♪♪
Murphy: Nikola Tesla was the greatest inventor
in American history.
A. C. Power, electric motors, fluorescent lights,
x-rays, wireless energy...
Tesla paved the way for all of these technologies.
Prince: Tesla was taking several of his inventions
and putting them together to become this superweapon.
He called it the death ray.
Did Tesla invent the world's first weapon
of mass destruction, and was he murdered for it?
Narrator: Now a military investigator, a historian,
and an engineer unlock the mysteries behind
what could be the greatest cover-up of the 20th century.
Prince: When Tesla died, his nephew, sava kosanovic,
broke in to the safe.
Those documents that were stolen?
Nobody knows what those are.
There is a strong likelihood that kosanovic
will make such information available to the enemy.
Now, who's the enemy in 1943?
The Germans.
There are rumors that some of those documents
may be about the death ray.
We need to track down where these documents went.
If that leads to Serbia, then that's where we need to go.
We're looking for the missing pieces of the death ray.
Do you think they're in the museum?
Yes.
Were there any other countries that tried to buy the death ray
other than Russia?
Tesla had a lot of offers from Germans.
We're gonna build Tesla's death ray.
Oh, what the [bleep]
We need to run some structural tests on it.
I think this is gonna hold.
350.
It scares the [bleep] out of me.
Woman: This is the Tesla archive.
Getting access to the archive is nothing short of a miracle.
Have these documents ever been published?
- No. - Is that the death ray?
That's definitely a death ray.
If Tesla's weapon was real,
then we could have found a possible motive
for the murder of an American hero.
Captions by vitac... www.Vitac.Com
captions paid for by discovery communications
narrator: 1943... New York City.
Nikola Tesla is found dead in his hotel room.
His safe is cracked and his research is stolen.
No suspects are ever questioned.
But a few years earlier,
Tesla tells the press of an eerily similar crime.
The inventor claims spies broke into his apartment,
searching for plans to his death ray.
♪♪
Welcome back, gentlemen.
Prince: We had a hell of a time getting access
to the archives there at the museum,
but we finally got these things...
Never-before-seen formulas, drawings, notes...
All about a previous or early version of the death ray
in Tesla's own hand.
Wow.
Prince: We have new information from Serbia...
Information to help Aron finish the death ray.
Schematics, drawings, formulas.
This is a lot more than just the physical design of the tower.
This is him actually working through
the electronics, the engineering.
The fact that these documents exist show
that Tesla may very well have actually built a death ray...
I mean, he was pretty far along in the design...
And that leads us to believe that he was murdered for them.
The FBI documents point to sava kosanovic
as being the prime suspect.
But when we were in Serbia talking to [bleep]
He brought up the prospect that the Nazis were trying
to find the death-ray designs.
Man: Tesla had a lot of offers from Germans
before the second world war.
When Tesla died, it was the height of world war ii.
The Nazis were trying to gain an edge
by infiltrating the American scientific establishment.
In the 1940s,
they were infiltrating spies into the United States,
as well as sabotage cells.
Some of them came from the reichsfuhrer-s.S.,
who was sort of the elite intelligence network
of Nazi Germany,
and they sent people here to try to steal potential secrets
that could advance the Nazi war effort.
Narrator: 1943.
The Nazis control most of the European continent,
and Hitler eyes a new target... The United States.
Hitler's elite spy agency infiltrates the U.S.,
looking for weapons that could help the third reich
take over the world.
It is rumored the Nazis have Nikola Tesla and his death ray
in their sights.
A weapon like this could have provided
a massive coastal-defense system.
It could have eliminated the nuclear threat in 1943 and 1944.
That means this thing works. Who wouldn't want it?
It's enormously powerful.
And at the time, this would have been
tremendously intimidating to anybody.
If the Nazis had been able to acquire the death-ray plays,
it potentially could have changed the course of the war.
And the world.
Any major superpower would want this.
I think that, for sure, Tesla was a lot further
along than anyone really previously thought.
