The Tesla Files: Shadow Government Revealed - Full Episode (S1, E5) | History

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👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/tampaflorida8 📅︎︎ Oct 01 2020 🗫︎ replies

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NARRATOR: Tonight on The Tesla Files... KINNEY: If there's any place in the building that Tesla could've had a laboratory, it would've been in here. SEIFER: Papers in there. STAPLETON: We know that Tesla was being spied on. And we know he loved pigeons. Would it be possible to use pigeons to carry messages? More than likely. Probable. Wow. WOOD: Tesla was doing some experiments where he wound up using the Earth's entire magnetic field to send a transmission to the stars. 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? (electricity buzzing) NARRATOR: For the past several weeks, astrophysicist Dr. Travis Taylor and investigative journalist Jason Stapleton have been engaged in a global quest to find an estimated 20 trunks filled with Nikola Tesla's missing scientific files and top secret inventions. It is a search that has taken them to more than a dozen cities and across two hemispheres. TAYLOR: We've done so many things to get us to this point. We've educated ourselves, you know, we did the experiments, we've been to Wardenclyffe, we've been to Colorado, we've been to Serbia. NARRATOR: Today, the pair has returned to New York City in hopes of following up on a potential breakthrough, which, if proven, could change everything that is currently known about Nikola Tesla and his final years. STAPLETON: I'm excited to go back and actually get to have specific stuff that we're looking for. You know, all these things we've done, we know more about it now. When we look, the things are gonna jump out at us -better this time. -Yeah. NARRATOR: Travis and Jason have returned to the New Yorker Hotel, the place where Tesla lived for the last decade of his life. It was here that Tesla kept some 80 trunks filled with everything from scientific inventions to thousands of pages filled with drawings, designs, and plans. But on the night he died in 1943, someone entered Tesla's rooms, opened his safe, and removed an unknown number of important documents. Agents for the U.S. government also entered Tesla's rooms and, despite the fact he was a naturalized citizen, used his immigrant status as a pretext to seize his property and hold it for nine years before returning it to the scientist's family in Serbia in 1952. -Hey, fellas. -What's up guys? NARRATOR: Meeting Travis and Jason at the hotel is their friend and partner, acclaimed Tesla biographer Marc Seifer, and hotel historian Joe Kinney. What's all this? Well, we have the, uh, reproductions of the original blueprints from 1928. STAPLETON: This is what it looked like when they built it. NARRATOR: Last week, Travis and Jason received an important package from Marc Seifer... I thought you might have some ideas. ...containing both a facsimile of a blueprint for Tesla's wireless electricity tower at Wardenclyffe and recently discovered blueprints of the New Yorker Hotel. This hotel could have been built to be Wardenclyffe. That's an incredible idea. Hang on, though. He-- the guy couldn't finance a 600-foot tower. How did he finance a hotel? -That-- if that were really... -He didn't build the hotel. It kind of gives me chills, guys. SEIFER: You've got an amazing theory, Travis. The more and more I think about this idea that the New Yorker could have been a Tesla experiment, the more and more I get excited about it. I-I at least got to go take a look. NARRATOR: Originally commissioned as part of a transatlantic radio communications system, Nikola Tesla decided instead to convert his massive Wardenclyffe Tower into one that would generate and distribute wireless electricity from a network of tunnels deep underground. But when his chief investor, J.P. Morgan, found out about Tesla's plan, he pulled out of the project, leaving Tesla publicly humiliated and nearly broke. However, given the eerie design similarities between Wardenclyffe and the New Yorker Hotel, is it possible that Tesla was given a second chance at his most ambitious invention? This is the 41st floor, the floor that you were interested in. -TAYLOR: Yeah. -SEIFER: Well, Travis had a theory that, if Tesla had a lab, it'd be on this floor. If you had to guess, where would you guess the lab might be? -I would say one of the corners. -You mean either here or here. TAYLOR: So it says "operators, restrooms." KINNEY: That was for the-the large switchboard operators -we had here. -TAYLOR: Oh. KINNEY: That was the largest switchboard in the