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.
Thanks Warren, as astute observation worth sharing, and the main point of Bearden's scientific position.
The truth is always hidden in plain sight; our understanding is the limiting filter that prevents us from grasping the possibilities. Scientific laws and theory are only our best guess at any given time with in the given paradigm. If anyone knows how to generate and detect scalar signals I am interested in exploring further.
Just a paranoid thought - if this signal was part of a defence related experiment, should you have published the article at all? You might be making public - to an international audience - info that for our own benefit should be withheld from certain other entities.
If the radar was mistuned or too wideband for a particular frequency, you could easily recieve a normal signal only 2 miles away if you were in a wild node of the dish, even underground.
At only 2 miles, you also could have been on the same power grid as the radar and they were dumping transients onto the line.
This is far more likely than immediately jumping to blaming a phemonena that has not been shown to exist.
Scalar waves are not woo-woo, but are real. With these waves the E and B fields are in phase. I have personally witnessed these waves creating problems at NASA back in 1994. It really is true - you cannot easily prevent them from interfering or appearing in circuitry. Tesla became an expert at generating these waves. Problem is, if his power transmission system was implemented the health of the area population would degrade considerably.
As for power line interference, the lab with the bipolar square wave pulse was never on the same grid as the airport. Both locations have their own substations, providing a high degree of line isolation. In any case, it would be a stretch for this perfectly symmetrical waveform to be coming in on a power line and appearing on the screen of a high end Tektronix scope. Finally, the bipolar square wave was free of spurious frequencies, and switched polarity every single time the dish came back around. We watched it for about 10 minutes. How it was generated I do not know.
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!
"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.
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).
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?
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.
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