Incredible Evidence Uncovered in Tesla's Tower | The Tesla Files (S1, E3) | Full Episode

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NARRATOR: Tonight on The Tesla Files... JOE KINNEY: The beauty of the New Yorker, you can see things the way they were 80 years ago. So clandestine. KINNEY: This is the original main breaker plant. TAYLOR: I can just see Tesla down here flipping some of these things. We want to get inside the original lab. STAPLETON: Holy smokes! TAYLOR: We have really high confidence that underneath this 200-foot tower that there was a deep tunnel right in the center of this octagon area. We'll start with the ground-penetrating radar. SEIFER: This is the Holy Grail. That's amazing! ♪ NARRATOR: Shortly before he died alone in a New York hotel room, scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla claimed to have 80 trunks filled with his life's work-- everything from detailed plans for wireless electricity to weapons so powerful they could destroy entire cities. But after he died, only 60 of Tesla's 80 trunks were reportedly found. For decades, people have wondered what happened to the files contained in Tesla's missing trunks. Could they have contained secrets, secrets that could forever change the world? ♪ SEIFER: Okay, guys, our next stop is the Hotel New Yorker. This is where Tesla lived the last ten years of his life. NARRATOR: August 2017. Acclaimed Nikola Tesla biographer Marc Seifer, along with astrophysicist Dr. Travis Taylor and investigative journalist Jason Stapleton, have traveled to New York City to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding the controversial scientist's death in 1943. We're gonna meet Joe Kinney, who's the hotel historian. He's also an engineer. He's met many, many people who have wanted to see Tesla's rooms. TAYLOR: And so he's heard all of the scuttlebutt, all of the little nuances, and all of the little theories and hypotheses about what was going on there. So, it might be enlightening. NARRATOR: For the past several weeks, Marc, Travis, and Jason have been searching for evidence that would lead to the discovery of some 20 trunks filled with scientific papers that were reportedly taken from Tesla's hotel rooms at the time of his death. Evidence that the trunks existed was revealed in a number of recently released-- though still redacted-- FBI files. Hey, you must be Joe. Nice to meet you. -Hey, Travis. -Hey, I'm Travis. -Glad to meet you. Hey, Marc. -Good to see you again. -Welcome to the New Yorker Hotel. -Thank you. Joe Kinney has worked at the New Yorker Hotel since 1996 and serves as the building's project engineer and unofficial archivist. He has made the study of Tesla's years at the hotel one of his top priorities and is considered an expert on the scientist's financially troubled and lonely final years. Let's go see what we can find out about Mr. Tesla. -Yeah. -Okay, lead the way. Built in 1929, the New Yorker Hotel was once one of the city's largest and most fashionable hotels. In addition to ten private dining salons and five restaurants, it boasted the largest barbershop in the world. But if Nikola Tesla was broke, as was widely believed, how did he come to be living at such a state-of-the-art hotel? SEIFER: When you think about the Hotel New Yorker, you first think about Tesla living in his apartment and the files that he had. And it all comes alive in looking at this fantastic, incredible hotel. -(ding) -Trying to envision what it was like for him being here at its height in the 1930s and the 1940s. So, what I'm thinking is, this is where Tesla walked down every day, -this very path. -KINNEY: Yeah. TAYLOR: Does this look like it did in 1943? The floor plan's the same, but the décor is completely different. There was a door just about right here. So, effectively, it was a two-room suite. TAYLOR: Okay. KINNEY: Come on in. STAPLETON: Holy smokes! This is tiny. This is unbelievable. Wow. -This was, like... -How many years did he spend in this room? -Ten. -Ten years in this little room. There are probably prison cells bigger than this room, right? Well, you're just imagining so much a bigger place -in your mind, you know? -Yeah. This is where he did his research, he would've kept his papers, any documents, -things like that. -KINNEY: Yes. NARRATOR: Born during a lightning storm in the small Croatian village of Smiljan in 1856, Nikola Tesla grew up obsessed with electricity and the limitless possibilities of electrical power. Emigrating to the United States in 1884, he quickly established himself as a genius in the field of electrical engineering, especially after his invention of the alternating current electricity delivery system, which