world at the time. So there was a communications switchboard up here? Yes. Is it feasible that you could've tapped into Tesla's phone? Any operator could have tied into any phone in the house. Monitoring would've been extremely easy. Whatever Tesla was doing in the New Yorker, if he was talking on those phone lines, then anybody could have known what he was talking about. There could have been Nazi spies, Russian spies, there could be-- whoever, British spies. There were certainly-- the Americans were listening, uh, even if, uh, they were there to help protect him. Is there space above this where Tesla might've worked? Yes, there is. On the 42nd floor. These areas here going all the way around. This area would be unobserved and wide open. Much more secretive, if you will. -Wow. -It's unbelievable. TAYLOR: I-I remember when we were here before, we saw the generator way down in one of the subbasements. KINNEY: That's right. TAYLOR: So you could get all the power from the generator -to the roof of the building? -KINNEY: That's right. And you said that the smokestack was riveted steel and it goes all the way from the top, a big metal cylinder goes all the way from the top. Well, it's sitting on bedrock pretty much. -It goes down probably... -All the way to the bedrock. -The base would be 65 feet below grade. -Wow. TAYLOR: Puts us at close to 600 feet high. -Pretty close. -That's amazing. That's... The entire building was what Tesla wanted Wardenclyffe to actually be. NARRATOR: Originally designed to reach a height of 411 feet above ground, the New Yorker was mysteriously redesigned during construction to stand 600 feet tall, the exact same height as Tesla's proposed tower at Wardenclyffe. Also like Wardenclyffe, the New Yorker stood high above a maze of subterranean tunnels which stretched deep throughout a solid granite foundation. Tunnels which, like those at Wardenclyffe, could be used to conduct the Earth's energy from deep underground. Whether or not Tesla was involved in designing the hotel to make it have these features, or if he just realized the hotel had these particular features, it doesn't matter. The point is, it had the features that could be suitable for doing a Wardenclyffe-type experiment. Well, power, check. Cylinder, check. -65 feet below ground, check. -Wow. Yeah, did you guys see this? It's an artist's rendering of a proposed addition to the Hotel New Yorker, and they added a couple of, uh, towers on top. It looks like... I mean, we're talking about potentially radio transmissions. We're talking about this potentially being -a covert Wardenclyffe, right? -Right. NARRATOR: Two towers on top of the New Yorker Hotel? Has the team just found a smoking gun? The ultimate evidence that Tesla had intended to use the hotel to realize his ambitious dream to generate and transmit virtually free electricity, first to New York City and then the entire world. It's gonna be really cool now to be able to take those blueprints and actually walk the floor plan and see what it actually looked like when Tesla was there and find out if it was even possible for that building to be used as a gigantic Wardenclyffe Tower. NARRATOR: Could the New Yorker Hotel really have been Nikola Tesla's secret attempt to continue his most audacious experiment under the very noses of his harshest critics? Critics who had dismissed him as nothing more than a penniless old man whose inventions were failures. But if so, who financed this incredible scheme? Could it have been a wealthy benefactor? Forces within the U.S. government? Or someone else? KINNEY: Let's take a little walk. So this is the 41st floor. Look at this. This is unbelievable. KINNEY: This is the original wiring room for the phone system that's been here since 1929. This is for the 33rd floor, and this right here is for 3327. -That's Tesla's room. -That's Tesla's room. -Tesla's room. -Yeah. So, this is actually where you could tap into Tesla's line and no one would know. The way the phone system was set up, it would've been so easy just to put a jumper wire on there and over to whatever other room in the hotel you wanted to. So, you could be sitting in your hotel room and listen to every phone conversation that Tesla made. NARRATOR: In the weeks before Nikola Tesla was found dead in his hotel room, there were numerous but unverified reports that agents from both the FBI and the OSS, the precursor to today's CIA, had taken rooms near Tesla's on the 33rd floor. Within hours, a team of agents gathered up what was later reported as 30 trunks filled with Tesla's most preciously held scientific papers. Papers which were later examined and determined to be worthless