CoD Zombies: Fact or Fiction?

[Guest NukaColaClear]

[center:b8glssv8]Call of Duty Zombies[/center:b8glssv8]

[center:b8glssv8]Fact or Fiction?[/center:b8glssv8]

[center:b8glssv8]A wealth of information detailing the true historical aspects of the famous game mode.[/center:b8glssv8]

Table of Contents:

Introduction/Prologue written by NukaColaClear

Chapter 1: Ununpentium

Chapter 2: Wittenau Sanatorium

Chapter 3: The Tunguska Event

Chapter 4: Die Glocke

Chapter 4.5: The Tesla Coil

Chapter 5: Der Riese

Chapter 6: Project Mercury

Chapter 7: Shangri La

Chapter 8: The Nazi/U.S. Moon Base: Project Aurora

Epilogue/Final Thoughts written by NukaColaClear

INTRODUCTION

Hello knowledge seekers of the CoDz forum. Many of you may have played the Zombies game mode and wondered, "Is any of this true?". Well that's what I'm here for, and after many hours of reseasrch and compiling information, I've made a full 38-page research paper on everything from the Zombies game mode that has some truth to it in the real world.

It's a lengthy piece, and I'm not going to ask you to read the whole thing(unless of course you want to), but I've tried my best to divide up the info into smaller paragraphs, so feel free to just skim for the info you want to know.

Now let's begin the journey through the lesser known history of the WW2 and Vietnam era...

[Guest NukaColaClear]

Chapter 1:

UNUNPENTIUM-ELEMENT 115

Ununpentium is the temporary name of a synthetic superheavy element in the periodic table that has the temporary symbol Uup and has the atomic number 115. It is placed as the heaviest member of group 15 (VA) although a sufficiently stable isotope is not known at this time that would allow chemical experiments to confirm its position.

It was first observed in 2003 and only about 30 atoms of ununpentium have been synthesized to date, with just 4 direct decays of the parent element having been detected. Four consecutive isotopes are currently known, 287–290Uup, with 289Uup having the longest measured half-life of ~220 ms. On February 2, 2004, synthesis of ununpentium was reported in Physical Review C by a team composed of Russian scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, and American scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The team reported that they bombarded americium-243 with calcium-48 ions to produce four atoms of ununpentium. These atoms, they report, decayed by emission of alpha-particles to ununtrium in approximately 100 milliseconds.

48Ca + 243Am + 291Uup*? 288Uup

The Dubna-Livermore collaboration has strengthened their claim for the discovery of ununpentium by conducting chemical experiments on the decay daughter 268Db. In experiments in June 2004 and December 2005, the Dubnium isotope was successfully identified by milking the Db fraction and measuring any SF activities. Both the half-life and decay mode were confirmed for the proposed 268Db which lends support to the assignment of Z=115 to the parent nuclei.

Sergei Dmitriev from the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions (FLNR) in Dubna, Russia, has formally put forward their claim of discovery of ununpentium to the Joint Working Party (JWP) from IUPAC and IUPAP. In 2011, the IUPAC evaluated the Dubna-Livermore results and concluded that they did not meet the criteria for discovery.

Ununpentium is historically known as eka-bismuth. Ununpentium is a temporary IUPAC systematic element name derived from the digits 115, where "un-" represents Latin unum. "Pent-" represents the Greek word for 5, and it was chosen because the Latin word for 5 starts with 'q', which would have caused confusion with uuq, element 114. Research scientists usually refer to the element simply as element 115. The team at the FLNR have scheduled further experiments on the 243Am + 48Ca reaction to start in September 2010.

The exact goals of these experiments have not been outlined. It is likely they are attempting to measure a complete excitation function. Furthermore, a primary next goal for the Dubna team is to measure the mass of the dubnium product from the above reaction, so this may also be a part of their immediate plans. The FLNR also have future plans to study light isotopes of element 115 using the reaction 241Am + 48Ca.

This section deals with the synthesis of nuclei of ununpentium by so-called "hot" fusion reactions. These are processes which create compound nuclei at high excitation energy (~40–50 MeV, hence "hot"), leading to a reduced probability of survival from fission. The excited nucleus then decays to the ground state via the emission of 3–5 neutrons. Fusion reactions utilizing 48Ca nuclei usually produce compound nuclei with intermediate excitation energies (~30–35 MeV) and are sometimes referred to as "warm" fusion reactions. This leads, in part, to relatively high yields from these reactions.

238U(51V,xn)289?xUup

There are strong indications that this reaction was performed in late 2004 as part of a uranium(IV) fluoride target test at the GSI. No reports have been published suggesting that no products atoms were detected, as anticipated by the team.

243Am(48Ca,xn)291?xUup (x=3,4)

This reaction was first performed by the team in Dubna in July–August 2003. In two separate runs they were able to detect 3 atoms of 288Uup and a single atom of 287Uup. The reaction was studied further in June 2004 in an attempt to isolate the descendant 268Db from the 288Uup decay chain. After chemical separation of a +4/+5 fraction, 15 SF decays were measured with a lifetime consistent with 268Db.

In order to prove that the decays were from dubnium-268, the team repeated the reaction in August 2005 and separated the +4 and +5 fractions and further separated the +5 fractions into tantalum-like and niobium-like ones. Five SF activities were observed, all occurring in the +5 fractions and none in the tantalum-like fractions, proving that the product was indeed isotopes of dubnium.

Theoretical calculations using a quantum-tunneling model support the experimental alpha-decay half-lives. Ununpentium is projected to be the third member of the 7p series of chemical elements and the heaviest member of group 15 (VA) in the Periodic Table, below bismuth.

In this group, each member is known to portray the group oxidation state of +V but with differing stability. For nitrogen, the +V state is very difficult to achieve due to the lack of low-lying d-orbitals and the inability of the small nitrogen atom to accommodate five ligands. The +V state is well represented for phosphorus, arsenic, and antimony. However, for bismuth it is rare due to the reluctance of the 6s2 electron to participate in bonding. This effect is known as the "inert pair effect" and is commonly linked to relativistic stabilisation of the 6s-orbitals.

It is expected that ununpentium will continue this trend and portray only +III and +I oxidation states. Nitrogen(I) and bismuth(I) are known but rare and Uup(I) is likely to show some unique properties. Because of spin-orbit coupling, Ununquadium may display closed-shell or noble gas-like properties; if this is the case, Uup will likely be monovalent as a result, since the cation Uup+ will have the same electron configuration as Uuq.

Chapter 2:

WITTENAU SANATORIUM

(Zombie Verruckt)

"Though not much came up in the results when searched for (I went through multiple pages), it did bring up an interesting find on a man named Werner Heyde:"

Werner Heyde (aka Fritz Sawade) (25 April 1902 in Forst (Lausitz) — 13 February 1964 in Butzbach) was a German psychiatrist. He was one of the main organizers of Nazi Germany's T-4 Euthanasia Program.

Heyde completed his Abitur in 1920. From 1922-1925, he studied medicine in Berlin, Freiburg, Marburg and Würzburg and after short placements at the General Hospital in Cottbus and the sanatorium Berlin-Wittenau became assistant doctor at the Universitätsnervenklinik (university psychiatric hospital) in Würzburg.

He obtained his licence to practice medicine in 1926, having completed all courses throughout his studies with top ranks. In 1933, Heyde made the acquaintance of Theodor Eicke, and became member of the NSDAP. One year later, he was appointed director of the polyclinic in Würzburg. In 1935, he entered the SS as medical officer with the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer, and became commander of the medical unit in the SS-Totenkopfverbände.

There he was responsible for establishing a system of psychiatric and eugenic examinations and research in concentration camps, and for the organisation of the T-4 Euthanasia Program. Additionally, he also worked as a psychiatric consultant for the Gestapo. In 1938, he was appointed chief of staff of the medical department in the SS-Hauptamt (headquarters); in 1939, he became professor for psychiatry and neurology at the University of Würzburg, and from 1940 on he also was director of the psychiatric hospital.

He was replaced as head of the T4 program by Paul Nitsche in 1941, but continued his involvement as member of the "department Brack" (after the end of World War II, it was never found out what his role there was). In 1944, he was awarded the SS-Totenkopfring, and before the end of the war reached the rank of SS-Standartenführer (Colonel).

After World War II, Heyde was interned and imprisoned, but escaped in 1947. He went underground using the alias Fritz Sawade and continued practicing as a sports physician and psychiatrist in Flensburg. Many friends and associates knew about his real identity, but remained silent even as he was an expert witness in court cases. His true identity was revealed in the course of a private quarrel, and on November 11, 1959, Heyde surrendered to police in Frankfurt after 13 years as a fugitive. On February 13, 1964, five days before his trial was to start, Dr. Heyde hanged himself at the prison in Butzbach.

Chapter 3:

THE TUNGUSKA EVENT

(Shi No Numa/Element 115)

The Tunguska event, or Tunguska blast or Tunguska explosion, was an enormously powerful explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, at about 7:14 a.m. KRAT (0:14 UT) on June 30 [O.S. June 17], 1908.

The explosion is believed to have been caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5–10 kilometres (3–6 mi) above the Earth's surface. Different studies have yielded varying estimates of the object's size, with general agreement that it was a few tens of metres across. The number of scholarly publications on the problem of the Tunguska explosion since 1908 may be estimated at about 1,000 (mainly in Russian).

Many scientists have participated in Tunguska studies, the best-known of them being Leonid Kulik, Yevgeny Krinov, Kirill Florensky, Nikolai Vladimirovic Vasily, and Wilhelm Fast. Although the meteoroid or comet burst in the air rather than hitting the surface, this event is still referred to as an impact. Estimates of the energy of the blast range from 5 to as high as 30 megatons of TNT (21–130 PJ), with 10–15 megatons of TNT (42–63 PJ) the most likely —roughly equal to the United States' Castle Bravo thermonuclear bomb tested on March 1, 1954, about 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, and about one-third the power of the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated.

The explosion knocked over an estimated 80 million trees covering 2,150 square kilometres (830 sq mi). It is estimated that the shock wave from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter scale. An explosion of this magnitude is capable of destroying a large metropolitan area. This possibility has helped to spark discussion of asteroid deflection strategies.

The Tunguska event is the largest impact event over land in Earth's recent history. Impacts of similar size over remote ocean areas would most likely have gone unnoticed before the advent of global satellite monitoring in the 1960s and 1970s. At around 7:17 a.m. local time, Tungus natives and Russian settlers in the hills northwest of Lake Baikal observed a column of bluish light, nearly as bright as the Sun, moving across the sky. About 10 minutes later, there was a flash and a sound similar to artillery fire.

Eyewitnesses closer to the explosion reported the sound source moving east to north. The sounds were accompanied by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of kilometres away. The majority of witnesses reported only the sounds and the tremors, and not the sighting of the explosion. Eyewitness accounts differ as to the sequence of events and their overall duration. The explosion registered on seismic stations across Eurasia. In some places the shock wave would have been equivalent to an earthquake of 5.0 on the Richter scale. It also produced fluctuations in atmospheric pressure strong enough to be detected in Great Britain.

