Maxwell's Silver Hammer 279
porarily vulnerable,
the
Navy
wanted a message system
using
ELF
waves, which penetrate earth and water.
The original design involved 6,000 miles of buried cable arranged in
a grid across the upper two fifths of Wisconsin. A transmitter would
pump current into one side; the electricity would emerge from the other
side and complete the circuit by traveling through the ground. The
device was actually a giant loop antenna using the earth as part of the
loop. ELF waves issuing from it and resonating between the earth's sur-
face and the ionosphere could be picked up anywhere on the globe.
Sanguine was one of the first military projects scrutinized under the
Environmental Protection Act. In 1973 the Navy set up a committee of
scientists to review fifteen years of naval research on ELF effects, as well
as other pertinent work. Captain Paul Tyler of the Office of Naval Re-
search asked me to be one of its seven members.
The only thing sanguine we found was the name. While the research
to date didn't prove there would be grave harm to human health, it
showed several dangers. The antenna would produce an electromagnetic
field 1 million times weaker than that from a 765-kilovolt power line. It
was to broadcast at 45 to 70 hertz, frequencies close enough to the
earth's micropulsations that living things are very sensitive to them.
Similar fields had been shown to raise human blood triglyceride levels
(often a harbinger of stroke, heart attack, or arteriosclerosis), and change
blood pressure and brain wave patterns in experimental animals. The
generalized stress response, desynchronized biocycles, and interference
with cellular metabolism and growth processes—and hence increased
cancer rates—were also distinct possibilities. Hundreds of thousands of
people would be living inside the antenna even in this sparsely populated
area; long-term effects on plants and animals were unknown; and, be-
cause the signals would resonate throughout the world, the biohazards
might be similarly widespread. For these reasons we unanimously rec-
ommended that the project be shelved pending answers to the ominous
questions it raised. We provided a long list of necessary research, em-
phasizing further tests on triglycerides, biorhythms, stress, and psycho-
logical responses to ELF fields. We also warned that the health of a large
part of the U.S. population might already be impaired by 60 hertz
power lines carrying vastly more power than the proposed antenna.
The committee met on December 6 and 7, 1973, generating a report
then and there, with a secretary taking down our conclusions. The Navy
group
in
charge was apparently displeased
with
our
findings,
The
printed proceedings, marked "For official
use only,'' went
out
only to
committee members, and the Navy refused to discuss them with anyone
else.