The mystery of Nikola Tesla 

The prestigious Nikola Tesla

Tesla is a rock band. Tesla is an electric car company. Tesla is the unit of measure for the strength of a magnetic field. And it all springs from Nikola Tesla (1856-1953): inventor, Edisonian clay pigeon, and dead guy. Now, David Bowie, naturally, portrays Tesla as a steampunk scientist in the new movie The Prestige.

Here in reality, most of us agree that Nikola Tesla did amazing things with electricity, developing the alternating current motor, radio, and remote control. After achieving remarkable successes, he was ill-used by his own hubris and by the captains of industry, especially Thomas Edison, to the point that he died destitute in New York City.

Years later he resurfaced as the goofiest cult figure this side of Immanuel Velikovsky. Let's consider Wall of Light: Nikola Tesla and the Venusian Space Ship ... The X- 12 by Arthur H. Matthews. According to the tale, some Venusians visited Earth in 1856, leaving behind a child that had been born on the trip here. Apparently, that child --- Tesla --- became prone to visions, a striking interest in his home planet, and secretly supplying outer space technology to people in power. Even without the space messiah tales, it has been suggested that the U.S. government confiscated Tesla's notes upon his death, except for those that eventually found their way to the TeslaMuseum in Belgrade after the Nazis had perused them.

Either way, these notes apparently contained the secret to electromagnetic flight harnessed by various government entities to build flying saucers and torment their own populace (see Man-Made UFOs 1944-1994: 50 Years of Suppression by RenatoVesco and David Hatcher Childress, or just watch the bizarreness unfold before your eyes on the DVD Nazi UFOs How They Fly: Exposing German Tesla Free Energy Program.Or visit Tesla's Secret Lab, www.members.tripod.com/uforeview/teslasecretlab.html).

On the sane side of the scale, a fine statue of Tesla was unveiled on July 9 in Queens Victoria Park in Niagara Falls in honor of his 150th birthday. Slowly, the scales balance.