Over the next few days, night skies in Asia and Europe were aglow; it has been theorized that this was due to light passing through high-altitude ice particles formed at extremely cold temperatures, a phenomenon that occurs when the Space Shuttle re-enters the Earth's atmosphere. In the United States, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Mount Wilson Observatory observed a decrease in atmospheric transparency that lasted for several months, from suspended dust.

There was little scientific curiosity about the impact at the time, possibly due to the isolation of the Tunguska region. If there were any early expeditions to the site, the records were likely to have been lost during the subsequent chaotic years—World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War. The first recorded expedition arrived at the scene more than a decade after the event. In 1921, the Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik, visiting the Podkamennaya Tunguska River basin as part of a survey for the Soviet Academy of Sciences, deduced from local accounts that the explosion had been caused by a giant meteorite impact. He persuaded the Soviet government to fund an expedition to the Tunguska region, based on the prospect of meteoric iron that could be salvaged to aid Soviet industry.

Kulik's party eventually undertook an expedition in 1927. Upon arrival, Kulik made arrangements with the local Evenki hunters to guide his party to the impact site. Reaching the explosion site was an extremely arduous task. Upon reaching an area just south of the site, the superstitious Evenki hunters would go no further, fearing what they called the Valleymen. Kulik had to return to the nearby village, and his party was delayed for several days while they sought new guides. The spectacle that confronted Kulik as he stood on a ridge overlooking the devastated area was overwhelming. To the explorers' surprise, no crater was to be found.

There was instead around ground zero a vast zone (8 kilometers [5 mi] across) of trees scorched and devoid of branches, but standing upright. Those farther away had been partly scorched and knocked down in a direction away from the centre. Much later, in the 1960s, it was established that the zone of leveled forest occupied an area of some 2,150 square kilometres (830 sq mi), its shape resembling a gigantic spread-eagled butterfly with a “wingspan” of 70 kilometres (43 mi) and a “body length” of 55 kilometres (34 mi).

Upon closer examination, Kulik located holes which he erroneously concluded were meteorite holes; however, he did not have the means at this time to excavate the holes. During the next ten years there were three more expeditions to the area. Kulik found several dozens of little “pothole” bogs, each some 10 to 50 metres (33 to 160 ft) in diameter, that he thought might be meteoric craters. After a laborious exercise in draining one of these bogs (the so-called “Suslov’s crater”, 32 metres [105 ft] in diameter), he found there was an old stump on the bottom, ruling out the possibility that it was a meteoric crater. In 1938, Kulik arranged for an aerial photographic survey of the area covering the central part of the leveled forest (some 250 square kilometres [97 sq mi]). The negatives of these aerial photographs (1,500 negatives, each 18 × 18 cm or 7.1 x 7.1 in) were burned in 1975 by order of Yevgeny Krinov, then Chairman of the Committee on Meteorites of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

It was done under the pretext that they were a fire hazard, but the truth may have been the active dislike by official meteorite specialists of anything associated with an unyielding enigma. However, positive imprints could be preserved for further studies in the Russian city of Tomsk. Despite the large amount of devastation, there was no crater to be seen. Expeditions sent to the area in the 1950s and 1960s found microscopic silicate and magnetite spheres in siftings of the soil. Similar spheres were predicted to exist in the felled trees, although they could not be detected by contemporary means. Later expeditions did identify such spheres in the resin of the trees.

Chemical analysis showed that the spheres contained high proportions of nickel relative to iron, which is also found in meteorites, leading to the conclusion they were of extraterrestrial origin. The concentration of the spheres in different regions of the soil was also found to be consistent with the expected distribution of debris from a meteorite airburst. Later studies of the spheres found unusual ratios of numerous other metals relative to the surrounding environment, which was taken as further evidence of their extraterrestrial origin.

Chemical analysis of peat bogs from the area also revealed numerous anomalies considered consistent with an impact event. The isotopic signatures of stable carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen isotopes at the layer of the bogs corresponding to 1908 were found to be inconsistent with the isotopic ratios measured in the adjacent layers, and this abnormality was not found in bogs located outside the area. The region of the bogs showing these anomalous signatures also contains an unusually high proportion of iridium, similar to the iridium layer found in the K–T boundary. These unusual proportions are believed to result from debris from the impacting body that deposited in the bogs.

The nitrogen is believed to have been deposited as acid rain, a suspected fallout from the explosion. The leading scientific explanation for the explosion is the airburst of a meteoroid 6–10 kilometres (4–6 miles) above Earth's surface. Meteoroids enter Earth's atmosphere from outer space every day, usually travelling at a speed of more than 10 kilometres per second (6 miles/sec or 21,600 mph). The heat generated by compression of air in front of the body (ram pressure) as it travels through the atmosphere is immense and most meteoroids burn up or explode before they reach the ground.

Since the second half of the 20th century, close monitoring of Earth's atmosphere has led to the discovery that such meteoroid airbursts occur rather frequently. A stony meteoroid of about 10 metres (30 ft) in diameter can produce an explosion of around 20 kilotons, similar to that of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and data released by the U.S. Air Force's Defense Support Program indicate that such explosions occur high in the upper atmosphere more than once a year.

Tunguska-like megaton-range events are much rarer. Eugene Shoemaker estimated that such events occur about once every 300 years. The explosion's effect on the trees near ground zero was replicated during atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s. These effects are caused by the shock wave produced by large explosions. The trees directly below the explosion are stripped as the blast wave moves vertically downward, while trees farther away are knocked over because the blast wave is travelling closer to the horizontal when it reaches them. Soviet experiments performed in the mid-1960s, with model forests (made of matches on wire stakes) and small explosive charges slid downward on wires, produced butterfly shaped blast patterns strikingly similar to the pattern found at the Tunguska site.

The experiments suggested that the object had approached at an angle of roughly 30 degrees from the ground and 115 degrees from north and had exploded in mid-air. The composition of the Tunguska body remains a matter of dispute. In 1930, the British astronomer F.J.W. Whipple suggested that the Tunguska body was a small comet. A cometary meteorite, being composed primarily of ice and dust, could have been completely vaporized by the impact with the Earth's atmosphere, leaving no obvious traces. The comet hypothesis was further supported by the glowing skies (or "skyglows" or "bright nights") observed across Europe for several evenings after the impact, possibly explained by dust and ice that had been dispersed from the comet's tail across the upper atmosphere. The cometary hypothesis gained a general acceptance amongst Soviet Tunguska investigators by the 1960s.

In 1978, astronomer ?ubor Kresák suggested that the body was a fragment of the short-period Comet Encke, which is responsible for the Beta Taurid meteor shower: the Tunguska event coincided with a peak in that shower, and the approximate trajectory of the Tunguska impactor is consistent with what would be expected from such a fragment. It is now known that bodies of this kind explode at frequent intervals tens to hundreds of kilometres above the ground. Military satellites have been observing these explosions for decades.

In 1983, astronomer Zden?k Sekanina published a paper criticizing the comet hypothesis. He pointed out that a body composed of cometary material, travelling through the atmosphere along such a shallow trajectory, ought to have disintegrated, whereas the Tunguska body apparently remained intact into the lower atmosphere. Sekanina argued that the evidence pointed to a dense, rocky object, probably of asteroidal origin.

This hypothesis was further boosted in 2001, when Farinella, Foschini, et al. released a study suggesting that the object had arrived from the direction of the asteroid belt. Proponents of the comet hypothesis have suggested that the object was an extinct comet with a stony mantle that allowed it to penetrate the atmosphere. The chief difficulty in the asteroid hypothesis is that a stony object should have produced a large crater where it struck the ground, but no such crater has been found. It has been hypothesized that the passage of the asteroid through the atmosphere caused pressures and temperatures to build up to a point where the asteroid abruptly disintegrated in a huge explosion. The destruction would have to have been so complete that no remnants of substantial size survived, and the material scattered into the upper atmosphere during the explosion would have caused the skyglows.

Models published in 1993 suggested that the stony body would have been about 60 metres (200 ft) across, with physical properties somewhere between an ordinary chondrite and a carbonaceous chondrite. Christopher Chyba and others have proposed a process whereby a stony meteorite could have exhibited the behavior of the Tunguska impactor. Their models show that when the forces opposing a body's descent become greater than the cohesive force holding it together, it blows apart, releasing nearly all its energy at once. The result is no crater, and damage distributed over a fairly wide radius, all of the damage being blast and thermal.

Three-dimensional numerical modelling of the Tunguska impact done by Utyuzhnikov and Rudenko in 2008 supports the comet hypothesis. According to their results, the comet matter dispersed in the atmosphere, while the destruction of the forest was caused by the shock wave. During the 1990s, Italian researchers extracted resin from the core of the trees in the area of impact to examine trapped particles that were present during the 1908 event. They found high levels of material commonly found in rocky asteroids and rarely found in comets.

In research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, scientists contend that the impact was caused by a comet because of the sightings of noctilucent clouds following the impact, a phenomenon caused by massive amounts of water vapor in the upper atmosphere. They compared the noctilucent cloud phenomenon to the exhaust plume from NASA's Endeavour space shuttle.

In June 2007, scientists from the University of Bologna identified a lake in the Tunguska region as a possible impact crater from the event. They do not dispute that the Tunguska body exploded in midair but believe that a one-meter fragment survived the explosion and impacted with the ground. Lake Cheko is a small, bowl-shaped lake approximately 8 kilometres north-northwest of the hypocenter. The hypothesis has been disputed by other impact crater specialists.

A 1961 investigation had dismissed a modern origin of Lake Cheko, saying that the presence of metres-thick silt deposits at the lake's bed suggests an age of at least 5,000 years; but more recent research suggests that only a meter or so of the sediment layer on the lake bed is "normal lacustrine sedimentation," a depth indicating a much younger lake of about 100 years. Acoustic-echo soundings of the lake floor provide support for the hypothesis that the lake was formed by the Tunguska event. The soundings revealed a conical shape for the lake bed, which is consistent with an impact crater. Magnetic readings indicate a possible meter-sized chunk of rock below the lake's deepest point that may be a fragment of the colliding body. Finally, the lake's long axis points to the hypocenter of the Tunguska explosion, about 7.0 kilometres (4.3 mi) away.

Work is still being done at Lake Cheko to determine its origins. The conclusions of the Italian scientist were published on the website of the University of Bologna. The main points are that "Cheko, a small lake located in Siberia close to the epicentre of the 1908 Tunguska explosion, might fill a crater left by the impact of a fragment of a Cosmic Body. Sediment cores from the lake's bottom were studied to support or reject this hypothesis. A 175-centimetre (69 in)-long core, collected near the center of the lake, consists of an upper c. one-metre (39 in)-thick sequence of lacustrine deposits overlaying coarser chaotic material.

