireless power transmission systems. Their website lists both NASA and DARPA as partners. So, it is possible. Possible enough that someone might have wanted to prevent it from ever happening, or wait until it was built by someone who'd license it to the government.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  Then there's the invention most famously associated with the name Tesla: the electric car. Yes, we have finally arrived at the place we all at least know the name from: Tesla and the electric car. How do they go together? Well, according to one theory, before he died, Nikola Tesla worked on an electric car concept. We could do a whole episode on the conspiracy theories to stop the progress of electric cars, but the general concept goes all the way back to at least the 1800s. At one point, Edison Incorporated and Ford Motors teamed up to create an affordable electric car.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  They tested dozens of designs, but the project eventually fell apart. According to Tesla's other nephew, Peter Savo, in September 1931, Tesla brought him to Buffalo, New York. Yes, that's the city Tesla single-handedly brought electricity to. And in Buffalo, Tesla showed his nephew what seemed to be a normal car. But when he popped the hood, Savo saw something completely unexpected. Tesla had removed the car's engine and replaced it with a battery. Savo was fascinated. He asked Tesla how it worked, but the inventor was tight-lipped. All he said was that they should take the machine for a test drive.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Savo climbed into the driver's seat and turned the key in the ignition. The car started, but unlike a gas-powered vehicle, it didn't make any noise. Savo noticed that it had an antenna, and his uncle explained that the power was coming from a nearby Tesla coil, a wireless electrical tower. With that explanation, the men set off. During their test drive, the new electric car accelerated to 90 miles per hour. The drive was fast, smooth, and completely battery-powered. If this story is true, it means the technology for electric cars existed almost 100 years

• 37:39Speaker 00

  before their widespread adoption. But someone suppressed it before they could go mainstream, just like Thomas Edison and his company tried to suppress alternating current. Okay, let's take a look at this, because there are a few lingering questions. First, if Edison Incorporated had a secret stolen blueprint, well, why not build a car and pass it off as their own? If the government had it, why not use it for the military? As some say, the oil and gas lobbies would have killed it, but they weren't as powerful in the 1930s as in the 1990s and 2000s. They hadn't made their billions yet. Lastly, the records don't entirely line up.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  Given poor record-keeping in the early 20th century, we can't even say for sure that Savo was really Tesla's nephew. Much less that they knew each other. And at the time the story allegedly occurs, Tesla was struggling financially. He didn't have the resources to build an electric car. And if he did, he likely would have sold it. In all likelihood, Tesla never worked on a battery-powered automobile, and it's just a popular story, a fun urban myth. Still, in the decades after Tesla's death, technology developed quickly, maybe too quickly.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  Some suspected that the government was innovating off Tesla's stolen notes. They think the FBI stole these blueprints, then engineered the technologies for mass consumption. And they never gave Tesla the proper credit. Meaning, it's possible that the government didn't just steal Tesla's notes, they might have seized his entire legacy. It's similar to theories about reverse engineering, the idea that the US military used recovered alien technology to make major leaps in aeronautics and weapons. But in this case, they used it to make leaps in electronics and communications.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Speaking of aliens, there's one specific Tesla invention the US military would want to have, and have reason to keep quiet. An alien communicator. Oh yeah, I might have forgotten to mention that Nikola Tesla claimed he'd invented a way to receive signals from extraterrestrials, and got a message from Mars. Okay, yeah, here we go. This goes back to the late 1890s, when Tesla registered the first US patents for radio technology. But they weren't the first radio patents in the world. In Europe, an Italian inventor named Guglielmo Marconi registered paperwork for nearly identical

• 40:30Speaker 00

  technology. Suddenly, Tesla had serious competition. If he wanted to stay ahead, he needed a technological breakthrough, fast. And that required more money. So Tesla convinced banker JP Morgan to fund him with the explicit promise that he'd outpace Marconi. Intrigued, Morgan invested $150,000, the equivalent of over $4.5 million today.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Tesla set up two research stations dedicated to radio experimentation. The first was established in 1899 in Colorado Springs, where high altitude helped optimize signal transmission. The second was built in 1901 on Long Island and was called Warden Cliff Tower. One day, while searching for signals, one of Tesla's receivers pulsed in an awd-rhythmic fashion. The series of electrical disturbances felt timed, intentional. He described them as "one, two, three."