by the government's appointed scientist, John G. Trump. But given the fact that, at the time of the Serbian-born scientist's death in 1943, the United States was deeply engaged in World War II, could it be that agents were keeping close tabs on him? Even going so far as to monitor his phone conversations so that no enemy agent could come into possession of Tesla's most important scientific papers? And could John G. Trump's assessment of the value of Tesla's papers have been part of a deliberate campaign of disinformation? KINNEY: I think if there's any place in the building that Tesla could've had a laboratory or work area, it would've been in here. TAYLOR: Really? Why-why do you say that? Well, if you look at the maps, there's no real designation here except "Transmitter Room." But there's a lot more space than you would ever need. -All right, well, let's check it out. -Yeah, well, show us. KINNEY: Here we go. TAYLOR: There we go. STAPLETON: Holy smokes. KINNEY: There's probably over a thousand square feet up here. Transmitters are very small, even back then. You wouldn't have needed a space this large for that, and the question becomes: why on earth would they build a room that big to house such a small piece of equipment? Well, it could be that they built the room for Tesla's lab, specifically. Take a look in here, and see if you see anything interesting. Check this out, huh? KINNEY: Of any place in the building, this would be the most likely place where his lab could have been. It's completely isolated, no traffic through it. SEIFER: There's papers in there. KINNEY: Those are original plans from when the building was built, from 1928. NARRATOR: Original plans? TAYLOR: Look at this. Could they help to further prove Travis' theory, that the New Yorker Hotel was built as a giant and more powerful version of Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower? -TAYLOR: Look at that. -STAPLETON: Holy smokes. They're just sitting up here, getting damp. I start thinking to myself, why weren't these taken care of? And it-it takes me back to the trunks and this idea that, man, Tesla's stuff could be anywhere. TAYLOR: This is all the blueprints for this building. SEIFER: 1929. We've got all the records... Yeah, but look at, look at this. Like, all this stuff is full. This is, this is all history. TAYLOR: Have you seen these pipes? Are these pipes original from the building's construction? KINNEY: Oh, yeah, they're vent pipes. They're vent pipes. They go all the way down? -Pretty much. -SEIFER: You mean for a ground connection? Yeah, that's what I'm wondering, you know? There's all sorts of places in this building where there are really good pieces you could get for a ground connection. NARRATOR: In Colorado Springs, Nikola Tesla drove 12-foot copper rods into the ground. Then, using his patented magnifying transmitter, otherwise known as a Tesla coil, he generated as much as 12 million volts and sent it into the air and through the surrounding ground. The ground itself proved to be a conductor, which Tesla claimed could spread the electricity over a distance of approximately 26 miles. At Wardenclyffe, Tesla attempted to perfect this idea by constructing a transmission tower that stood 187 feet tall above ground, and with a large metal rod that reached some 300 feet deep below ground. Stretching out from the metal rod was a network of additional metal rods and tunnels that extended outward by as much as 100 feet. Could a similar but much larger system have been designed for future use at the New Yorker Hotel? Man, look at the view. Watch your step. So, here we are on the roof of the New Yorker. -This is unreal. -That's amazing, man. See the big flagpole, there? It's huge. -Goes another 40, 50 feet in the air. -Wow. TAYLOR: See, that could clearly be used like a transmission tower on top of a big Tesla coil. On some level, I think your idea that this is Wardenclyffe is crazy. On another level, I think it's brilliant. TAYLOR: Well, there were people sending wireless communications from up here, standard systems. This was the communications nexus for the entire building. All the communications: radio and telephone lines. As keyed into the technology as Tesla was, it only makes sense that he would be using this highest point in New York City to be broadcasting wireless transmissions. This would be his playground. There's no, there's no way that Tesla was sitting in this hotel and not using all this stuff. -There's no way. -No. TAYLOR: This was the perfect radio tower at the time, and it had all the power in the world it needed -from that big old generator. -Yep. Well, you know Tesla was kicked out of a couple