In 1943 immediately following Nikola Tesla’s death, the FBI ordered the Office of Alien Property (OAP) to seize all of Tesla's belongings, including the safe from his apartment, his possessions stored in the basement of the New Yorker, up to 80 trunks stored in various storage units around Manhattan, and a mysterious safety deposit box at the Governor Clinton Hotel. This is somewhat of a controversial subject in that Nikola Tesla had been a naturalized U.S. citizen for over 50 years, thus the OAP had no legal right to raid his room. The FBI's justification for allowing the OAP to investigate Tesla's belongings was based on the premise that Sava Kosanovic, Tesla’s nephew who was affiliated with the Yugoslavian government at that time, was entitled to his uncle's estate. Since World War II was currently underway and Germany controlled a large part of Europe, Kosanovic was not trusted so the FBI felt it was necessary to seize "enemy assets" without a court order. However, the main reason they seized Tesla's belongings was because there was word that he had completed a working model of his "particle beam" weapon. This device was a natural extension of his high frequency work where he produced 100 foot long sparks in his laboratory experiments at Colorado Springs in 1899. The next step was to control and direct this energy as a weapon. The device he proposed was a open vacuum tube that could charge small or large particles to millions of volts and project these highly charged “non-dispersive” particles through free air to bring down hundreds of enemy airplanes. Since the U.S. government was already skeptical of Kosanovic and was worried that Tesla’s device might get into enemy hands, they impounded all of Tesla's possessions.

John O. Trump (uncle to former president Donald J. Trump), director of MIT's High Voltage Research Laboratory, and a small team of government officials conducted an investigation into Tesla’s possessions. Since Trump was the only qualified scientist to comprehend Tesla's work, he likely spent half the time going over all of Tesla's contents. In their two days of inspection, the team found nothing of value to the U.S. or to the enemy. As for the mysterious safety deposit box, it was found by Trump to contain a wooden chest containing a 20 year old resistance box used for Wheatstone bridge resistance measurements. This, Trump noted, was a common item found in every electric laboratory before the turn of the century. Although the investigation took only two days, it would take nine years for the government to return Tesla's possessions to his family.

Did the U.S. government secretly hold onto important information and acted as if there was nothing of value in Tesla’s possessions? Presumably we'll never really know, but it is a possibility. First, letters from researchers were written to both the FBI and the OAP about Tesla's property during their impound (1943-1952), and neither department claimed they were in possession of his belongings. Each pointed fingers at each other saying to talk to the opposing party. Another reason to be skeptical is that for years, the U.S. government denied having any paperwork, microfilm, or any details on Nikola Tesla. It wasn't until the Freedom of Information Act was enacted that it was exposed that there were in fact documents and microfilm on Tesla. Furthermore, out of the 80 trunks taken from Tesla's belongings, only 60 were returned to his family. This could simply be that his possessions were broken down to save space, but this detail has caused a tremendous amount of conspiracies on this topic.

Did Tesla really complete his weapon of mass destruction? No one really knows. There are many breadcrumbs that hint it may be plausible. One story is based on a woman whose husband's grandfather used to be one of Tesla's trusted employees. He would tell actual stories of Tesla bouncing beams off the moon. A reporter who once interviewed Tesla in his later years told of Tesla describing his work with cathode-ray tubes where sometimes a particle larger than an electron would break off from the cathode, pass out of the tube, and strike him. Tesla said he could feel a sharp, stinging pain where it first hit him and also where it passed out through him. That being said, the closest we can get to the truth is Tesla's elaborate technical paper on the subject (including diagrams), that he sent to a number of allied nations including the United States, Canada, England, France, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, titled “New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media" (circa 1935). The paper described the first technical description of his charged particle beam weapon. Tesla was directly communicating with the U.S. government and Prime Minster Chamberlain of Great Britain in an effort to promote his particle beam for defense against enemy aerial attacks. His correspondence with Prime Minster Chamberlain was his attempt to prevent Nazi Germany from taking over his native homeland, but when Great Britain, France and Italy agreed to let Germany annex Czechoslovakia at the Munich Conference in 1938, his communication with the government came to an end.

In the end, we'll really never know what happened to his missing papers, or even if there are any missing papers. Tesla made many statements in his later years that his defense weapon was completed and he was going to give it to the Geneva Conference for World Peace, but it never happened. OR NAZI SPIES KILLED HIM AND TOOK ALL HIS BLUEPRINTS BUT STILL ULTIMATELY LOST WORLD WAR II FOR SOME REASON. Lol jk! What do you all think happened to his papers?