Airplanes and ray guns

It is not as simple as you might think.

By nessie

There are any number of reasons why the propaganda machine of the corporate-government complex is glossing over the threat of radio-frequency terrorist weapons and focusing instead on rogue state missiles, suitcase nukes and bio-war. The charitable analysis holds that the powers that be prefer not to put any ideas into the heads of aspiring potential terrorists. This would be a lot more believable if the same propaganda machine didn't constantly complain about the ease with which bomb plans and drug recipes may be found on the Internet. Anybody who ever wished to build a bomb or cook some black-market drugs, but didn't know how, now knows where to find out. The corporate-government complex's mass media monopoly has drummed it into our heads.

As the old adage succinctly states, if you can bake a cake you can build a bomb. It's just not that difficult, nor are ingredients difficult to acquire. The same goes for at least some drugs. It's a sorry fool indeed who cannot manage to nurture a hemp plant to maturity. Methamphetamine can be made from ingredients available at the grocery, drugstore, and hardware. But what about radio-frequency weapons? Are these supposedly high-tech contraptions, like nuclear bombs, beyond the capabilities of the run-of-the-mill, wanna-be terrorist? Do their construction require resources and skills that you, gentle reader, can never hope to acquire? Hardly.

The parts are readily available, and often very cheap. The plans, like those for bombs and drug labs , are only a mouse click away.

Consider the Marx generator. A Marx generator is a clever way of charging a number of capacitors in parallel, then discharging them in series. It was originally developed in 1924. Marx generators are a common way of generating high voltage impulses for testing when the voltage level required is higher than available charging supply voltages. It is often the second half of a HERF gun. To see just how easy it is to learn how to build one, click here, here, here, here and here.

If you want to learn how to build the rest of a HERF gun, you're going to have to research it yourself. I'm not going to help because I don't think you should be doing things like employing radio frequency weapons to commit acts of terrorism. Of course, if you really, really want to do it, my lack of help certainly isn't going to stop you. It's not rocket science. It's not even brain surgery. And as you can see, the necessary information isn't even close to secret. I'm only telling you this much to illustrate the absurdity of believing that mass media's virtual blackout on RF weapons is in any way based on a desire to keep this information out of the wrong hands. Besides, it already is in the wrong hands.

Then there are those mischievous pranksters out there who may be contemplating some non violent use for the HERF gun. You know who I'm talking about. They are the artists who alter billboards and the monkey wrenchers who chainsaw billboards to the ground. It's only a matter of time before some of these folks turn to electronics as away to express themselves. We can only hope that their predilection for non violence stems from a sense of responsibility to the public, and translates to extreme caution and technical competence before they start blasting away.

There are certainly cases in life where vandalism is not only justified, it's required. And art never needs justification. But terrorism is quite another matter, particularly where the lives of working folks are at stake. And remember, even the most sublime prank is no substitute for the planet wide, grass roots organizing that is our only hope for a safe, sane, consensual future.

There is a far more sinister explanation for why we are not being told about the potential terrorist uses for RF weapons. Whether it is the correct explanation remains to be seen, but we must at least consider it. Could RF weapons already have been brought into use by terrorists? If so, could we realistically expect the government to tell us the truth about it?

As we saw last time, it is highly likely that HERF guns have been used for the purpose of extortion. It's too easy to do and the potential profits are too great ignore. We also learned that at least one HERF gun has been definitely used at least once for the purpose of fraud. But what we do not know is how many times (if any) the use of RF weapons has been covered up by blaming what happened on computer glitches, hackers, or wires chewed through by rodents. This is not to say that computer glitches, hackers and rodents never effect our information infrastructure or even the power grid. They do. But that in no way means that HERF guns aren't also part of the picture.

Until some terrorists take credit for it in public, we are unlikely to learn the truth. The problem is simple. The primary reason that people go along with governments, even to the point of working as de facto slaves for several days a week to pay their bills, is so that those governments will protect them. To a certain extent, governments do. Government is, above all else, a protection racket. Governments protect their citizens primarily from other governments. They also at least go through the motions of protecting citizens from criminals, terrorists in particular. Modern technology has placed in criminal and terrorist hands weapons against which there are no defenses. As this gradually sinks in to the public consciousness, people's willingness to pay for protection they aren't receiving will inevitably come into question.

Let's examine one possible use of RF weaponry that fits easily into established terrorist patterns. Can HERF be used as an anti-aircraft weapon? This disturbing possibility has been largely overlooked so far by the virtual cottage industry of conspiracy theorists that has sprung up around such well known but mysterious airline crashes as TWA 800 and Swissair 111.

