Excerpts From the personal memoirs of Nikola Tesla
The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs.
This is the difficult task of the inventor who is often misunderstood and unrewarded. But he finds ample compensation in the pleasing exercises of his powers and in the knowledge of being one of that exceptionally privileged class without whom the race would have long ago perished in the bitter struggle against pitiless elements. Speaking for myself, I have already had more than my full measure of this exquisite enjoyment; so much, that for many years my life was little short of continuous rapture.
I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labor, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers.
Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts. In attempting to give a connected and faithful account of my activities in this story of my life, I must dwell, however reluctantly, on the impressions of my youth and the circumstances and events which have been instrumental in determining my career.
Our first endeavors are purely instinctive promptings of an imagination vivid and undisciplined. As we grow older, reason asserts itself and we become more and more systematic and designing. But those early impulses, though not immediately productive, are of the greatest moment and may shape our very destinies.
Indeed, I feel now that had I understood and cultivated instead of suppressing them, I would have added substantial value to my bequest to the world. But not until I had attained manhood did I realize that I was an inventor. This was due to a number of causes.
In the first place I had a brother who was gifted to an extraordinary degree; one of those rare phenomena of mentality which biological investigation has failed to explain. His premature and unexpected death left my parents disconsolate.
We owned a horse which had been presented to us by a dear friend. It was a magnificent animal of Arabian breed, possessed of almost human intelligence, and was cared for and petted by the whole family, having on one occasion saved my dear father's life under remarkable circumstances.
My father had been called one winter night to perform an urgent duty and while crossing the mountains, infested by wolves, the horse became frightened and ran away, throwing him violently to the ground.
It arrived home bleeding and exhausted, but after the alarm was sounded, immediately dashed off again, returning to the spot, and before the searching party were far on the way they were met by my father, who had recovered consciousness and remounted, not realizing that he had been lying in the snow for several hours.
This horse was responsible for my brother's injuries from which he died. I witnessed the tragic scene and although so many years have elapsed since, my visual impression of it has lost none of its force.
The recollection of his attainments made every effort of mine seem dull in comparison. Anything I did that was creditable merely caused my parents to feel their loss more keenly. So I grew up with little confidence in myself. But I was far from being considered a stupid boy, if I am to judge from an incident of which I still have a strong remembrance.
One day the Aldermen were passing through a street where I was playing with other boys. The oldest of these venerable gentlemen, a wealthy citizen, paused to give a silver piece to each of us. Coming to me, he suddenly stopped and commanded, "Look in my eyes."
I met his gaze, my hand outstretched to receive the much valued coin, when to my dismay, he said,

"No, not much; you can get nothing from me. You are too smart."

My mother descended from one of the oldest families in the country and a line of inventors. Both her father and grandfather originated numerous implements for household, agricultural and other uses. She was a truly great woman, of rare skill, courage and fortitude. I owe so much to her good graces and inventive mind that I can still today see her wonderful features etched upon my mind.
The Inner Mind Made Real
In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thoughts and action. They were pictures of things and scenes which I had really seen, never of those imagined.
When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not.
This caused me great discomfort and anxiety. None of the students of psychology or physiology whom I have consulted, could ever explain satisfactorily these phenomenon.
They seem to have been unique although I was probably predisposed as I know that my brother experienced a similar trouble. The theory I have formulated is that the images were the result of a reflex action from the brain on the retina under great excitation. They certainly were not hallucinations such as are produced in diseased and anguished minds, for in other respects I was normal and composed.
To give an idea of my distress, suppose that I had witnessed a funeral or some such nerve-wracking spectacle. Then, inevitably, in the stillness of night, a vivid picture of the scene would thrust itself before my eyes and persist despite all my efforts to banish it from my innermost being.
I also began to see visions of things that bore no resemblance to reality. It was as if I was being shown ideas of some cosmic mind, waiting to make real its conceptions.
If my explanation is correct, it should be possible to project on a screen the image of any object one conceives and make it visible. Such an advance would revolutionize all human relations. I am convinced that this wonder can and will be accomplished in time to come.
I may add that I have devoted much thought to the solution of the problem. I have managed to reflect such a picture, which I have seen in my mind, to the mind of another person, in another room.
To free myself of these tormenting appearances, I tried to concentrate my mind on something else I had seen, and in this way I would often obtain temporary relief; but in order to get it I had to conjure continuously new images.
It was not long before I found that I had exhausted all of those at my command; my "reel" had run out as it were, because I had seen little of the world -only objects in my home and the immediate surroundings.
As I performed these mental operations for the second or third time, in order to chase the appearances from my vision, the remedy gradually lost all its force. Then instinctively commenced to make excursions beyond the limits of the small world of which I had knowledge, and I saw new scenes.
These were at first very blurred and indistinct, and would flit away when I tried to concentrate my attention upon them. They gained in strength and distinctness and finally assumed the concreteness of real things.
I soon discovered that my best comfort was attained if I simply went on in my vision further and further, getting new impressions all the time, and so I began to travel; of course, in my mind. Every night, (and sometimes during the day), when alone, I would start on my journeys, see new places, cities and countries; live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life, and not a bit less intense in their manifestations.
This I did constantly until I was about seventeen, when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind.
Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radially opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient.
The moment one constructs a device to carry into practice a crude idea, he finds himself unavoidably engrossed with the details of the apparatus. As he goes on improving and reconstructing, his force of concentration diminishes and he loses sight of the great underlying principle.
Results may be obtained, but always at the sacrifice of quality. My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea, I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind.
It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever; the results are the same.
In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it.
In twenty years there has not been a single exception. Why should it be otherwise? Engineering, electrical and mechanical, is positive in results. There is scarcely a subject that cannot be examined beforehand, from the available theoretical and practical data.
The carrying out into practice of a crude idea as is being generally done, is, I hold, nothing but a waste of energy, money, and time. My early affliction had however, another compensation. The incessant mental exertion developed my powers of observation and enabled me to discover a truth of great importance.
I had noted that the appearance of images was always preceded by actual vision of scenes under peculiar and generally very exceptional conditions, and I was impelled on each occasion to locate the original impulse.
After a while this effort grew to be almost automatic and I gained great facility in connecting cause and effect. Soon I became aware, to my surprise, that every thought I conceived was suggested by an external impression. Not only this but all my actions were prompted in a similar way.
In the course of time it became perfectly evident to me that I was merely an automation endowed with power of movement responding to the stimuli of the sense organs and thinking and acting accordingly.
The practical result of this was the art of "teleautomatics" which has been so far carried out only in an imperfect manner. Its latent possibilities will, however be eventually shown. I have been years planning self-controlled automata and believe that mechanisms can be produced which will act as if possessed of reason, to a limited degree, and will create a revolution in many commercial and industrial departments.
I was about twelve years of age when I first succeeded in banishing an image from my vision by willful effort, but I never had any control over the flashes of light to which I have referred. They were, perhaps, my strangest and [most] inexplicable experience.
They usually occurred when I found myself in a dangerous or distressing situation or when I was greatly exhilarated. In some instances I have seen all the air around me filled with tongues of living flame. Their intensity, instead of diminishing, increased with time and seemingly attained a maximum when I was about twenty-five years old.
While in Paris in 1883, a prominent French manufacturer sent me an invitation to a shooting expedition which I accepted. I had been long confined to the factory and the fresh air had a wonderfully invigorating effect on me.
On my return to the city that night, I felt a positive sensation that my brain had caught fire. I was a light as though a small sun was located in it and I passed the whole night applying cold compressions to my tortured head.
Finally the flashes diminished in frequency and force but it took more than three weeks before they wholly subsided. When a second invitation was extended to me, my answer was an emphatic NO!
These luminous phenomena still manifest themselves from time to time, as when anew idea opening up possibilities strikes me, but they are no longer exciting, being of relatively small intensity. When I close my eyes I invariably observe first, a background of very dark and uniform blue, not unlike the sky on a clear but starless night.
In a few seconds this field becomes animated with innumerable scintillating flakes of green, arranged in several layers and advancing towards me. Then there appears, to the right, a beautiful pattern of two systems of parallel and closely spaced lines, at right angles to one another, in all sorts of colors with yellow, green, and gold predominating.
Immediately thereafter, the lines grow brighter and the whole is thickly sprinkled with dots of twinkling light. This picture moves slowly across the field of vision and in about ten seconds vanishes on the left, leaving behind a ground of rather unpleasant and inert gray until the second phase is reached.
Every time, before falling asleep, images of persons or objects flit before my view. When I see them I know I am about to lose consciousness. If they are absent and refuse to come, it means a sleepless night.
During this period I contracted many strange likes, dislikes and habits, some of which I can trace to external impressions while others are unaccountable. I was fascinated with the glitter of crystals, but pearls would almost give me a fit.
After finishing the studies at the Polytechnic Institute and University, I had a complete nervous breakdown and, while the malady lasted, I observed many phenomena, strange and unbelievable.
Nikola Tesla - Born July 9/10, 1856 From Tesla's own writings we can observe that he had a unique mental capacity that few of his fellow human beings have ever hoped to achieve. It is no wonder that when Tesla was faced with an event as mind-shaking as the revelation that humans may not be alone in the universe, he faced it head on.
Tesla's atypical way of facing and dealing with the unknown has lead some to speculate that his true parentage may have originated from beyond this planet. This suggestion is not new, in fact, Tesla once confided to one of his personal assistants that he often felt that he was a stranger to this world.
Tesla was from a family of Serbian origin. Born in the village of Smiljan, Lika (Austria-Hungary) in what is now Croatia. Tesla's father was an Orthodox priest; his mother was unschooled but highly intelligent. A dreamer with a poetic touch, as he matured Tesla added to these earlier qualities those of self-discipline and a desire for precision.
Margaret Cheney, in her book: Tesla: Man out of time (1981), noted that Tesla as a child began to make original inventions. When he was five, he built a small waterwheel quite unlike those he had seen in the countryside. It was smooth, without paddles, yet it spun evenly in the current. Years later he was to recall this fact when designing his unique bladeless turbine.
Some of his other experiments were less successful. Once he perched on the roof of the barn, clutching the family umbrella and hyperventilating on the fresh mountain breeze until his body felt light and the dizziness in his head convinced him he could fly. Plunging to earth, he lay unconscious and was carried off to bed by his mother. Tesla would later write that this incident was the catalysis for his unusual visions.
In her book Return of the Dove, Margaret Storm states that Tesla was not an earth man. On page 71 of her privately printed book, she says that the space people related that a male child was born on board a spaceship which was on a flight from Venus to the earth in July, 1856.
The little boy was called Nikola. The ship landed at midnight, between July 9 and 10, in a remote mountain province in what is now Croatia. There, according to prior arrangements, the child was placed in the care of a good man and his wife, the Rev. Milutin and Djouka Tesla.
Supposedly, the space people released this information in 1947 to Arthur H. Matthews of Quebec, Canada.
Alien Signals in the Night
Arthur H. Matthews was an electrical engineer who from boyhood was closely associated with Tesla. Matthews claimed that Tesla entrusted him with many tasks, including the Tesla interplanetary communications set that was first conceived in 1901, with the objective of communicating with the planet Mars. Tesla had suggested that he could transmit through the earth and air, great amounts of power to distances of thousands of miles.

"I can easily bridge the gulf which separates us from Mars, and send a message almost as easily as to Chicago."

Due to pressures of other research at the time, the first working model was not built by Tesla until 1918.
In 1899, Nikola Tesla, with the aid of his financial backer, J.P. Morgan, set up at Colorado Springs an experimental laboratory containing high voltage radio transmission equipment. The lab had a 200 ft. tower for transmission and reception of radio waves and the best receiving equipment available at the time.
One night, when he was alone in the laboratory, Tesla observed what he cautiously referred to as electrical actions which definitely appeared to be intelligent signals. The changes were taking place periodically and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they could not be traced to any cause then known to him.
Tesla elaborated on the subject of Talking With the Planets in Collier's Weekly (March 1901):

"As I was improving my machines for the production of intense electrical actions, I was also perfecting the means for observing feeble efforts. One of the most interesting results, and also one of great practical importance, was the development of certain contrivances for indicating at a distance of many hundred miles an approaching storm, its direction, speed and distance traveled. "It was in carrying on this work that for the first time I discovered those mysterious effects which have elicited such unusual interest. I had perfected the apparatus referred to so far that from my laboratory in the Colorado mountains I could feel the pulse of the globe, as it were, noting every electrical change that occurred within a radius of eleven hundred miles. "I can never forget the first sensations I experienced when it dawned upon me that I had observed something possibly of incalculable consequences to mankind. I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth... My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night; but at that time the idea of these disturbances being intelligently controlled signals did not yet present itself to me. "The changes I noted were taking place periodically and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause known to me. I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis, and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes. "The nature of my experiments precluded the possibility of the changes being produced by atmospheric disturbances, as has been rashly asserted by some. It was sometime afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. "Although I could not at the time decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another. A purpose was behind these electrical signals"

This incident was the first of many in which Tesla intercepted what he felt were intelligent signals from space.
At the time, it was surmised by prominent scientists that Mars would be a likely haven for intelligent life in our solar system, and Tesla at first thought these signals may be originating from the red planet. He would later change this viewpoint as he became more adept at translating the mysterious signals. Near the end of his life, Tesla had developed several inventions that allegedly could send powerful amounts of energy to other planets.
In 1937, during one of his birthday press conferences, Tesla announced:

"I have devoted much of my time over the years to the perfecting of a new small and compact apparatus by which energy in considerable amounts can now be flashed through interstellar space to any distance without the slightest dispersion." (New York Times, July 11, 1937.)

Tesla never publicly revealed the technical details of his improved transmitter, but in his 1937 announcement, he revealed a new formula showing that,

"The kinetic and potential energy of a body is the result of motion and determined by the product of its mass and the square of its velocity. Let the mass be reduced, the energy is reduced by the same proportion. If it be reduced to zero, the energy is likewise zero for any finite velocity." (New York Sun, July 12, 1937, pg. 6.)

A Fear of Aliens
In the Tesla journals that he uncovered, Dale Alfrey noted that by the 1920's Tesla had grown confident that he was able to make sense of the strange radio broadcasts from space. However, soon afterwards, Tesla began to expressed great concerns about beings from other planets who had unsavory designs for planet Earth.

"The signals are too strong to have traveled the great distances from Mars to Earth," wrote Tesla. "So I am forced to admit to myself that the sources must come from somewhere in nearby space or even the moon. I am certain however, that the creatures that communicate with each other every night are not from Mars, or possibly from any other planet in our solar system."

Several years after Tesla announced his reception of signals from space, Guglielmo Marconi also claimed to have heard from an alien radio transmitter. However, Marconi was just as quickly dismissed by his contemporaries, who claimed that he had received interference from another radio station on Earth.
There is some public confirmation in the validity of the lost journals and Tesla's belief in extraterrestrials and the importance of communicating with them. As noted earlier, Arthur H. Mathews claimed that Tesla had secretly developed the Teslascope for the purpose of communicating with aliens. The late Dr. Andrija Puharich interviewed Matthews for the Pyramid Guide, May-June & July-Aug. 1978. This interview revealed for the first time Matthews connections to Tesla.
Arthur Matthews was born in England and his father was a laboratory assistant to the noted physicist Lord Kelvin back in the 1890s. Tesla came over to England to meet Kelvin... to convince him that Alternating Current was more efficient than Direct Current. Kelvin at that time opposed the AC movement.
In 1902, the Matthews family left England and immigrated to Canada. When Matthews was 16 his father arranged for him to apprentice under Tesla. He eventually worked for him and continued this alliance until Tesla's death in 1943.

"It's not generally known, but Tesla actually had two huge magnifying transmitters built in Canada," Matthews said.

"I operated one of them. People mostly know about the Colorado Springs transmitters and the unfinished one on Long Island. I saw the two Canadian transmitters. All the evidence is there."
Matthews stated that the Teslascope is the thing Tesla invented to communicate with beings on other planets. There's a diagram of the Teslascope in Matthews book, The Wall of Light.

"In principle, it takes in cosmic ray signals," Matthew's said.

"Eventually the signals are stepped down to audio. Speak into one end, and the signal goes out the other end as a cosmic ray emitter."
Matthews' diagrams of the Teslascope make little electronic sense. No one has ever confirmed the reality of the device. Matthews claims, however, that he built a model Tesla Interplanetary Communications Set in 1947 and operated it successfully.
He suggested that due to the sets limited range, he was only able to contact spacecraft operating near the earth. He had hoped to someday build a set capable of communicating directly to the planets.

"Tesla had told me that beings from other planets were already here," related Matthews. "He was very afraid that they had been controlling man for thousands of years and that we were simply test subjects for an experiment of extremely long duration."

Matthews did not share in Tesla's convictions that aliens may not have the Earth's best interests in mind. His opinion was that if extraterrestrials were so advanced as to be able to travel from solar system to solar system, then they must also be socially advanced and peace-loving.
Matthews eagerness to continue experimenting with the Teslascope was indicative of the early days of the so-called "modern UFO era." By the 1950's, contactees such as George Adamski and Howard Menger were writing books and lecturing to eager believers about the almost god-like space brothers.
These UFO occupants claimed to be from almost every planet in the solar system, with Venus and Mars being especially favored. The space brothers preached a form of "New Age Space Religion," with Utopian descriptions of their home worlds and denouncement of mankind's warlike ways.
Tesla would certainly have felt vindicated by his earlier claims if he had lived long enough to experience the modern UFO era. He mentions in his journals his frustrating attempts to interest those in the government or military about his theories. Apparently Tesla's letters went unanswered - the question remains whether or not his ideas were seriously considered or if he was thought of as simply a crackpot.
Circumstantial evidence points to a certain amount of expectation by the United States when the first UFOs were sighted during WWII. It could be that Tesla's ideas had more impact, albeit secretly, than Tesla ever imagined.
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Nikola Tesla had suggested that he could transmit through the earth and air, great amounts of power to distances of thousands of miles.

"I can easily bridge the gulf which separates us from Mars, and send a message almost as easily as to Chicago."