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THE SECRET TESLA PAPERS
    For many years, a number of Tesla nerds sought his secret particle beam weaponry papers which the War Department had apparently obtained right after he died in 1943. In 1984, Andrija Puharich's name emerged yet again when it was announced by the International Tesla Society, that Puharich would be discussing these very secret documents at the first American International Tesla Conference to be held in Colorado Springs, the site of Tesla's 1899 Experimental Station. I also submitted a paper, and flew out to Colorado that summer to present it.

    Sure enough, Puharich had the actual secret patent application, and authentic drawings of the weapon, which had been squirreled to him by one of the men from military intelligence who had interviewed Tesla during the last weeks and months of his life over 40 years before. This individual had sat on the copy all this time before releasing it to the Psychotronic Society, where Puharich got a hold of it.

    Over the next 12 years, as I worked to hone a comprehensive chronology of Tesla's life, I continued to obtain relevant books and articles, as I also spoke at each Tesla symposium held every other year in Colorado Springs. Simultaneously, I submitted and presented papers in Europe at the Tesla conferences held in Yugoslavia and at handwriting symposia in Canada and Israel.

    In 1986, I travelled to Zagreb and to Belgrade where the Tesla Museum resides and also to Smiljan, Croatia, the site of the inventor's birth place. During that trip, I obtained access to information on Tesla's work in vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft. For the first time, I saw strange drawings of unusual vehicles, reactive jet dirigibles and hovercraft and also combination helicopter/airplanes (that I had seen earlier) that the inventor designed. Clearly, as I explain in WIZARD, Tesla is one of the forefathers of both the Harrier jet, which can hover and take off vertically, and the Osprey helicopter-airplane which was used so successfully in the recent war with Iraq.

    Also in Belgrade, I studied the correspondence with financiers such as Thomas Fortune Ryan and John Jacob Astor and also analyzed the letters between Tesla and his editor Thomas Commerford Martin, editor of the classic compendium The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla, which was published in 1893.

    I travelled to Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley to look over the papers of Stanford White, Katharine Johnson, Mark Twain and Julian Hawthorne, to Washington D.C. and the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institute where large Tesla holdings are, to Butler and Avery Libraries at Columbia University to read Tesla's correspondence with Robert Johnson and also Stanford White, to the Edison Archives in Menlo Park, New Jersey and up to the Hammond Castle, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, home of John Hayes Hammond Jr., an inventor who worked on guided weaponry systems who worked with Tesla during the years 1912-13; and also, I used the Freedom of Information Act to peruse the National Archives and the archives of the FBI and Office of Alien Property.

    I also interviewed Tesla's grandnephew William Terbo who met Tesla when he was a child, the illustrious lawyer Elmer Gertz, who defended Jack Ruby and Nathan Leopold during his long career, who met Tesla in the 1930's, and Ralph Bergstressor, a man who had worked for military intelligence during WWII who had been briefed by Tesla about his particle beam weapon, while the 85-year-old inventor sat in his New Yorker apartment barely alive in late 1942. I also met with numerous Tesla experts such as Leland Anderson a Teslafile and author of important Tesla works since the 1950's, Robert Golka, who built a gigantic Tesla coil in Utah in the 1970's and Col. Tom Bearden, who saw military potential to many of Tesla's inventions.

    On a lark I wrote to the University of Prague, and was fortunate enough to obtain Tesla's course load for the year he was there, and by that route found out that he was most likely influenced by the famous physicist Ernst Mach, who was teaching physics there, whose work also influenced Albert Einstein.

    In the late 1980's, as I continued to complete a careful chronology, I also formed a partnership with Tim Eaton, a visual FX editor at Industrial Light & Magic, with the hopes of selling a screenplay. For the 1996 Colorado Springs Tesla Symposium, which would be my seventh presentation there, I decided to review the scope of my entire 20-year journey.

THE CURE FOR ALL ILLNESSES
    Sometime before the dinner of the first night, I had a glass of wine with the president of the society, J.W. McGinnis who discussed with me his radio program which is broadcast on the largest ham radio station in the world, and also some of the more interesting people that were about to be presented at the conference.
    "We got one guy who runs a car on water," J.W. said.
    "By splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen?" I asked.
    "Yeah. And another guy who uses implosion instead of explosion to run his engine, so that his tailpipe is cold to the touch." J.W. also told me about another man who uses a Tesla turbine pump instead of a motorboat engine in a jet ski and yet another fellow "who will totally blow your mind."
    "What's his trip?"
    "This guy employs magnetic resonance imaging to scan the body and then uses an X-ray laser to zap cancer cells and viruses. He claims he's got the cure for Aids," he concluded as he disappeared to oversee some crucial aspect of the symposium.
    The next day I attended the lecture of the fellow who had the car that ran on water. Unfortunately, he was speaking on his "free energy" device, which was really a simple aerial that drew currents from local radio and TV stations. This device, which worked on the same principle of the old crystal radio sets from the 1920's, was then attached to the power grid so that the electric meter on his house ran backwards, and thus, the electric company had to buy back power back from him!

