Al Bielek Debunked
Al Bielek’s false statements about scientists
Al Bielek about Tesla
By the time Bielek makes his famous MUFON (Texas) conference debut, he has already complicated the story by inserting unsubstantiated comments about the involvement of the great Serbian scientist, Nikola Tesla. We will see that Bielek will cling to this assertion, to this day, despite not providing a single credible scrap of evidence to back up the claim. Later, we will see that there exists (outside of Bielek’s speeches) small but tangible support to Tesla’s involvement, however small. This is a quotation of his MUFON speech:
“About that time in ’31, some people decided maybe it was about time to do something about it and they got together at the University of Chicago. The three principles involved were Dr. Nikola Tesla, Dr. John Hutchinson Sr. and dean of the University of Chicago, later chancellor, and a Dr. Kirtenauer, who was an Austrian physicist, who came from Austria and was on staff at the University of Chicago. They did a little research….a feasibility study type thing at that time, did not accomplish very much, at that particular moment, in that period. A little bit later, the entire project was moved to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton.”
And more detailed a second time:
“Other people became important to this project as time went on. Now in 1934 roughly, they moved the project to the Institute, and Dr. Tesla comes into play here. Tesla is a very important man. His history’s fairly well known.”
Up to here, it all seems to fit. The Institute for Advanced Studies was founded in 1930 by Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld with the School of Mathematics as part of the IAS staffed in 1932. According to Tesla’s biography by Margaret Cheney and Robert Uth, in 1934 Tesla, at the age of 78, moved to what became his final residence, the Hotel New Yorker and put a sign on the door: “Please do not disturb the occupant of this room”. On July 11 of the very same year, he presented a report of his famous death-ray weapon to the media. No single piece of evidence has been found to verify that Nikola Tesla ever worked for or with other scientists of the Institute for Advanced Study. But according to Bielek, the story continued this way:
“Make it work, in other words. There was a deadline date, which happened to be March of ’42. The specific test approached; he became very uneasy about it, and finally decided, with no extension in time and no way that he could modify the hardware to correct the problem, there was only one out for him. And that was to sabotage the equipment, not by physically destroying it, but making certain that it would never work when it was turned on, which was in essence what he proceeded to do on this test date, March of ’42.
The battleship did not have a special crew on. It had the regular crew, although it had the specialized equipment. And the switches were thrown and nothing happened, and Mr. Tesla bowed out. He said, “Well, gentlemen, the experiment is a failure and it’s time for me to leave. There’s a very good man here that can take over and make things work for you. And that’s Dr. John von Neumann. Bye!”
As the story goes, he was fired. Bielek states that there was another version to this event and it goes: ‘You can’t fire me; I quit!’ Whatever the case, he left. There was some other interest, and he did do other research from that point on until the date of his death, January 7, 1943, which figured into some of the other things that happened later, but was not directly related at that time to the experiment.
You should note that at this point Bielek has claimed that Tesla, then aged 84, was working on a top-secret US government project, 15 years after he had practically disappeared from public sight. To give you an impression of how Tesla looked like, I added a photo of him, showing him in early 1943, a few weeks before he died on 4 January 1943. There is an excellent book about Tesla still in print: “Tesla – Master of Lightning” by Margaret Cheney and Robert Uth, which has painted the fullest picture known of this outstanding scientist, from his earliest efforts until his death in 1943. There are many photo’s in the book which makes it quite clear that despite his bright and inventive mind, by the end he was a very old, sickly, and somewhat strange man in his last years. It is incomprehensible and highly unlikely that Tesla was in any condition to actively participate in the strenuous war research that surrounded the PX
Cheney’s book tells of a little incident the fall of 1942, which perfectly describes the state Tesla was in during this time. Contrast this depiction with Bielek’s insistence that Tesla was hot at work on the second most important research project in the country, the Manhattan Project being only more important.
“In the fall of 1942 Tesla telephoned the offices of the Yugoslav Monarchy in Exile, the headquartered at the embassy on Fifth Avenue in New York. Kosanovic was ill at that time and Charlotte Muzar, a young secretary, took the call. Tesla told her that he urgently needed §50 in cash. She went at once to his hotel, knocked, and was told to enter. She recalled,
“When I came in I wanted to see everything all at once
because here was this great man and I had a chance
to see him and how he lives. He was in bed, facing the door. He was sitting
up in pajamas, very fragile… and I didn’t know of this man was going
to live through to the next day because he looked very, very ill and very frail to me.”
How can we imagine a man described in this way actively participating in a very complex and unique scientific project, one which would demand a clear mind and a strong body? This participation would have necessitated quite a bit of traveling back and forth between his apartment in New York to the naval yards in Philadelphia and then the distinct possibility that he would have to clamber into the bowels of a retrofitted boat and help conduct on the spot assessments of the project.
It is very doubtful, that about 6 months before Charlotte Muzar met Tesla in his Hotel room, Tesla was working in a key position on the development of the Philadelphia Experiment.
Bielek about Dr. Kurtenauer
Dr. Emil Kurtenauer, an Austrian physicist, was allegedly involved with the planning and conduct of the PX – so says Al Bielek in his famous speech at Phoenix in 1990. Five months previously, when he was a guest speaker at the UFO-NEW AGE CONFERENCE in Phoenix, Arizona, he claimed that he knew the members of the team which led the preparation phase for the Philadelphia Experiment. According to Bielek, this team “included John Hutchinson, Dean of the University of Chicago; the brilliant Nicola Tesla; and a third man who has been very hard to identify. I finally tracked him down as Dr. Emil Kurtenauer, an Austrian, who had a Ph.D. in physics.” Bielek later changed the name into Kirtenhauer, however, this unknown scientist allegedly was of Austrian origin. This is taken from the speech at the UFO-New Age Conference:
“Actually, the Philadelphia Experiment, at least in its preliminary stages, probably began about 1932-’33 in the Chicago area. The popular scientific press of the day was very hot on the subject of invisibility. It was at that time that a small team of scientists got together and started to investigate the subject and its possibilities. The team included John Hutchinson, Dean of the University of Chicago; the brilliant Nicola Tesla, and a third man who has been very hard to identify. I finally tracked him down as Dr. Emil Kurtenauer, an Austrian, who had a Ph.D. in physics.“
A second and much older source for this ‘Dr. Emil Kurtenauer’ can be found in the well-known book “Thin Air” by Simpson and Burger. This book was published in January 1978 by Dell Publishing Co., Inc., NY, and tells the story of the DE 166 USS Sturman, The story obviously is based on the content of the Allende letters and tells the story of one survivor of an invisibility experiment conducted with the USS Sturman during World War II. For anybody interested in the Philadelphia Experiment, this is good reading despite the story being a fiction, plainly stated so by the authors. This is the relevant part of Al Bielek’s speech at the MUFON Conference in 1990:
“„It actually had its genesis in 1931-1932, in a strange little windy city called Chicago, Illinois. At that time there had been, through the Twenties and early Thirties, a lot of speculation in the popular literature, meaning scientific popular literature like “Popular Science”, “Popular Mechanics”, “Science Illustrated”, on the subjects of invisibility, trying to make an object disappear, or a person disappear, or even teleportation. I guess the people at that time in there writing thought that maybe we were close to it, in the terms of a scientific accomplishment, but there was a great deal of speculation, and very little if anything was ever done about it. About that time in ’31, some people decided maybe it was about time to do something about it and they got together at the University of Chicago. The three principles involved were Dr. Nikola Tesla, Dr. John Hutchinson Sr. and dean of the University of Chicago, later chancellor, and a Dr. Kirtenauer, who was an Austrian physicist, who came from Austria and was on staff at the University of Chicago. They did a little research….a feasibility study type thing at that time, did not accomplish very much, at that particular moment, in that period. A little bit later, the entire project was moved to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton.”
The figure of an Austrian scientist, “Dr. Kirtenauer” is exactly what Bielek needed to dramatize the background to his story. In other interviews, he refers to him as “Kurtenauer”. Of course, there had to be somebody involved like an unknown scientist, besides such well-known names like Einstein, Tesla and von Neumann. And if it’s not a German, an Austrian will do as well. To be blunt: the character of “Dr. Kurtenauer” was lifted directly out the fictional novel “Thin Air” (written by George E Simpson and Neal R. Burger”). Bielek was not the only one who lifted a name from that book; William Moore lifted the name “Rinehart” from this book and he used it for the mysterious scientist that he tracks down and eventually interviews. This scientist, it turns out, was a true witness and participant to the developmental phase of the real PX.
This is the section of “Thin Air” referring to Kurtenauer, page 153:
“It (project Thin Air) was initiated by a man named Emil Kurtnauer, whose roots in it extend back to 1933.“
Thin Air (1978) by George E. Simpson, Neal R. Burger
“..Emil Kurtnauer was an Austrian physicist much influenced by Albert Einsteins’s theories of relativity.
He was studying in Duesseldorf in October of 1933 when Einstein and Niels Bohr met in conference at Bruessels. Kurtnauer went there and pestered them until Einstein agreed to sit down with him for two whole days they discussed an application of Einstein’s unified field theory that Kurtnauer wanted to work on. Einstein took great pains trying to talk him out of it, nsisting that the theory, which he’d put forth in 1929, was desperately flawed and any applications of it could only compound the error. Kurtnauer insisted to the contrary: there was something to it and he intended to devote himself to this project. Einstein, sensing determination, encouraged him to send over his findings and he in turn would keep Kurtnauer advised of his own progress. So Kurtnauer happily went home.“
“.. Kurtnauer, a Jew, fled Germany in 1935, emigrating to America. He got in touch with Einstein, who helped him secure a teaching post at the University of Chicago.“
Our little team has checked with all major Austrian universities and institutes for Kurtnauer / Kurtenauer and found no evidence for his existence at all. He is not known in Austria, nor did he study at Duesseldorf/Germany in October 1933, as written in “Thin Air”. Some of the replies that we received from various Austrian universities and institutes.
