Bielek recounts the first test on July 22, 1943, which achieved optical and radar invisibility but left sailors on deck severely disoriented. He describes the disastrous second test on August 12, when Dr. John von Neumann's switch to a pulsed system at eight-megawatt peak power caused the ship to vanish entirely. Bielek says he and his brother Duncan jumped overboard and found themselves transported to 1983 at Montauk, Long Island, where an aged von Neumann sent them back to destroy the equipment with axes.
The account includes sailors embedded in the ship's steel deck, personnel fading in and out of reality, and a government cover-up that declared the victims lost at sea. Bielek addresses his claimed age discrepancy by explaining he was born in 1916 as Ed Cameron and was later age-regressed and given a new identity. Callers challenge and question his extraordinary claims throughout the broadcast.
Key Moments
Tesla's hardware: 160 MHz quadrophase antenna and conical coils: Bielek lays out the 1940 Brooklyn rig in unprecedented technical detail: a top-mounted four-element antenna fed by four separate transmitters at 160 MHz with amplitude modulation alternating across the elements to electrically rotate the E-field, paired with rotating magnetic-field coils - air-core, conical Tesla design, six feet high, water-cooled copper tubing - also electrically rotated by phasing.
Von Neumann pulses the system - 8 megawatt peak, 10% duty cycle: Bielek explains the fatal upgrade for the Eldridge: Von Neumann dropped Tesla's continuous analog approach for a pulsed system, boosting RF finals from a 0.5 MW continuous rating to 2 MW continuous and pulsing them at a 10% duty cycle for roughly 8 MW peak. The Fourier-series ringing on the pulse is what made the biological effects far worse than the analog version.
Tesla's death: not natural - a staged taxi cab on January 7, 1943: Bielek says he was told within the last five years by someone with file access that Tesla was murdered. On the morning of January 7, 1943 he left the New Yorker Hotel; Secret Service held back other pedestrians at a green light while a taxi driver floored it and ran Tesla over to stop him from going public about the Navy's disregard for sailors' lives.
August 12, 1943: blue flash, falling, and the Montauk doors open in 1983: About 70 seconds into the test the Eldridge appeared normal through a green haze, then a blinding blue flash and the ship vanished - even the waterline gone. Inside, the 6L6 filaments pulsed bright and dim, switches froze, Bielek and Duncan jumped overboard but never hit water; they fell down a black shaft, landed at a chain-link fence in floodlit night, and were taken by MPs to an underground facility where an elderly Von Neumann told them it was 1983 and they were at Montauk.
Shutting it down with axes - sailors fused into the steel deck: Sent back through Montauk's tunnel in radiation suits, Bielek and Duncan smash the electron-tube banks in the control room with axes until the generators wind down. Back on deck they find two sailors buried upright in the steel bulkheads, two more buried in the deck, and a fifth man with his hand sunk to the wrist into the bulkhead - the only survivor of the five, later given an artificial hand. Bielek's younger brother Jim's head and shoulders protrude from the steel as he dies.