Tim R. Swartz has had a long career in the field of paranormal journalism. One might call him a “journeyman” of sorts, covering diverse topics such as UFOs, Nikola Tesla, ghosts and hauntings – the list goes on – and chipping away at those imposing boulders of mystery without much fanfare. It is in some ways a lonely struggle, but it has always had its rewards.
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Swartz is the author of the book “The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla,” for instance, which has become a bestseller for his publisher, Global Communications. He has been on the scene for a poltergeist haunting that also included a verifiable teleportation event. He has edited the online publication “The Conspiracy Journal” for many years, helping to inform interested readers of the latest machinations of the “shadow government,” which, Swartz believes, has already taken control of the world in the name of a small elite group who continue to remain ominously concealed.
It all began for Swartz, as with most people in this field, in childhood. As Swartz recalls, it was sometime around 1968 and he was in the third grade. Studying a publication called “My Weekly Reader,” distributed by Scholastic Book Services, was part of the curriculum at Swartz’s school. “My Weekly Reader” was a small newspaper-type publication, written for children, which kept up with current events in the U.S. and throughout the world. Swartz and his fellow students were required to make a written and oral report on one of the news articles in the newspaper.
There was a UFO flap taking place in the U.S. at the time, and Swartz was asked to do a report on “My Weekly Reader’s” coverage of the sightings wave.
“Up until that point, I had never really even heard or thought too much about UFOs or the paranormal,” Swartz said. “I did my report as best I could at that age, and from that day on in school I was dubbed ‘the flying saucer guy,’ the guy who believed in little green men. I really wasn’t interested in that kind of stuff, but you know how things get thrust upon you as a kid.”
While many of the kids made fun of Swartz to his face about it, some of them would approach him later with personal stories of UFO sightings or ghosts in their homes, stories they asked Swartz not to share with other people.
“That’s what really got me interested in it,” Swartz explained. “Not so much the media reports and things like that about UFOs. But it was the personal angle that got me going. It was the fact that these people would just come to me. They weren’t interested in telling anybody else or contacting the newspaper or anything like that. They wanted a sympathetic ear to hear their story. They wanted confirmation that they really did see something and that they weren’t crazy.”
They also wanted confidentiality, Swartz said, because even then there was a forbidding “giggle factor” attached to such subjects, which continues to prevail, making experiencers throughout the world loathe to talk about what has happened to them.
Swartz said he has had only one possible sighting experience himself. One night, as an adult, he saw a bright, red, stationary light to the southwest that was visible from the back door of his home in Jasper, Indiana. There was an airport about 70 miles away in that same direction, but he was familiar with jets and their landing and maneuvering lights, and he was confident that this was something different. The red light he was observing went out suddenly, and he remained watching too see if a plane would fly overhead from that direction but never saw anything.
“So take it as you will,” he said. “I can’t really say it was a UFO. I didn’t know what it was. Unfortunately, when it comes to UFOs, that’s been my only experience.”
While earning a bachelor’s degree in broadcast technology with a minor in journalism at Vincennes University in his native Indiana, Swartz was already working at a television station in Terra Haute. He would go on to win several Emmy Awards, mostly in the technical field, for editing and producing various news segments. For example, while employed at the PBS station in Indianapolis, he worked on a Halloween episode for a program called “Across Indiana.” Swartz’s segment on local ghost stories was singled out by the judges when the entire program won an Emmy.
The first time Swartz heard the name “Nikola Tesla,” he was working for a television station in Dayton, Ohio. The legendary Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which according to UFO lore houses the dead alien bodies recovered from the Roswell crash, among other things, is close to Dayton.
“One of the weekly assignments my producer and I had,” Swartz recalled, “was to go to Wright-Patterson and talk to the press liaison there just to see if there were any interesting stories we could do. The press liaison would go through his files to see what was available for the local press. I remember one day he was going through his files looking for some stories and he just made an offhand comment that they were doing some work there about which they couldn’t release any information to the press at that time, but maybe later. And he said, ‘work based on that mad scientist, Nikola Tesla.’ And then that was it. He went on to other stuff.”
