About seven years ago, a brain scientist was working with primate brain signals three floors underground. The scientist was using special neurological amplifiers that amplified micro-volt signals. He called me to solve a strange, sporadic noise problem that had appeared in his amplifier outputs.
His laboratory had been in operation for many years before this problem appeared. When confronted with a mysterious problem, I always ask one particular question: "What is changed, what is different?" But in this case, the answer was nothing.
Connecting up a scope, I soon saw a signal on the screen that coincided with a noise from a speaker connected to a neural amplifier output. We heard a distinctive "click” sound. By slowing the horizontal time period to one second/division, we could see the entire several-millisecond-long noise pulse. But this was no ordinary noise pulse -- it was actually a perfect bipolar square wave.
Envision a single period of a full sine wave on a scope screen, then convert that same wave pattern to fit a bipolar square wave. That's exactly what it was. Every few seconds it appeared, but each time, the starting and ending polarity was flipped. There was no question this was an intelligently generated signal -- but from where?
Soon, a pattern was discernible. Pulse spacing was a consistent 5.5 seconds.
Remember, this laboratory was about 60 feet underground. The building had corrugated steel plates as the base, with three reinforced concrete floors up above. Line of sight with the local radar dish required that you travel through wet dirt, steel, rock, and reinforced concrete for about two miles at a slight upward angle to reach the local airport dish. And microwaves will not travel through any of these materials very well.
Certain types of microwave sources contain a property few engineers know about -- scalar energy. Scalar electromagnetic waves have the E and B fields in phase, unlike normal electromagnetic waves where E and B fields are typically 90 degrees out of phase. There is another interesting characteristic of scalar waves -- they are not stopped by shielding, even by a Faraday cage. When E and B fields are in phase, they do not interact with metal molecules like conventional RF does, which makes shielding useless. Usually, only distance can stop scalar waves. Based on the waveform period, there could be only one source of this signal.
I called the local international airport TRACON group, which stands for TRacking and CONtrol. My one question to the engineer on duty was simply this: "What is the rotation period of your radar dish? I'm certain I'm picking up your signal at the university." He replied: "Let me look out the window and see."
A short time later, he came back to the phone, saying: "About five and a half seconds." Ah Ha! There was my signal source. Conventional microwave theory says this was impossible, but there it was. Clearly these were not conventional microwaves at all. The engineer then asked where I was picking up their signal and I told him. He mumbled, "Guess it would be good for tracking submarines, too."
Apparently, I was correct. This scalar signal disappeared overnight and never returned. As for the real purpose of this scalar pulse, which traveled through two miles of dirt, reinforced concrete, steel, and rock? It remains unknown to this day. Shutting down that short-lived signal, which was transmitted for just one day, did not cause the airport to close. Apparently, it had little to do with air traffic control.
Here is the strangest part of all: It was a signal that was DC-based and detected by a neural amplifier with a -3db bandwidth of 50Hz. No diode detector, no RF amplifier, no demodulators, no IF stages, no dish, no waveguides, none of the usual RF components. Yet, this very low frequency signal definitely originated from a radar dish after traveling through about two miles of dirt and other materials.
This entry was submitted by Ted Twietmeyer and edited by Rob Spiegel.
Ted Twietmeyer’s background includes a patented optical backplane technology. He also has more than 30 years of experience in defense and aerospace systems engineering, project management, and the training of customer technical personnel. Since 2000, Ted has been designing advanced, custom-designed, high-performance systems at the board level.
Tell us your experience in solving a knotty engineering problem. Send stories to Rob Spiegel for Sherlock Ohms.
Scalar energy is not fiction. Many physicists which I am not allowed to name here are aware of scalar energy. Few engineers understand why constant values are used for AC equations, but not DC.
Many engineers do not understand (or question) why AC transmission lines have all their energy on the outside surface. Cross-country transmission lines have steel cores for strength, since no real power flows through the steel. But DC transmission lines use the entire conductor cross section and suffer ohmic losses over short distannces, as Edison found out. Why? It is the changing voltage of AC that creates a coupling into the surrounding space-time.
Constant values used for some AC equations actually remove the relationship between the circuit and surrounding space-time. Is this property demonstrable? When coax cables are mismatched with load impedances, gain occurs at certain frequencies. All one needs is a scope, coax cable, a load and a signal generator to prove it. All energy has an source. In this case is the surrounding space-time. Surrounding space-time couples into AC power transmission lines couple to. Space-time is the reason scalar energy exists.
Where does the inductive kick from an inductor or relay coil come from when the applied voltage is suddenly removed? How can a coil develop back EMF of about 10 times the applied voltage it was energized with? All energy must have a source and cannot come from nothing. The source of this energy IS the surrounding space-time, and is scalar in nature. Tesla was aware of this source and utilized it.
There's undoubtedly a good reason that few engineers know about "scalar energy."
I would like to propose another theory about the mysterious waveform: aliens landed. They visited Earth for one day and then left. While they were here, they used their zug-zug guns to capture unknown energy sources.
I've been designing, building, and operating military radar transmitters since 1968. The pilot who told you that radar antennas emit "classified radiation" was incorrect.
I hope to see more April 1 articles in Design News. they are hilarious!
Undetected coupling mechanisms are certainly a very rational explanation, and it would have been very educational to understand the exact path of entry. But a system not specificly designed to reject that sort of interference is likely to suffer from it on occasion. BUt the appearance of signals underground is nothing new, cave explorers have been sending signals much deeper underground, using much less power, for many years.
I recall an interesting "discovery" made and published by a consultant that I was working with. It related to the "instant" travel of an acoustic wave through steel, with very little loss. When I tried to duplicate his results in our lab, using a more sophisticated setup and accurate instrumentation, I was unable to duplicate his results until one of my ground connections failed. At that point our waveforms matched very well. But the signal was arriving by electrical conduction, not by acoustical transport.
From that point onward, every one of my experiments included a reality check, to verify that the results changed if the ground was disconnected. Sometimes we can learn from the mistakes that others make.
So you have this amplifier for neurosignals... With a band-limited front end. How so?
The typical amplifier surely did have RF rectification capability if of bipolar design. Then it is followed by filtering and the audio amplifier - which also are subject to the RF rectification effects.
Your 3 stories underground building consists of a series of steel columns that extend above ground by a height you didn't give. There will be an energy transference to these columns which will be higher in amplitude the more distant you are from the ground point of the columns. You didn't say if the building goes lower than 3 floors.
I don't really see this as all that surprising. Even though you were 3 floors "underground" you were not 3 floors really under GROUND.
I've experienced this same emission here in OC in the past (>20 years) from either OC Airport or El Toro, I don't remember which. Going to FET input op amps along with ferrite beads in a few areas eliminated the signals.
Yes, I agree articles like this that make their way to this forum do harm to EDNs credibility. Even before I read the Comments section, I had to peek at a calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1st and someone's idea of a joke. Congratulations to jlbraun and jfowkes for being the first to bring the bright light of reality to the post.
A simple Google search will reveal a great many characteristics assigned to this 'energy' with fantastic claims of free energy (zero-point energy), unlimited energy, healing the body of all disease, universal healthcare and best of all, the 'energy' exists in a "4-dimensional realm" and is "shrouded in secrecy". The conspiracy theory sites are thick with these claims and strangely enough, there are not any scientific or academic websites backing up these claims with verifiable, testable, experimental or peer-reviewed data.
Most of us probably have decades of experience and education and still have not seen, heard or measured these fantastic effects before. If it has been around forever, and its secrets decoded by Tesla and others, why wouldn't industry have taken advantage of it by now? Isn't it more likely (Occam's razor) that the propagated microwave signal, transmitter, or power supplies coupled the bipolar signal into the sensitive underground amps by some other simple means? And regarding the signal's coincidental or mysterious disappearance, how many forum posts in the recent past conclude with something like closing a hatch, door or access panel to attenuate the offending noise?
