Some say that people went to Mars in 1903. Certainly fun to talk about, I think it deserves serious consideration. Especially when looking at an alternate line of human technological development, in spite of what traditional history teaches us. The claim is that human beings flew to Mars the same year the Wrights tossed their motor glider across a beach.
Sean Casteel’s Nikola Tesla’s Journey To Mars: Are We Already There? (Global/Beckley, 2002) poses the titular question. Did it happen? In an interview with Tim Swartz that is presented in the book, Casteel discusses his personal interest with the Tesla association to Mars which, Casteel first learned about in 1973. Admitting that it sounded farfetched at the time, Casteel was a journalist for a local TV station then and ended up getting an interview with the guest speaker: J. Allen Hynek for the opening of a Project Blue Book exhibit in the US Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio. Hynek told him about US Air Force files on Nikola Tesla’s attempt to send a spacecraft to Mars, a project financed by wealthy investors. Allegedly these were the same people responsible for the 1890s airship sightings. This was, Hynek added, one of the reasons Tesla’s papers were confiscated by agents of the US government upon his death. Casteel was intrigued.
Sources curiously attributed the mid-19th Century airship development, including that of the Sonora Aero Club, to information provided through spirit mediums, channeled from a source on Mars. The problem is that Charles Dellschau, the original and only real source on this issue of the Sonora Aero Club, says nothing about spiritism or Ouija boards being involved. On the contrary, Dellschau’s claims are firmly in the materially technological realm, whether you accept them as fact or not. Was Casteel’s source the product of a ridiculous cover story put out at the time by the airship builders themselves? I don’t know, but I think Casteel was onto something. The next part of Casteel learned of Tesla’s research in receiving intelligent signals via a low-frequency radio receiver in his Colorado Springs lab. Here is what Tesla said in a March 1901 article from Collier’s Weekly:
“As I was improving my machines for the production of intense electrical actions, I was also perfecting the means for observing feeble efforts. One of the most interesting results, and also one of great practical importance, was the development of certain contrivances for indicating at a distance of many hundred miles an approaching storm, its direction, speed and distance traveled….
“It was in carrying on this work that for the first time I discovered those mysterious effects which have elicited such unusual interest. I had perfected the apparatus referred to so far that from my laboratory in the Colorado mountains I could feel the pulse of the globe, as it were, noting every electrical change that occurred within a radius of eleven hundred miles.
“I can never forget the first sensations I experienced when it dawned upon me that I had observed something possibly of incalculable consequences to mankind. I felt as though I were present at the birth of a new knowledge or the revelation of a great truth….
“My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night; but at that time the idea of these disturbances being intelligently controlled signals did not yet present itself to me. The changes I noted were taking place periodically and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause known to me. I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis, and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes. The nature of my experiments precluded the possibility of the changes being produced by atmospheric disturbances, as has been rashly asserted by some. It was sometime afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another. A purpose was behind these electrical signals….”
It is from this that the apocryphal story that Tesla received signals from Mars has likely been drawn. But look closely at what Tesla said:
“…the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental.”
Tesla suspected these ‘disturbances’ were signals created by an intelligent source, but he could not translate them and he was convinced they were consciously sent. Only his later comment about ‘greeting from one planet to another’ refers to any possibility of an extraterrestrial source – and this is a reflection made after much rumination following the radio incident in the lab. But the leap to signals sent by Martains based on that comment, though popular, is pure assumption.
Is there an alternative possibility?
Read Origin: The Nineteenth Century Emergence of the 20th Century Breakaway Civilizations by Walter Bosley available here.