210Pb and 137Cs indicate that the transition from lower to upper sequence occurred close to the time of the Tunguska Event. Pollen analysis reveals that remains of aquatic plants are abundant in the top post-1908 sequence but are absent in the lower pre-1908 portion of the core. These results, including organic C, N and ?13C data, suggest that Lake Cheko formed at the time of the Tunguska Event." The behaviour of meteorites in the Earth's atmosphere was less well understood during the early decades of the 20th century. Due to this, as well as the paucity of relevant data resulting from Soviet secrecy during the Cold War, a great many other hypotheses for the Tunguska event have sprung up, none of which are accepted by the scientific community. One study "suggests that a chunk of Comet 2005NB56 caused the 5–10 megaton fireball, bouncing off the atmosphere and back into orbit around the sun."

The scientists involved in the study claim that the object that caused the event will pass close to Earth again in 2045. In 1989, Serge J.D. D'Alessio and Archie A. Harms suggested that some of the deuterium in a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere may have undergone a nuclear fusion reaction, leaving a distinctive signature in the form of carbon-14. They concluded that any release of nuclear energy would have been almost negligible. Independently, in 1990, César Sirvent proposed that a deuterium comet, i.e., a comet with an anomalous high concentration of deuterium in its composition, could have exploded as a natural hydrogen bomb, generating most of the energy released. The sequence would be first a mechanical or kinetic explosion, triggering a thermonuclear reaction.

These proposals are inconsistent with our knowledge of the composition of comets and of the temperature and pressure conditions necessary for initiating a nuclear fusion reaction. Studies have found the concentration of radioactive isotopes in the blast region to be inconsistent with those expected following a nuclear explosion, fusion or otherwise. Edward Drobyshevski, has suggested that the event was caused by the explosion of the hydrogen-saturated part of the nucleus of a comet that struck the Earth's atmosphere, with most of the remaining comet nucleus surviving, and possibly continuing to orbit the sun.

In 1973, Albert A. Jackson and Michael P. Ryan, physicists at the University of Texas, proposed that the Tunguska event was caused by a small (around 1017 kg to 1019 kg) black hole passing through the Earth. This hypothesis is flawed, as there was no so-called exit event—a second explosion occurring as the black hole, having tunnelled through the Earth, shot out the other side on its way back into space. Based on the direction of impact, the exit event would have occurred in the North Atlantic, closer than the impact event to the seismic recording stations that collected much of the evidence of the event. The hypothesis also fails to account for evidence that cosmic material was deposited by the impacting body, including dust trails in the atmosphere and the distribution of high-nickel magnetic spherules around the impact area.

In 1941, Lincoln LaPaz, and later in 1965, Clyde Cowan, Chandra R. Atluri, and Willard F. Libby suggested that the Tunguska event was caused by the annihilation of a chunk of antimatter falling from space. As with the other hypotheses described in this section, this does not account for the mineral debris left in the area of the explosion. Oliver Nichelson suggested that the Tunguska explosion may have been the result of an experiment by Nikola Tesla using the Wardenclyffe Tower, performed during one of Admiral Robert Peary's North Pole expeditions. This theory failed to gain many adherents owing to the lack of positive evidence, the presence of meteoroid fragments in soils and trees from the time, and the fact that the Wardenclyffe Tower was largely or entirely inactive at that time.

A number of theories based on UFOs have claimed that the Tunguska event was the result of the activities of extraterrestrial beings, including an exploding alien spaceship or even an alien weapon going off to "save the Earth from an imminent threat". These claims appear to originate from a science fiction story "The Explosion" by the Soviet writer Alexander Kazantsev in 1946, in which a nuclear-powered Martian spaceship, trying to land on the Earth, meets with a disaster and blows up in mid-air. Kazantsev never visited Hiroshima, but his idea of the above-ground explosion of the Tunguska space body was inspired by the news about the nuclear explosion over that Japanese city, as well as by his talks with some leading Soviet nuclear physicists. Many events in Kazantsev's tale, which was intended as pure fantasy, were subsequently confused with the actual occurrences at Tunguska.

The nuclear-powered UFO hypothesis was adopted by the TV critics Thomas Atkins and John Baxter in their book The Fire Came By (1976). The television series The Secret KGB UFO Files (Phenomenon: The Lost Archives) in 1998, broadcast on Turner Network Television, referred to the Tunguska event as "the Russian Roswell" and claimed that crashed UFO debris had been recovered from the site.

In 2004, a group from the Tunguska Spatial Phenomenon Foundation claimed to have found the wreckage of an alien spacecraft at the site. In 2009, Dr. Yuri Labvin, the president of the Tunguska Spatial Phenomenon Foundation repeated these claims, based upon findings of quartz slabs with strange markings on them found at the site, which, he claims, represent the remnants of an alien spaceship's control panel. In reference to Rupert Furneaux's book entitled "The Tungus Event" published in 1977 he wrote on page 122-123, 'it is claimed that the spacecraft changed course abruptly at Kezhma, zoomed eastwards and turned back to reach the point where it exploded. The ambiguities of some of the eye-witness reports are thus employed to suggest that the object was intelligently guided.' Again in the same book on page 23, Furneaux wrote, ' Zigel concluded that the object could only have been an artificial craft flying from another planet, an explanation he slightly tempered by suggesting it might have been 'some extraordinary, still unfamiliar heavenly body'.

His experience in training Soviet astronauts convinced him that the object had been steered because it followed precisely the re-entry corridor adopted by the astronauts who must navigate at an angle of minus 6.2 degrees to the horizon in order to survive without their vehicle burning up from friction by too steep a passage through the atmosphere or, alternatively, rebounding into space. The irregular shape of the stricken forest indicated that the explosion had fanned out elliptically. That was due to the explosive material being contained in a casing.'

Chapter 4:

DIE GLOCKE

(Der Riese/Wunderwaffe)

Die Glocke (German for "The Bell") was a purported top secret Nazi scientific technological device, secret weapon, or Wunderwaffe. First described by Polish journalist Igor Witkowski, it was later popularized by military journalist and author Nick Cook as well as by writers such as Joseph P. Farrell. Farrell and others associate it with Nazi occultism and antigravity or free energy research. Mainstream reviewers such as former aerospace scientist David Myhra express skepticism that such a device ever actually existed. Claims about the existence of Die Glocke originated in the works of Igor Witkowski.

His 2000 Polish language book Prawda O Wunderwaffe (The Truth About The Wonder Weapon, reprinted in German as Die Wahrheit über die Wunderwaffe), refers to it as "The Nazi-Bell". Witkowski wrote that he first discovered the existence of Die Glocke by reading transcripts from an interrogation of former Nazi SS Officer Jakob Sporrenberg. According to Witkowski, he was shown the supposedly classified transcripts in August 1997 by an unnamed Polish intelligence contact who claimed to have access to Polish government documents regarding Nazi secret weapons. Witkowski maintains that he was only allowed to transcribe the documents and was not allowed to make any copies.

Although no evidence of the veracity of Witkowski's claims have been produced, they reached a wider audience when they were retold by British author Nick Cook, who added his own speculations to Witkowski's claims in The Hunt for Zero Point. Allegedly an experiment carried out by Third Reich scientists working for the SS in a German facility known as Der Riese ("The Giant")near the Wenceslaus mine and close to the Czech border, Die Glocke is described as being a device "made out of a hard, heavy metal" approximately 9 feet wide and 12 to 15 feet high having a shape similar to that of a large bell. According to Cook, this device ostensibly contained two counter-rotating cylinders which would be "filled with a mercury-like substance, violet in color. This metallic liquid was code-named "Xerum 525" and was otherwise cautiously "stored in a tall thin thermos flask a meter high encased in lead". Additional substances said to be employed in the experiments, referred to as Leichtmetall (light metal), "included thorium and beryllium peroxides". Cook describes Die Glocke as emitting strong radiation when activated, an effect that supposedly led to the death of several unnamed scientists and various plant and animal test subjects.

Based upon certain external indications, Witkowski speculates that the ruins of a metal framework in the vicinity of the Wenceslas mine (aesthetically dubbed "The Henge") may have once served as test rig for an experiment in "anti-gravity propulsion" generated with Die Glocke; others, however, dismiss the derelict structure as simply being a conventional industrial cooling tower. Witkowski's claims along with Cook's speculations prompted further conjecture about the device from American fringe science authors such as Joseph P. Farrell, Jim Marrs, and Henry Stevens.

Farrell claims that the device was considered so important to the Nazis that they killed 60 scientists that worked on the project and buried them in a mass grave. In his book, Hitler's Suppressed and Still-Secret Weapons, Science and Technology (2007), Stevens speculates that Die Glocke contained red mercury and describes stories alleging that a concave mirror on top of the device provided the ability to see "images from the past" during its operation.Witkowski speculated that Die Glocke ended up in a "Nazi-friendly South American country". Cook speculated that it was moved to the United States as part of a deal made with SS General Hans Kammler. Farrell speculated that it was recovered as part of the Kecksburg UFO incident.

According to Patrick Kiger writing in National Geographic, Die Glocke has become a "popular subject of speculation" and a following similar to science fiction fandom exists around it and other alleged Nazi “miracle weapons” of Wunderwaffen.

Chapter 4.5:

THE TESLA COIL

A Tesla coil is a type of resonant transformer circuit invented by Nikola Tesla around 1891. It is used to produce high voltage, low current, high frequency alternating current electricity. Tesla coils produce higher current than the other source of high voltage discharges, electrostatic machines. Tesla experimented with a number of different configurations and they consist of two, or sometimes three, coupled resonant electric circuits.

Tesla used these coils to conduct innovative experiments in electrical lighting, phosphorescence, x-ray generation, high frequency alternating current phenomena, electrotherapy, and the transmission of electrical energy without wires. Tesla coil circuits were used commercially in sparkgap radio transmitters for wireless telegraphy until the 1920s, and in pseudomedical equipment such as electrotherapy and violet ray devices.

Today their main use is for entertainment and educational displays. Tesla coil transformer operates in a significantly different fashion from a conventional (i.e., iron core) transformer. In a conventional transformer, the windings are very tightly coupled and voltage gain is determined by the ratio of the numbers of turns in the windings. This works well at normal voltages but, at high voltages, the insulation between the two sets of windings is easily broken down and this prevents iron cored transformers from running at extremely high voltages without damage.

With Tesla coils, unlike a conventional transformer (which may couple 97%+ of the magnetic fields between windings) a Tesla coil's windings are "loosely" coupled, with a large air gap, and thus the primary and secondary are typically sharing only 10–20% of their respective magnetic fields. Instead of a tight coupling, the coil transfers energy (via loose coupling) from one oscillating resonant circuit (the primary) to the other (the secondary) over a number of RF cycles.

As the primary energy transfers to the secondary, the secondary's output voltage increases until all of the available primary energy has been transferred to the secondary (less losses). Even with significant spark gap losses, a well designed Tesla coil can transfer over 85% of the energy initially stored in the primary capacitor to the secondary circuit. Thus the voltage gain of a Tesla coil can be significantly greater than a conventional transformer, since the air gap has a very high insulation. With the loose coupling the voltage gain is instead proportional to the square root of the ratio of secondary and primary inductances.

