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The Body Electric
of naval research has privately discounted the idea that it's directed
against the U.S. population. However, Robert Beck, a Los Angeles
physicist who regularly serves as a DOD consultant, told me that the
signal has a threefold purpose. He said it acts as a crude over-the-horizon
radar that would pick up a massive first strike of U.S. missiles if Soviet
spy satellites and other detectors were knocked out. Second, the signal's
modulations are an ELF medium for communicating with submarines
underwater. Third, he claimed the signal has a biological by-product
about which he promised further information. Of course, I haven't been
able to contact him since.
Several educated guesses can be made, however. Adey's research sug-
gests that the best way to get an ELF signal into an animal is to make it
a pulse modulation of a high-frequency radio signal. That's exactly what
the woodpecker is. Within its frequency range, it could be beamed to
any part of the world, and it would be picked up and reradiated by the
power supply grid at its destination.
Raymond Damadian has theorized that the woodpecker signal is de-
signed to induce nuclear magnetic resonance in human tissues. Dama-
dian, a radiologist at Brooklyn's Downstate Medical Center, patented
the first NMR scanner, a device that gives an image of internal organs
similar to CAT scanners but using magnetic fields rather than nuclear
radiation. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, NMR could greatly
magnify the metabolic interference of electropollution or EMR weapons.
Maria Reichmanis calculated the pulse frequency that would be required
to do this with a radio signal in the woodpecker's range, and she came
up with a band centered on the same old alpha rhythm of 10 hertz. And
in fact, the signal's pulse is generally about that rate, although it is
often a two-part modulation of 4 + 6, 7 + 3, and so on. The available
evidence, then, suggests that the Russian woodpecker is a multipurpose
radiation that combines a submarine link with an experimental attack on
the American people. It may be intended to increase cancer rates, inter-
fere with decision-making ability, and/or sow confusion and irritation.
It may be succeeding.
I keep hearing persistent rumors of American transmitters set up to
try to nullify the Russians' signal or to affect their people in a similar
way. In 1978, Stefan Rednip, an American reporter living in England,
claimed access to purloined CIA documents proving the existence of a
program called Operation Pique, which included bouncing radio signals
off the ionosphere to affect the mental functions of people in selected
areas, including Eastern European nuclear installations.
The whole business sounds too much like an undeclared electromag-