NIKOLA TESLA – WIZARD AT WAR

Interview with Tesla biographer Marc J. Seifer

Author Marc J. Seifer shares his views on Nikola Tesla and discusses his latest book, Tesla: Wizard at War, upcoming projects, and his opinion that Tesla left us the technological means to counter Fukushima-level nuclear disasters and Covid-19.

Interview by Arthur Shattuck O’Keefe 

Originally published in the January-February 2022 issue of New Dawn Magazine. (This is the original text of the interview, and varies slightly from the version published in the magazine, which is print only. Links have been added here by the interviewer.)

Marc J. Seifer established himself as an authority on iconic Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla with the publication of Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla. He has also written on topics such as a true-life murder mystery, handwriting analysis, and expanded states of consciousness, as well as several novels. His new Tesla volume, Tesla: Wizard at War, is out as an audio book by Tantor Audio, narrated by Simon Vance, with hardback and Kindle editions scheduled for release in June 2022.

Arthur Shattuck O’Keefe (ASO’K): Thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Could you start by telling me how you first got interested in exploring the life of Nikola Tesla?

Marc J. Seifer (MJS): I was working on an article in the New York Public Library about Avatars, for ESP Magazine. Avatars are enlightened beings who help advance the species, and I came upon a book about three of them. One was Jesus, another was a so-called Tibetan lama named Lobsang Rampa and a third was about a man I had never heard of, Nikola Tesla. The year was 1976. The chapter on Tesla said that he was born on the planet Venus and that he descended to the Earth in 1856 in the mountains of Croatia, and arrived here to give humans such inventions as the induction motor, the hydroelectric AC power system, fluorescent and neon lights, remote control, artificial intelligence and robotics, and his name was Nikola Tesla. I thought this was absurd because if such a man had lived, surely I would have heard of him.

When I got back to Rhode Island, the magazine editor, Howard Smukler said, “Oh Tesla, here’s a few books on him.” One of the books was the biography Prodigal Genius by John O’Neill, written in 1944. O’Neill knew Tesla for 40 years. On my own, I got a book of his patents, which was actually only available through a UFO organization, and once I saw the patents I knew I was sitting on a huge story. The O’Neill bio was great, but it had many missing parts, so I set out to fill in the gaps. I also made Tesla the subject of my doctoral dissertation, to explain how this man who did so much could disappear from the history books. Again, this was in the late 1970s to mid 1980s, when Tesla was a very obscure individual.

Even today, many kids think Tesla is just a car. They don’t know it’s based on an inventor.  

ASO’K: I find the idea of Nikola Tesla being from another planet a bit difficult to accept, though on paranormal topics generally I try to balance skepticism with an open mind. As for your own view, do you consider Tesla to have been an Avatar, in this sense of the word? In Hinduism, it means (though I may be oversimplifying it) a god appearing on earth as a physical manifestation, which is more or less the conviction of committed Christians regarding Jesus.

MJS: Yes, in the sense that he was an enlightened being, one way or another, who appeared among us with important information, one thing being that he had the solution to dealing with the inefficiency of DC generators by inventing a hydroelectric power system that ran on the more efficient AC, which is renewable energy and non-polluting. He brought a Utopian dream of, in Tesla’s words, harnessing the wheelwork of the universe for the service of mankind.

Naturally, I do not believe he was from another planet. He was a Serb with a normal mother and father, born in Croatia. 

ASO’K: Could you tell me something about your new Tesla biography, Tesla: Wizard at War? 

MJS: In 2017, I starred in the History Channel 5-part series titled The Tesla Files. The show was about Tesla’s missing files. When he died in 1943, which was during the height of World War II, the US Government sat on his files for 10 years before handing the estate over to Tesla’s nephew, Sava Kasanovic, who was also the ambassador from Yugoslavia. At that time, Yugoslavia was a communist country, and Tesla’s work had military applications. 

I studied many of Tesla’s secret files, and we uncovered some others from the CIA, FBI, and also the OSS and so I thought I’d expand this research and cover it in a new book about Tesla’s link to three wars: In 1898, the Spanish American War, when Tesla unveiled his remote controlled robotic boat, the world’s first submersible drone; in 1914-1918, World War I, when Tesla was working with the German wireless company Telefunken; and World War II, when Tesla was actually negotiating with the Russian, British, and US Governments on his top secret particle beam weapon. The book covers much new material about all three wars and Tesla’s connection to each of them.