of hotels because of the pigeons. He had pigeons here, and no doubt, he must have come up here, released pigeons, and maybe even had pigeon coops. -I mean, is it possible that he had pigeon coops? -Lots of space for 'em. There's no reason they couldn't have been here. Well, if that telephone switching system was so easy to eavesdrop on, no telling who was watching him. A way to communicate with people might have been -to use the pigeons. -Yeah. NARRATOR: Pigeons? As a means of secret communications? While living at the New Yorker, Nikola Tesla was known to keep a number of pigeons in his room, and every day he could be seen feeding dozens of them from his favorite bench in nearby Bryant Park. There was even one pigeon that Tesla had a particular attachment to, going so far as to have a formal portrait of her taken so that he could carry it with him at all times. Is it possible that Tesla's seemingly obsessive interest in these unique birds was a strategic one? STAPLETON: The military used them for years. -To send covert messages? -Yeah. To send messages back and forth. It was one of the things in their arsenal. I remember there was an article from 1935 about a carrier pigeon that flew into the 40th floor and it was injured and they gave it to Tesla. NARRATOR: On February 6, 1935, The New York Times published a story about a wayward pigeon that had flown into a room near the roof of the New Yorker Hotel. The pigeon appeared disoriented, and on its leg was a band displaying an alphanumeric code, indicating that it had most likely been trained to carry messages. But as the hotel manager attempted to examine the pigeon and decipher the code, Tesla insisted he would care for the bird himself and quickly took it away to his room. Was this just another example of the scientist's notoriously strange behavior? Or was Nikola Tesla using carrier pigeons to send and receive secret messages under the very noses of the government agents assigned to track his every move? NARRATOR: One day after their visit to the New Yorker Hotel, Jason and Travis meet to discuss the team's critical next steps. I got to tell you that the New Yorker, if it wasn't built deliberately to be a Wardenclyffe-type experiment, Tesla realized that it could be used for a Wardenclyffe-type experiment. I think both of us kind of feel like, like there was, rather than him being chased by the government or secretly watched by the government, that it's much more likely a scenario -that he was working with them... -Absolutely. ...the way the other greatest minds at the time -were working with them. -Absolutely. NARRATOR: By 1943, as nations on both hemispheres were engulfed in the 20th century's Second World War, both the Allied and the Axis powers were racing to see which side could develop weapons of such deadly force that victory would be assured. For the United States, the Manhattan Project would eventually produce the world's first atomic bomb. The Germans, in turn, engaged their greatest scientific minds to develop a line of "Wunderwaffe," or "Miracle Weapons." Is it any wonder that Nikola Tesla would find himself on a list of scientists that would be considered invaluable to the Allied war effort? -Hey, guys. -Hey, Marc. -Marc, how you doing? -What's up, man? TAYLOR: Have a seat, have a seat. SEIFER: You're not gonna believe this. -This is Vannevar Bush. -TAYLOR: Vannevar Bush, yeah. SEIFER: He wrote an article, "Guided Missiles and Techniques." Now, Tesla was in that. And this is gonna blow your minds. He's training pigeons to go inside guided missiles. It's an ingenious idea, it really is. -TAYLOR: Wow. -SEIFER: But what's so interesting is that maybe Tesla turned him on to the pigeons. The use of pigeons. NARRATOR: As an engineer, inventor, and science administrator, Vannevar Bush was one of the most powerful civilian figures of World War II. Often referred to as "the man who would win or lose the war," he headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which coordinated the activities of some 6,000 leading American scientists. In 1940, Bush employed famed behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner to head "Project Pigeon," a top secret government research project that would train homing or carrier pigeons to serve as virtual pilots for guided missiles. Is it possible that Nikola Tesla was also secretly involved with this program? Such an audacious notion seems even more likely when one considers that the person who ultimately supervised John G. Trump's evaluation of Nikola Tesla's scientific papers was none other than Vannevar Bush. Now, the other document I found, it's signed by James Conant. Now, James Conant