• 41:40Speaker 00

  They were like no signal his transmitters had picked up before. Upon further study and reflection, he deduced they had to be coming from outer space, specifically Mars. He wanted to find a way to signal back. He hoped to hear the "one, two, three" again and answer "four." Tesla felt this discovery was of global importance, so he shared it with the world. And it didn't go over well. Some members of the public believed him, but the scientific community scoffed. His professional and public reputation took a massive hit, and there was no way Tesla

• 42:24Speaker 00

  could have detected signals from Mars. And now, almost a century later, we can be fairly certain Mars isn't sending out electrical signals. With that said, just a few years after Tesla died, the US Air Force launched Project Blue Book, which was dedicated to studying possible extraterrestrial encounters. Even though Tesla's claim went nowhere, they might have wanted to examine it for themselves. One final invention the US government may have wanted to get their hands on: a machine to control the weather. Tesla openly stated his belief that a strong enough radio transmission tower might be able to influence the weather.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  He hoped to eventually create one in Colorado Springs. Now, as far as we know, he didn't achieve that, though the weather's great in Colorado Springs, but his notes may have paved the way for projects like HARP.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  Officially, it's a radio transmitter in Alaska that studies our upper atmosphere. But some people think HARP is actually a weather control device. We've covered it before if you want more info. But it's just one of the many modern things Tesla's missing notes might have inspired. Okay, let's sum it up. Nikola Tesla's notes might have included plans for death rays, weather machines, alien transmissions, electric cars, and wireless electricity. And those are just the experiments we know of. The 20 missing trunks could also contain technology Tesla kept secret from the public.

• 44:07Speaker 00

  Or maybe, they held nothing at all. Because as much as Tesla was a visionary, he may also have been a scam artist. Remember, Tesla registered over 300 patents, many for inventions that were never built. So he can't guarantee everything he invented worked. And he was known to inflate the importance of his work. While reviewing Tesla's belongings, Dr. John Trump learned that the inventor had left behind more than just notes. Employees at the New Yorker Hotel told Trump about a safe at the nearby Hotel Governor

• 44:50Speaker 00

  Clinton, where Tesla used to live. He'd left a prototype there as collateral. Okay, so by his 70s Tesla was eyeballs deep in debt. He had to sell off his radio tower financed by JP Morgan. He moved from hotel to hotel, taking his 80 trunks every time. He racked up massive bills and didn't always pay them.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  When he left the Governor Clinton Hotel, he had $400 in charges. Instead of paying, he allegedly gave them a prototype of the death ray. When John Trump learned this from the employees at the New Yorker Hotel, he was stunned. He dashed to the Governor Clinton Hotel and persuaded those hotel employees to show him the box. They pulled it out of their safe, and the collateral was wrapped in a paper bag with a handwritten note from Tesla. It said the device was worth $10,000 and that the hotel should keep it as collateral while Tesla worked to pay his outstanding bill.

• 45:57Speaker 00

  He told the staff the box contained a secret weapon. If any unauthorized person tried to open the box, the device would explode. Dr. Trump didn't know if that was true, but there was only one way to find out. He gathered his courage and carefully opened the package. Then he burst out laughing. It wasn't a weapon of war. It was a multi-decade resistance box, a common piece of equipment found in any electrician's laboratory. Nikola Tesla had conned the Governor Clinton Hotel to get out of paying his bill.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  After discovering this scam, Dr. Trump closed his investigation into Tesla's death ray. It seemed like the prototype had never existed outside Tesla's mind. He'd used his reputation as a famous inventor to make people believe he was more capable than he was. And if Tesla talked up the death ray to avoid paying his debts, well, what other inventions might have been a scam? Some people say he made up the story about the Mars transmission after Guglielmo Marconi beat him to the punch on radio. And he never truly cracked wireless electricity, despite using it to rake in thousands from JP Morgan.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  And even though modern electric cars bear his name, most historians agree that the tale of Tesla building one is an urban legend. And this is what I love so much about the mythos of Tesla. It lives in the gray. Was he maybe the greatest inventor of the 20th century? The godfather of our best technology? Or was he another hustler? A smart guy creating great stuff and trying to make his way through his world? Probably the truth is a bit of both. So while it's possible the US government is hiding a death ray or incredible technological advances from the public,

• 48:04Speaker 00

  it's also possible Tesla was the one lying to us all along.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at the conspiracy pod. And if you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. For more information on Nikola Tesla, amongst the many sources we used, we found the book Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla by Mark Seifer and the PBS site Tesla: Life and Legacy extremely helpful to our research. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written by Matt Teamstra, edited by Maggie Admire,

• 48:58Speaker 00

  researched by Brian Petrus, fact-checked by Cara McElhene and Sophie Kemp, and engineered, video edited, and sound designed by Alex Button. I'm your host, Carter Roy.

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