Whenever any airliner crashes for non obvious reasons, conspiracy theories flood the net. In part this is because a large segment of the population is prudently hesitant to believe the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration, or anyone else who speaks for America's federal government. No one who pays attention to such things is even surprised when the CIA, the FBI, the BATF, the FDA, the IRS, or the DEA discredit themselves. But even the staunchest supporter of America's government must admit it's a pretty sorry state of affairs when we can't even trust the NTSB and the FAA. But, alas, it has come to that.

The government has no one to blame but itself for our dwindling trust. As the old Yankee proverb so succinctly puts it, "Trick me once, shame on you. Trick me twice, shame on me." Only the most fanatic, ill informed and intellectually challenged still give the official version of any event the benefit of the doubt whatsoever. These days smart folks look deeper.

This was not always the case. Distrust of official pronouncements was once the near exclusive purview of political extremists, paranoid schizophrenics, and anarchists. These days, virtually anything that happens in the media for non obvious reasons sparks a frenzy of citizen doubt and detective work. Airline crashes in particular capture the public imagination. The sheer horror of ordinary people dying in mass strikes home in way that no single death, not even the public murder of a celebrity, can. Add to that the government's well documented history of one bogus pronouncement after another, and even the slightest discrepancy can take on enormous proportion.

See for yourself. Sit sown some evening and ask your favorite search engine about TWA 800 , or even Swissair 111. Fix a little sandwich and brew a pot of coffee first, though, and don't plan on getting to bed too early. Don't expect any help from me, either. Sorry, but I have no idea what brought down those planes. Unlike some people, I'm willing to admit it. I'm not about to endorse some extant theory. Nor am I about to make a case for either plane having been brought down by terrorists wielding some Buck Rogers style ray gun, either.

I do find it extremely interesting, however, that electromagnetic interference has played so small a role in the panoply of possible explanations that have been put forth. I had rather expected more of the independent research community. We are generally known for doing our homework. Perhaps some of us have become overly preoccupied with the conspiratorial machinations of the overlapping cabals that populate the world's parapolitical landscape. But it's not all about plotters and backstabbers, corruption and cover-ups. It's also about the technology at the disposal of the welter of cabals that pull our strings. Cloaks and daggers went out with the bustle and buggy whip. This is not to say that back room deals and dirty tricks are no longer the backbone of the nation state. Clearly they are. But technological innovation has been opened up the range of possibilities to a degree that was scarcely conceivable to conspiracy buffs of even a generation or two ago.

Even accidental EM interference can be deadly to a plane in flight. The FAA is certainly aware of the danger. Their training course for personnel who will be involved in managing, planning design, executing high energy radio frequency (HERF), testing, analysis, and certification lasts eighteen hours. We who seek the truth would behoove ourselves to at spend least that much time learning the subject. It wouldn't hurt read up of related topics, either.

TWA 800 and Swissair 111 are by no means the only air crashes that have drawn widespread suspicion. But they easily rank with Amelia Earhart and Pan Am 103 when it comes to the variety of explanations that have been proffered. Bombs, missiles, lasers, even space debris have been considered. Even passenger lists draw attention. Conspiratorially inclined AIDS dissidents note that Dr. Jonathan Mann, who became known as the outspoken head of the World Health Organization's AIDS program when the disease exploded in the 1980s, was among the 229 people killed in the crash of Swissair 111. So was his wife, Mary-Lou Clements-Mann, also was a noted AIDS researcher who taught at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. She was working on developing AIDS vaccines. Coincidence? Probably, but in today's world, we can never be entirely sure. Billions of dollars in pharmaceutical patent license fees are a tempting motive, and life is notoriously cheap. It takes more than a motive to make a solid murder case. But a motive is enough to raise some suspicions.

TWA 800 is an even bigger can of worms. The shear number of eye witnesses makes a substantial case for some kind of missile strike. This is not to say that we should always believe an eyewitness. Far from it. But there are a great deal many more eye witnesses than it would take to indict you or me for any crime. And if it were a missile, what was it doing there? Two of the most likely explanations are an intentional launch, probably by terrorists, and an accident, probably in the course of military maneuvers. These are also two of the least likely explanations to generate a straight story by the government. If it was terrorists, did they get the missiles from the CIA? We know the CIA armed the Afghan mujahadeen with Stingers. Many are still unaccounted for. The altitude of the TWA 800 explosion rules out Stingers as a possible cause, but we can't help but wonder what other kinds of missiles that our tax money has paid to place in terrorist hands. Just because we haven't heard about it yet doesn't mean it hasn't happened.

If it was the military who was responsible for the missile, a particular individual gave the order. Independent investigators have a better chance of finding Jimmy Hoffa's body than they do of learning this officer's name. And that's if he exists at all. Anybody who doubts the ability of the government, particularly the military, to keep a secret for a very long time, would do well to read up on the history of the Manhattan Project.