With these plans, it's very clear
that Tesla was actually working his way through the design,
trying to figure out technically how it would work.
Here, take a look at this one.
I'm interested what your take is on it.
♪♪
It's not every day you get to see a document like this.
It's really impressive.
You know, we've been working on this thing
pretty much blind up till this point,
and now we have Tesla's handwritten notes
filling in some gaps that we weren't sure we had right.
What do you take away from the equations?
It looks like he's starting to work toward
some of the wind-loading stuff.
And so this is a purely structural thing.
Right.
It looks like he's playing with some relatively large loads.
He's accounting for some pretty fast wind speeds, too.
Which you would have to do if you were gonna have
this outside.
That shows that he was thinking about all the factors,
the big picture.
He was thinking of it as an integrated defense system.
It's really nice to see him going into this level of detail.
That's something that we would have to apply to our design.
Prince: Tesla's research is extremely complicated.
We're talking about formulas and scientific notations,
and maybe even written in code.
This is what makes it so hard to get into Tesla's head.
Narrator: In his later years,
Tesla grows increasingly paranoid.
Fearing people are trying to kill him and steal his work,
he makes claims that most of his research
only exists in his mind,
and what he does put on paper might be written in code.
Koscho: You know, I build Tesla technology,
but some of this stuff's really hard to grasp.
It'd be great to have another set of eyes on those documents.
I know a guy named John Scott.
He's a rocket engineer. This is right up his alley.
I'd like to go talk to him.
That might be a place to start.
Yep. I agree.
I'm gonna go over them, as well, see if there's anything
I can pull out of them that we can apply to the prototype.
In the meantime, I've been doing
a little bit of additional research,
and there's this one guy, Erik Orion...
He claims that he has firsthand knowledge
about the Nazis' interest in the death ray,
and I'd like to see where it leads.
Is this seeming more real to you now, Jack?
This changes the nature of our investigation.
Murphy: If there's any chance that the Nazis were involved
in Tesla's death,
that's something we need to follow up on.
♪♪
Narrator: While Aron and his team continue work
on the large-scale death ray,
Jack travels to New York to meet Erik Orion...
An informant with a family secret.
We just got back from Serbia
and talking to some people over there
about Nikola Tesla's death ray.
We had one of our contacts over there tell us
that the Nazis were very interested in the death ray,
and perhaps acquiring it, and that's why I reached out to you.
Yes, well, about 20 years ago, I was dating a woman,
and her elderly father, he wasn't feeling well.
She had asked me come visit him.
I said sure.
He said, "well, you know, I got something
I really want to tell you about.
I've been meaning to tell you for a couple years,
and I want to get this off my chest."
And he told me that he was someone named Otto skorzeny.
The famous Nazi commando.
Yes.
Hitler's most trusted s.S. Commander is Otto skorzeny.
Like the fuhrer, skorzeny is born in Austria,
and is quickly at the center of Nazi-espionage operations.
A gifted spy, skorzeny is tasked with a number of high-profile,
undercover missions,
including freeing deposed Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini from prison in Italy.
In 1943, skorzeny leads a failed plot called operation long jump,
which aims to assassinate the so-called "big three"...
Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin.
After the war, skorzeny narrowly escapes from allied forces
and vanishes.
The following years bring reports of sightings in Egypt,
Ireland, and Argentina.
But skorzeny evades capture until his death in 1975.
[ All singing in German ]
So you're saying he actually faked his death.
Yeah, he faked his death in 1975,
and he lived to be 92 years old.
He made a deathbed confession to me
that he and Reinhard gehlen actually murdered Nikola Tesla
after they stole his best inventions.
Including the death ray.
Murphy: Eric's theory is a little crazy,
but there are all kinds of crazy Tesla fringe theories.
As an investigator, it's really important to come at things
from an unbiased perspective.
You have to follow up on every lead.
And this is especially true in this mystery,
which is 100 years old.
So, he claims Hitler actually ordered
the assassination of Tesla.