In spite of how the press liaison had only casually mentioned Tesla, the name stuck with Swartz. He found the mere sound of Tesla’s name to be “exotic,” and he was further intrigued that Tesla had been labeled a “mad scientist.” Swartz would eventually be employed by Timothy Green Beckley, the CEO of Global Communications and the editor of several paranormal-related publications. Beckley and Swartz were kicking around some ideas for possible books one day, and Swartz suggested he try to write something about Tesla.
“Here’s somebody you don’t hear very much about,” Swartz told Beckley, “yet allegedly he contributed so much to modern technology. I’d like to do some research and see if there’s anything that would be worth writing a book about.”
Beckley gave the book proposal his blessing, and Swartz began his research into Tesla, though at the time, around 1998, there was scant material available. But then something serendipitous happened. Beckley received a letter from the late Jim Keith, another paranormal journalist who had written a number of conspiracy-based books. Keith wrote that he had been approached by a book buyer in New Jersey named Dale Alfrey, who had unknowingly purchased some of Tesla’s old papers and notes. Keith had little interest in the material and had passed the information on to Beckley, who then forwarded it to Swartz.
“It was fortuitous,” Swartz said, “that at the time I had only started doing the research on a possible book about Tesla.”
Swartz contacted Alfrey and began to learn further details of the book buyer’s story.
“He had bought a couple of boxes of old books from an estate sale,” Swartz recounted, “and in one of these boxes, underneath these books, he found a lot of old paperwork and journals that were from Tesla. Like a lot of people at the time, he had no idea who Tesla was. Nevertheless, he started reading it and got interested in what he was reading. So he started compiling what he was reading onto old floppy disks. More and more, he came to realize this was pretty unique material.”
Swartz said it is now known that Tesla was not much of a journal-keeper. Tesla had the rather unique ability to visualize his inventions and experiments in his head completely and without needing to put those ideas down on paper. He would convey his ideas to his assistants, whose job would then be to construct whatever device or set up any experiment that was asked of them as well as to write down certain details when necessary.
In any case, Alfrey posted on an Internet forum that he had found this material by Tesla, whom he knew nothing about, and inquired whether anyone out there knew who Tesla was and if the material was worth anything. That was Alfrey’s primary interest: were the papers valuable and was there any money to be made by selling them? Shortly thereafter, he received a rather unsettling visit at his front door by two men, similar, according to Swartz, to the familiar Men-In-Black of UFO legend.
“I don’t think they were dressed in black,” Swartz said, “but they looked almost like federal agents. They were very clean cut, wearing suits and ties, sunglasses, the whole nine yards. They started inquiring about this material. Whether or not he still had it. Whether or not it was there. If he knew who Tesla was, all of that. He didn’t suspect anything. He just talked to them like he would anybody else.”
After a while, the two men thanked him for his help and left. Alfery reported to Swartz that he had felt comfortable throughout the interrogation, oddly enough, and was unaware that anything nefarious was going on. Alfrey next went into the office in another room of his house and found that all of his floppy disks had been stolen and his back door was unlocked. Someone had obviously come in through the back door while he was talking to the two men. Not only were the floppy disks gone, but the relevant material had also been erased from the hard drive in his computer. Nothing else was taken, and none of his stuff had been rifled through.
“It was as though these guys knew exactly where to go,” Swartz said, “what to take, and what to remove from his hard drive. Alfrey told me he wasn’t a computer genius, but he knew enough to check if his deleted files could be recovered. He couldn’t find any evidence that those deleted files had ever been on his computer at all. Whoever had deleted them had done an expert job. That’s when he started looking more into the subject and ran across Jim Keith’s name and wrote to him, which is how the story eventually came to me.”
Alfrey had had no prior experience with any of this, of course, and knew nothing about the dark side where the Men-In-Black and disinformation agents lurk. He asked Swartz, “Have you ever heard about anything like this before? Do government agents come and steal from American citizens? Why are they interested in this?” Swartz said he could not offer much to Alfrey in the way of helpful information in that regard.
However, as he continued researching Tesla, Swartz did learn that something similar had happened shortly after Tesla died in 1943. The United States government swooped in and took everything its agents could get their hands on from Tesla’s apartment and from his former residences as well.