The early Tesla coil transformer design employs a medium- to high-voltage power source, one or more high voltage capacitor(s), and a spark gap to excite a multiple-layer primary inductor with periodic bursts of high frequency current. The multiple-layer Tesla coil transformer secondary is excited by resonant inductive coupling, the primary and secondary circuits both being tuned so they resonate at the same frequency (typically, between 25 kHz and 2 MHz). The later and higher-power coil design has a single-layer primary and secondary. These Tesla coils are often used by hobbyists and at venues such as science museums to produce long sparks.

The "American Electrician" gives a description of an early Tesla coil wherein a glass battery jar, 15 x 20 cm (6 x 8 in) is wound with 60 to 80 turns of AWG No. 18 B & S magnet wire (0.823 mm²). Into this is slipped a primary consisting of eight to ten turns of AWG No. 6 B & S wire (13.3 mm²) and the whole combination immersed in a vessel containing linseed or mineral oil. (Norrie, pg. 34-35) Tesla's 1902 design for his advanced magnifying transmitter used a top terminal consisting of a metal frame in the shape of a toroid, covered with hemispherical plates (constituting a very large conducting surface).

The top terminal has relatively small capacitance, charged to as high a voltage as practicable. The outer surface of the elevated conductor is where the electrical charge chiefly accumulates. It has a large radius of curvature, or is composed of separate elements which, irrespective of their own radii of curvature, are arranged close to each other so that the outside ideal surface enveloping them has a large radius. This design allowed the terminal to support very high voltages without generating corona or sparks.

Tesla, during his patent application process, described a variety of resonator terminals at the top of this later coil. Modern high voltage enthusiasts usually build Tesla coils that are similar to some of Tesla's "later" air core designs. These typically consist of a primary tank circuit, a series LC (inductance-capacitance) circuit composed of a high voltage capacitor, spark gap and primary coil, and the secondary LC circuit, a series resonant circuit consisting of the secondary coil plus a terminal capacitance or "top load."

In Tesla's more advanced design, the secondary LC circuit is composed of an air-core transformer secondary coil placed in series with a helical resonator. The helical coil is then connected to the terminal capacitance. Most modern coils use only a single helical coil comprising both the secondary and primary resonator. The terminal capacitance actually forms one 'plate' of a capacitor, the other 'plate' being the Earth (or "ground"). The primary LC circuit is tuned so that it resonates at the same frequency as the secondary LC circuit. The primary and secondary coils are magnetically coupled, creating a dual-tuned resonant air-core transformer.

Earlier oil insulated Tesla coils needed large and long insulators at their high-voltage terminals to prevent discharge in air. Later version Tesla coils spread their electric fields over large distances to prevent high electrical stresses in the first place, thereby allowing operation in free air. Most modern Tesla coils use simple toroids, typically fabricated from spun metal or flexible aluminum ducting, to control the high electrical field near the top of the secondary and to direct spark outward and away from the primary and secondary windings. More advanced Tesla coil transmitters involve a more tightly coupled air core resonance transformer network or "master oscillator" the output of which is then fed another resonator, sometimes called the "extra coil." The principle is that energy accumulates in the extra coil and the role of transformer secondary is played by the separate master oscillator secondary; the roles are not shared by a single secondary.

In some modern three-coil Magnifying transmitter systems the extra coil is placed some distance from the transformer. Direct magnetic coupling to the upper secondary is not desirable, since the third coil is designed to be driven by injecting RF current directly into the bottom end. This particular Tesla coil configuration consists of a secondary coil in close inductive relation with a primary, and one end of which is connected to a ground-plate, while its other end is led through a separate self-induction coil (whose connection should always be made at, or near, the geometrical center of that coil's circular aspect, in order to secure a symmetrical distribution of the current), and of a metallic cylinder carrying the current to the terminal. The primary coil may be excited by any desired source of high frequency current.

The important requirement is that the primary and secondary sides must be tuned to the same resonant frequency to allow efficient transfer of energy between the primary and secondary resonant circuits. The conductor of the shaft to the terminal (topload) is in the form of a cylinder with smooth surface of a radius much larger than that of the spherical metal plates, and widens out at the bottom into a hood (which is slotted to avoid loss by eddy currents). The secondary coil is wound on a drum of insulating material, with its turns close together. When the effect of the small radius of curvature of the wire itself is overcome, the lower secondary coil behaves as a conductor of large radius of curvature, corresponding to that of the drum. The top of the extra coil may be extended up to the terminal U.S. Patent 1,119,732 and the bottom should be somewhat below the uppermost turn of the primary coil. This lessens the tendency of the charge to break out from the wire connecting both and to pass along the support.

Modern day transistor or vacuum tube Tesla coils do not use a primary spark gap. Instead, the transistor(s) or vacuum tube(s) provide the switching or amplifying function necessary to generate RF power for the primary circuit. Solid-state Tesla coils use the lowest primary operating voltage, typically between 155 to 800 volts, and drive the primary winding using either a single, half-bridge, or full-bridge arrangement of bipolar transistors, MOSFETs or IGBTs to switch the primary current. Vacuum tube coils typically operate with plate voltages between 1500 and 6000 volts, while most spark gap coils operate with primary voltages of 6,000 to 25,000 volts.

The primary winding of a traditional transistor Tesla coil is wound around only the bottom portion of the secondary (sometimes called the resonator). This helps to illustrate operation of the secondary as a pumped resonator. The primary induces alternating voltage into the bottommost portion of the secondary, providing regular "pushes" (similar to provided properly timed pushes to a playground swing). Additional energy is transferred from the primary to the secondary inductance and topload capacitance during each "push", and secondary output voltage builds (called ring-up).

An electronic feedback circuit is usually used to adaptively synchronize the primary oscillator to the growing resonance in the secondary, and this is the only tuning consideration beyond the initial choice of a reasonable topload. In a dual resonant solid-state Tesla coil (DRSSTC), the electronic switching of the solid-state Tesla coil is combined with the resonant primary circuit of a spark-gap Tesla coil. The resonant primary circuit is formed by connecting a capacitor in series with the primary winding of the coil, so that the combination forms a series tank circuit with a resonant frequency near that of the secondary circuit. Because of the additional resonant circuit, one manual and one adaptive tuning adjustment are necessary.

Also, an interrupter is usually used to reduce the duty cycle of the switching bridge, in order to improve peak power capabilities; similarly, IGBTs are more popular in this application than bipolar transistors or MOSFETs, due to their superior power handling characteristics. Performance of a DRSSTC can be comparable to a medium power spark gap Tesla coil, and efficiency (as measured by spark length versus input power) can be significantly greater than a spark gap Tesla coil operating at the same input power. A large Tesla coil of more modern design often operates at very high peak power levels, up to many megawatts (millions of watts). It should therefore be adjusted and operated carefully, not only for efficiency and economy, but also for safety. If, due to improper tuning, the maximum voltage point occurs below the terminal, along the secondary coil, a discharge (spark) may break out and damage or destroy the coil wire, supports, or nearby objects.

Tesla experimented with these, and many other, circuit configurations (see right). The Tesla coil primary winding, spark gap and tank capacitor are connected in series. In each circuit, the AC supply transformer charges the tank capacitor until its voltage is sufficient to break down the spark gap. The gap suddenly fires, allowing the charged tank capacitor to discharge into the primary winding. Once the gap fires, the electrical behavior of either circuit is identical. Experiments have shown that neither circuit offers any marked performance advantage over the other. However, in the typical circuit (above), the spark gap's short circuiting action prevents high frequency oscillations from 'backing up' into the supply transformer.

In the alternate circuit, high amplitude high frequency oscillations that appear across the capacitor also are applied to the supply transformer's winding. This can induce corona discharges between turns that weaken and eventually destroy the transformer's insulation. Experienced Tesla coil builders almost exclusively use the top circuit, often augmenting it with low pass filters (resistor and capacitor (RC) networks) between the supply transformer and spark gap to help protect the supply transformer. This is especially important when using transformers with fragile high voltage windings, such as Neon-sign transformers (NSTs).

Regardless of which configuration is used, the HV transformer must be of a type that self-limits its secondary current by means of internal leakage inductance. A normal (low leakage inductance) high voltage transformer must use an external limiter (sometimes called a ballast) to limit current. NSTs are designed to have high leakage inductance to limit their short circuit current to a safe level. The primary coil's resonant frequency should be tuned to that of the secondary, using low-power oscillations, then increasing the power until the apparatus has been brought under control. While tuning, a small projection (called a "breakout bump") is often added to the top terminal in order to stimulate corona and spark discharges (sometimes called streamers) into the surrounding air.

Tuning can then be adjusted so as to achieve the longest streamers at a given power level, corresponding to a frequency match between the primary and secondary coil. Capacitive 'loading' by the streamers tends to lower the resonant frequency of a Tesla coil operating under full power. For a variety of technical reasons, toroids provide one of the most effective shapes for the top terminals of Tesla coils. While generating discharges, electrical energy from the secondary and toroid is transferred to the surrounding air as electrical charge, heat, light, and sound. The electric currents that flow through these discharges are actually due to the rapid shifting of quantities of charge from one place (the top terminal) to other places (nearby regions of air).

The process is similar to charging or discharging a capacitor. The current that arises from shifting charges within a capacitor is called a displacement current. Tesla coil discharges are formed as a result of displacement currents as pulses of electrical charge are rapidly transferred between the high voltage toroid and nearby regions within the air (called space charge regions). Although the space charge regions around the toroid are invisible, they play a profound role in the appearance and location of Tesla coil discharges.

When the spark gap fires, the charged capacitor discharges into the primary winding, causing the primary circuit to oscillate. The oscillating primary current creates a magnetic field that couples to the secondary winding, transferring energy into the secondary side of the transformer and causing it to oscillate with the toroid capacitance. The energy transfer occurs over a number of cycles, and most of the energy that was originally in the primary side is transferred into the secondary side. The greater the magnetic coupling between windings, the shorter the time required to complete the energy transfer. As energy builds within the oscillating secondary circuit, the amplitude of the toroid's RF voltage rapidly increases, and the air surrounding the toroid begins to undergo dielectric breakdown, forming a corona discharge.

As the secondary coil's energy (and output voltage) continue to increase, larger pulses of displacement current further ionize and heat the air at the point of initial breakdown. This forms a very conductive "root" of hotter plasma, called a leader, that projects outward from the toroid. The plasma within the leader is considerably hotter than a corona discharge, and is considerably more conductive. In fact, it has properties that are similar to an electric arc. The leader tapers and branches into thousands of thinner, cooler, hairlike discharges (called streamers).

The streamers look like a bluish 'haze' at the ends of the more luminous leaders, and it is the streamers that actually transfer charge between the leaders and toroid to nearby space charge regions. The displacement currents from countless streamers all feed into the leader, helping to keep it hot and electrically conductive. The primary break rate of sparking Tesla coils is slow compared to the resonant frequency of the resonator-topload assembly. When the switch closes, energy is transferred from the primary LC circuit to the resonator where the voltage rings up over a short period of time up culminating in the electrical discharge.

