Posted on 11/11/2002 7:50:40 PM PST by Int
AND THE VOICE SAID...
Go home, slaughter your first-born and make sacrifice unto me. Ha! Just kidding. Still, had you fooled for a minute, didn't I?
by Justin Mullins
I was at a party in downtown Oakland when I first heard about the Voice of God. It was the usual mix - a few intellectuals from Berkeley and Stanford, the gracious host and hostess and a gaggle of greedy jouranlists, of whom I was one. The conversation was highbrow and stilted but the food was plentiful, so I stayed to chat. It was an innocuous, forgettable evening, except for one thing, a short conversation with an expert in laser optics from Stanford University. His extraordinary tale left me spinning.
It involved a clandestine military project with a goal so outrageous that, even now, it is difficult to comprehend. The story was set in the late 1980s, at an undisclosed military research facility hidden in the New Mexico desert. Here, researchers working with high-power laser weapons discovered that they could create a glowing ball of fire in the sky by crossing the beams of two powerful infrared lasers. The beams were invisible to the naked eye, but where they intersected, their electric fields became so intense that they ripped apart molecules in the air, creating a plasma - a luminous mix of high-energy ions and electrons.
By moving the laser beams around the sky, the researchers found they could shift the plasma ball back and forth at very high speed. They even discovered that by switching the beams on and off quickly and redirecting them to different spots, they could maintain several plasma balls in the air at the same time. At night, they demonstrated their skills, flying their glowing creations in formation high above the cold desert.
These shows were noisy events. When the intense electric field rips one molecule apart, it releases electrons that smash into its neighbors, breaking them apart and releasing more electrons. This develops into a cascade known as inverse bremsstrahlung, and the result is explosive. Literally. The pressure wave it creates can reach thousands of atmospheres. Even the smallest shock waves sound like firecrackers, and by rapidly pulsing the plasma balls on and off, the researchers created a stream of shock waves that merged together to form a continuous loud hiss or, depending on the frequency of the pulsations, a crackle.
Now the tale gets more interesting. According to my fellow party guest, the team discovered that by modulating the frequency and intensity of the hissing sound, they could create a voice-like effect. The result was a highly- manoeuvrable, glowing ball of plasma that seemed to appear out of thin air - a ball of plasma that could "talk". The U.S. military named the technology the Voice of God and classified it top secret. My contact said that he had heard of plans to use the device as a psychological weapon during the Gulf War in 1991, but that for some reason these plans were never realised.
And there the tale ends. After the party, I contacted the researcher for more details but he was unable, or possibly unwilling, to provide them. I was stuck with nothing to follow up - no military facility, no contact numbers, no names. Nothing but the idea itself.
So is it possible? Does the technology really exist to create glowing balls of plasma that talk? Thus began a quest to discover not whether the Voice of God exists, but whether it could exist.
My first useful interview was with Leik Myrabo, a professor of engineering physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York State who works with the Propulsion Directorate at the U.S. Air Force Research Lab at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Myrabo is no stranger to the way lasers can break down the atmosphere to form a plasma. He uses the effect to propel prototype spacecraft into the air on the tip of a laser beam (New Scientist, 10 January 1998, p 34). But after hearing my story, he sounded skeptical: "I'm not saying it's impossible, but it would be difficult."
The first problem, he told me, would be generating the required intensity of several gigawatts per square centimetre. The laser Myrabo uses is the most powerful of its kind in the U.S. Known as the Pulsed Laser Vulnerability Test System (PLVTS), it generates a rapid series of infrared pulses, each one lasting only 18 microseconds. One pulse has the energy of 450 joules. And the PLVTS can generate 20 of them every second. This gives an average power of 9 kilowatts but the only way Myrabo can create inverse bremsstrahlung is by focusing this beam down to a point. In this tiny spot, the power density is millions of times higher than in the unfocused beam, and the air explodes. "It sounds like a firecracker going off," he said.
The focusing optics in Myrabo's propulsion system are built into his prototype spacecraft: the back of the craft is a curved mirror. But the Voice of God would not have the benefit of a curved mirror or a lens floating in the air, and any focusing system built at the laser end of things would have to be huge to operate over long distances. There's another problem: crossing two laser beams would be of little value, according to Don Walters, an atmospheric physicist at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. "Crossing the beams only doubles the intensity but you'd need to increase it by many orders of magnitude," he said.
Without the ability to focus the beams, Walters and Myrabo agree that Voice of God technology would require lasers vastly more powerful than any that are easily available today. "I suppose NOVA could do it," Walters told me, referring to the world's most powerful laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco. "But that's the size of an entire building."
But Walters didn't dismiss the idea outright. "It seems a bit far-fetched, but I suspect it could work in the lab with just one laser," he said. In fact he went as far as to say that creating a laser-induced plasma should be easy in many labs but that the plasma can only be produced a few centimetres in front of the lenses that focus the beam.