One big discovery was that FDR, who was President of the USA during World War II, wanted to meet with Tesla. The big concern during WWII was that the Germans would build a nuclear bomb before the Americans did. But there was another advanced weapon, Tesla’s particle beam weapon, and I uncover that a lot of the scientists working on the bomb were also well aware of Tesla’s top secret work on what was also called the Death Ray. It is a lot of very exciting material. I cover a little of it in a video which you can see on Amazon alongside the book. 

ASO’K: Regarding secret files, I assume you mean they were formerly secret, but have since been declassified?

MJS: Not totally. For example, there’s one article on Tesla’s particle beam weapon which, I believe, is still classified. The government never officially released it, yet they also sent it to Belgrade in the early 1950s as part of Tesla’s estate. It’s the article everyone was trying to locate, in my case by using the Freedom of Information Act from 1976 to 1984, when Andrija Puharich unveiled it at the First International Tesla Society meeting held in Colorado Springs, where I was also a speaker. But yes, many other papers were declassified. 

ASO’K: Opinions on Tesla tend to be highly divided, in particular regarding his accomplishments versus those of Thomas Edison. I get the impression that some writers view admiration of Tesla and condemnation of Edison as mutually inclusive, or vice versa. Others have attempted what they apparently see as a more balanced approach. How would you summarize the legacy of each man?

MJS: In my new book Tesla: Wizard at War, I cover much new material about Tesla’s relationship with Edison as I uncover the correspondence between these two men throughout their lives. In general, Tesla saw Edison as a trial and error guy, whereas Tesla worked out everything mathematically. Tesla felt in general that Edison was able to build better mousetraps than anyone else. Edison built the best lightbulb, the best talking machine, and the best motion picture camera, but Edison was not the original inventor of any of these. Tesla, on the other hand saw himself as the discoverer of new principles such as the rotating magnetic field, which lay at the basis of the induction motor and what today we call the electric grid. This invention allowed electricity for the first time ever to be transported efficiently over long distances. Before Tesla, electricity could only be transported about a mile for lighting only, with power dropping off over distance. After Tesla, from one power source, such as Niagara Falls, the Tesla hydroelectric power system could literally power the entire Northeast. It was a quantum leap in technology ushering us into the Modern Age. I don’t completely agree with Tesla. I think Edison’s invention of the phonograph was amazing, even if he was not the very first to obtain sound through that vibrational process. 

ASO’K: I’ve written a novel featuring Aleister Crowley and Nikola Tesla as protagonists, and I naturally disclaim any definitive depiction of their real-life counterparts. Despite the license afforded fiction writers in making use of historical figures, do you ever take issue at the way Tesla has been depicted in novels, comics, and movies? (And as a novelist yourself, have you ever thought about using Tesla as a main character?) 

MJS: I have a screenplay which covers Tesla’s life as a great epic drama ala Lawrence of Arabia, Out of Africa or Doctor Zhivago. With my partner Tim Eaton, a visual effects editor who worked on many movies for George Lucas at ILM (Back to the Future, Field of Dreams, Galaxy Quest, Forrest Gump, Titanic and many others) we have also expanded the screenplay into a long-form limited series, something like Downton Abbey or The Crown. The key here is that Tesla’s real story is more amazing than any work of fiction, so what we attempted to do was to recapture exactly what happened with Tesla, although of course this is a film and we did take a few artistic liberties. However, much of the dialog comes from Tesla’s actual correspondence. Our screenplay comes very close to what really happened. 

I liked The Prestige, but I also thought that David Bowie was too understated when he played Tesla. I’d make Tesla bigger than life. I give as an example in the show Seinfeld, the Kramer character. He steals every scene and I think if I had made The Prestige, I would have asked Michael Richards or Christopher Lloyd, who played Doc Brown in Back to the Future, to play Tesla. Bowie was an incredible character and an amazing singer, but I think he was afraid to really let himself go in the part, and I think he should have. Tesla is a bit of the mad scientist and Bowie played him much too staid. 

ASO’K: If Tesla were alive today, able to use the present level of science, technology, and infrastructure, what sort of projects do you imagine he might be working on? (For example, SETI comes to mind; in Wizard you devote one chapter to Tesla’s speculations about intelligent life on Mars.)

MJS: Tesla invented the hydroelectric power system, which because it was renewable and non-polluting was a scheme that worked within nature and thus it didn’t sap the Earth of its natural elements. Look at what happened in Japan when a tsunami hit their nuclear power plants. Japan sits on volcanoes — Tesla was into geothermal energy as well, and harnessing wind and solar energy. That’s the way Japan should have gone and they would not have had that catastrophe at Fukushima. 