is still the standard used today. But just as rapid as Tesla's rise to fame was his downfall. Known to have a quarrelsome and almost paranoid personality, he burned bridges with powerful colleagues like Thomas Edison and investors like J.P. Morgan. The press often sneered about what they described as the inventor's wild claims concerning everything from the wireless distribution of electricity and telecommunications to weapons of mass destruction. This is the room where he was found? Yes, it was. By one of the New Yorker housekeepers. After he dies, who shows up? Does he have next of kin to come collect the body and his things? His closest relative, Sava Kosanovic, came. -Kosanovic, the, uh, ambassador from Yugoslavia. -Okay. Kosanovic was able to see the room and look inside the safe. How did, uh, his relative know how to get into the safe? They brought a locksmith. -So, they actually had to break into the safe? -Yes. Now, were the things in the safe supposed to be there? And what was the process there? Well, the contents looked like they'd been disturbed. -So, somebody had beat them to it? -We don't officially know who the first was. Well, do we unofficially know who the first was? Well, they think it was the OSS or the FBI. -So... -Holy smokes. NARRATOR: In the three days between the time Nikola Tesla put a "Do Not Disturb" sign outside the door of his hotel room and the time his body was discovered by a hotel maid, could someone else have entered his room? If so, was it the very last person to see Tesla alive or the first person to find him dead? According to very qualified, educated sources I met here, the FBI and the OSS had the rooms just down the hall from here and were monitoring Tesla closely, perhaps waiting for him to pass. That's intriguing. Joe said that there was a possibility that there were FBI agents or OSS agents that were living on the same hallway with Tesla. That makes me think that he's being watched the whole time. Now, if this is true, then they would've known instantly when he was dead. They had all the time in the world, three days, probably, that they could've gone in and taken documents, changed documents, done whatever they wanted to. What I think's interesting is that one of the files says that a Mr. Doty and a Mr. Fitzgerald, uh, accompanied Kosanovic, and they were supposedly hotel managers. But there's a Mr. Doty, who was in war intelligence, and Bloyce Fitzgerald, who was an Army representative who worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and those two guys have the exact same last names. So, it seems to me it's very possible it was Army intelligence and Navy intelligence. Also, those names were not of any general managers -at that time. -You know that? KINNEY: I have tons and tons of documents advertising it was Frank L. Andrews, general manager, signed. NARRATOR: If Frank L. Andrews was the manager of the New Yorker Hotel at the time of Nikola Tesla's death in 1943, then just who were Doty and Fitzgerald? More importantly, what exactly were they doing there? Could it be they were following the orders of government physicist John G. Trump, the man hired by the Office of Alien Property to collect all of Tesla's belongings, including some 80 trunks filled with scientific papers and then evaluate them for their possible strategic importance? The same John G. Trump who was the uncle of Donald Trump, the future president of the United States. That clearly sounds to me like there was a cover story for whoever these two guys were that came in and got the documents. And I-I don't believe this room is big enough to house everything that he was working on. Well, some people believe it was stored -in the tunnels underneath your feet. -SEIFER: Tunnels? -Yes. -Where are those? -TAYLOR: They're in this building? -Yes, they're about 30 feet below ground. -TAYLOR: Wow! Well, we need to go see that. Yes. -Absolutely. -Okay. Let's go take a look. -Cool. TAYLOR: Man, check it out. NARRATOR: While visiting the New Yorker Hotel in New York City in search of some 20 missing trunks filled with scientist Nikola Tesla's designs and inventions, Tesla biographer Marc Seifer, along with astrophysicist Dr. Travis Taylor and investigative journalist Jason Stapleton, have been invited by hotel historian Joe Kinney to explore a virtual labyrinth of tunnels and storage rooms that exist some three stories deep underground. -Elevator still functional? -No, it's not. It's removed, but it goes up to the entrance -that you came in today. -Okay. -But Tesla would've -definitely taken this? -Oh, for sure. Right now, we're on the very southern part of the hotel, and we're walking out of the hotel proper. We're