“You have to understand,” Swartz explained, “that at the time Tesla passed away he was basically broke. The only way he was surviving was through monetary gifts from his friends. And when he would get low on funds, he would have to move to another place. He always lived in hotels there in Manhattan. Several times, when he had to leave these places, he also had to leave behind his possessions, which the hotels would use as collateral in lieu of him not being able to pay his bills. If he came back and paid his bills, he could get his possessions back.”
Swartz said that he suspects that a lot of Tesla’s material was sold by these hotels years later. They would run across the papers while cleaning out their basements, for example, and, not knowing what it was, would sell it to paper buyers or other merchants. Thus the material would end up in the hands of others.
“I think the military was most likely monitoring any kind of media outlet,” Swartz said, “the early Internet, things like that, for any Tesla material, in order to swoop in and grab whatever they had missed. I do know that a lot of the material they took directly from Tesla’s estate after he died ended up at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.”
Which is, of course, where Swartz first heard Tesla’s name while still a young television station employee. The pattern of coincidences and lucky happenstance that led to Swartz’s “The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla” is readily apparent. As was mentioned, earlier, the book is still a bestseller for publisher Global Communications, well worth buying and reading for those who have not previously done so. Swartz’s book’s continued impressive sales testify eloquently to the fact that Tesla’s hold on the collective imagination shows no signs of weakening, and Swartz also marvels that, as much time as he has devoted to the study of the legendary inventor, new information on Tesla still emerges all the time.
“I think Tesla still holds a fascination for people,” Swartz said, “because he was such a genius in his day. He went from being a publicly honored figure to being an eccentric hermit, desolate, broke, and referred to as a ‘mad scientist.’ Here we have a guy who created the AC motor, the thing that really helped propel our world into the 20th and 21st century and was part of creating our electronic age. Not just the AC motor, but all kinds of things: radio, remote control, robotics. Tesla even had his own Unified Field Theory on how the universe works. To go from somebody like that to somebody who was considered a crank, a nut job – that alone fascinates people.
“But then you also have a scientist,” Swartz continued, “who was so advanced, so ahead of his time in his thinking. We still haven’t caught up in understanding a lot of the things that he was experimenting with and conceiving. This was a guy that up until the day he died was still coming up with new ideas and theories. He may not have had the money to have a laboratory to conduct experiments any longer, but he was still coming up with things and registering new patents. His last patent was for a helicopter-like device.”
As far back as the late 19th century, according to Swartz, Tesla was looking for a method to transmit electrical energy wirelessly, and by the early 20th century was very close to reaching his goal.
“This is a technology we still don’t have today,” Swartz said, “at least in the public arena. I daresay there are military or government scientists who have a better understanding of what Tesla was trying to do and maybe are well aware of this technology and how it’s used. But it’s not available to the public because that would have devastating consequences on the way our whole economic system operates.”
On the issue of the UFO presence, Swartz has no doubts that the phenomenon is real and utterly amazing.
“It seems to almost have an intelligence of its own,” Swartz said, “in the sense of being able to detect when people are interested in it. It’s almost like the old saying, ‘When you look at it, it looks back at you.’ But the ET hypothesis, is probably too simplistic. It could very well be that at some aspects of the UFO phenomenon do represent physical nuts-and-bolts spaceships from other planets. But I think the overall UFO phenomenon is a lot more complex and may represent a lot of things at once.”
Among the many possibilities, Swartz explained, is the idea that UFOs may be a kind of time machine, or contain inter-dimensional travelers, or be a device operated by a race indigenous to Planet Earth but who live underground or exist at a higher or lower vibration and are thus normally invisible to the human eye. Perhaps one comparison would be to the “jinn,” the Islamic word for “demon,” though, as Swartz points out, a jinn has free will comparable to that of a human being and is a more morally complex creature than our usual understanding of what “demon” means. One must include the word “paranormal” when attempting to classify even some of the more common UFO phenomena, and allow for things outside our usual sense of the material world to be part of our investigation. Swartz says the aliens may simply be mimicking the belief structures already present in our collective consciousness.