In a spark gap Tesla coil the primary-to-secondary energy transfer process happens repetitively at typical pulsing rates of 50–500 times per second, and previously formed leader channels don't get a chance to fully cool down between pulses. So, on successive pulses, newer discharges can build upon the hot pathways left by their predecessors. This causes incremental growth of the leader from one pulse to the next, lengthening the entire discharge on each successive pulse. Repetitive pulsing causes the discharges to grow until the average energy that's available from the Tesla coil during each pulse balances the average energy being lost in the discharges (mostly as heat). At this point, dynamic equilibrium is reached, and the discharges have reached their maximum length for the Tesla coil's output power level.

The unique combination of a rising high voltage Radio Frequency envelope and repetitive pulsing seem to be ideally suited to creating long, branching discharges that are considerably longer than would be otherwise expected by output voltage considerations alone. High voltage discharges create filamentary multi-branched discharges which are purplish blue in colour. High energy discharges create thicker discharges with fewer branches, are pale and luminous, almost white, and are much longer than low energy discharges, because of increased ionisation. There will be a strong smell of ozone and nitrogen oxides in the area.

The important factors for maximum discharge length appear to be voltage, energy, and still air of low to moderate humidity. However, even more than 100 years later after the first use of Tesla coils, there are many aspects of Tesla coil discharges and the energy transfer process that are still not completely understood. Tesla coil circuits were used commercially in sparkgap radio transmitters for wireless telegraphy until the 1920s, and in electrotherapy and pseudomedical devices such as violet ray. Today their main use is entertainment and educational displays. Tesla coils are built by many high-voltage enthusiasts, research institutions, science museums and independent experimenters. Although electronic circuit controllers have been developed, Tesla's original spark gap design is less expensive and has proven extremely reliable.

The Tesla coil can also be used for wireless transmission. In addition to the positioning of the elevated terminal well above the top turn of the helical resonator, another difference from the sparking Tesla coil is the primary break rate. The optimized Tesla coil transmitter is a continuous wave oscillator with a break rate equaling the operating frequency. The combination of a helical resonator with an elevated terminal is also used for wireless reception. The Tesla coil receiver is intended for receiving the non-radiating electromagnetic field energy produced by the Tesla coil transmitter. The Tesla coil receiver is also adaptable for exploiting the ubiquitous vertical voltage gradient in the Earth's atmosphere.

Tesla built and used various devices for detecting electromagnetic field energy. His early wireless apparatus operated on the basis of Hertzian waves or ordinary radio waves, electromagnetic waves that propagate in space without involvement of a conducting guiding surface. During his work at Colorado Springs, Tesla believed he had established electrical resonance of the entire Earth using the Tesla coil transmitter at his "Experimental Station." Tesla stated one of the requirements of the World Wireless System was the construction of resonant receivers. The related concepts and methods are part of his wireless transmission system (US1119732 — Apparatus for Transmitting Electrical Energy — 1902 January 18).

Tesla made a proposal that there needed to be many more than thirty transmission-reception stations worldwide. In one form of receiving circuit the two input terminals are connected each to a mechanical pulse-width modulation device adapted to reverse polarity at predetermined intervals of time and charge a capacitor. This form of Tesla system receiver has means for commutating the current impulses in the charging circuit so as to render them suitable for charging the storage device, a device for closing the receiving-circuit, and means for causing the receiver to be operated by the energy accumulated.

A Tesla coil used as a receiver is referred to as a Tesla receiving transformer. The Tesla coil receiver acts as a step-down transformer with high current output. The parameters of a Tesla coil transmitter are identically applicable to it being a receiver (e.g.., an antenna circuit), due to reciprocity. Impedance, generally though, is not applied in an obvious way; for electrical impedance, the impedance at the load (e.g.., where the power is consumed) is most critical and, for a Tesla coil receiver, this is at the point of utilization (such as at an induction motor) rather than at the receiving node.

Complex impedance of an antenna is related to the electrical length of the antenna at the wavelength in use. Commonly, impedance is adjusted at the load with a tuner or a matching networks composed of inductors and capacitors. A Tesla coil can receive electromagnetic impulses from atmospheric electricity and radiant energy, besides normal wireless transmissions. Radiant energy throws off with great velocity minute particles which are strongly electrified and other rays falling on the insulated-conductor connected to a condenser (i.e., a capacitor) can cause the condenser to indefinitely charge electrically.

The helical resonator can be "shock excited" due to radiant energy disturbances not only at the fundamental wave at one-quarter wave-length but also is excited at its harmonics. Hertzian methods can be used to excite the Tesla coil receiver with limitations that result in great disadvantages for utilization, though. The methods of ground conduction and the various induction methods can also be used to excite the Tesla coil receiver, but are again at a disadvantages for utilization. The charging-circuit can be adapted to be energized by the action of various other disturbances and effects at a distance.

Arbitrary and intermittent oscillations that are propagated via conduction to the receiving resonator will charge the receiver's capacitor and utilize the potential energy to greater effect. Various radiations can be used to charge and discharge conductors, with the radiations considered electromagnetic vibrations of various wavelengths and ionizing potential. The Tesla receiver utilizes the effects or disturbances to charge a storage device with energy from an external source (natural or man-made) and controls the charging of said device by the actions of the effects or disturbances (during succeeding intervals of time determined by means of such effects and disturbances corresponding in succession and duration of the effects and disturbances). The stored energy can also be used to operate the receiving device.

The accumulated energy can, for example, operate a transformer by discharging through a primary circuit at predetermined times which, from the secondary currents, operate the receiving device. While Tesla coils can be used for these purposes, much of the public and media attention is directed away from transmission-reception applications of the Tesla coil since electrical spark discharges are fascinating to many people. Regardless of this fact, Tesla did suggest that this variation of the Tesla coil could utilize the phantom loop effect to form a circuit to induct energy from the Earth's magnetic field and other radiant energy sources (including, but not limited to, electrostatics ). With regard to Tesla's statements on the harnessing of natural phenomena to obtain electric power, he stated: Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. — "Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency" (February 1892) Tesla stated that the output power from these devices, attained from Hertzian methods of charging, was low, but alternative charging means are available.

Tesla receivers, operated correctly, act as a step-down transformer with high current output. There are, to date, no commercial power generation entities or businesses that have utilized this technology to full effect. The power levels achieved by Tesla coil receivers have, thus far, been a fraction of the output power of the transmitters. The dangers of contact with high frequency electrical current are sometimes perceived as being less than at lower frequencies, because the subject usually doesn't feel pain or a 'shock'. This is often erroneously attributed to skin effect, a phenomenon that tends to inhibit alternating current from flowing inside conducting media.

It was thought that in the body, Tesla currents travelled close to the skin surface, making them safer than lower frequency electric currents. In fact, in the early 1900s a major use of Tesla coils was to apply high frequency current directly to the body in electrotherapy. Although skin effect limits Tesla currents to the outer fraction of an inch in metal conductors, the 'skin depth' of human flesh at typical Tesla coil frequencies is still of the order of 60 inches (150 cm) or more. This means that high frequency currents will still preferentially flow through deeper, better conducting, portions of an experimenter's body such as the circulatory and nervous systems. The reason for the lack of pain is that a human being's nervous system does not sense the flow of potentially dangerous electrical currents above 15–20 kHz; essentially, in order for nerves to be activated, a significant number of ions must cross their membrane before the current (and hence voltage) reverses. Since the body no longer provides a warning 'shock', novices may touch the output streamers of small Tesla coils without feeling painful shocks.

However, there is anecdotal evidence among Tesla coil experimenters that temporary tissue damage may still occur and be observed as muscle pain, joint pain, or tingling for hours or even days afterwards. This is believed to be caused by the damaging effects of internal current flow, and is especially common with continuous wave (CW), solid state or vacuum tube type Tesla coils. Some transformers can provide alternating current with such high frequencies that the skin depth becomes small enough for the voltage to be safe. Skin depth is inversely proportional to the root of the frequency, putting these frequencies in the megahertz range.

Large Tesla coils and magnifiers can deliver dangerous levels of high frequency current, and they can also develop significantly higher voltages (often 250,000–500,000 volts, or more). Because of the higher voltages, large systems can deliver higher energy, potentially lethal, repetitive high voltage capacitor discharges from their top terminals. Doubling the output voltage quadruples the electrostatic energy stored in a given top terminal capacitance. If an unwary experimenter accidentally places himself in path of the high voltage capacitor discharge to ground, the low current electric shock can cause involuntary spasms of major muscle groups and may induce life-threatening ventricular fibrillation and cardiac arrest.

Even lower power vacuum tube or solid state Tesla coils can deliver RF currents that are capable of causing temporary internal tissue, nerve, or joint damage through Joule heating. In addition, an RF arc can carbonize flesh, causing a painful and dangerous bone-deep RF burn that may take months to heal. Because of these risks, knowledgeable experimenters avoid contact with streamers from all but the smallest systems. Professionals usually use other means of protection such as a Faraday cage or a chain mail suit to prevent dangerous currents from entering their body.

The most serious dangers associated with Tesla coil operation are associated with the primary circuit. It is the primary circuit that is capable of delivering a sufficient current at a significant voltage to stop the heart of a careless experimenter. Because these components are not the source of the trademark visual or auditory coil effects, they may easily be overlooked as the chief source of hazard. Should a high frequency arc strike the exposed primary coil while, at the same time, another arc has also been allowed to strike to a person, the ionized gas of the two arcs forms a circuit that may conduct lethal, low-frequency current from the primary into the person.

Further, great care should be taken when working on the primary section of a coil even when it has been disconnected from its power source for some time. The tank capacitors can remain charged for days with enough energy to deliver a fatal shock. Proper designs should always include 'bleeder resistors' to bleed off stored charge from the capacitors. In addition, a safety shorting operation should be performed on each capacitor before any internal work is performed. Tesla's Colorado Springs laboratory possessed one of the largest Tesla coils ever built, known as the "Magnifying Transmitter".

The Magnifying Transmitter is somewhat different from classic 2-coil Tesla coils. A Magnifier uses a 2-coil 'driver' to excite the base of a third coil ('resonator') that is located some distance from the driver. The operating principles of both systems are similar. The world's largest currently existing 2-coil Tesla coil is a 130,000-watt unit, part of a 38-foot-tall (12 m) sculpture. It is owned by Alan Gibbs and currently resides in a private sculpture park at Kakanui Point near Auckland, New Zealand. The Tesla coil is an early predecessor (along with the induction coil) of a more modern device called a flyback transformer, which provides the voltage needed to power the cathode ray tube used in some televisions and computer monitors.

The disruptive discharge coil remains in common use as the ignition coil or spark coil in the ignition system of an internal combustion engine. These two devices do not use resonance to accumulate energy, however, which is the distinguishing feature of a Tesla coil. They do use inductive "kick", the forced, abrupt decay of the magnetic field, such that a voltage is provided by the coil at its primary terminals that is much greater than the voltage that was applied to establish the magnetic field, and it is this higher voltage that is then multiplied by the transformer turns ratio.

Thus, they do store energy, and a Tesla resonator stores energy. A modern, low power variant of the Tesla coil is also used to power plasma globe sculptures and similar devices. Scientists working with a glass vacuum line (e.g. chemists working with volatile substances in the gas phase, inside a system of glass tubes, taps and bulbs) test for the presence of tiny pin-holes in the apparatus (especially a newly blown piece of glassware) using high voltage discharges, such as a Tesla coil produces.