under the sidewalk now. STAPLETON: Holy smokes. Wow. Right now, we're-we're actually crossing 34th Street underground. SEIFER: So, this way led -to the railroads? -KINNEY: Yeah. TAYLOR: It is so clandestine. -It is a little sneaky, isn't it? -Yeah. Just walk around down here. Marc, think about what this looked like in its heyday. This would have been... SEIFER: It fires your imagination. Yeah, it really does. Yeah, it really does. NARRATOR: In recent years, Tesla and his discoveries have proven to be more prophetic and more accurate than they were thought to be in his lifetime. He is now credited with envisioning everything from X-ray technology and fluorescent lighting, to cell phones, self-charging, driverless cars, and remote control. Is it possible Tesla's precious scientific files could still be somewhere at The New Yorker Hotel, hidden away some 30 feet below ground? KINNEY: This is the, the demarcation between the hotel tunnel and the platform for the E train or the subway. So, you can walk right out these doors -and be in the subway? -Right. KINNEY: This was open 24 hours a day. At 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning he could have come through here to Penn Station, caught a train to anywhere he wanted to go in the city. What I think's neat is he can go out here, he could access the Hotel Governor Clinton where he had a safety-deposit box. He's also got trunks in the Hotel Pennsylvania. NARRATOR: The tunnels under The New Yorker Hotel were designed as part of an elaborate system of underground passages that connected with other hotels and subway lines. If Nikola Tesla really did have sensitive files or important inventions stowed away at other hotels, this underground network would have provided him with the perfect means of moving them from place to place without detection. So, this is the original generator room. STAPLETON: Man, we are deep down in it now. I personally believe that Tesla came down here and showed these guys how to make this plant run right, because he was an expert on DC as well. SEIFER: What's all these switches? KINNEY: This is the original main breaker plant of the entire hotel. STAPLETON: Holy smokes. NARRATOR: When The New Yorker Hotel was completed in 1930, it was unique among all buildings in the city because it could boast of having the largest private power plant in the United States. TAYLOR: I could just see Tesla down here flipping some of these things. NARRATOR: Using coal-burning furnaces and high-pressure boilers, its DC generators were capable of producing some 2,200 kilowatts of electrical power, more than three times the capacity the hotel required. TAYLOR: When I was a young engineer, we were designing a new lab for high-energy laser systems. And it took us about five years just to design the power grid for that building. And that was just to run lasers that weren't even gonna use the type of power that this thing could supply in The New Yorker. I can't imagine they put a generator in there that was gonna generate that much power and for what use? NARRATOR: During the course of his career, Nikola Tesla was known to require incredible amounts of electricity for his experiments. Could this help explain the reason why Tesla chose The New Yorker Hotel as his headquarters? Did he need the hotel's incredible power plant for some secret purpose? TAYLOR: So it ran on its own power. KINNEY: It was islanded. If you think about Tesla's past, everywhere he went and did his experiments, he would brown out the locations. Right? Sometimes black out the locations. This place had its own power. And that had to be appealing to him that if he were going to do experiments here, he wouldn't be worried about blacking out the city block around him. 'Cause this was a building -that-that ran on its own. -That was right. It was, it was ahead of the curve. And Tesla was right at the very front of that. Why would you incur the cost of building a generator that supplied three times the amount of power, and why would this man, who was so interested in electricity, find himself at one of the most prestigious hotels in New York City, and he also had all of the power that he could ever want? You start layering those things in and you start to realize, there may be more to this story than we understand. Well, this is the Manufacturers Trust Company bank vault. Holy smokes. That's a big vault door right there. That is cool. Do we know if Tesla held anything here at all? Well, it would make sense that if he's living here, and banking was done in person then, it makes sense that he would have a safety-deposit box here or more. STAPLETON: He could put research, he could put... the technology that he was working on, that no one could see. I'm starting to form a picture in my mind that this was intentional. This specific location. Where he had independent electricity, more than he could possibly need, that he had his own dual suite. Well, when you add on top of that, though, the fact that there's rumors that the FBI and the OSS were in the building as well, I'm beginning to think that he didn't choose the building. I think it was chosen for him. SEIFER: Well, Joe, we appreciate so much you showing us this. A pleasure to do so. TAYLOR: Thanks a lot, Joe. ♪ NARRATOR: Shortly after conducting their search for information about Nikola Tesla's missing files at The New Yorker Hotel, Jason, Travis and Marc, along with Tesla researcher Tim Eaton, have begun shifting their focus to the team's next destination. This is just off the charts great. I have to say I'm incredibly excited. This is the Holy Grail. STAPLETON: I think it's so important that we get a chance to kind of take this investigation to the 21st century. NARRATOR: Nikola Tesla had spent nearly a year in Colorado proving that electrical energy could travel through the air and use the ground as a conductor. But by 1901, the scientist was eager to prove that his Tesla coils could do more than illuminate light bulbs wirelessly. He wanted to electrify entire cities. After prominent banker and industrialist J.P. Morgan offered him the opportunity to have his own state-of-the-art laboratory located 74 miles east of New York City, Tesla abandoned Colorado for what he hoped would be a permanent location in which to realize his life's dream: Wardenclyffe Tower. Tesla built an almost 200-foot tower out in the middle of nowhere in Wardenclyffe, and we know almost nothing about it. It's as though there is a concerted effort to ensure that nothing of value that Tesla created or wrote down was saved or protected. NARRATOR: Marc has arranged to meet with Jane Alcorn... -Morning, Jane. Nice to see you again. -Hi, Tim. ...president of The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, an organization which oversees the property. So let's go over to the tower base. NARRATOR: In return for J.P. Morgan's hefty $150,000 investment, Tesla promised that Wardenclyffe Tower would primarily serve as a communications station, transmitting radio signals across the Atlantic. But when Tesla tried to get Morgan to additionally finance his effort to convert Wardenclyffe into a wireless power transmitter, the two men had a bitter falling out. Tesla lost his most powerful patron, and was forced to abandon Wardenclyffe in 1906. ALCORN: Well, this is the last 16 acres of Tesla's original 200-acre property, and we are now stepping up on the tower base. It's made from concrete with some stones that probably came from the local beaches. And if you look at the trees around us and imagine a tower three times the size of these trees, that's how tall the tower was: 187 feet. Have you known anybody who has, uh, ever seen tunnels underneath the tower? There are local anecdotes about what might be potential sightings of tunnels or related construction. NARRATOR: Because of Tesla's theory, that electricity could be transmitted wirelessly by using the earth's natural conductivity, Tesla was rumored to have built a virtual maze of brick tunnels located deep beneath the main complex. I've read about where he drove these metal pipes deep, deep into the earth and there were these tunnels that were somehow connected to it. Now, Jane, from the pictures, that looks like the laboratory, but it looks all boarded up. It looks-- Can you tell me a little bit about that? It is boarded up for a very good reason. We had a lot of contamination inside from the prior owners and there was a lot of asbestos inside, which has been removed, but it's riddled with mold, -and so... -So we can't go inside and look at it? ALCORN: No, no. STAPLETON: Can we get a drone in there? Well, there's a potential, but that might be difficult, because it's a lot of little rooms, and-and turns and twists, so you might be able to, but you might not. Uh, but definitely no humans inside. NARRATOR: As their plan to find out what lies buried beneath Wardenclyffe gets underway, Travis and Jason break off to get a closer look at the ruins of what was once Tesla's laboratory. Originally designed and built for Tesla by the noted architect Stanford White in 1901, the laboratory at Wardenclyffe offered nearly everything the scientist could have hoped for. But after Morgan pulled his funding, Tesla was ultimately forced to leave the facility. The laboratory stood abandoned for nearly 20 years, until it was repurposed as a photochemical development facility in 1939. We don't actually know how we're gonna get into the building, but it's getting really late in the day, and so what we decided to do was hire a local drone operator and actually fly the drone through the building. -Hey, Joe. How you doing? -Doing well. How are you, Travis? All right, you got the drone -ready to go, man? -I do indeed. I do indeed. -Hey. NARRATOR: Drone operator Joe Quigley will help the team see what, if anything, could still be hidden inside Tesla's laboratory. -Hey, Jane, how you doing? -Hello. -So, Joe, this is Jane. -Hi. -Hi, Jane. And, uh, so, Jane, what I was just telling Joe is that, ideally, we'd like to go into the wooden door down here. ALCORN: Well, it's blocked off. TAYLOR: So, we can't open it and put anything through there? ALCORN: No. No. Sorry. -I understand. -We don't want any bodies inside that building until it's having... So, then what are the ways that we cou possibly get in there? Well, the site that you could get in is really this door. I would be able to unlock that for you to let the drone in. Nobody can go inside, um, because of the contamination there. TAYLOR: I realize that there might be some toxic mold or something inside this building, but we really need to get inside it if we want to figure out what Tesla was doing here at Wardenclyffe. So this is the building part that was built after the fact, right? ALCORN: Right. This is built many years after Tesla was no longer here. Well, what are the odds that we're gonna be able to fly through here and get to there? There are gonna be a lot of ob... of obstacles. NARRATOR: While searching for clues that might help them locate Nikola Tesla's missing files... -TAYLOR: "Keep out" or else. -ALCORN: With good reason. ...Travis Taylor and Jason Stapleton, along with Marc Seifer and Tim Eaton, have arranged to photograph the interior of Tesla's long-abandoned Wardenclyffe laboratory with the help of drone operator Joe Quigley. -You need help? -I need help. All right. You got it? -How heavy is it? Oh, it's not that bad. -Hold your breath. -Wow. Smell that. -Oh, you can smell it -right when you open the door. -Phew. That's mold smell. -Yeah. -How far can I go in? Just keep to the vestibule where at least you have some ventilation. -Otherwise, it's really dangerous. -Okay. (whirring) NARRATOR: As the drone slowly makes its way toward the main building, it is obvious that more than a century of neglect has taken its toll. Except for brief glimpses, it's hard to find any resemblance between the current building and photographs of what was once Tesla's gleaming, state-of-the-art laboratory. STAPLETON: You know, the thing about Wardenclyffe is, is that now we get to actually be here. We get to do the investigation ourselves, and we get to determine and find out, once and for all, what's truth, what was fact and what's fiction. (overlapping chatter) -(laughing) -TAYLOR: There you go. -Oh, look, there's-there's... -Oh. -TAYLOR: Look. The graffiti on the wall! -Yup. STAPLETON: When the drone cleared the corner and you got to see it drive down into the lab, and we got to see the old brick against the wall and the graffiti, it was amazing to get to see what nobody had been able to see for years. TAYLOR: What a shot of that hallway, man. SEIFER: This is amazing. -EATON: Oh, look at that! -Oh, man. EATON: Wow, that's incredible. With all the stories and documentation, any little bit of information inside the laboratory, and just getting here and being able to see things, I think I'm gonna be able to maybe figure out more of what Tesla was doing. All right, well, I appreciate it, Joe, man. -Good job! -Thanks a lot, Joe. That was awesome. -Thanks a lot, man. Great job. -Appreciate your help. -Yeah. -Yeah. NARRATOR: Early the next morning, Travis and Jason meet with Mario Carnevale from Hager Geoscience, Incorporated, one of the country's leading geophysical firms. Well, we appreciate you coming out and, uh, and helping us. The only thing we know about what's underneath the ground at Wardenclyffe is, like, secondhand knowledge, hearsay from people that say Tesla told them, or they walked down in there during the time when it was being built. So, there's no idea what's down there. NARRATOR: Because virtually all of Tesla's drawings and designs for Wardenclyffe have mysteriously vanished, many scientists have speculated that Wardenclyffe was little more than an elaborate hoax, designed by Tesla to squeeze money out of investors like J.P. Morgan. But if Travis' suspicions are correct, Wardenclyffe may have been Nikola Tesla's greatest scientific achievement. One designed with a far more strategic and more secret purpose than that of a mere transatlantic radio station. There's legends that... that there was a big tunnel right in the center that went really deep. And then there's stories that there are tunnels radiating outward. And so, what we would like to do is try to map that. 'Cause if we can figure out what it looked like, we might can figure out what he was doing here. What we envision doing is to use ground-penetrating radar... -Mm-hmm. -...and electrical resistivity to image the subsurface and try to locate these features. NARRATOR: Ground-penetrating radar, or GPR, uses electromagnetic radiation to locate structures hidden deep underground. It works by sending microwaves from a machine called a "transmitter," which then bounce back to an object called a "receiver" when they encounter any objects in the soil that have a different electromagnetic resistance. How deep will the radar penetrate? Well, we brought several different antenna frequencies so that we can resolve features from just a few feet down to maybe a hundred plus feet. I'd like to have a... like, a model built where we can turn it in different directions and kind of see at the different levels. -A 3-D model. -Well, yeah. Well, yeah. -Yeah. That's the simplest way. 3-D model. Can you guys build one of those off of what you're gonna do? Yes, we plan to take our data and build a 3-D model. That'll be amazing. NARRATOR: A model of what lies beneath Wardenclyffe? Could the GPR data actually reveal the truth behind Tesla's most ambitious invention? TAYLOR: We have really high confidence that underneath this 200-foot tower, that there was a deep tunnel right in the center -of this octagon area. -Mm-hmm. -Yeah. So, I think that that's the best place to start. -Let's see if we can find that tunnel. -All right. -Okay. -Okay, yeah, let's go. -Well, let's go to our trucks and -take off. -Grab some gear. -Yeah. Hey, what can we do to help? -Is all this coming out? -All right. Yes. MARIO: We'll start with the ground-penetrating radar. These are the hundred-megahertz antennas. We'll assemble them-- the transmitter and receiver. Then we'll drag it out to the location, lay a tape out, hook up the cables, and make a run at... at the, uh, shaft. All right, so this is gonna be line one. TAYLOR: All right, here we go. Showing about how fast, you think? MARIO: That's good, actually. -Keep going? -MARIO: Yup. So, we're transmitting one scan every inch, actually. -TAYLOR: Got it? -MARIO: Yup. Oh, hold on a second. Well, here, this is interesting. We're getting, um... I can see a disruption of that boundary. See that? -STAPLETON: Mm-hmm. Yeah. -You see it's coming across here? -Right over there. -MARIO: That's right at the midpoint. NARRATOR: The radar crew has discovered a major anomaly right where the tower's underground tunnel was rumored to exist. Could this mean that Tesla had built Wardenclyffe, not as a radio station, but as a place to replicate his Colorado experiments on a much larger scale? -How deep? -Somewhere around 13 to 15 feet. -13 to 15 foot? -It looks like there's some kind of cover, and then it opens up. This is amazing! TAYLOR: How deep? Somewhere around 13 to 15 feet. NARRATOR: While exploring the grounds in and around what was once Nikola Tesla's Long Island laboratory, astrophysicist Dr. Travis Taylor and investigative journalist Jason Stapleton, along with a team of radar technicians from Hager Geoscience have just made an important discovery. They have detected evidence of a long-rumored shaft that reportedly stretched from the top of Wardenclyffe Tower down some 120 feet deep below the ground. TAYLOR: Being here at Wardenclyffe is pretty amazing, but there's nothing above the ground, and it's hard to tell where anything was. So, it's really exciting to have this ground-penetrating radar scanning company here to help us figure out where things were. You can see how wide it is. So, it's roughly eight or nine feet in diameter. And then you think it opens up beneath that? -So... -Well, I think, yeah, as far as I can see it's... -So that sounds like a cover... -STAPLETON: That's -a good first test, man. Yeah. -...a cover to a tunnel -that goes down. -Right. That's amazing. NARRATOR: A tunnel? Could Travis and Jason have just discovered what many have long thought could be a virtual maze running not only deep beneath the site of Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower, but also out from it? But if so, where would those tunnels lead? And why were they constructed? This ground-penetrating radar scan is gonna tell us a lot of detailed information about what's under the ground. With this level of information, we might be able to get insight into what he thought he was gonna do with the Wardenclyffe Tower. STAPLETON: Marc mentioned that when he came here originally, over that direction, there was an igloo-shaped dome that was supposedly was an entrance to one of the tunnels. So, if you guys are running that line and-and checking all the way down... You're gonna go all the way to the end, right? We have a 170-foot line that goes from roughly the wooded area down to the fence. STAPLETON: Okay, perfect. Our crew doing the survey reports an anomaly that is oriented in that direction. Where? Pointing towards that monument. TAYLOR: That's amazing. STAPLETON: We've been here one day, man, and we have already found two really interesting pieces that are helping to reassemble this puzzle. And that's from raw data, -without even having the data processed, right? -Right. So, I can't-- I can't wait to see what we're gonna have once you get all of this data put together, processed, and we get a full 3-D picture -of what-what it looks like underground here. -Yeah. TAYLOR: We haven't been able to find blueprints for Wardenclyffe anywhere, so I have no idea what's under the ground and what Tesla had in mind. This ground-penetrating radar, when we get all the data back and they run it through the supercomputer algorithms that they've got to run it through, it's gonna give us a full 3-D rendering of what's underneath the ground. That'll be just as good as a blueprint. Hey, we'll get out of your hair. You guys keep going. -Okay. -All right, thanks a lot. -Take care. -All right. Bye-bye. NARRATOR: While the ground beneath Wardenclyffe has begun to reveal its secrets, Jason and Travis are beginning to think that not all of Tesla's activities at Wardenclyffe were limited to developing wireless electricity. STAPLETON: You know, I didn't realize before we got here, like, the scale of this. It really is huge. There's 16 of these... -granite blocks. -Granite blocks. NARRATOR: Granite blocks? Could Travis and Jason have just discovered another important secret connected to Tesla's experiments at Wardenclyffe? Granite has different properties. Some granites can be really good insulators, or you can make them have conductive properties. Tesla did his experiments in Colorado over a granite basin, so I suspect that granite was important in his experiment that he was doing at Wardenclyffe. They all got these copper rods that have been driven into 'em. TAYLOR: I think he did that for electrical reasons. I think that this is connecting this copper to the granite electrically. It reminds me of The Bell, Die Glocke. -You ever heard of that? -No, what's The Bell, Die Glocke? We found it in, uh, in Germany after the war, World War II, and it sat on a thing that looked like this. -The same shape? -The same shape. It's just odd. NARRATOR: Shortly after the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, a team of Allied scientists discovered formerly top secret information about a Nazi invention known simply as Die Glocke or The Bell. Although there remains some debate as to whether the device ever actually existed, there are those who remain convinced that evidence it did can be linked to a mysterious scientific facility called the Henge. Located in a remote valley just outside Ludwikowice, Poland, the Henge features an unusual concrete platform, similar in size and shape to the one at Wardenclyffe. Even more bizarre are the various claims that Die Glocke was intended to be everything from an anti-gravity craft to a time-travel device. Could the Nazis have come into possession of some of Nikola Tesla's missing files? Files that dealt with scientific discoveries on a scale never before imagined? TAYLOR: I'm excited. We're going to be able to get a picture of what's happening under the ground here. STAPLETON: Yeah. NARRATOR: Three weeks after their exploration of Tesla's compound at Wardenclyffe, Dr. Travis Taylor and Jason Stapleton meet with Marc Seifer at the Army/Navy Club in Washington, D.C. -How you doing? -Good. How are you? NARRATOR: They are eager to review the results of the ground penetrating radar survey conducted by the team from Hager Geoscience, Incorporated. On this little thumb drive right here are the results of the ground-penetrating radar at Wardenclyffe. So, Jason, why don't you plug that in over there? -Have you seen it yet? -I have not seen it yet, so I'm itching to see what's on there. -So this is the 3-D rendering. -Wow. Wait, I gotta get closer to this. I've been at this for over 30 years. To see what, actually, Tesla had done underneath the ground was earth-shattering. I think the scientists around the world are gonna be amazed. This is a truly-- a historic event. -This is the picture of the tower, right? -Yeah. So that's sitting on top, right where the octagon is. You see, right in the middle? And then, in those yellow pieces there, those are grounding rods. Those are metallic rods, and the red parts are the tunnels. SEIFER: Wow. TAYLOR: The ground-penetrating radar data that we now have, we know for sure that there were indeed tunnels built underneath the Wardenclyffe Tower. All these things that we heard rumors and stories of, turns out that they're true. And how many tunnels do we have here? -Well, at least four. -At least four. That's incredible. You know, the interesting thing about it, in his Colorado notes, he describes digging a hole. This is a much bigger version of that, it looks like. They had no reason to believe that the tunnels didn't go all way on out to the ocean, like some of the stories say. The thing that bothers me, though, is, as far as blueprints are concerned, all we have is this ground-penetrating radar and pictures. H-How can that be? Yeah, it's worse than you think. I've been breaking myself to try and find these blueprints, and I just went to Stanford White's estate. Stanford White's the guy who designed Wardenclyffe. Has no record in his estate of any blueprints. I went to municipal court records-- nothing. J.P. Morgan's archives. You'd think that he would have some records of what he was paying for-- nothing. There's a record in a court filing, under number 11. A blueprint copy of map of Wardenclyffe, in Long Island. So, we know that there were blueprints, and at least we have one citing that says the blueprints existed, but I can't find them anywhere. I think it's not a business thing that shut him down. I think he was so successful that it became something that we didn't want the rest of the world to know about. It wasn't enough that J.P. Morgan just pulled the funding, because he could always go somewhere else, he actually had to get rid of all the evidence. I'm telling you, why else would you go and remove all the history of it, all the documents, everything? So nobody else could rebuild it. NARRATOR: Nikola Tesla had made a powerful enemy in J.P. Morgan. Morgan had enormous interests in Alaskan copper mines, which would have far less value if copper wires became obsolete. But pulling Tesla's funding was only J.P. Morgan's first step in shutting down Wardenclyffe. Tesla's reputation also had to be destroyed. And to that end, Morgan began to circulate stories that Wardenclyffe had been a hoax. He also made certain the inventor would never regain either his financial footing or his once-envied reputation in the scientific community. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I gotta tell you, man, there's-- something nefarious is going on. This isn't a conspiracy. This is deliberate. I'm telling you somebody, whether it's our government or the war department at the time or whatever. I think they went and they took all of these blueprints and hid them so no one else could get them in the world. They didn't want our enemies to have them. What now, though? We've done so much digging, I don't know what else to do. I think we look at evidence today. Let's think reverse engineering. Let's look at what's existing today and go backwards. Military applications, whatever. -I think that's the next step. -Okay. I'm gonna try and get you guys out to California to meet with the founders of Tesla motors. The people that created the electric car which they named after Tesla. -Sounds like a logical place to start, then. -All right. -Yep. We got it. Let's go. -All right. -Okay, guys. -STAPLETON: We'll talk to you soon. -SEIFER: Okay. STAPLETON: Take it easy. NARRATOR: In Colorado Springs, Nikola Tesla proved he could transmit wireless electricity. At Wardenclyffe, he hoped to distribute that electricity to everyone in the world. But after suffering a bitter humiliation at the hands of his enemies, Tesla was determined to take on the world with a series of inventions so powerful, so revolutionary, and so potentially destructive... ...that they were stolen at the time of his death and kept hidden from the public, at least until they are found. TAYLOR: Holy smokes. NARRATOR: Next time on The Tesla Files... So, this is a patent from Nikola Tesla. The concept is certainly innovative. This ties the Tesla papers to military intelligence. -Right. -EBERHARD: We weren't convinced about what was the right technology. And that is what made us think about Nikola Tesla. He of course invented the AC induction motor. TAYLOR: This hotel might be a laboratory. SEIFER: That really is an incredible idea.

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Length: 42min 21sec (2541 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 10 2022