Yes.
He passed the order down to gehlen and Otto,
and sent them to the United States?
Yes.
Otto skorzeny told me they were pretending
to be American o.S.S. Officers.
They came to visit Nikola Tesla.
He invited them in. He made them some tea.
Tesla turned his back,
and gehlen held his arms down by his side,
and skorzeny actually put a pillow in front of him
and smothered him.
So, they acquire the death-ray plans,
they assassinate Tesla.
Yes.
Is there any proof to back any of this up?
When he laid this information on me,
I didn't know what to think.
I thought maybe he was losing his mind.
Maybe he was senile, or had dementia.
But he came me a shoe box full of 60 years'
worth of photographs.
And one by one, he went through the photographs
and he pointed out, "this is me.
This is Reinhard gehlen."
I was able to recognize all the photos of the people
who he claimed they were based on my own research.
Would you like to see it?
Yeah, very much.
Here's Otto skorzeny at the age of 92.
Here he is with the Nazi war criminal Walter rauff.
Walter rauff had his fingers blown off
by a Mossad letter bomb when he was living in South America.
Holy [bleep]
There were Nazis who faked their deaths
or otherwise just disappeared.
A lot of them were wanted war criminals,
just like Otto skorzeny.
I need to prove two things...
Is the person in these photographs
really Otto skorzeny?
And two, did Otto really kill Tesla on Hitler's order?
If this story turns out to be the truth
and this photograph is really of Otto skorzeny,
then we've just solved the mystery of Tesla's death.
Prince: These are real death-ray plans.
This is missing.
So he's got something original in there
that he's got pictures of.
There's no figure 5. The money page.
This is a pretty critical part.
If we don't get this right, we're not going
to get a functional death ray.
You can look at the ears.
Murphy: These guys are the same person.
I mean, what percentage would you rate this at?
If we do this right, we can move on
and finish the rest of this death ray.
Three, two, one.
♪♪
Narrator: While Jack chases down leads
about a possible Nazi connection to Nikola Tesla's death,
Cameron is meeting with a rocket scientist
who can examine the death-ray plans found in Serbia
and help the team understand them.
Some of this is engineering stuff that Aron understands,
but a lot of it is really complex notes
in shorthand or code,
so we've got to find someone that can help us
decipher this stuff.
This is kind of cool. This is all handwritten.
This is fascinating.
Max deflection. A little rough surface here.
Loading length.
And there's the moment of inertia.
That's fascinating.
So, this is more tower work.
"Covering of the tower.
Asbestos ebony sheet."
So, it's some sort of covering, an insulator.
I would imagine... he's dealing with large, large potentials,
so he's probably making some sort of insulating cover.
Why do you think that was important?
Well, in my opinion, what he's trying to do
is essentially cover his tower
so he does not jump the energy
he's built up back to ground or any objects nearby...
Birds, people, cars.
But what he's looking at is insulating this tower
so that all the energy will go up
to where he needs to use it.
It'd be very, very dangerous to be around, quite frankly.
Narrator: These documents appear to show Tesla carefully
working through a critical aspect
of the death ray... insulation.
Tesla plans to send such large amounts
of energy through the weapon,
he is concerned energy will escape
before it is fired from the top.
A strong insulator could prevent a misfire,
which could be deadly.
What John says proves that Aron was on the right track
when it comes to the insulator.
But I've got to let him know all the precautions
Tesla was taking with the insulator,
and to make sure it's strong enough to hold
and direct the potential energy the way he wants it to.
Otherwise it might not work.
This is more of the physics of what he's doing.
"The references to figure 5 of my original communication,"
and then...
Is there a next page to this?
- I'm not sure. - Hmm.
He's leading us someplace else.
He said, "then the velocity becomes..."
And from the top, "from the references to figure 5
of my original communication."
He's writing something in addition to something else.
So, it's clear something's missing.
The money page.
