IUBio

Hear radar waves

Mark Kinsler kinsler at frognet.net
Sun Nov 1 21:53:16 EST 1998


I have found that the only way to deal with pseudoscience, which we
certainly seem to be dealing with here, is to try to find the grain of
truth behind the misconceptions.  Why do microwaves seem so logical for
mind-control uses?  Why not infra-red lasers, or something else?  Well,
for one thing, "microwave" is a cool name.  But there's more.  

I think a lot of it goes back to a very prominent news story from around
1960.  A small radio transmitter was found to have been secreted in the
office of the US ambassador to the Soviet Union.  It was, in fact, a very
small resonant cavity, and it was installed in the beak of an American
eagle sculpture that had been presented by the Soviets to the ambassador.
(God only knows why nobody checked the fool thing, but that's another
story.)

This resonant cavity was just a metal box, one face of which was very thin
and could thus vibrate as a diaphragm.  A microwave beam sent through the
window of the office from some building next door was made to "illuminate"
this cavity, as it were.  Since the cavity's resonant frequency was quite
close to the frequency of the incident microwave signal, any change in the
cavity's size would make a very large change in such signals that were
reflected from it.  Thus sounds in the room caused the cavity to reflect
an amplitude-modulated signal, presumably back out the window.  No wires,
no batteries.  A very clever system, though I'm not sure how efficient it
was. 

The publicity surrounding the discovery of this "bug" was tremendous, and
microwaves were talked about everywhere.  That was the beginning of all
this, I think.  Add to the mix the fact that the Soviets, and everyone
else, was doing some very ineffective research in mind control at the
time, and you get microwaves and mind control.  Seems logical.  In fact,
the Soviets were taken for lots of money by a host of scientists who
claimed that they could control the minds of the populace, etc.  Nothing
came of any of this work, either. 

At about the same time, telephone calls were starting to be transmitted in
the US and elsewhere by microwave links, so we got to hear a fair amount
about that as well.  Radar was in a thorough ferment of development, and
the Cold War was raging. 

Much later in this strange conflict, another weird piece of news
developed.  This was sort of variation of the eagle's beak device.  It
turns out that if you shine two e/m radiation sources, preferably of the
radio variety on a semiconductor junction, you'll get a faint mixture of
the two signals reflected off of the junction.  So if you had, say, the
e/m field from a telephone, you could let it hit a semiconductor junction
which is also being illuminated by a microwave beam.  Reflected from the
junction would be a slightly amplitude-modulated microwave beam containing
the telephone's audio signal.  

I don't know how well this works, but it was apparently a good enough idea
that someone dumped a zillion little semiconductor diodes--without leads,
just the junctions--into the concrete mixer that was used in the
construction of the new US embassy in Moscow.  Again, it was a big spy
story involving microwaves.  It didn't take long for the
eternally-suspicious to latch onto this intelligence. 

Meanwhile, people in the USA were using satellites, with microwaves, and
telephone links, with microwaves, and ovens, with microwaves, and nobody's
brain seemed to be controlled by these. 

Corrections to this stuff is welcome: I'm just recalling it off the top of
my weary head.

Meanwhile, didn't I read an implied threat to unbelievers in one of the
last posts?  I think it was the one with the amusing bibliography--I'll
try to dig it out.

Mark Kinsler
  
-- 
............................................................................
Interpretation and instruction of physical science and technology
Athens, Ohio, USA.     http://www.frognet.net/~kinsler



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