Nikola Tesla Was Never Forgotten, He Was Just Sad

Ancient Aliens wants you to believe Nikola Tesla was an alien conduit whose secret death ray was buried by the FBI. The actual story: the "vault" they seized in 1943 contained a Wheatstone bridge, which was the 1940s version of a multimeter you could order from a catalogue. The MIT physicist who wrote the dismissive evaluation report was, no joke, John G. Trump, uncle of the current US president. The Office of Alien Property Custodian was a wartime filing bureaucracy, not Warehouse 13. And the death ray Tesla pitched in 1934 ran into the same physics problem every subsequent attempt has run into: air. Charged particles scatter when they hit it. DARPA spent decades and a lot of money rediscovering this.

Physicist and YouTuber Angela Collier (back for round two after the Planet Nine episode) walks Tristan through why the lone-genius myth keeps getting recycled, why Tesla's actual story is sadder and more interesting than the conspiracy version, and how the same myth-making machine that turned a guy who died broke feeding pigeons into a $1.4 trillion brand also lets Elon Musk cosplay as a self-made inventor while doing Nazi salutes and gutting USAID. Plus: why the History Channel was built explicitly as "romance television for men," what disability justice has to say about the autism-as-superpower frame, and why Hans Asperger was, factually, a Nazi.

Guest plug: Angela Collier is a physicist and YouTuber whose videos do for physics what this show tries to do for archaeology. Go watch her recent Dyson sphere video, in which she reads a physics paper out loud and explains, with admirable patience, why disassembling Jupiter to build solar panels is silly. Her channel is at youtube.com/@acollierastro.

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Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max

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