But the big question is why, after all these years, people are still asking these kinds of questions. The answer is simple. Consider the source. Besides, questioning the government is the very essence of democracy at work. It's more than a right. It's a duty. To accept the government's word without question is to refuse to participate in the democratic process. Without our direct participation there is no democracy.

Which brings us to philosopher Elaine Scarry. She is not generally known as a conspiracy theorist. She is the author of On Beauty and Being Just. She recently received the Truman Capote Prize for Dreaming by the Book. She teaches at Harvard, where she is completing a study of war and the social contract. Writing in the September 21, 2000 issue of the New York Review of Books, Scarry raises some questions about electromagnetic interference that the NTSB really should answer. Don't hold your breath.

In two years and two months that separates the TWA 800 and Swissair 111 accidents close to 18 million airplanes took off from American airports Two of those 18 million departures led to an apparent electrical catastrophe. Those two flights could have originated from two different airports anywhere in the country. But as it happens, both planes took off from a single airport, JFK. They could have taken off on any two days of the week and at any two minutes of the day. But as it happens, both took off on a Wednesday at 8:19 PM. Coincidence? Perhaps. But at the very least it merits further research.

The literature on electromagnetic interference is full of stories about unwanted electrical upsets that recur in the same space at the same time. Scarry cites one example, a company that found that its computers crashed every Friday at 3:00 PM. The cause turned out to be a piece of mowing equipment that was turned on at 3:00 PM each Friday during the summer. When electromagnetic interference happens only a single time, it often remains an unsolved mystery. Electromagnetic interference problems that recur irregularly and/or in widely separate locations are also notoriously difficult to solve. But when the event recurs at an exact time and place, it may become clear that, as in the case of the computer and the mowing machine, the problem is arising from something outside, something on a regular enough schedule, that its responsibility can eventually be tracked down.

According to Scarry, TWA 800 and Swissair 111 share at least five features:

(1) a grave electrical accident, (2) a so far indecipherable cause, (3) a takeoff from the same airport and a route across the same geography, (4) a takeoff on the same minute of the day and day of the week, and (5) the malfunctioning of its radios beginning at almost the same time (somewhere in the three-minute interval between 8:31 and 8:34).

Consider also that on the night when TWA 800 fell, a Navy P3, flying out of Brunswick, Maine, had crossed the plane's path fifteen seconds before TWA 800 lost its transponder, voice recorder, and data recorder. Though it had a safe flight, the P3 reported on its return that it lost the use of various pieces of electrical equipment during the flight.

Are these a set of interesting but ultimately insignificant coincidences, asks Scarry, or are they instead features that together might expose the cause of the accidents? Perhaps the route is a clue. Any plane on its way from JFK to northern Europe must thread its way through a maze of military warning zones. The boundaries of each zone are marked on aviation maps. They are labeled with the letter "W" followed by a number. Where the map has room, a printed sentence appears inside the zone: "Warning: National Defense Operations Area, Operations hazardous to the flight of aircraft conducted within this area."

Any number of "operations hazardous to the flight of aircraft" come to mind. Electromagnetic weaponry is by no means the only possibility, far from it. My best guess is that, if anything, Scarry's revelations seem to suggest otherwise. Something more like case of the computer and the mowing machine seems to be what we are looking at here. A more paranoid mind might suggest it was an act of foul play timed to look like one. I don't think so. But I'm guessing, and so are most of the pundits out there.

There is one virtual certainty about these cases, though. You are highly unlikely to learn the truth from the NTSB, the FAA, or any branch of the military. If you want the truth, you're going to have to work for it. Study every scrap of evidence dredged up by the ordinary citizen sleuths who have flocked to the cause. Better still, you should join them. File Freedom of Information Act requests. Debrief witnesses. Study the pictorial record. Learn the technology. Don't let these cases die.

But before you go any further, you should consider the long historical background of electromagnetic interference with flight, especially in and around the New York area. It goes back quite a while. As you may recall, the Denver Post, on May 26, 1935, on Page one reported:

Airplane pilots making flight in this vicinity have asked the department of commerce to investigate a supposed radio-ray device which they believe stops the motors of airplanes passing over New York city.

The airplanes, flying over the central part of Manhattan, have had mysterious troubles with their engines during the last few months. As a result, belief is spreading in aeronautical circles here that some short-wave experimenter has developed a "Z-ray" which interferes with the workings of airplane motors at which it is aimed.

A peculiar thing about the occurrences is that the planes' motors simply "go dead" without apparent cause, and when they are examined later, it is seldom possible to determine what was wrong. Twice, however, electrical parts have been found to be burned out, as if by a heavy current of electricity.

Several times disasters have narrowly been avoided . . .

Which brings us to Nicola Tesla's so-called "death ray." But that's another story. Stay tuned.

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Copyright © 2000 San Francisco Bay Guardian.