According to their own recently declassified files,
on the night of Nikola Tesla's death,
the FBI allows 80 additional trunks of Tesla's research
to be confiscated by a mysterious agency
known as the office of alien property custodian.
The agency's authority extends only to immigrants
without legal status, but Tesla is a U.S. citizen,
which prompts outcry from many
who claim this seizure is illegal.
His belongings are held by the U.S. government
for almost nine years.
Finally, after repeated protests from Serbia,
Tesla's belongings are sent to his home country.
Rumors persist that key documents are never shipped.
Now, what you're saying, clearly,
we don't have all the information.
No, we don't.
He's got something original in there
that he's got pictures of.
It's not here.
It looks like we got pages missing.
Tesla's own hand.
Did the museum have them and not give them to us?
Did sava steal them?
Did the missing pages ever make it to Serbia?
Either way, I have to find out.
Narrator: In Texas, Aron and his team
are building a large prototype of the death ray.
If they can prove Tesla created a revolutionary
anti-aircraft weapon,
it might show a motive for Tesla's murder.
Based on the death-ray plans found in Serbia,
Aron is re-designing the insulator for the build.
So, this is a pretty critical part.
I mean, because we didn't have one of these,
our first prototype failed.
It did.
The insulator worked well on the second one.
We got to go a lot larger now
because the scale is larger.
Koscho: We've got to make sure that this insulator can stand off
the very large voltages
that this system is going to be experiencing.
Narrator: None of Tesla's experiments with wireless energy
are more mysterious than the tunguska event.
Siberia... 1908.
A massive explosion destroys more than 750 square miles
in the Russian wilderness.
It is never explained.
Reports in the media insist the damage is caused by a meteor,
but many believe it was a Tesla death-ray test
gone horribly wrong.
So, what are we gonna make this out of?
All right, so, we're gonna make this out of cast nylon.
These ridges here are serving the same purpose
as they did on the other insulator.
They're making it really difficult for the high voltage
to jump across all of them
and escape out the side where we don't want it, right.
Koscho: Nylon's an amazing material.
But it's expensive, and it's difficult to handle,
so if you have to cut it with any normal hand tools,
it's pretty much impossible.
Narrator: The insulator needs to be the exact shape
and dimensions as the computer design.
To fabricate the part from cast nylon,
the team will use a state-of-the-art 3-d printer.
They hope it will be enough to keep the massive amount
of energy from leaking when the death ray is fired.
Obviously, this could be dangerous for anybody
who is anywhere near this thing.
Look at that.
♪♪
Narrator: Jack is investigating a potential Nazi plot
to kill Nikola Tesla.
Informant Erik Orion claims Nazi spy Otto skorzeny
confessed to assassinating Tesla.
Now he meets with Peter crutchley,
a journalist who has studied the Nazi spy ring extensively.
I wanted to do a little reality check with you,
because I got some information about Otto skorzeny.
I know you've done some research on him in the past.
The investigation I'm working on
is trying to determine whether or not the death ray
is something that was actually real.
Yeah.
And part of that is to identify who else was after it,
what different parties were interested in it.
And one of them, as it turns out, may have been the Nazis.
I talked to one contact, and he told me
that Otto skorzeny was assigned
to assassinate Tesla here in New York.
And he told me that Otto was actually living in Florida,
and lived there up until 1997 when he passed away,
and had an American family.
And he laid all these photographs on me
that supposedly show Otto living in the United States.
Right.
Erik claims that Otto skorzeny died
as a very old man in Florida.
He lived to be 92 years old.
He made a deathbed confession to me.
However, the history books tell us
that Otto died in Madrid in 1975, at the age of 67.
But it's definitely possible
that there were Nazis who faked their deaths
or otherwise just disappeared to try to start a new
and anonymous life after the war.
Tesla died in '43.
Yeah.
So I'm trying to establish where Otto was
during that time frame... Specifically,
January of 1943.
Peter says that it's possible that Otto left Europe in 1943,
so maybe he did have a hand in murdering Tesla.
I mean, he was Hitler's favorite commando.
Right. Right.
It sounds like Otto was Hitler's tactical commander of choice.
If they were to send a team of assassins to the United States
to conduct an overseas operation,
do you think Otto is the type of person
who would be in charge of that?
The reality that we don't have an exact record
of where Otto skorzeny was in January of 1943 raises doubt.
It means that we have to pursue this thing all the way
and establish who's in these photographs.
Narrator: After a visit with an expert to look at the plans
of Tesla's death ray from Serbia...
Loading length, and there's the moment of inertia.
Cameron discovers key pages are missing.
Is there a next page?
Something's missing.
But finding the missing pages will mean
tracing the path of the documents
before they were shipped to Serbia.
We're gonna keep looking, beating the bushes,
and see what we can come up with.
We got a couple more leads.
And I'll be in touch if we find anything.
♪♪
While Cameron traces the documents from Serbia,
Jack is tracking down a lead that suggests
Tesla was murdered by a Nazi spy on the order of Adolf Hitler.
Using his background as a military investigator,
he finds a photo-forensics expert who can help.
I have some photographs that I'd like
to have some forensic analysis done on
that reportedly show a fairly prominent Nazi
named Otto skorzeny.
We have some pictures that are confirmed to be his,
and then we have some other pictures
that are reported to be of him,
and I'm wondering if you could compare the two
and tell me if it's the same guy.
No.
One photographs, the ones we know are authentic,
he ranges from, say, age 30 to 50.
The ones that we're trying to understand
if it's the same person,
the person appears to be about 90 years old.
That sounds great. Thank you.
See you soon.
♪♪
Hey, y'all. Get on over.
Now that we've got our insulator all taken care of
and our sphere all built, I think we've got it.
If it can hold that weight, then it's going to be able to deal
with anything we throw at it.
Next step is to move on to the power source.
And just like in our prototype,
we're going to be using capacitors.
But we're talking about a ton more energy this time.
We're expecting our beam to deliver around
100 megawatts of power to the target.
That's enough power to power 10,000 homes.
So everybody's got to be on the same page with this.
So, we've got some capacitor work to do.
Those gray capacitors that we started out
with really did do their job well.
Yeah.
But to get a good death ray, to actually blow up a target,
we're gonna need a lot more energy,
so I ordered some larger capacitors.
They're about four times the size of the gray ones
we used in the test.
Going this size is gonna be very dangerous.
If something fails, it would be a very spectacular failure.
Narrator: Many of Tesla's high-voltage experiments
are at his wardenclyffe lab on long island,
where some thing he is developing the death ray.
Locals report night after night of mysterious
bright flashes like lightning in the sky.
Eventually, public pressure forces
Tesla to abandon his work at this location.
Though he abandons the lab,
historians believe he never abandons the death ray.
♪♪
To get all of the energy storage that we need
to make this death ray work,
we're gonna combine eight of these capacitors
to make one mega-capacitor.
Narrator: One of the key documents found in Serbia
outlines Tesla's plans to insulate his death ray
in order to control the weaponized energy.
Aron's team will insulate each capacitor separately.
They will also add additional insulation
on all connection points between the capacitors.
The insulation is critical to ensure the energy moves
to the weaponized portion of the death ray.
If the insulator's fail, the results could be deadly.
♪♪
Koscho: To prevent flashover, we're going to use insulating
plastic tubes in silicone.
It's an extra layer of insulation.
Hays: Our only areas between this connection
and this connection are highly stressed,
and that high voltage just wants to jump between these.
And if it does, it blows our project to pieces.
Yeah.
So we cannot let that happen.
And we do that with an 1/8-inch
of polycarbonate insulating material.
So, we're pretty much keeping that failure
that the prototype did from happening again.
Exactly.
[ Loud bang ]
[Bleep]
Let's see if it fits.
Hey. Oh, yeah.
- Hey. - Nothing can happen to that.
Man, this is looking good, dude.
Yeah.
♪♪
Murphy: It seems pretty clear that someone like Hitler
would have been interested in Tesla's death ray.
Man: Tesla had a lot of offers from Germans
before the second world war.
But whether or not he dispatched Nazis to New York
to actually assassinate Tesla,
that's a little bit harder to prove.
Otto skorzeny.
The famous Nazi commando.
He made a deathbed confession to me
that he and Reinhard gehlen murdered Nikola Tesla
after they stole his best inventions.
Here's Otto skorzeny at the age of 92.
By seeking out a forensic photo expert,
I'm hoping that they can compare the facial features
on these photographs
and see if it's the same person or not.
I can look at it and give an opinion,
but this is somebody who has actual training,
and he'll be able to tell us the real deal, I think.
All right, well, let me show you what I got.
Yeah, what are we looking at here?
So, I have a whole bunch of pictures that you gave me.
Mm-hmm.
I am putting them up on the screen here.
There's a couple from the unknown person.
That's Otto there in the middle.
Right, back in like the '60s. We know that's him for sure.
What I need to know, though, is this older gentleman this guy?
Right.
The process that we call identifying somebody
is actually called individualization,
and what that means is you want
to find enough agreement of characteristics and features
that this is the same person.
Not a person that looks like them
or has a lot of features that match,
but we're trying to say, "this is the same person."
And that's really hard to do,
especially when age is concerned.
With age comes things like your cartilage expands
and starts to sag,
and you have all kinds of additional,
like, wrinkles, and time to grow moles
that weren't there before.
Now, when I got your photos,
it was a little bit more difficult.
And the reason why is because, with pictures like this,
the angle and the lighting
and the photo quality and the perspective,
all of those things they don't match very well.
However, that said, if you look on the screen over here,
the skull shape is similar,
the nose shape is similar, the hairline is similar.
He's got moles in similar places.
It's kind of in the same place.
Is it down here because of time, has sagged, right?
Or it could be a completely new mole.
You can see a similarity?
Like I said, there are some similarities.
You know, his skull shape is similar.
Both appear to be about the same height.
Sure.
If you look at his hairline, it goes up,
he's got a widow's peak.
It's similar. His hair being slicked back.
His face shape is similar.
The slope of his forehead appears to be similar.
He's got wrinkles in the right places.
These might be the same person.
Narrator: Jack investigates a claim that Nazi spy
Otto skorzeny made a deathbed confession
to the murder of Nikola Tesla.
To prove this theory, Jack is working with a forensic expert
to compare known photos of skorzeny...
Combs: The skull shape is similar, the nose shape is similar.
With images of the man
who allegedly claimed to be skorzeny.
These might be the same person.
Can you walk me through, then, some of the things you found
that are different between the two photos?
Yeah.
So, actually, one of the things that you can do is,
you can look at the ears.
And this is one of the tools that people are using as a way
to identify people, is from their ears.
The ears are pretty consistent?
Well, they still change, and they do have differences,
but the ears themselves are a unique feature.
Here's some of my things.
In all of the unknown-person pictures that I have,
if you look at this one...
Again, we got to consider perspective
and lighting and angle and stuff like that,
'cause there might be distorted things.
However, in every photo of this man that we have,
his left ear sticks out from his head
a little bit more than all of the pictures of Otto
that we have where that left ear
is kind of plastered back towards
his head a little bit more.
So, if you were to, like, throw a percentage on this
that these guys are the same person,
I mean, what percentage would you rate this at?
It's hard for forensic analysis to say 100% anything.
Right.
However, I've picked out enough things
that I feel like it's not the same person.
Murphy: We can't prove that the Nazis were involved in Tesla's murder
or chasing after him in New York City,
but this doesn't mean the Nazis were not interested
in Tesla's death-ray plans.
So we need to try to find something to support that.
I've been following up on this Nazi theory.
I went to talk to Allen who does forensic photography analysis.
From Allen's analysis, he says that this gentleman
is almost certainly not Otto skorzeny.
