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New York: I boarded a plane to Boston to find Doctor John Trump of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Doctor Trump, now retired from High Voltage Engineering, agreed to meet at the company office the next morning.
Carl T. Compton, then president of MIT, asked me in 1943 to go to New York and examine the effects of Nikola Tesla. These were contained in an upper floor of a warehouse in New York City. I spent time examining papers, books, and memorials Tesla had accumulated, searching for evidence of a secret weapon of concern to the United States. I found letters directed at the upper echelons of the British Empire and to the czar of Russia, explaining that Tesla was the inventor of a secret weapon and that he would be interested in negotiating a disclosure. I looked for the nature of the secret weapon and, while I had an idea of its properties, I did not find in Tesla’s technical papers an explanation of how such a device could operate. It had the capability of acting at a great distance and being destructive to flying objects at a remote location.
I also opened another box, supposedly a secret weapon Tesla left at a hotel. When I concluded my study, one of the agents reminded me there was a box held as security for an unpaid obligation, an item of considerable value that might itself be the secret weapon. We went to the hotel, the assistant manager led us to a room containing a steel cabinet. The cabinet was opened, revealing a rectangular box wrapped in brown paper on a lower shelf. It turned out to be a highly polished box with brass clasps, resembling an instrument case, kept there for about five years as security. I opened it; it was a decade resistance box, manufactured by an American maker, of value but not of great significance or ominous nature.
So, after Tesla let the world know of his secret weapon and wrote letters to the King of England and to the Tsar of Russia offering them this weapon during World War II, no evidence or papers referred to any such secret weapon.
My report to Compton was that I saw no danger in releasing these papers and relics to Tesla’s heirs. Miss Musar arrived too late to know who opened Tesla’s safe or what had been removed. Tesla had been a naturalized American citizen for fifty-four years, so why were his papers seized by agents of the custodian of alien property? I suspect that governments other than the United States, England, and Russia were interested in Tesla’s inventions.