Controlling the frequency of the pulses would be straightforward too, though changing their intensity would be tough. "But I wouldn't be suprised if somebody had already done it," he said. After many telephone calls and several interviews, the concensus seemed to be that the Voice of God was possible in the lab but very difficult to produce in the sky.
Finally, I contacted John Pike, a spokesperson for the Federation of American Scientists in Washington DC and a long-time observer of the U.S. military machine. "I've never heard of it," he said, pointing out that it sounded a bit like a story that had circulated soon after the Gulf War. Somebody, he said, had suggested that beaming a short film of an imitation Allah saying "Go home" onto the low clouds over Kuwait, but apparently the plan was never put into action.
So what about the Voice of God? Pike wasn't particularly impressed with the idea. "It sounds like a project that didn't have the benefit of adult supervision," he joked. Conceivably true, I thought, but hardly grounds to rule out the possibility. After all, the U.S. military has tested a piloted flying saucer, experimented with mind control, and attempted to recreate "Star Wars" technology in space. Would the Voice of God really be a step too far?
Given the way the extraordinay keeps becoming ordinary, I doubt it. And even if the idea hasn't been tried before, somebody is almost certain to try it now...
Here is the relevant section:
Holographic Projector
Operational Concept. This concept, which would fall into the force enhancement mission area, was considered in the Spacecast 2020 study, and as a truly novel idea provides evidence that the strategic studies did consider “out of the box” ideas. However, the concept ignores the fundamental physics of generating holograms. The concept is a “system that could project holograms from space onto the ground, in the sky, or on the ocean anywhere in the theater of conflict for special operations deception missions. This system would be composed of either orbiting holographic projectors or relay satellites that would pass data and instructions to a remotely piloted vehicle or aircraft that would then generate and project the holographic image.”94 The apparent intention is to generate three-dimensional images of sufficient quality to make the observer believe an actual object is being seen. For example, projecting the face of Allah over Baghdad has been mentioned as one application of this concept for PSYOP missions; projecting the image of a tank would be a deception mission that could force enemy troops to move out of their position, exposing themselves to attack. There have even been suggestions by anonymous sources that these holographic images could be made to produce speech as well, which is theoretically possible using the photo-acoustic effect in air. This effect has been proposed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory for a laser-based emergency broadcast system.95
Operational Enhancement. If this concept were achievable, there would be great operational enhancement. There would be a tremendous “dual-use” benefit to the entertainment industry if the technology were releasable.
Key Enabling Technologies. A hologram is basically an interference pattern that has been recorded in some medium, such as film or a nonlinear crystal. The pattern is generated by overlapping a laser reference beam that has a very smooth phase front with a laser beam that has been scattered off the object to be imaged. The two beams interfere, creating bright and dark regions that, when reilluminated with a suitable optical source, recreate the image to an observer who looks at the hologram from the right point of view. Ideally, a laser is used to view the hologram, although “white light holograms” produce fairly good images using regular incandescent bulbs. The key technologies here are finding some way to generate the interference pattern in air and then illuminate that pattern with a visible laser beam, or possibly sunlight if the angle is correct, to create the image for the intended observers. Modulating the interference pattern would be required to create the illusion of motion.
Challenges. The ability to create holographic images is well established, but creating them in an uncontrolled environment like the open air is almost inconceivable. Making images that are realistic enough to confuse an enemy is highly unlikely in the next 30 years. The ancillary concept of auditory project, however, is feasible and demonstrated, but probably would not be done from a space-based platform given the difficulty of controlling the region of air that is modulated.
Scoring. Even the Spacecast 2020 study ranked this idea as “so far in the future” that it is not worth further consideration.
Technical feasibility: 1. Technical maturity: 1. Operational enhancement: 5. Cost: 1. Total Score: 8.
If you ask me, this would be pretty slick if they could pull it off but, as the report says, it isn't terribly likely any time soon. It would be hillarious though.
In fact, if I'm not mistaken, this is a required experiment in the freshman dorms every year across the country.
He was - shall we say - eccentric. But he was no fool. I am certain he participated in embedding coded messages (steganography) into articles he wrote for broadcast on Radio Free Europe. His association with U.S. intelligence agencies dated back to his days in the refugee camps in Germany, due to his language skills. So who knows what other secrets he may have come across.
It's interesting that you mention this. I posted this New Scientist piece after originally finding it as a footnote in an article titled 'Unfriendly Fire' in the Oct. 2002 issue of the British magazine Fortean Times. The article also mentioned the following: "The same principal was tried as an experimental form of street lightning in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. The project was abandoned because of the plasmoid's tendency to be attracted to passing aircraft."
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