Tesla's wireless energy transmission system was initially based upon technology for sending power through the air, but he soon developed a far more efficient transmission medium: the ground. In a series of experiments in Colorado, Tesla showed that the earth could be adapted from its customary role as an energy sinkhole — a place to dump excess electricity — into a powerful conductor; a giant planetwide energy transmission system that obviated the need for wires.
Tesla died penniless in 1943, mumbling to the end about fantastic beam weapons that could blast aircraft from the skies or be bounced off the ionosphere to strike at targets anywhere on the globe. One of the wilder theories that still cling to his memory revolves around a supposed experiment to beam some kind of message to the Arctic explorer Robert Peary, who in mid-1908 was making an attempt to reach the North Pole. According to legend, Tesla, who had built a powerful transmitter at Wardencliff on Long Island, beamed the "message" on June 30 and awaited news from Peary. The explorer saw nothing, but thousands of miles away, in a remote corner of Siberia, a massive explosion equivalent to 15 megatons of TNT devastated 500,000 acres of land centered on a place called Tunguska.
The Tunguska "incident" is generally ascribed to the impact of a comet fragment or a meteorite, but the absence of evidence for the impact theory has enabled Tesla proponents to maintain the line that it was Tesla's "death ray" that caused the blast. Certainly, Tesla himself seemed to believe he was responsible, for immediately afterward he dismantled the "weapon" and reverted to other pursuits.
What Tesla and Hutchison shared was a complete sense of ease at being around electricity. Tesla, for example, knew it was perfectly safe to pass high voltages through his own body, provided the current was kept low. Using himself as a conductor, he would stage dramatic demonstrations aimed at validating the safety of AC power. In one of them, he would hold a wire from a Tesla Coil in one hand while drawing a spark from the fingers of the other to light a lamp. The newspapers of the day would frequently run photographs of him in morning dress, his whole body alive with sparks. It must have seemed like magic, but was nothing more than straightforward evidence of Tesla's deep-seated feel for his subject.
It was the same with Hutchison. By the age of 15, he had already assembled his own laboratory, cramming it with Tesla machines he had constructed himself; signal generation equipment, static generators and a uranium source housed in a copper tube that used a magnetron pulsed by an old rotary spark plug system to transmit microwaves. During the 1970s, Hutchison set up shop in a bigger, more sophisticated laboratory in the basement of a house in Lynn Valley, North Vancouver, which contained racks full of signal generators, low-power radar systems and phasing equipment coupled to refinements of his earlier devices.
One evening in 1979, Hutchison was in his laboratory, sitting amid the sparks and high voltage effects of his equipment, when he was struck on the shoulder by a piece of metal. He threw it back and it hit him again. This was the ignominious beginning of the Hutchison Effect. In the ensuing months, Hutchison found that by tweaking the settings on the equipment, he could get things — ordinary household objects — to levitate, move horizontally, bend, break and even explode. In the latter case, this portion of the effect came to be known as "disruption."
In 1980, Hutchison went into partnership with a company called Pharos Technologies, which had been formed by Hathaway and the South African Pezarro. Pharos Technologies was designed exclusively to promote the Hutchison Effect, which in these early days was billed as a "lift and disruption" system. This, however, barely begins to describe some of the extraordinary phenomena Hutchison was manifesting in his Lynn Valley basement.
Using only tiny amounts of power — between 400 and 4,000 watts via a 110 AC wall socket — Hutchison found he could raise any kind of material — sheet metal, wood, styrofoam, lead, copper, zinc … whatever — from a few ounces to a hundred pounds in weight at distances of up to 80 feet. From a physics standpoint, it was meant to be impossible, of course, but Hutchison was doing it — regularly, if not exactly on demand. Nine times out often, nothing would happen. The rest of the time it was like a bad day on the set of the film Poltergeist', objects rising slowly from the area of influence in the center of the equipment and looping back somewhere else; or shooting skyward in a powerful ballistic arc and striking the ceiling, kicked there by a massive energy impulse; or simply levitating and hovering, continuously, for ages.
What was more, Hathaway said, it had been captured on hours of film and videotape and had been demonstrated in front of hundreds of witnesses.
As for what might be producing the Effect, there were many theories. Some said that it was triggered by opposing electromagnetic fields that canceled each other out, creating a powerful flow of zero-point energy to any object in the zone of influence; others that Hutchison was causing electromagnetic fields to spin or swirl in some unknown way and that this was the trigger for lévitation — shades of the torsion fields generated by Schauberger, Podkletnov and the Bell. Another camp maintained that Hutchison was generating the Effect himself by psychokinesis.
What was interesting, Hathaway said, was that Hutchison himself did not know what caused it and he had no control over it once it started. Sometimes the Effect produced lévitation, sometimes it caused objects to shred, tear apart or evaporate; other times, it would cause transmutation — the alteration of an object's molecular composition; Hutchison, like an alchemist, could change one metal into another. "You're shitting me," I said. But Hathaway shook his head. "John's a wild and crazy guy. He lives in his own world and he can't readily express what he's doing in terms an engineer or a physicist might always understand. You should go see him, no question." He paused, then added: "A visit to John is definitely a once-in-a-lifetime thing."
As the Canadian Airlines A320 tracked westward above the Great Lakes, I sat alone at the back of the aircraft, my mind still beset by doubts, in spite of Hathaway's no-nonsense assessment of the man I was about to meet.
The one thing that kept me going was the germ of a mystery rooted in some hard, incontrovertible fact I'd managed to glean separately from Hutchison and Hathaway: in 1983, a Pentagon team spent money on Hutchison — tens of thousands of dollars over a period of several months — analyzing the Effect.
In promoting Hutchison's technology to potential investors — people to exploit its potential as a propulsion or "disruption" system— Hathaway and Pezarro had come into contact with a unit inside the Pentagon that was prepared to take their claims at face value.
Led by Col. John B. Alexander of the U.S. Army's Intelligence and Security Command, INSCOM, the team put up money to move Hutchison's cramped lab at Lynn Valley to a large empty warehouse on the edge of North Vancouver.
The facility was set up under tight security and anything pertaining to it was classified.
The "INSCOM group" tasked with analyzing the Hutchison Effect comprised five people besides Hutchison, Hathaway and Pezarro — two scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory, a representative of the Office of Naval Research, an Army R&D specialist and Alexander himself.
The presence of the Los Alamos and ONR representatives appeared to be significant, since both of these organizations were driving forces behind the Strategic Defense Initiative. SDI—"Star Wars," as it had been dubbed by the media — had been the brainchild of Ronald Reagan's science advisers and Reagan had hawked it to the rooftops as the be-all and end-all arms program of his presidency: a space-based ring of steel comprising sensors, laser weaponry and missiles that would protect the United States from an all-out nuclear strike by the Soviets.