was president of Harvard University and he was writing to the president of the United States, FDR. TAYLOR: What time frame is this? SEIFER: This is 1941. So, this is before Tesla died. TAYLOR: Okay. All right. He wants to set up an Office of Research and Development and he says, "I want to put in charge Dr. Vannevar Bush." Name him as director. -Huh. -Now he created a flow chart here. Now, look at what Bush is now going to be in charge of. National Academy of Sciences, Aeronautics which becomes NASA, National Defense Research and he's basically also taking over the secretary of war, secretary of navy, but he has a direct line... ALL: To the president. TAYLOR: He's gonna be directly in charge of "other agencies concerned with defense research." So that's the key right there. The really interesting piece of that to me is that he's going to be over what becomes the Air Force Research Labs at Wright-Patterson. And there's all sorts of conspiracy theories and stuff about Wright-Patterson. NARRATOR: Located just outside Dayton, Ohio, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is one of the U.S. military's largest and most secretive facilities. After World War II, Wright-Patt, as it came to be known, became the center for the Air Force's UFO investigations, including Project Blue Book. It's intriguing that we've got something here. A guy, Bush, who is in charge -of figuring out what's in the Tesla files, right? -Right. TAYLOR: Uh, and he's now, at this time frame, in charge of all of the research being done. And guess what. In 1945, what's Wright Field asking for? BOTH: All the documents on Tesla. And so Vannevar Bush knows about that. -Yeah. -And so he seems -like a puppet master here, doesn't he? -Yeah. Yeah. NARRATOR: According to a number of recently uncovered, though still unverified, top secret government documents, in 1947, shortly after a reported UFO crashed into the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, President Harry S. Truman brought together an elite team of the nation's top scientists and military strategists. Dubbed The Majestic 12, the group was charged with investigating various reports of UFO activity and, if true, whether or not they had national security implications. The group's members included Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter, and, not surprisingly, Vannevar Bush. When we started looking into Tesla, I would've had no thought in my mind that we were gonna be going off into a-a UFO, Majestic 12 kind of conspiracy theory investigation thing. But, if you think about it, Vannevar Bush was the guy who told Trump to go get Tesla's belongings and then investigate them and see if there's anything there. If he was the guy, then, a few years later, in charge of all the research for all the other government agencies, then he would be usurping all of this technical data underneath his umbrella. NARRATOR: Was Nikola Tesla secretly in the employ of the United States government? And, if so, was the public perception of him as a penniless eccentric really an elaborate cover? Or was his relationship to men like Vannevar Bush even more complicated and more covert than anyone at the time could ever have imagined? It's over there across the street. Yeah, it's got to be right over here. NARRATOR: Eager to test their theory that Nikola Tesla's keen interest in pigeons may have been more professional than personal, Travis and Jason have come to Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn. Hey. William? -Hey. Jason Stapleton. -Nice to meet you. -Travis Taylor. -Nice to meet you. Why don't you guys come up and see the loft? -All right, perfect. -All right, cool. NARRATOR: William Macleod is a professional real estate agent who has also become widely known throughout New York City as a self-taught expert on pigeons. He has offered to help Travis and Jason find out more about these unique birds and perhaps offer insight as to what it was about them that so captivated a man who is regarded by many as a scientific genius. TAYLOR: We've been really digging deep into the last, uh, few years of Nikola Tesla's life, and history sort of shows he was an older, senile type, old man who was just playing, feeding the pigeons in the park. And we've kind of developed a different story about that. We know that Tesla-- there's some risk that Tesla was being spied on while he was at the New Yorker. More than risk, it's very highly likely. STAPLETON: Yeah, highly likely. Well, if he was and he was worried about it, how would he transfer messages back and forth? And we know from history that he loved pigeons. He spent time in the park. He kept pigeons. So we thought, would