Maxwell's Silver Hammer 323
The Soviets may already be using theirs, however, on a scale far
beyond that of the Moscow signal. During the U.S. bicentennial cele-
bration of July 4, 1976, a new radio signal was heard throughout the
world. It has remained on the air more or less continuously ever since.
Varying up and down through the frequencies between 3.26 and 17.54
megahertz, it is pulse-modulated at a rate of several times a second, so it
sounds like a buzz saw or woodpecker. It was soon traced to an enor-
mous transmitter near Kiev in the Soviet Ukraine.
The signal is so strong it drowns out anything else on its wavelength.
When it first appeared, the UN International Telecommunications Union
protested because it interfered with several communications channels,
including the emergency frequencies for aircraft on transoceanic flights.
Now the woodpecker leaves "holes"; it skips the crucial frequencies as it
moves up and down the spectrum. The signal is maintained at enormous
expense from a current total of seven stations, the seven most powerful
radio transmitters in the world.
Within a year or two after the woodpecker began tapping, there were
persistent complaints of unaccountable symptoms from people in several
cities of the United States and Canada, primarily Eugene, Oregon. The
sensations—pressure and pain in the head, anxiety, fatigue, insomnia,
lack of coordination, and numbness, accompanied by a high-pitched
ringing in the ears—were characteristic of strong radio-frequency or mi-
crowave irradiation. In Oregon, between Eugene and Corvallis, a power-
ful radio signal centering on 4.75 megahertz was monitored, at higher
levels in the air than on the ground. Several unsatisfactory theories were
advanced, including emanations from winter-damaged power lines, but
most engineers who studied the signal concluded that it was a manifesta-
tion of the woodpecker. The idea was advanced that it was being di-
rected to Oregon by a Tesla magnifying transmitter. This apparatus,
devised by Nikola Tesla during his turn-of-the-century experiments
on wireless global power transmission at a laboratory near Pikes Peak,
hasn't been much studied in the West. It reportedly enables a transmit-
ter to beam a radio signal through the earth to any desired point on its
surface, while maintaining or even increasing the signal's power as it
emerges. Paul Brodeur has suggested that, since the TRW company
once proposed a Navy ELF communications system using an existing
850-mile power line that ended in Oregon, the Eugene phenomenon
might have been the interaction between a Navy broadcast and Soviet
jamming.
He that as it may, the woodpecker continues in operation, and there
are several unsettling possibilities as to its main purpose. A former chief