Tesla would have expanded on avenues in delivering wireless power. He would also have been interested in sending impulses to distant planets. 

Tesla was wrong about Einstein’s theories. He died before the atom bomb was exploded. Had he lived, he would have had to rethink his understanding of the ether, or the fundamental structure of space. I get into this, which is linked to Tesla’s so-called “Dynamic Theory of Gravity,” in the last chapter of Tesla: Wizard at War. 

I think he would have done more study on the ether, and what is called the God particle, the particle that gives matter its mass, and he would have explored hyperspace and the tachyonic, or faster than light, realm. 

ASO’K: Tesla was famously germophobic. How do you think he would have dealt with the recent coronavirus pandemic? 

MJS: Tesla invented an ozone generator, which ozone therapists use today to kill viruses. Ozone therapy involves the injection of about 97% pure oxygen and 3% ozone into the bloodstream. It’s a medical procedure that is well over 100 years old. Unfortunately, the FDA and the FTC are against it, stating that “Ozone is a toxic gas with no known useful medical application.” This is a false premise that is easily dismissed.  

ASO’K: Do you mean to say that ozone itself is not toxic, or that its toxicity (in the opinion of doctors who use it) is not a valid reason to dismiss it as a treatment? For example, chemotherapy has toxic side-effects, but is still used to treat cancer.

MJS: Ozone alone, if injected would indeed be toxic. But that is not what medical doctors who use ozone therapy do. They inject a mixture of pure oxygen and a very small amount of ozone into the bloodstream, or into blood that is removed from the patient and then reintroduced into the bloodstream. The ratio is about 30 to one. What we call “Ozone Therapy” is really “Oxygen-Ozone Therapy,” with, as mentioned above about 97% of the mixture being oxygen and only 3% being ozone.  

In fact, my new book Covid’s Achilles Heel: A Rational Pathway Out of Any Pandemic (Inner Traditions Publishers) will not only cover the history of ozone therapy going back more than 100 years, it will also establish that the FDA and FTC are directly responsible for this pandemic. [Interviewer’s note: The book was released in March 2023 under the title Ozone Therapy for the Treatment of Viruses: The Science and Promise of Healing with Ozone.] It has long been known that ozone therapy kills viruses. I’m all for the vaccine, but what has occurred is that the FDA has blocked medical doctors from advertising on their websites through the FTC sending them warning letters to not claim that they could treat Covid with ozone therapy! Further, although terrific for what they do, vaccines are useless when it comes to treating patients suffering with Covid. Vaccines are only given to healthy individuals, ozone therapy can treat those that are Covid-positive including patients suffering in ICUs.

I’ve seen the warning letters sent to medical doctors who are also ozone therapists by the FTC. This censorship is what has prevented ozone therapists from getting the recognition they deserve for using a perfectly safe treatment that is known to kill viruses. And unfortunately, the major newspapers have caved to the FDA and have refused to report key developments: In 2001, chemist Paul Wentworth, Ph.D. from the Scripps Research Institute, discovered that our own antibodies manufacture ozone for the express purpose of disabling bacteria and viruses.

Numerous medical doctors throughout the world have reported that ozone therapy will kill the Covid virus. A report on this from Rhian King in The Ibizan has not been picked up by the AP, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, TIME, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe or The Providence Journal. How do I know? Because I sent this report to them multiple times. Just google it and you will not find this information in these newspapers. It is the greatest blunder in the history of newspaper reporting. I also sent this to 60 Minutes and every TV talking head you can think of including Lester Holt, Norah O’Donnell, Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, Wolf Blitzer, Chris Wallace, Jake Tapper, Andrea Mitchell, Rachel Maddow, etc. and none of them have picked up on it. The FDA has scared them but the evidence, when you look at it, is overwhelming that ozone therapy will indeed disable this Covid virus. Tesla’s invention of the ozone generator establishes that he is one of the forefathers of ozone therapy. 

Regarding the report in The Ibizan, note the date: April 8, 2020. Dr. Alberto Hernandez reports that instead of putting his Covid patients on ventilators, he gave them just a few sessions of ozone therapy and “the results have been spectacular!”

But Dr. Hernandez did not stop there. Working with four other medical doctors, they chose 18 Covid patients and split them into two random groups of 9. The 9 who got ozone therapy were out of the hospital on average of 7 days as compared to 28 days for the control group. For anybody who knows statistics, this study is statistically significant, and really it speaks for itself.