When the system is evacuated and the discharging end of the coil moved over the glass, the discharge travels through any pin-hole immediately below it and thus illuminates the hole, indicating points that need to be annealed or re-blown before they can be used in an experiment.

[Guest NukaColaClear]

Chapter 5:

PROJECT RIESE

(Der Riese)

Riese [??i?z?] (German for "giant") is the code name of the mining and construction project of Nazi Germany, started and unfinished in the Owl Mountains and Ksi?? Castle in 1943-45. It consists of seven complexes of the underground military facilities located in Lower Silesia, previously Germany, now territory of Poland.

In the presence of the increasing Allied air raids Nazi Germany moved a large part of its strategic armaments production into the assumed safety of the District of Sudetenland. In September 1943 a project was created to construct Hitler's headquarters in Ksi?? Castle and underground factories below the Owl Mountains. For this purpose the Schlesische Industriegemeinschaft AG (Silesian Industrial Company) was established in autumn 1943 with headquarters in Jedlina-Zdrój.

The plans included adaptation works in Ksi?? Castle, the creation of the underground complex below the castle, the construction of tunnels and large underground halls at several locations in the Owl Mountains. The rocks of the mountains were drilled and blasted with explosives and the resulting caverns were reinforced by concrete and steel. Then a network of roads, a narrow gauge railway, water supply, sewerage, electricity and telephone lines were put into place. For this purpose mining specialists were employed, mostly Germans, Italians, Ukrainians and Czechs but the majority of the work was done by forced labourers (chiefly Poles and Russians) and POWs (Italians and Russians).

In November 1943 labour camps were established in Jedlinka, G?uszyca Górna, Walim and Kolce. Dissatisfied with the progress of the project, in April 1944 supervision of construction was handed over to the Organisation Todt headquartered in Jedlina-Zdrój. Prisoners of the nearby concentration camp were assigned to forced labour. They were deployed in thirteen camps and a hospital in the vicinity of the complexes. The network of these camps has been named Arbeitslager Riese (List of subcamps of Arbeitslager Riese) and was part of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Administration of Arbeitslager Riese and the camp commander (SS-Hauptsturmführer Albert Lütkemeyer) were located in AL Wüstegiersdorf.

From December 1944 to January 1945 the prisoners were guarded by 853 SS troops. According to incomplete data at least 13,000 prisoners worked for the project, most of them transferred from Auschwitz concentration camp. The documents allow the identification of 8,995 prisoners. All of them were Jews, about 70 percent from Hungary, the rest from Poland, Greece, Romania, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

They bored tunnels inside mountains, built roads and railway tracks, worked in the transportation of building materials. Mortality was very high because of disease, malnutrition, exhaustion, dangerous underground works and the treatment of prisoners by German guards. The deportation of 857 exhausted prisoners to Auschwitz concentration camp as well as 14 planned executions after failed escape attempts are documented. The estimated total number of 5,000 victims lost their lives.

According to Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich:

"And in 1944 he [Hitler] had two underground headquarters blasted into mountains in Silesia and Thuringia, the project tying up hundreds of indispensable mining specialists and thousands of workmen. (...) According to Point 18 of the Führerprotokoll, June 20, 1944, I reported to the Fuehrer that "at the moment a good 28,000 workers are building additions to the Fuehrer's headquarters." According to my memorandum of September 22, 1944, some 36,000,000 marks were spent for bunkers in Rastenburg [Wolf's Lair], 13,000,000 for bunkers in Pullach near Munich to provide for Hitler's safety when he visited Munich, and 150,000,000 for the bunker complex called the "Giant" near Bad Charlottenbrunn. These projects required 328,000 cubic yards of reinforced concrete (including small quantities of masonry), 277,000 cubic yards of underground passages, 36 miles of roads with six bridges, and 62 miles of pipes. The "Giant" complex alone consumed more concrete than the entire population had at its disposal for air-raid shelters in 1944."

According to Nicolaus von Below, Hitler's adjutant:

"The plans that we kept criticizing in those months [early 1944] included the construction of a huge new Headquarters for the Führer in Silesia, near Waldenburg, which was also to include Fürstenstein Castle within the estate of the von Pless princes. Hitler defended his orders and commanded that construction continue with the use of concentration camp prisoners managed by Speer. During the year, I visited this facility twice and each time had the strong impression that I wouldn't see its completion. I tried to inspire Speer to somehow influence Hitler to give the order that the project be stopped. Speer said that was impossible. The extravagant work continued - at a time when every tonne of concrete and steel was so urgently needed elsewhere. "

Before the entry of the Red Army some underground structures were probably destroyed, or at least the tunnels leading to them were blown up. In the documents of the Third Reich there are records which allow an assessment of the quantity of materials used in the construction of Project Riese and the volume of the tunnels. On this basis it appears that about half of the underground corridors have not been found yet.

Together with the Red Army the Polish Army arrived in the area in May 1945. After the war the complexes were stripped of all machinery and raw materials within a few years. They were very valuable to a country ruined as a result of six years of war. Some German documents concerning Project Riese were found by the Polish Army and taken over by The Office of Security and never seen again. It appears that the castle and its immediate surroundings were prepared as one of Hitler's main headquarters, although there is no direct evidence in documents.

The purpose of the underground complexes in the mountains has not been determined. The opinions of experts incline towards the assumption that they were shelters for war production. None of the underground workings are finished, all are in different states of completion with only a small percentage of tunnels reinforced by concrete, except for complex Ksi??. Presently the underground workings are visited by tourists and the enthusiasts of military facilities. Much of the underground is closed because of risk of accidents. The complexes Rzeczka, W?odarz and Osówka are open to visitors. Ksi?? Castle is located near the city of Wa?brzych 50°50?32?N 16°17?32?E.

The castle’s last owner in the inter-war period was the Hochberg family, one of the wealthiest baronial dynasties in Prussia, Hans Heinrich XV, Prince of Pless and his English wife Mary-Theresa Olivia Cornwallis-West (Princess Daisy). In 1941 the Nazis confiscated the castle. At that time sons of Daisy and Hans Heinrich fought against Hitler’s army - one in British Army and one in Polish Armed Forces in the West. The works in Ksi?? Castle led to the destruction of some chambers, in particular suffered the decorative elements of the ceilings and floors. The most serious work however took place below the castle. There are two levels of corridors and chambers.

The first level is 15 m under the ground accessible from the castle by a lift and a staircase and also by two entrances from the gardens. It is reinforced by concrete (80 m long, 180 m2, 400 m3). The second level is 53 m under the courtyard. It contains four entrances, the network of wide tunnels (5 m high and 5.5 m wide) and four chambers. Most of the underground is reinforced by concrete. There are three shafts leading to the surface with diameters: 5 m (presently filled with rubble), 3.5 m and 0.7 m. The total length of the complex is 950 m (3,200 m2, 13,000 m3). Presently it contains seismological measuring equipment of the Polish Academy of Sciences, only the first level of the underground is open to visitors. Above the ground are foundations for machinery, a series of buildings and storehouses and two reservoirs of water. There are remains of sewage treatment plant and a narrow gauge railway. The forced laborers camp of AL Fürstenstein was built near the castle. The complex is located on a borderline between the villages of Rzeczka and Walim, inside Ostra Mountain 50°41?19?N 16°26?40?E. There are three entrances leading to parallel tunnels about 45 m away from each other. Between them are large halls (up to 10 m in height), one is reinforced by concrete, two are collapsed. The tunnel number 1 is 100 m long and has an almost finished guardroom. There is one shaft leading to the surface (depth 30 m, diameter 5 m), presently filled with rubble. The length of the complex of tunnels is 500 m (2,500 m2, 14,000 m3). Built above the ground was the main telephone exchange, capable of serving a few hundred phone numbers. A narrow gauge railway was used for transportation. In 1995 the complex Rzeczka was opened for visitors and in spring 2001 transformed into museum. It contains exhibits connected to history of Project Riese.

Complex W?odarz is located near the village of Walim, inside W?odarz Mountain 50°42?8?N 16°25?4?E. There are four entrances 80 m - 160 m away from each other leading to tunnels (180 m - 240 m long) containing guardrooms. The entire complex is a large amount of corridors intersecting at right angles and forming a grid. It contains one of the biggest unfinished halls (10 m high). There is a shaft leading to the surface (depth 40 m, diameter 4 m). Some of the corridors have higher second levels connected by small shafts (depth 3 m - 5 m, diameter 1.5 m). This is a stage of creating big halls. Two tunnels were bored, one over the other and then the ceiling was collapsed to create large space. Approximately 30% of the complex is flooded and can only be accessed by boat. The total length of the tunnels is 3,100 m (10,700 m2, 42,000 m3). Above the ground are foundations for machinery and buildings, the reservoir of water and storehouses with thousands of fossilized bags of cement. The forced laborers camp of AL Wolfsberg was built near the complex. The network of narrow gauge railway, existing here after the war was disassembled and scrapped. The complex is open to visitors.

Complex Osówka is located near the villages of Kolce and Sierpnica, inside Osówka Mountain 50°40?22?N 16°25?14?E. It has two entrances and one tunnel not connected to the main underground, all on different levels. There is a shaft leading to the surface (depth 48 m, diameter 5 m). The tunnel number 1 (150 m long) has chambers created for a guardroom. The tunnel number 2 (450 m long) begins on the level 15 m below the main underground. It has a guardroom reinforced by concrete and behind it there is the so-called "fault". It is a connection of two levels created by the collapse of the ceiling. The tunnel number 3 (120 m long) is not connected to the main underground. It is 450 m away from the entrance number 2 and 45 m below the level of the main underground. The tunnel contains two dams and a hydraulic equipment of unknown purpose. The total length of the tunnels is 1,700 m (6,700 m2, 30,000 m3). Above the ground are foundations for machinery and buildings, the depots of building materials and the reservoir of water. The network of narrow gauge railway existed here after the war. The forced laborers camp of AL Sauferwasser was built near the complex. Two objects are particularly interesting, the so-called "officers' mess" (679 m2, 2,300 m3) and "power station" (894 m2). he "officers' mess" is a building with walls 0.5 m thick and a roof adapted for a camouflage by vegetation. An unfinished subway (30 m long) connects it with the shaft. The "power station" is a concrete monolith (30 m x 30 m) with tens of pipes, drains, culverts and equipment of unknown purpose.

Complex Sokolec is open to visitors. The complex is located near the villages of Sokolec and Sowina, inside Gontowa Mountain. It consists of two independent undergrounds 1 km apart on different levels. The underground 640 m AMSL 50°38?44?N 16°27?36?E has two entrances 100 m apart leading to tunnels containing chambers for guardrooms. The tunnel number 1 is 130 m long and the tunnel number 2 is 150 m long. The underground is collapsed in many places because it was bored in soft rock of sandstone. The underground 580 m AMSL 50°38?35?N 16°28?2?E has two independent tunnels 200 m apart. The tunnel number 3 was discovered in 1991. It is collapsed 11 m from the entrance and has not been explored yet. The tunnel number 4 (100 m long) was discovered in 1994, the only one which was found with mining equipment from 1945. The total length of known tunnels is 850 m (2,400 m2, 7,100 m3). Above the ground are remains of building and storage infrastructure and a narrow gauge railway. The forced laborers camp of AL Falkenberg was built near the complex.