it be possible to use pigeons to carry messages? Yeah, not only possible, more than likely probable. The moment they've reached maturity, especially if they've mated, pigeons mate for life, so they'll always fly home to their mate. How do they decide what home is? Home is literally the coop. It's where they grew up. It's where they live. It's where the food is. It's their safe place. And it's where their mate is. If I went to a new location, how long would it take me to create some homing pigeons, and so that they call this place home and that they would always come back to that place? -You'd start off with babies... -Right. ...and basically you'd keep the babies in the coop while the babies were growing up. From the time they hatch to the time they fly is only about four weeks. Oh, wow. MACLEOD: Someone like Tesla, with a lot of focus, probably in about a week could start training a bird to go from the hotel room to the park and then back to the hotel room. STAPLETON: We always think that Tesla would have used technology, some sort of advanced technology in order to communicate, but in this instance, it may have made a lot more sense for him to use an old school technology that would've been virtually undetectable to anybody trying to figure out what he was doing. NARRATOR: Domesticated more than 3,000 years ago, homing pigeons are highly prized for their impressive ability to find their way back home, even over distances of 1,000 miles. It is this unique navigational trait that has made the bird a useful tool in the sending and receiving of messages. Genghis Khan employed pigeons as a communication system across his vast empire. And an estimated half million birds were used in World War I and II to carry messages across enemy lines. Even today, pigeons continue to be used for military purposes. In 2010, the Chinese military trained 10,000 birds as a backup messaging system in the event their modern communications were rendered inoperable. -Can we go inside? -Oh, yeah. Come on. -I'd love to see some of the birds and... -Come on. -STAPLETON: Lead the way. -TAYLOR: All right, cool. -All right, guys. If you want to go in... -All right. -...and meet the birds. -Wow. They're-they're actually bigger than I thought. Can you take one of these birds, go over to our friend Marc at the New Yorker and let that bird go and we'll stay here and see if the bird comes back? Oh, yeah, definitely. 100%. -TAYLOR: That would be cool. -MACLEOD: All right. Shh. TAYLOR: This is a really cool experiment in showing how Tesla could have delivered messages clandestinely. He could have found these pigeons in the park. So, he could have taken these pigeons who knew where their home was, taken them over to his lab, put messages on their feet, and then let them go, and they would fly home to whoever was keeping them. NARRATOR: In order to help Travis and Jason test their theory, William Macleod has brought one of his pigeons to the New Yorker Hotel. -SEIFER: You must be William. -Yes, I am. -I'm Marc Seifer. -Nice to meet you. This is great. Okay, let's get going. NARRATOR: Marc and William will attempt to send a message from the rooftop of the New Yorker in Manhattan to where Travis and Jason are, some seven miles away in the heart of Brooklyn. TAYLOR: How are you so calm, dude? -How-how long is this supposed to take? -Yeah, right? You think this is gonna work? I don't know. What's gonna keep a hawk or something -from jumping down and eating that thing? -You-you watch, dude. -We got the only stupid pigeon in this entire coop. -(laughs) Thing's gonna, thing's gonna fly to New Jersey. MACLEOD: All right. Take this here. Yeah. That's tight enough. That's good. All right. So, what we're gonna do is we're gonna release him. He's gonna fly off to Brooklyn and then they'll get the note. And three, two, one. Right. SEIFER: Wow. -There he goes. -Yeah. NARRATOR: Travis and Jason are waiting to see if a bird released from the New Yorker Hotel will return to its coop, some seven miles away. (phone rings) Ah, there's Marc. Hang on. -Marc. -SEIFER: Hey, Jason. All right. We're standing by. All right. Yeah, bye. All right. He just let it go. So... Which way is the New Yorker from here? That way. STAPLETON: Hey, there's a-- hey, look at that. -Is that it? -TAYLOR: Was that him? STAPLETON: There he goes. -TAYLOR: Hey, he did it. -STAPLETON: That's him. -TAYLOR: Look, there's something taped to his leg. -Yep. STAPLETON: Hey, it worked! -All right. -(both laugh) Hey, you want to read the message? All right. We should've played rock- paper-scissors or something. -Well, you already lost. -(stammers) What? TAYLOR: Where'd you go, bird? Oh, yeah, I