“Back in the day, people believed in gods, angels and demons,” Swartz said. “I think there may be an intelligent force that exists on or off our planet that is able to conform itself to our state of reality, to correspond, so to speak, with these pre-existing belief structures. If you have people who believe in gods and angels or leprechauns or fairies, or what have you, then this phenomenon reshapes itself to correspond to these belief systems, for whatever reason. It may be perfectly natural to them to find themselves being manipulated by our collective consciousness. There may be no control over it; it just happens.”
Swartz also briefly mentioned the idea that this alien race may put itself through the machinations involved in interacting with us either for its own amusement or for the sake of “dinner,” referring to speculation on the part of some researchers that these intelligences use our emotions as their food source. The African shaman Credo Mutwa, for example, once said that the aliens exist as a form of energy and require emotional “energy” from us as an essential nourishment.
Time travel is another of Swartz’s favorite subjects, and he again does not question that it is a reality.
“And I think that Mother Nature,” he said, “is showing us that at least some form of time travel is available through what are called ‘time slips.’ We hear accounts of people who are walking down the street and suddenly find that their environment around them has changed. They actually experience, both physically and with all their senses, a different time period. Their surroundings will change to an older time. The asphalt will suddenly turn to bricks; the skyscrapers will disappear and be replaced by houses; the cars are replaced by horse-drawn carriages. They’ll hear, they’ll smell, what’s going on around them, and then, just as quickly, they’ll find themselves back in their own time. So I think that there could very well be ‘eddies’ in time. You may consider time to be a river that flows from the past to the future, but it’s not just smooth-flowing. You have whirlpools and eddies and little diversions that I think people can get caught up in and experience, albeit briefly, the past and sometimes the future.”
It is through a conscious, mechanical manipulation of time that UFOs traverse such vast distances in outer space so quickly, Swartz went on. One would describe their propulsion system as a kind “time machine” as opposed to one that utilized a form of fuel that would somehow propel them through space in more conventional ways, even if such a device could somehow operate at slightly less than the speed of light.
It is the UFOs’ ability to fold and bend time that permits them to exit their time in their solar system and emerge almost instantaneously at their destination untold light years away. Similar disruptions in the normal passage of time are also experienced by many abductees, who may believe they have been aboard a ship for several hours but upon returning discover they have been away only for a few minutes.
In addition to this kind of fascinating speculation, Swartz also has some interesting personal experiences of his own to offer. He has, on at least two occasions, witnessed apparent teleportation events that continue to defy conventional explanation. The first time teleportation happened was when he was working at a television station in Dayton, Ohio, and received a report from an older couple in nearby Springfield, who claimed there was a poltergeist presence in their home.
“They were grandparents,” Swartz recounted, “and their grandchildren had come to live with them due to bad circumstances. Their parents were no longer able to take care of them. It was a boy and a girl, and they were not quite teenagers. It was shortly after these children had come to live with their grandparents that what you would call classic poltergeist happenings started to occur – knocks on the wall, things being moved around, whispering voices, stuff like that.”
When Swartz visited the family’s home, he took his television camera, lights, batteries and other accessories with him to record the interview for the sake of his personal investigative records while assuring the family that none of what transpired would ever be put on the air.
“That was the only way they would talk to me, naturally,” he said. “I’ve run across this time and time again. People want to talk about their experiences, but they don’t want to reveal them to the whole wide world.”
He sat down in the family’s living room, and the children were in their bedroom, adjacent to the adults and visible from where Swartz was seated. Suddenly, and without warning, small rocks started to fall from the living room ceiling. The rocks were similar to pieces of gravel, “like driveway rocks,” little white pieces of limestone.
“Just clunk, clunk, clunk,” Swartz said.
Above the living room was an attic of sorts, but it was just filled with insulation. It was a ranch-style home, and it would have been very difficult for someone to have hidden in the attic. Swartz checked that later and also determined there were no holes in the ceiling through which the small rocks could have fallen. Nevertheless, the rocks had appeared just below the ceiling and fallen to the floor in front of Swartz and the elderly couple. Five or six rocks had dropped, one right after the other, and were clearly visible.
Part II of this article continues tomorrow Wednesday, April 16, 2014! https://www.ufodigest.com/article/tim-swartz-0416
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To read more by Sean Casteel, please visit his website at www.seancasteel.com]