    As the day wore on, I waited, somewhat impatiently, for the X-ray guy with the cure for all diseases. He was speaking after the wine and cheese, which was held at night, and as it turned out, after the belly dancer as well.

    The fellow who spoke, Neil Gerardo, 42-year-old CEO of Gerardo International, was quite stiff and measured, kind of like a shorter and stockier Al Gore. While a Kim Novak look-alike receptionist handed out literature on his $300 million company, Gerardo read a fire and brimstone speech about collapsing paradigms and about the great opposition his technique had faced. He also stated that he had 600 scientists working for him and that thousands of other scientists had sent him their resumes.

    After briefly describing his cure for cancer, Aids and every other virus, and for all new strains of anti-biotic resistant bacteria with his invention of a magnetic resonance imaging/X-ray laser technique he called MRX, Gerardo took the discussion into another dimension. Apparently this X-ray laser could be tuned to any molecular frequency, and therefore it could also be used to desalinate water or clean up toxic waste and even radioactive dump sites.

    In theory, the idea was flawless. Since every bacteria, virus or tumor has its own signature or individualized vibration, if the laser could match this resonant frequency, like Ella Fitzgerald and the Memorex glass, when tuned correctly, the X-ray laser would, in microsecond, destroy or shapper the bonds of any shape it so desired. The rest of the organism would be completely untouched. Thus, this would be a perfect and complete cure.

    Defense technologies included the ability to deactivate satellites, neutralize biological weapons or incoming missiles and also create a lethal or non-lethal anti-personnel weapon which could operate by knocking a person unconscious by disrupting his or her ability to metabolize oxygen.

    Gerardo went on at length as to how he has been opposed by the FDA and drug companies here in America, how he spent $26 million in development, (his company apparently does $500+ million a year in industrial business) and how he almost signed a deal in Belgium to begin his anti-Aids/anti-cancer treatment, but how Eli Lilly blocked him. Other places he was considering setting up shop included Thailand, Cuba and the most promising site, Columbia. It was Gerardo's plan to offer stock of his company to the entire people of the host country, so that everyone will benefit when his operations begin draining off 10-20% of the United States' gross national product. The implication was clear: since there would be no need for drugs, MRX would make obsolete practically the entire pharmaceutical industry! "A new day," Gerardo said, "is dawning."

    Having emphasized so much about the conspiracy and military aspects of his operations, and how he had been vigorously opposed by the people that really run this country, I found his speech unsettling.
    "Why don't you just go on 60 Minutes and show a person who has a fully documented case of Aids being cured," I asked.
    "The FDA would arrest me," he countered. "The cure would be illegal."
    "Then do animal studies."
    "They won't let me do that either," he said.
    "I can't believe that," I said and later offered my services to locate a doctor who would help verify this technique.
    "The reason you won't get any help from a doctor," Gerardo said, "is because the drug companies are supporting the institution that he is working for." Gerardo also said that he had no plans to obtain patents on his invention because that would create an open door to copy it. "Can you imagine if Omar Khadaffi had this technique? He could rule the world. The best inventions are never patented," he concluded boldly.

    Is Neal Gerardo the next Nikola Tesla? Only time will tell.
    Scientific American ("X"-(Rays) Mark the Tumor, October 1986) reported on a similar process being carried out at Texas Tech University in Amirillo, called X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) whereby cancer cells can be made to respond in such a way that they become tumor-specific markers. In turn, the immune system can thereby be boosted to create specific white blood cells that can destroy these tumors.
    Similarly, Newsweek (Let There Be Light, January 26, 1998) reported a technique being developed by Dr. Eric Edell at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnisota for treating inoperable lung cancer. The treatment called photodynamic therapy (PDT) uses a drug called porfimer sodium (brand name: photofrin) which is a "special light-sensitive drug that travels through the blood stream and settles in cancerous cells." Once thereby marked, a laser can be used during a 15 minute session to activate the drug to "create an unstable form of oxygen that kills the cancer."

    Gerardo has set man on another path which may prove as revolutionary in the medical field as Tesla's inventions were in the field of electronics. At least I didn't discover him in a book on extraterrestrials.