The Body Electric and Electromagnetic Effects

In 1985, an orthopedic surgeon named Robert O.

Becker published his best-known book,

The Body Electric.

He wrote it with co-author Gary Selden after nearly

30 years of his own research.

His big idea?

Your body doesn't run on nerve signals alone.

Becker argued there's an older, slower electrical

system underneath,

a steady current,

and that it helps control healing.

He built that case in the lab.

Salamanders can regrow a lost leg.

Adult frogs can't.

Becker measured the voltage at the stump, and the two behaved

differently.

Within about 10 days, the salamander's signal swung

from positive to negative, and it stayed negative while the

leg regrew.

A frog stayed positive until its wound had

healed.

He wrote that bone gives off a tiny electric signal when you

bend it, and he reported that a current of billionths of

an amp helped young rats regrow part of an

upper arm bone.

Then the book turns. "If the body runs on

electricity,"

Becker asked, "what are man-made fields doing to it?"

We now live surrounded by power lines, radio,

and radar.

Becker argued that no one had proven any of it

safe, and that all of us had become subjects in

a giant experiment.

And then he went further, into what he called invisible

warfare.

Becker wrote that the Soviets had studied these effects first,

and had apparently already used microwaves against the

American Embassy in Moscow.

But he said the United States had been exploring electromagnetic

weapons for years, too.

He laid out what such weapons could do.

Becker wrote that researcher Allan Frey found

certain pulsed microwaves could be heard as sounds,

even by some deaf people.

Becker wrote that in 1973, an Army

researcher, Joseph Sharp, heard spoken

words beamed into his brain this way.

Becker warned that a device like that could drive a

target crazy with voices, or deliver hidden

instructions to a programmed assassin.

He also wrote that pulsed microwaves had sped up, slowed,

or stopped frog hearts,

and that a beam built to reach the human chest could,

in principle, cause a heart attack.

Then he turned to the mind itself.

He described experiments in which shaped microwave

signals pushed specific brainwave patterns in cats.

He described the work of Jose Delgado, who used

electrical signals in the brain to make monkeys walk, turn their

heads, or smile on command.

As Becker quotes him,

"The animals looked like electronic toys."

Becker warned that broadcasts tuned to produce

moods like compliance could become a new kind of

tyranny.

He named names.

He wrote that the CIA's MKUltra program funded

electromagnetic mind control research as early as

1960, including ways to activate the human

body by remote electronic means.

He cited a 1977 Senate hearing where

MKUltra's director, Sidney Gottlieb,

was asked about controlling minds by radio.

The record shows he first answered no,

then allowed that someone may have tried to see whether a person

standing in a radio beam was easier to hypnotize,

though he said it was never a major focus.

Becker described a 1974 research plan to

carry a hypnotist's words into the brain by microwave,

and he told readers to take it with a pillar of salt.

And he cited a 1976 Defense Intelligence Agency

report on Soviet bloc research that

recommended an earlier study to readers

interested in microwave weapons.

Then there was the Russian Woodpecker,

a pulsing Soviet radio signal heard around the world

from 1976.

Becker noted that a former Chief of Naval Research

privately discounted the idea that it was aimed at

Americans.

But Becker argued the evidence suggested it combined a

submarine link with what he called an

experimental attack on the American people.

He even warned that energy from power lines and radio,

amplified high above the Earth, could be changing the weather,

and that climate itself could become a weapon.

To Becker, all of this added up to one conclusion:

nuclear weapons were the immediate danger, but he

believed the ultimate weapon was the manipulation of our

electromagnetic environment because it is invisible

and strikes at life itself.

His answer was not to unplug the world.

He called for a pause of no more than five years, if

properly funded, on new sources of

electromagnetic energy,

while scientists studied the ones we already

have with honesty and real funding.

The Body Electric started as a book about healing.

It ended as a warning that the same force that keeps us

alive could be used

against us.