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From: fowler@uw-beaver.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.rumor
Subject: Re: Giant Magnet
Message-ID: <2044@uw-beaver>
Date: Fri, 26-Oct-84 22:35:36 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.2044
Posted: Fri Oct 26 22:35:36 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 28-Oct-84 05:39:59 EST
References: <2567@ihldt.UUCP>
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 40

The way I heard it was that they had latched onto the wonderful
ideas of that neglected genius N. Tesla and were screwing up the
earth's electric/magnetic field by doing weird DC things to their
long distance power distribution grid.  Oh yeah, they supposedly
also use their power lines as the antennae for ULF radio for
submarine communication.  That seems more likely since the U.S. navy
has an antenna for that purpose near here that looks for all the world
like a high tension power line crossing a mountain valley.

The source of the weather manipulation rumor was some guy who worked for
Canada's National Research Council.  Around 76-78 he was releasing (not
necessarily publishing) a couple of papers a year about how the Soviets had
managed to push Arctic storms over the pole into Canada and the U.S. The
Vancouver papers would pick up on this and print filler pieces about this.
Somehow their recent crop failures don't seem to support the claim that
whatever they could have been fooling around with (if anything) could be a
reliable weather control/modification mechanism.

Just to keep the rumors flying, I once talked (read "swilled a lot of
burbon") with a guy who'd done a lot of military/oceanographic/nuclear
test detection instrumentation.  He'd just given a talk about how
even about 10 miles from shore on the ocean floor south of Long Island, N.Y.
that ambient 60 cycle hum was a real problem.  That struck a chord in me
cause I'd just seen a movie with a bunch of European hippies (actually
a film of a performance in Germany of Julian Beck's Living Theater) who
were "OM"ing.  Because they were doing it in Germany they were in tune
with the 50Hz power grid.  It sounded discordant, "out of tune with
the universe" to me.  Anyway, the instrumentation guy said that in the
U.S. that only farmers complain that 60Hz high voltage lines screw you
and your cows up psychologically.  In contrast, he claimed that the
Soviets had done a lot more studies of the biological effects of 
low frequence EM radiation and that as a result they had some very strict
environmental regulations about what could and could not be done near
the power lines.  Anyone out there know anything about this?  It's
the kind of thing which (if at all true) would lend more credence to
the "Giant magnet" rumor.

-- Rob Fowler ( ...uw-beaver!fowler or fowler@washington)