Complex Jugowice is located in the village of Jugowice Górne (Jawornik), inside Dzia? Jawornicki Mountain 50°42?35?N 16°25?12?E. It has seven entrances leading to six independent tunnels. The tunnel number 1 is 10 m long. The tunnels number 2 (115 m long) and number 4 lead to an underground of the total length of 450 m. There is a shaft leading from the surface (depth 16 m, diameter 0.5 - 0.6 m) near the underground but not connected to it. The tunnel number 3 is 15 m long. The tunnel number 5 is 5 m long. The tunnel number 6 is collapsed 30 m from the entrance and has not been explored yet. It has double armoured doors, one at the entrance and one behind the collapse. The tunnel number 7 has length of 40 m with concrete reinforcement 10 m long. The identified tunnels of the complex have length of 550 m (1,400 m2, 3,000 m3). Above the ground are remains of building and storage infrastructure and a narrow gauge railway. The forced laborers camp of AL Wüstewaltersdorf was built near the complex.

Complex G?uszyca is located near the hamlet of Zimna Woda and the town of G?uszyca, inside Sobo? Mountain 50°41?7?N 16°23?58?E. It contains three tunnels running from three directions to one point. The tunnel number 1 is 216 m long, number 2 is 250 m long. The tunnel number 3 is not connected to the main underground. It is collapsed 83 m from the entrance and has not been explored yet. The total length of tunnels is 700 m (1,900 m2, 4,000 m3). Above the ground are several buildings, a bunker and traces of earthworks carried out on a massive scale. A narrow gauge railway was used for transportation. The forced laborers camp of AL Lärche was built near the complex. The town of G?uszyca was in the centre of activity connected to Project Riese. Many camps of forced laborers were located in this area. It was a reloading place for the majority of supplies due to existence of a railway junction. In autumn 1943 the factory of Maschinenbau F. Krupp was relocated here from Essen. It took over local industry, mostly textile factories and adapted them to armaments production. As a preparation for the war an air raid shelter was built inside a hill near the factory of Mayer-Kauffmann Textilwerke AG 50°41?13?N 16°22?38?E. It has two entrances and is reinforced by bricks and concrete. The total length of tunnels is 240 m (600 m2, 1,800 m3).

Complex Dzikowiec is located near the village of Dzikowiec, inside Wapnica Mountain 50°34?11?N 16°34?46?E. It is not classified as one of the complexes of Riese. A quarry and tunnels were created before the war as a result of limestone mining. It is surmised adaptation works were made here since 1943 by the prisoners of AL Ludwigsdorf II. The entrances number 1 and 2 are located inside the quarry. The tunnel number 3 (250 m long) starts from higher level and inclines towards the complex, reaching it 5 m above its floor. There are two large chambers (7 m high). The tunnel number 4, 100 m long and reinforced by stone, is not connected to the main underground. It was built to drain water from the mine.

Complex Mi?ków was located near a railway. The complex is located in the village of Ludwikowice K?odzkie, the hamlet of Mi?ków and inside W?odyka Mountain 50°37?34?N 16°29?35?E. It is not classified as one of the complexes of Riese. It consisted of the ammunition and explosives factory Dynamit Nobel AG (code name: Mölke-Werke) which was located around the unused coalmine of Wenceslaus. The explosives from Dynamit Nobel AG were used to blast the tunnels of Riese, and the power station located here supplied the project with electricity. The coalmine was closed and flooded in 1939 because of frequent methane explosions. 191 miners lost their lives in one such explosion in 1930. When adaptation works started in 1942 numerous buildings and bunkers were built for the production and storage of ammunition and explosives. They were connected by the network of concrete roads and protected by anti-aircraft artillery. The forced laborers camps of AL Ludwigsdorf I and AL Ludwigsdorf II were built nearby. Presently the complex is in a state of ruin. The coalmine is still flooded and inaccessible, except for small sections. A large quantity of ammunition has been found hidden in the area of the complex.

Chapter 6:

PROJECT MERCURY

(Ascension)

Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States. It ran from 1959 through 1963 with the goal of putting a human in orbit around the Earth. The Mercury-Atlas 6 flight on February 20, 1962, was the first American flight to achieve this goal. The program included 20 unmanned launches, followed by two suborbital and four orbital flights with astronaut pilots. Early planning and research were carried out by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, but the program was officially conducted by its successor organization, NASA. Mercury laid the groundwork for Project Gemini and the follow-on Apollo moon-landing program.

The project name came from Mercury, a Roman mythological god often seen as a symbol of speed. Mercury is also the name of the innermost planet of the Solar System, which moves faster than any other and hence provides an image of speed, although Project Mercury had no real connection to the planet. The Mercury program cost approximately $384 million, the equivalent of about $2.9 billion in 2010 dollars.

The goals of the program were to orbit a manned spacecraft around Earth, investigate the pilot's ability to function in space and to recover both pilot and spacecraft safely. NASA also established program guidelines: existing technology and off-the-shelf equipment should be used wherever practical, the simplest and most reliable approach to system design would be followed, an existing launch vehicle would be employed to place the spacecraft into orbit, and a progressive and logical test program would be used.

Project requirements for the spacecraft were that it must be fitted with a reliable launch escape system to separate the spacecraft and its astronaut from its launch vehicle in case of impending failure; the pilot must have been given the capability of manually controlling the attitude of the spacecraft; the spacecraft must carry a retro-rocket system capable of reliably providing the necessary impulse to bring the spacecraft out of orbit; a zero-lift body utilizing drag braking to be used for reentry; and that the spacecraft design must satisfy the requirements for a landing on water.

On October 7, 1958, T. Keith Glennan, the first administrator of NASA, approved the Mercury project. On December 17 Glennan announced Project Mercury publicly. On December 29, 1958 North American Aviation was awarded a contract to design and build Little Joe launch vehicles to be used for altitude flight testing of the Mercury launch escape system.

In January 1959 McDonnell Aircraft Corporation was chosen to be prime contractor for the Mercury spacecraft, and the contract for 12 spacecraft was awarded in February. In April seven astronauts, known as the Mercury Seven or more formally as Astronaut Group 1, were selected to participate in the Mercury program.

In May 1959 North American Aviation delivered the first two Little Joes, and in June, an Atlas D launch vehicle named Big Joe was delivered, for use in a suborbital heat shield test flight. In July, the planned use of the Jupiter rocket as a suborbital launch vehicle was changed to the Redstone. In October General Electric delivered to McDonnell the ablative heat shield designated for installation on the first Mercury spacecraft. In December the launch vehicle for Mercury-Redstone 1 was ready to begin static tests installed on a test stand at ABMA.

In January 1960 NASA awarded Western Electric Company a contract for the Mercury tracking network. The value of the contract was over $33 million. Also in January, McDonnell delivered the first production-type Mercury spacecraft, less than a year after award of the formal contract. On February 12, Christopher C. Kraft, Jr. was appointed to head the Mercury operations coordination group. Kraft was asked to, "come up with a basic mission plan. You know, the bottom-line stuff on how we fly a man from a launch pad into space and back again. It would be good if you kept him alive." In April, the first spacecraft was delivered to Wallops Island for the beach-abort test. The test was completed successfully on May 9.

Chapter 7:

SHANGRI LA

Shangri-La is a fictional place described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James Hilton. In the book, "Shangri-La" is a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains.

Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise but particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia — a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world. In the novel Lost Horizon, the people who live at Shangri-La are almost immortal, living years beyond the normal lifespan and only very slowly aging in appearance.

The word also evokes the imagery of exoticism of the Orient. In the ancient Tibetan scriptures, existence of seven such places is mentioned as Nghe-Beyul Khimpalung. The use of the term Shangri-La is frequently cited as a modern reference to Shambhala, a mythical kingdom in Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which was sought by Eastern and Western explorers; Hilton was also inspired by then-current National Geographic articles on Tibet, which referenced the legend.

The phrase "Shangri-La" most probably comes from the Tibetan ???,"Shang" - a district of Tsang, north of Tashilhunpo[2]" + ??, pronounced "ri", "Mountain" = "Shang Mountain" + ?, Mountain Pass, which suggests that the area is accessed to, or is named by, "Shang Mountain Pass". In China, the poet Tao Yuanming (???) of the Jin Dynasty (265-420) described a kind of Shangri-La in his work "The Tale of the The Peach Blossom Spring" (simplified Chinese: ????; traditional Chinese: ????; pinyin: Táohu? Yuán Jì). The story goes that there was a fisherman from Wuling, who came across a beautiful peach grove, and he discovered happy and content people that lived completely cut of from the troubles in the outside world since the Qin Dynasty (221–207 BCE).[3]

In modern China, the Zhongdian county was renamed to Xi?nggél?l? (????, Shangri-La in Chinese) in 2001, to attract tourists. The legendary Kun Lun Mountains (???) offer another possible place for the Shangri-La valleys. A popularly believed inspiration for Hilton's Shangri-La is the Hunza Valley in northern Pakistan, close to the Chinese border, which Hilton visited a few years before Lost Horizon was published. Being an isolated green valley surrounded by mountains, enclosed on the western end of the Himalayas, it closely matches the description in the novel. A Shangri-La resort in the nearby Skardu valley is a popular tourist attraction. Today, various places claim the title, such as parts of southern Kham in southwestern Yunnan province, including the tourist destinations of Lijiang and Zhongdian.

Places like Sichuan and Tibet also claim the real Shangri-La was in its territory. In 2001, Tibet Autonomous Region put forward a proposal that the three regions optimise all Shangri-la tourism resources and promote them as one. After failed attempts to establish a China Shangri-la Ecological Tourism Zone in 2002 and 2003, government representatives of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces and Tibet Autonomous Region signed a declaration of cooperation in 2004.

Also in 2001, Zhongdian County in northwestern Yunnan officially renamed itself Shangri-La County. Bhutan, which until 1999 was largely isolated from the outside world and has its unique form of Buddhism, has been hailed as the last Shangri-La. Another place that has been thought to have inspired the concept of Shangri-La is the Yarlung Tsangpo Canyon.

Television presenter and historian Michael Wood, in the "Shangri-La" episode of the PBS documentary series In Search of Myths and Heroes, suggests that the legendary Shangri-La is the abandoned city of Tsaparang, and that its two great temples were once home to the kings of Guge in modern Tibet. American explorers Ted Vaill and Peter Klika visited the Muli area of southern Sichuan Province in 1999, and revealed that the Muli monastery in this remote region was the model for James Hilton's Shangri-La, which Hilton learned about from articles on this area in several National Geographic magazine articles in the late 1920s and early 1930s written by Austrian-American explorer Joseph Rock.