can actually see the actual bird now. He's actually, he knows I'm coming for him. I got you, I got you. Did you get it? What's it say? "Another successful Tesla experiment. Marc Seifer." When you combine the similarities between Wardenclyffe and the New Yorker, and then you tie on top of that the pigeon stuff that we're now uncovering, I'm just thoroughly convinced there is no way that that man was sitting around, doing nothing for the last 15 years of his life. He was actively involved with something. I just don't know what. NARRATOR: Deeply secretive to the point of paranoia, Nikola Tesla lived in fear that his life's work would be stolen from him. But if, as evidence suggests, Tesla knew he was being watched by both the FBI and the OSS, and may very well have been working with them on the war effort, why would he need carrier pigeons to send and receive messages? For the answers, Jason and Travis have arranged to meet with someone back at the hotel who has promised to share with them potentially important information about Nikola Tesla and his very top secret relationship with Vannevar Bush. Hey. -You must be Bob. -Yeah. NARRATOR: During a career that spanned ballistic missile defense, radar, and the International Space Station, retired aerospace engineer Dr. Robert Wood has been investigating UFOs and related phenomena for more than 30 years. STAPLETON: You might be able to shed some light for us on this Vannevar Bush and the Majestic 12. WOOD: Well, I think the first actual release of anything to do with MJ-12, officially, was 1984, when the so-called Eisenhower Briefing Document was announced that had pages signed by Truman that identified the 12 people who were in MJ-12. NARRATOR: In 1984, an anonymous package arrived at the Burbank home of film producer and UFO enthusiast Jaime Shandera. Inside was an eight-page memo intended to brief president-elect Dwight Eisenhower on the top secret activities of the Truman administration. The memo summarized the government's numerous investigations into reports of recently crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft, including the one in Roswell, New Mexico. It also revealed the existence and members of the Majestic 12. WOOD: Tesla, in 1899, was doing some experiments where he wound up using the Earth's entire magnetic field to send a transmission to the stars. TAYLOR: And so, it's possible that there was something in his notes that would have triggered interest or concern by some of these folks. I think that's an excellent point. NARRATOR: During his stay in Colorado Springs, Nikola Tesla was conducting a series of experiments in an effort to track thunderstorms. -(thunder crashing) -One night, he began receiving a number of strange transmissions which, according to an account detailed in several of his letters, Tesla concluded were originating from somewhere in outer space. This is what I think happened. In 1947, there was a lot of UFO scares in the public domain, right? It was on the news, people were claiming -they were seeing flying saucers. -WOOD: Right. Well, somebody like Vannevar Bush, they might have gone and said, "Hey, we ought to at least "study this phenomena; even if it's real or not, "it's causing public panic. "We should look at it, and, oh, by the way, "there might be something to it, because I remember reading "in the Tesla documents that Tesla had claimed -he had contacted aliens or something." -Well, I... I think that... the fact that Vannevar Bush was clearly the guy right on top of all the technology right then, he'd have been the absolutely logical guy to make sure that he was the one who knew. NARRATOR: Could Tesla's belief in the existence of extraterrestrial life have been one of the reasons why Vannevar Bush was so determined to keep tabs on him? And if so, might Tesla have been working with Vannevar Bush in a far more top secret capacity than anyone could imagine? STAPLETON: We're back, Marc. -SEIFER: Okay, guys. -TAYLOR: Good to see you, as always. -How you doing? -Great. NARRATOR: One day after their meeting with retired aerospace engineer Dr. Robert Wood, Travis and Jason meet with their partner Marc Seifer at the team's home base in Washington, D.C. STAPLETON: Well, we had an interesting talk. You want to tell him about it? TAYLOR: Wow, did we have an interesting talk. If there is an organization like this, like an MJ-12, that exists at this time frame, then they would have wanted to see all of Tesla's stuff. Let's-let's start with what we do know. Vannevar Bush was the head of the Manhattan Project. That's an absolute fact. -Sure. -So we know that Vannevar Bush was definitely involved with top secret work. I think that's, that's the point is that he was a player. He was a player, and when we talk about John Trump, he was a player who was directly tied to, uh... -TAYLOR: To Bush. -STAPLETON: To Bush, yes. STAPLETON: And so you've got a connection there, and that ties back to Tesla, so certainly, people who ran in the circles that would be interested in this type of stuff Tesla was working on, they got to his stuff and they took it. TAYLOR: I got to tell you, I am more convinced now than ever that whatever was going on at the New Yorker was more than just he was living there. There's tunnels under the place. The building was built for a purpose. It's got tunnels, just like at Wardenclyffe, -underneath it, right? -SEIFER: Unbelievable. TAYLOR: And it's got a big tower, which is the hotel. His laboratory is at the top of it. It had generators at the bottom of this thing that supplied three times the power than the hotel needed. How do we know that the New Yorker wasn't Wardenclyffe? How crazy would it be if all this time, we thought that he had lost his funding for Wardenclyffe and the whole project was shut down and he was defeated and he was beaten, and they were building him a $100 million Wardenclyffe -in the middle of New York City? -Wardenclyffe in New York City. TAYLOR: I tell you, the most important thing I think we've shown to history, Marc, is that the last ten or 15 years of Tesla's life, he wasn't this senile old man that was out in the park feeding the pigeons, -he was doing something important. -I agree. Now, I got one more thing to show you; this is unbelievable. Here's a document from the Office of Alien Property. "For the purpose of inquiring about a safe, "which records found at the warehouse indicating "was purchased by Tesla in 1929, and which was not among the property stored in the Manhattan warehouse." In other words, there's another safe that's missing. Now, also listed, it says "122 trunks, boxes and barrels." This definitely suggests that there's missing trunks. NARRATOR: More missing trunks? And a safe? And all filled with Tesla's scientific writings and plans for new inventions? Marc drops another bombshell on us and tells us that there's possibly 122 trunks out there. It just re-intensifies my desire to go out and find this stuff. TAYLOR: There's no telling what valuable documents and ideas and things Tesla had in all these trunks and cases. What would he have kept in a safe? I talked about, when we started this, that if we did it right, and we were successful, we might be able to change the world with the information, and we're not there yet. We can talk about all this stuff that you just talked about and the achievements that have been made and-and realized. The fact is, we've got at least 122 trunks -that we can't find. -We still don't know where they are. STAPLETON: I don't want to quit this just simply because I want to find it. -Like, it makes me angry. -TAYLOR: I know, it's irritating. -Yes, it makes me angry now. -Extremely irritating. STAPLETON: It's now under my skin. Well, I've got to keep going. I-I have to know. I'm invigorated. We've got to figure this out. NARRATOR: Did Nikola Tesla really die a poor, lonely, old man? A mad scientist, who lived out his last days largely forgotten by a world he wanted to change? Or was the inventor really what Albert Einstein said he was, "the smartest man in the world"? A genius who conducted his experiments in secret, while hiding in plain sight? As far as Marc, Travis, and Jason are concerned, the answers to these questions are still waiting to be found, along with more than 60 trunks filled with what they believe to be Tesla's most brilliant and innovative work. A legacy of dreams and inventions that someone, or some group, wanted so badly that they locked it away for decades. And that, once discovered, will forever change the world. CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY A+E NETWORKS

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Channel: HISTORY

Views: 894,741

Rating: 4.8102169 out of 5

Keywords: history, history channel, history shows, history channel shows, nikola tesla, conspiracy theory, conspiracy theories, cia, central intelligence agency, the new yorker, new yorker hotel, The Tesla Files, The Tesla Files s1 e5, The Tesla Files season 1 episode 5, The Tesla Files se01 e05, The Tesla Files season 1 clips, The Tesla Files full episodes, The Tesla Files 1X5, watch The Tesla Files full episodes, watch The Tesla Files, The Tesla Files new season, watch history shows

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Length: 42min 22sec (2542 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020