Please tell me why The New York Times and all the other outlets mentioned above did not jump on this information? A cure for killing the Covid virus exists, and one of the key reasons is Nikola Tesla.

ASO’K: My impression is that advocating ozone as a Covid-19 therapy, per se, is not officially deemed full-blown “misinformation,” as there is Facebook and YouTube content on it (i.e. not taken down), including statements by physicians who approve of it. I guess US authorities draw the line on actually offering certain ozone treatments. Though I can’t claim to have a clear position on all this, I think the dichotomy on ozone between different countries’ medical authorities (e.g. the US versus Italy) goes back decades. I recall that in the early 90s, some people were advocating it as a cure for HIV/AIDS.

MJS: You have to ask yourself why they didn’t even try it, when literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people are dying on ventilators. They blackballed ozone therapy because it is indeed a cure. It’s a huge threat to Big Pharma. That’s really what it’s all about.  And yes, there was some success in treating AIDS patients. Ozone therapy will also disable all mutations of the coronavirus.

ASO’K: As a Nikola Tesla biographer, what would you say is the most common misconception about Tesla?

MJS: People think that Tesla was a loner, that he was unhappy and that the last years of his life were unproductive. All of this is untrue. Tesla had a great sense of humor, he was hip, his friends were major historical leaders in their own right. He was close friends with Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, John Muir, architect Stanford White (designer of the original Madison Square Garden and the magnificent capitol in Providence, Rhode Island who designed his wireless lab and tower, Wardenclyffe), John Jacob Astor, owner of the Waldorf Astoria where he lived, Robert Johnson, editor of The Century Magazine and his wife Katharine, J.P. Morgan and his daughter Anne Morgan, playwright Marguerite Merrington, George Westinghouse, John Hays Hammond Jr., and many others. I cover this in Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla. 

In Tesla: Wizard at War, I uncover that he was very active all the way through his 80s. As World War II came closer, Tesla negotiated with the heads of secret weapons development for Canada and the British Empire. He was in contact with Joseph Stalin’s right hand men, when Russia was neutral, and he also worked with American Military Intelligence in the run-up to the war to try and get them to build his particle beam weapon. These were the very highest echelons of power, including FDR himself.

ASO’K: What are your plans after Wizard at War?

MJS: I have several projects, including my upcoming book I mentioned on the Covid pandemic and ozone therapy, and perhaps a third book on Tesla and Wardenclyffe.

I would also recommend my novels which, although fiction are based to a great extent on fact. Rasputin’s Nephew is a parapsychology spy novel which reflects a lot of the ESP research that was done in the last quarter of the 20th century working with super-psychics. Doppelganger is a World War I drama about the development of flight, as we follow the Maxwells, a German Jewish family creating an airline in an anti-Semitic environment. I cover a lot about the Red Baron and what it was like to fly for the Kaiser during the Great War. Crystal Night continues the story of the Maxwells as they struggle to keep their airline afloat during the run up to WWII. As they are Jewish, obviously, this was a terrible challenge! In the book I give a new view on the so-called Miracle at Dunkirk, explaining how Hitler took over France in a matter of weeks, and also a very different look at Claus von Stauffenberg, the guy who tried to assassinate Hitler. Claus’s sister-in-law, Melitta von Stauffenberg, was actually a test pilot for Herman Goering’s Luftwaffe! As it turns out, she was actually Jewish through her grandfather! 

The latter two books also follow a modern story by ace reporter Rudy Styne, who is the protagonist in all 4 novels. In these two he is on the trail of a major computer hacker, and runs into his doppelganger in Germany, and quickly finds out that this look-alike might help him find his true roots, because he discovers he is not biologically related to the lady that raised him and that will tie Rudy Styne to the back story. 

Fate Line is a graphology murder mystery, also starring ace reporter Rudy Styne.

ASO’K: Speaking of working with super-psychics in the 20th century, Robert A. Monroe, famous for seeking empirical evidence for the out of body experience (aka astral projection) was apparently connected with the US government’s Stargate Project, in which military applications of alleged psychic powers were investigated. I’ve often thought Monroe would be interesting to portray in fiction. Maybe you could put him in a future novel?

MJS: Great idea. A funny story about that: I’m in an apartment, and the bad guys are after me, and I run out to the fire escape and go up a bunch of stairs and they keep coming after me. At that point I realize that I’m dreaming, so it’s a lucid dream, and so I say to myself, “Well since I’m dreaming, why don’t I just jump and escape?” But I was too afraid that I might break my ankle, so I figured out another way to get out of there.