Vaill completed a film based on their research, "Finding Shangri-La", which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. On December 2, 2010, OPB televised one of Martin Yan's Hidden China episodes "Life in Shangri-La", in which Yan said that "Shangri-La" is the actual name of a real town in the hilly and mountainous region in northwestern Yunnan Province, frequented by both Han and Tibetan locals.

Martin Yan visited arts and craft shops, local farmers as they harvest crops, and sampled their cuisine. There are a number of modern Shangri-La pseudo-legends that have developed since 1933 in the wake of the novel and the film made from it. The Nazis had an enthusiasm for Shangri-La, where they hoped to find an ancient master race similar to the Nordic race, unspoiled by Buddhism.

They sent one expedition to Tibet, led by Ernst Schäfer in 1938. Shangri-La is often used in a similar context to "Garden of Eden", to represent a paradise hidden from modern man. It is sometimes used as an analogy for a life-long quest or something elusive that is much sought. For a man who spends his life obsessively looking for a cure to a disease, such a cure could be said to be that man's "Shangri-La".

It also might be used to represent perfection that is sought by man in the form of love, happiness, or Utopian ideals. It may be used in this context alongside other mythical and famous examples of somewhat similar metaphors such as The Holy Grail, El Dorado and The Fountain of Youth.

Politically and geographically, the independent and previously independent nations isolated from the West, such as Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Tuva, Mongolia, the Tocharian Tushara Kingdom of the Mah?bh?rata and the Han Dynasty outpost Dunhuang have each been termed Shangri-Las.

Chapter 8:

THE NAZI/U.S. MOON BASE: PROJECT AURORA

(Moon)

Unfortunately, not much came up for a moonbase program that was reliable, but I did find this:

Aurora was a rumored mid-1980s American reconnaissance aircraft.

There is no substantial evidence that it was ever built or flown and it has been termed a myth. The U.S. government has consistently denied such an aircraft was ever built. Aviation and space reference site Aerospaceweb.org concluded "The evidence supporting the Aurora is circumstantial or pure conjecture, there is little reason to contradict the government's position."

Others come to different conclusions.

In 2006, veteran black project watcher and aviation writer Bill Sweetman said, "Does Aurora exist? Years of pursuit have led me to believe that, yes, Aurora is most likely in active development, spurred on by recent advances that have allowed technology to catch up with the ambition that launched the program a generation ago."

The Aurora legend started in March 1990, when Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine broke the news that the term "Aurora" had been inadvertently included in the 1985 U.S. budget, as an allocation of $455 million for "black aircraft production" in FY 1987. According to Aviation Week, Project Aurora referred to a group of exotic aircraft, and not to one particular airframe.

Funding of the project allegedly reached $2.3billion in fiscal 1987, according to a 1986 procurement document obtained by Aviation Week. In the 1994 book Skunk Works, Ben Rich, the former head of Lockheed's Skunk Works division, wrote that the Aurora was the budgetary code name for the stealth bomber fly-off that resulted in the B-2 Spirit.

By the late 1980s, many aerospace industry observers believed that the U.S. had the technological capability to build a Mach-5 replacement for the aging Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. Detailed examinations of the U.S. defense budget claimed to have found money missing or channeled into black projects. By the mid-1990s, reports surfaced of sightings of unidentified aircraft flying over California and the United Kingdom involving odd-shaped contrails, sonic booms and related phenomena that suggested the US had developed such an aircraft. Nothing ever linked any of these observations to any program or aircraft type, but the name Aurora was often tagged on these as a way of explaining the observations.

In late August 1989, while working as an engineer on the jack-up barge GSF Galveston Key in the North Sea, Chris Gibson and another witness saw an unfamiliar isosceles triangle-shaped delta aircraft, apparently refueling from a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker and accompanied by a pair of F-111 bombers. Gibson and his friend watched the aircraft for several minutes, until they went out of sight. He subsequently drew a sketch of the formation. Gibson, who had been in the Royal Observer Corps' trophy-winning international aircraft recognition team since 1980, was unable to identify the aircraft. He dismissed suggestions that the aircraft was a F-117, Mirage IV or fully swept wing F-111.

When the sighting was made public in 1992, the British Defence Secretary Tom King was told, "There is no knowledge in the MoD of a 'black' programme of this nature, although it would not surprise the relevant desk officers in the Air Staff and Defence Intelligence Staff if it did exist." A crash at RAF Boscombe Down on 26 September 1994 appeared closely linked to "black" missions, according to a report in AirForces Monthly. Further investigation was hampered by aircraft from the USAF flooding into the base.

The crash site was protected from view by firetrucks and tarpaulins and the base was closed to all flights soon after. A series of unusual sonic booms was detected in Southern California, beginning in mid- to late-1991 and recorded by U.S. Geological Survey sensors across Southern California used to pinpoint earthquake epicenters. The sonic booms were characteristic of a smaller vehicle rather than the 37-meter long Space Shuttle orbiter. Furthermore, neither the Shuttle nor NASA's single SR-71B was operating on the days the booms had been registered.

In the article, "In Plane Sight?" which appeared in the Washington City Paper on 3 July 1992 (pp. 12–13), one of the seismologists, Jim Mori, noted: "We can't tell anything about the vehicle. They seem stronger than other sonic booms that we record once in a while. They've all come on Thursday mornings about the same time, between 4 and 7." Former NASA sonic boom expert Dom Maglieri studied the 15-year old sonic boom data from the California Institute of Technology and has deemed that the data showed "something at 90,000 ft (c. 27.4 km), Mach 4 to Mach 5.2".

He also said the booms did not look like those from aircraft that had traveled through the atmosphere many miles away at LAX, rather, they appeared to be booms from a high-altitude aircraft directly above the ground moving at high speeds. The boom signatures of the two different aircraft patterns are wildly different. There was nothing particular to tie these events to any aircraft, but they served to grow the Aurora legend.

On 23 March 1992, near Amarillo, Texas, Steven Douglas photographed the "donuts on a rope" contrail and linked this sighting to distinctive sounds. He described the engine noise as: "strange, loud pulsating roar... unique... a deep pulsating rumble that vibrated the house and made the windows shake... similar to rocket engine noise, but deeper, with evenly timed pulses." I

n addition to providing the first photographs of the distinctive contrail previously reported by many, the significance of this sighting was enhanced by Douglas' reports of intercepts of radio transmissions: "Air-to-air communications... were between an AWACS aircraft with the call sign "Dragnet 51" from Tinker AFB, Oklahoma, and two unknown aircraft using the call signs "Darkstar November" and "Darkstar Mike".

Messages consisted of phonetically transmitted alphanumerics. It is not known whether this radio traffic had any association with the "pulser" that had just flown over Amarillo." ("Darkstar" is also a call sign of AWACS aircraft from a different squadron at Tinker AFB) A month later, radio enthusiasts in California monitoring Edwards AFB Radar (callsign "Joshua Control") heard early morning radio transmissions between Joshua and a high flying aircraft using the callsign "Gaspipe". "You're at 67,000 feet, 81 miles out" was heard, followed by "70 miles out now, 36,000 ft, above glideslope."

As in the past, nothing linked these observations to any particular aircraft or program, but the attribution to the Aurora helped expand the legend. In February of 1994 former Rachel, NV resident and Area 51 enthusiast Chuck Clark claims to have filmed the Aurora taking off from the Groom Lake facility.

In the David Darlington book "Area 51: The Dreamland Chronicles" he says:

I even saw the Aurora take off one night - or an aircraft that matched the Aurora's reputed configuration, a sharp delta with twin tails about a hundred and thirty feet long. It taxied out of a lighted hangar at two-thirty A.M. and used a lot of runway to take off. It had one red light on top, but the minute the wheels left the runway, the light went off and that was the last I saw of it. I didn't hear it because the wind was blowing from behind me toward the base." I asked when this had taken place. "February 1994. Obviously they didn't think anybody was out there. It was thirty below zero - probably ninety below with the wind chill factor. I had hiked into White Sides from a different, harder way than usual, and stayed there two or three days among the rocks, under a camouflage tarp with six layers of clothes on. I had an insulated face mask and two sleeping bags, so I didn't present a heat signature. I videotaped the aircraft through a telescope with a five-hundred-millimeter f4 lens coupled via a C-ring to a high-eight digital video camera with five hundred and twenty scan lines of resolution, which is better than TV."

The author then asked "Where's the tape?" "Locked away. That's a legitimate spyplane; my purpose is not to give away legitimate national defense. When they get ready to unveil it, I'll probably release the tape.

In the controversial claims of Bob Lazar, he states that during his employment at the mysterious S-4 facility in Nevada, he briefly witnessed an Aurora flight while aboard a bus near Groom Lake. He claimed that there was a "tremendous roar" which sounded almost as if "the sky was tearing."

Although Lazar only saw the physical aircraft for a moment through the front of the bus, he described it as being "very large" and having "two huge, square exhausts with vanes in them." Upon speaking with his supervisor, Lazar claims he was informed that the aircraft was indeed an "Aurora," a "high altitude research plane." He was also told that the aircraft was powered by "liquid methane." By 1996 reports associated with the Aurora name dropped off in frequency, suggesting to people who believed that the aircraft existed that it had only ever been a prototype or that it had had a short service life. In 2006, aviation writer Bill Sweetman put together 20 years of examining budget "holes", unexplained sonic booms, along with the Gibson sighting and concluded, "This evidence helps establish the program's initial existence. My investigations continue to turn up evidence that suggests current activity. For example, having spent years sifting through military budgets, tracking untraceable dollars and code names, I learned how to sort out where money was going. This year, when I looked at the Air Force operations budget in detail, I found a $9-billion black hole that seems a perfect fit for a project like Aurora."

EPILOGUE COMING SOON

[Guest Anti Earth]

It's brilliant that you've gone to so much work!

But sadly,

only two of all those chapters,

bring forward new ideas / info that wasn't already discussed in the Old Zombies forum.

(Though how were you to know, anyway?)

Brains!

[brains]

[Guest NukaColaClear]

It's brilliant that you've gone to so much work!

But sadly,

only two of all those chapters,

bring forward new ideas / info that wasn't already discussed in the Old Zombies forum.

(Though how were you to know, anyway?)

Brains!

[brains]

Thanks, and what two chapters are those?

[Guest Anti Earth]

- ShangriLa

- Project Mercury.

Although,

I don't think was ever such a huge compilation of info like this.

Kudos!

[Guest xToodlesmithx]

Thank you so much for posting this, I've been trying to find all this information in one place forever. Thanks man:D

[Guest Blamco177]

This took me a bit to read, I actually printed it out so I could read it on the go.

The information on project mercury is very new to me so thank you for your time and effort.

[brains] for you.

P.s. How long did it take you to write this?

[Guest NukaColaClear]

This took me a bit to read, I actually printed it out so I could read it on the go.

The information on project mercury is very new to me so thank you for your time and effort.

[brains] for you.

P.s. How long did it take you to write this?

It took me about 7 Hours combined. I worked on it whenever I had time. I couldn't do it all at once though, my eyes would fall out of my head. :lol: