Ceilidh

Michael Zey
futurist3000@aol.com

BY BILL FERGUSON

Knight Ridder Newspapers
Evil genius at work?




As I write this, Americans who live along the Gulf Coast, many of whom are still trying to get over the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, are preparing to deal with another deadly storm that seems to have them locked in its sights.

President Bush has already pledged to put all of his deficit-spending skills to work to help rebuild New Orleans and other devastated areas (what's another few hundred billion dollars in debt to a great country like this?), and I'm sure the pledge will remain in place no matter how many storms sucker punch the region this year and in coming years.

But we shouldn't be too hard on the president. He's doing the best he can in a very bad situation. These are acts of God, after all, tragedies that no one could have predicted or (obviously) prevented from happening in the first place.

Or, are they?

According to several readers who have contacted me in the recent weeks, we are wrong to call these hurricanes "natural disasters", because they are actually man-made events, or at least are being influenced by human activities in a very unnatural way. Join me now as we take a trip off the beaten path and onto the back roads of conspiracy theories and deep-seated distrust of the rich and powerful.

It all starts with a man named Nikola Tesla, a brilliant and somewhat eccentric electrical engineer who was a contemporary (and something of a rival) of renowned inventor Thomas Edison. Among his many accomplishments, Tesla mastered the use of alternating current for use in running electrical appliances. His technology is still used today by our local power companies to provide electricity to our homes and businesses.

Tesla was an undisputed genius, but he was also quite eccentric, especially in his later years. He claimed to have made a number of fantastic discoveries in his cutting-edge research in the field of electrical power. He believed he could develop a generator that could transmit power for free, through the airwaves, to every person on earth. He said that he had received and recorded messages from outer space. And he also claimed that he could generate earthquakes and control various weather phenomena by manipulating electricity in the earth's atmosphere.

It is this last claim that brings us back to the field of modern day conspiracy theory. Some people believe that the Russians, and possibly the Americans, seized Tesla's research on "weather modification" following his death and that one or both of these governments is creating and/or manipulating the hurricanes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters that seem to be battering the earth with increasing regularity.

One U.S. project that is looked on with deep suspicion by the weather control crowd is the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Gakona, Alaska. The government-run web site for this project states that its goal is "to further advance our knowledge of the physical and electrical properties of the Earth's ionosphere."

To those who are wary of government activities and familiar with the legends around Tesla's weather control research, this remote site with its huge array of radio antenna bouncing electrical waves around in the ionosphere seems awfully darn suspicious, and dangerous.

So is there anything to all this secret government weather control business? Let's just say I have my doubts. When I look at people like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Vladmir Putin, the words "evil genius" aren't among the first that come to mind.

I'd be surprised if some of these guys can tie their own shoes. If they were playing around with technology that could actually lead to worldwide calamity, I think we'd have been wiped out a long time ago.


Bill Ferguson, a resident of Centerville, can be reached by e-mail at fergcolumn@hotmail.com.

Actual Photo of HAARP Antennae in Alaska