ASO’K: How did you escape? 

MJS: I climbed through a window and ran like hell.

Sources Cited:

“Andrija Puharich.” Wikipedia.

“Avatar.” Wikipedia.

Bardi, Jason Socrates. “Antibodies Produce Ozone During Bacterial Killing and Inflammation.” TSRI News. The Scripps Research Institute. Vol. 2, Issue 35. 18 November 2002.

Broad, William J. “Pentagon is Said to Focus on ESP for Wartime Use.” The New York Times. 10 January 1984.

Cattel, Francesco, Susanna Giordano, et al. “Ozone Therapy in COVID-19: A Narrative Review.” Virus Research. 2 January 2021.

“Code of Federal Regulations Title 21, Chapter 1, Section 801.415: Maximum acceptable level of ozone.” United States Food and Drug Administration. 1 April 2020.

“Debunking the Tesla Myth.” Edison Tech Center. Undated.

Elvis, A.M. and J.S. Ekta. “Ozone Therapy: A Clinical Review.” Journal of Natural

Science, Biology, and Medicine. January-June 2011, pp. 66-70. National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Helleday, T. “Chemotherapy-induced Toxicity – a Secondary Effect Caused by Released DNA?” Annals of Oncology. Vol. 28, Issue 9, pp. 2054-2055. 1 September 2017.

Hernandez, Alberto, et. Al. “Ozone Therapy For Patients with Covid-19, Pneumonia: A Preliminary Report of a Prospective Case-Control Study.” International Immunopharmacology. Vol. 90, January 2020.

Hyman, Mark. “How is Ozone Therapy Being Used To Treat COVID-19 in Europe?” YouTube. 9 December 2020.

Inman, Matthew. “Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived.” The Oatmeal. Undated.

“The Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Crisis.” Scientific American. 11 March 2011.

King, Rhian. “Ozone Therapy Proving Successful in Covid-19 Patients.” The Ibizan. 8 April 2020.

Knapp, Alex. “Nikola Tesla Wasn’t God and Thomas Edison Wasn’t the Devil.” Forbes. 18 May 2012.

“Lobsang Rampa.” Wikipedia.

Macy, Marianne. “Did Nikola Tesla Discover a Treatment for COVID-19 Over a Hundred Years Ago?” Infinite Energy. Issue 151/152, May-August 2020.

“Medical Ozone Therapy.” Facebook.

Monroe, Robert A. Journeys Out of the Body. Doubleday, 1977.

The Spirit Phone by Arthur Shattuck O’Keefe: publisher’s book page, BHC Press.

O’Neill, John J. Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla. 1944. Internet Archive.

Rauscher, Elizabeth. “Tesla ’84 – Proceedings of the Tesla Centennial Symposium: In Light of Modern Physics.” September 1984. Tesla Universe.

“Robert Monroe.” Wikipedia.

Rowen, Robert and Howard Robins. “A Plausible ‘Penny’ Costing Effective Treatment for Corona Virus – Ozone Therapy.” Journal of Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology. Vol. 6, Issue 2, 2020.

Seifer, Marc J. “About.” Marcseifer.com.

---. “Books of Fiction by Marc Seifer, Ph.D.” Marcseifer.com.

---. “Books of Non-Fiction by Marc Seifer, Ph.D.” Marcseifer.com.

---. Email Communications. 24 March 2021 - 17 April 2021.

---. “Tesla vs. Einstein: The Ether & the Birth of the New Physics.” New Dawn. No. 113, Mar.-Apr. 2009.---. “The Secret Tesla Papers.” Marcseifer.com.

---. Tesla: Wizard at War- The Genius, the Particle Beam, and the Pursuit of Power. Kensington, 2021.

---. Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla. Citadel Press, 1999.

“Stargate Project.” Wikipedia.

Sunnen, Gerard V. May 2013, 2014. “MERS, SARS, and Emerging Coronaviruses: Theoretical Considerations and a Proposal for Critical Care Parenteral Oxygen/Ozone Therapy.” Ozonics International LLC.

The Tesla Files. The History Channel. May-June 2018/

Tesla, Nikola. “Apparatus for Producing Ozone.” United States Patent No. 568,177. Patented 22 September 1896. Google Patents.

---. “The New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy Through Natural Media.” Circa 16 May 1935. Twenty-First Century Books.

United States Federal Trade Commission. Warning letter to Tribeca Wellness Collective. 3 November 2020.

“Wardenclyffe Tower.” Wikipedia.