I think it's perfectly plausible that the Nazis had a motive
to try to acquire Tesla's death-ray plans,
and even kill him to get to it,
but the facts just don't add up.
Yeah.
We've got bigger suspects that we need to look into.
I went and spoke with a guy named John Scott.
First of all, he confirms these are real death-ray plans.
Scott: So, what he's looking at is insulating this tower
so that all the energy will go up to where he needs to use it.
It'd be very, very dangerous to be around, quite frankly.
The big takeaway, though, is that they're incomplete.
Really?
Is there a next page to this?
Something's missing.
The one that really had the meat,
the technical specifications of the weapon itself,
that was a middle page.
There was a previous page, there was a subsequent page,
and there was a figure that was missing.
The documents you've got, there's no figure 5.
It's not here.
So, either that means sava took it when he broke in the safe,
or something happened between the time it left the U.S.
And it was established in the museum.
The big thing is, we don't have everything.
Narrator: The night of Tesla's death,
80 trunks of the inventor's work is seized
by the U.S. government.
Nine years later, under mounting pressure,
the U.S. sends these trunks to Serbia.
But many historians believe the archives shipped
are missing key documents.
The newly declassified file on Nikola Tesla
show the FBI was concerned these documents
might fall into the hands of the axis powers or the Soviets,
giving them motive to remove crucial plans
related to the death ray.
So, what's next?
So, I did a lot of research,
and I found a guy who wrote an article
saying that he was the guy who inventoried
and went through Tesla's documents
when they arrived in Serbia in 1951.
Holy [bleep]
He wrote this article, and he says here he's the guy
who opened the trunks of Tesla's archive.
So he was the first guy to lay his hands
on the documents when they arrived.
Yeah.
If we can track him down, he might be able to tell us
what was in those trunks when he opened them up,
whether or not those documents were missing
when they arrived in Serbia
or if they were plucked out after.
Let's track this dude down.
Let's go.
Armed with new information from Tesla's death-ray plans,
Aron and his team put the final touches on insulation
designed for the high-voltage capacitors
that will power the weapon.
Hays: An 1/8-inch of polycarbonate insulating material.
Pritchard: So, we're pretty much keeping that failure
that the prototype did from happening again.
Exactly.
Before attaching their power source
to their large-scale death ray,
they will test their capacitor bank on a small target.
Hays: This will work for a test.
I like how you have it set up. This is pretty simple.
Gonna blow that melon up?
Yeah, man.
So, as long as our charging cable
doesn't short out back there
and we're safe on the power-supply end,
I think we're good to go.
If we do this right, then we're gonna splatter
melon all over the place.
We're gonna know these work.
We're gonna know the power supply works.
And then we can move on
and finish the rest of this death ray.
So, this gives us a really good idea of what this looks like,
of what we can actually do with the energy we store in here.
Yeah, I mean, you know, we are building
a death ray here, right?
And, I mean, this is the death part.
In this case, it's the death of a watermelon.
Hopefully, later on, it's gonna be the death
of something that flies.
As soon as we air-compressor fire that switch,
it should blow this thing to kingdom come.
All right, man, let's start charging these capacitors.
All right.
Okay.
Going to start charging.
All right.
Y'all ready?
- Yep. - Ready. - All right.
Three...
Two...
One!
Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo! That worked.
Yep. That worked.
[ Laughter ]
That was so much energy.
Imagine that going into light when this thing fires.
Oh, yeah.
Now that we know our power supply works,
our sphere is structurally sound,
it's time to build a death ray.
Every step from this point on has to be perfect.
There's no room for error here.
It's almost time to see if Tesla's death ray
is fact or fiction.
Narrator: Aron is tackling the next step
in his death-ray build...
Where to assemble and fire the weapon.
Koscho: I figure this is gonna be around 4 tons
when it's complete.
And that's a lot of [bleep] blowing in the wind.
If we don't get this right,
we're not going to get a functional death ray.