Yes, Scalar Waves are woo. A few minutes on Google will confirm that. (If yuu're sceptical about the veracity of google results, be more sceptical about scalar waves).
"Scalar" waves are the product of Bearden's fertile imagination.
"Scalar" waves are simply waves as presented in the reactive near field where E and B are out of phase as the energy in the antenna couples to 377 ohms of free space and they come into phase as a normal propagating wave. No new extensions to Maxwell are needed.
(and the solutions to Maxwell in far field have E and B *in* phase, not 90 degrees out of phase as this article - they are out of phase in the *near* field. Such an elementary error is disappointing.)
Similar "scalar" waves are present in transformer coils and capacitors, which can be considered as 2 antennas very close to one another in their near field. One can hardly say that the operation of a transformer or capacitor requires "scalar" extensions to Maxwell!
SLF/ELF/LF/VLF below 300kHz is regularly used to communicate with submarines, as they can penetrate hundreds of meters of water. In the case of ELF/SLF the *entire planet* is in the near field so E and B are going to be out of phase.
Here's a neat pamphlet on it from the FAS. You just need very big antennas, good ground coupling, and LOTS of power to overcome the fact that your transmit antenna at 46km long is a tiny fraction of the wavelength.
The receiving antennas on the subs for SLF/ELF/LF are simply small loops of wire - pretty much transformer coils - or very long wires unspooled from the fantail. If you have loops or planes or lines in a low frequency circuit that happen to be oriented the right way, those can pick up LF in the nearfield, at 2 miles you'd be in the nearfield for anything under 100KHz and could easily pick it up underground.
Here's a good explanation of why "scalar" waves are simply nearfield.
And yes, you can shield just fine in nearfield of LF/ELF. The reason people say "ZOMG you can't!" is because they can only conceive of shields as grounded metal boxes, which if you have a nearfield emission coming from current loops (which most of them are - AC motors and things), its emission will zip right through a grounded metal box around it as it induces a closed current loop on the box instead of trying to pull charge from ground. The reason you so rarely hear about LF EMI is that very few people operate sensitive circuits in the tens of hertz range, and if they do, they are likely in a commercial product and are well shielded against powerline frequencies anyway, so it's only the hobbyists and researchers running ELF stuff on the bench that run into this.
Instead, you can use lossy ferromagnetic materials, I have a box full of little stick-on lossy ferromagnetic buttons and flexible sheets that work very well for shielding against LF in low frequency analog circuits. In fact we used one last year to shield a sensitive opamp circuit against a 180Hz emission from a 3 phase AC motor driver - just squooshed a little thumbnail sized piece of the stuff over the feedback loop area on the PCBA and the spurs disappeared.
It's made by these guys. http://www.magnetic-shield.com/
Go tell your neuroscientist about mu-metal magnetic shielding. It will fix their problem.
ELF is fascinating stuff, don't pollute it with this woo "scalar" business.
I wouldn't like to comment on the science behind scalar waves as I simply don't know enough about the topic, but I can vouch for the ubiquity of radar signals when close to the antenna. A while ago I wrote about my own experience ("Earth Station had a Screw Loose") where just a simple mistake in assembling waveguide allowed airport radar signals to break into satellite receive channels. With peak powers often in MW range, even attenuation through concrete might not shield really sensitive gear. Also, it's amazing how even the best circuits can exhibit unexpected properties when operated outside normal limits - hence unexpected demodulation perhaps?
I'd like a pound for every time I've come across an odd effect and reflected that if I'd set out to design a circuit to do that exact function I wouldn't have known where to start, yet I've accomplished it by accident. It happens less now that I use circuit simluator software though, so I'm not really hankering for the old days!
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