This site has to be completely leveled.
We can't pour concrete where it's not flat.
I mean, if this slab is off by a few degrees at the bottom,
the top of the death ray is gonna be off by a mile.
So concrete's a great option here.
It's heavy. It's easy to set up.
We can pour it where we need it in the middle of the field.
It also allows us to bolt steel anchors in place
and weld the structure to it.
We can't forget that this weapon is going to fire a beam.
So wherever we're putting our death ray,
we need to make sure this is flat.
It allows us to predict
exactly where the discharge
from our death ray is going to go.
Without it, high voltage would go in every direction.
We would have no idea how to aim this thing.
It could be potentially fatal.
Narrator: In their investigation
of Nikola Tesla's suspicious death,
Jack and Cameron uncover never-before-seen plans
for his death ray,
but the plans are missing critical information.
A former employee of the Tesla archives could have the answers.
I tracked down this guy who worked
for the Nikola Tesla institute.
I found an article saying that he was the guy who inventoried
and went through Tesla's documents
when they arrived in Serbia in 1951.
Holy [bleep]
Tesla's nephew was sava kosanovic.
This is sava sremac.
He was one of the persons to inventory
and go through Tesla's documents
when they came to Serbia from the United States.
You know, I want to know,
how do they know there was things missing?
If anyone knows about what's there, it's him.
So, thanks for meeting us today.
Sava brought his daughter, Danielle,
who's gonna help him kind of work through some English.
Cameron and I have been conducting this investigation
into Nikola Tesla
and looking at whether or not he may have been murdered.
And we're just hoping to get a little bit
of added perspective from you.
We just got back from Belgrade,
shifting through some documents there,
and then we found out that you were actually the first person
to lay hands on the documents when they arrived in Belgrade.
So you're saying that pages
were physically torn out of the notebook?
Did you get any impression
of what those missing papers might be?
Prince: When sava received the documents,
he claims there were pages ripped out of notebooks.
I can't say for sure that the U.S. government
stole the documents, but they had the opportunity,
they had the means, and they had the motive.
This could change who we potentially look at
as a suspect.
Based on your inspection of the documents,
do you think it's possible that the FBI
took some of Tesla's papers before you received them?
I think it's interesting we're coming full circle around
on this whole thing with the documents.
One thing he was sure about is that there were pages missing.
Yeah, that there were actual pages ripped out of notebooks,
which doesn't seem like something Tesla would do.
Right.
That's the big unanswered question.
You can say, to be charitable,
it's highly probably that someone went in there
and removed documents out of these trunks.
Now the most likely suspect becomes the FBI
or the U.S. government.
They definitely had the means and the opportunity to do so.
I think the next step for us is to figure out
where these documents landed after
they were removed from the trunks.
They went somewhere. They didn't just disappear.
I think we should see if there's any whispers of them out there.
Well, we got some homework to do.
Let's get out of here.
Yeah. I think you're right.
♪♪
Murphy: We started this whole investigation
to build a death ray to prove whether or not there could be
a motive for Tesla's murder.
You think we've accomplished that?
Roscho: Nobody has tried to build this.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!
This is all ready [Bleep] set up for failure.
Tesla, he had a hell of a vision for this.
The whole thing's about to fall.
There's nothing safe about this thing,
even when it's working right.
Matter of fact, if this works right,
it's going to be very not safe.
Murphy: Is it possible that they had a team of scientists
picking through those documents to see
if there's anything in there of national-security value?
Consequences are that people will die.
I think we're starting to reach critical mass here.
The only country that bought his plans were the Russians.
Holy [bleep]
After all this time, I think we've got our man.
Whoa. What's that, there?
- That's it, man. It's big. - [Bleep]
- What's up, man? - Hey, man.
- What's up, guys? - Wow.
This thing will absolutely kill you.
That's good.
You get underneath this and it arcs to you, you will die.
Murphy: This is the moment that we've been building
up to for months now.
Three, two, one!
Whoa! - [Bleep]