Will The Real Nikola Tesla Please Stand Up?

Is Nikola Tesla Serbian or Croatian? Secrets of the Universe

Will The Real Nikola Tesla Please Stand Up?

By Ellis Oswalt
December, 21, 2023

The Australian Associated Press contacted me for my opinion about a supposed quote from Nikola Tesla. The quote received about 90,000 views on Facebook, and in it, Tesla explains when we die we turn into light and live for all eternity as a beam of light. I knew instantly that the quote was fake, and other experts agreed.

(Read the full AAP article: Nikola Tesla Death and Light Quote Dims Under Scrutiny).

It is hard to explain the avalanche of fake history surrounding this important scientist, who built the foundations for remote control, wireless communication, and modern electrical grids. Depending on who you ask, there are many different versions of Nikola Tesla.

YouTube videos with 10-million views claim that Tesla’s inspiration came from forgotten Egyptian knowledge shared by those who built the pyramids, but Tesla never spoke about anything related to this. Memes exaggerate Tesla's relationship with Hindu mystic, Swami Vivekananda. There is a genre of Tesla as a new-age guru and another genre of Tesla conspiracy.

All around the world, people celebrate a fake Tesla.

The person in the image is not
Nikola Tesla.

These images are used in fake patents attributed to Tesla which have gone viral online.

People often ask me what is my process to determine if a Tesla quote is fake, and it is surprisingly simple.

After researching this topic for years to create my drama, Tesla’s Words, I keep several digital catalogs of his newspaper interviews, articles authored by his pen, personal letters, speech transcripts, and other writings. In the recent past, a person would need to scan all the documents with their eyeballs for hours, but now I can just press (Cont + F) to search for words on the page.

But I can usually remember where a quote is from without much digging.

This is his most popular quote.

After about two years of researching for Tesla’s Words, I realized this quote never appeared in any of Tesla’s writing, interviews, or personal letters. It seemed to be fake. So I reached out to my friend Tim who was the producer of the groundbreaking show Tesla Files for his opinion, to which he replied “One of the sketch ones, for sure.”

He put me in touch with a top expert, Dr. Marc Seifer, who agreed he could not pin a source for this quote. But speculation didn’t end there, Seifer reached across the world to another expert, Dr. Branimir Jovanović. Our final expert said not only is there no documentation, but the quote sounds counter to things Tesla would actually say.

This is how a quote is authenticated, by both scanning the entire written works of Tesla, and by expert consensus. Here is another popular quote you might have seen:

I knew this quote had no source, so I double checked with another expert, Dr. Oliver Subotić, who speaks Tesla’s native tongue. This is important because Tesla’s letters to family and certain friends were not in English. Subotić also has access to the private archives at Belgrade's Nikola Tesla Museum, which contain plenty of Tesla’s personal documents which aren’t available to myself or the public.

Now two experts agree the quote is a fake.

When AAP FactCheck contacted me, I didn’t realize this would be the first of many times I would go public to reveal the real Tesla.

Non-profit groups around the globe existing to preserve Tesla’s broken legacy, one in Philidelphia and another in Perth, began to send me words of encouragement. A late draft of my book received blockbuster reviews from indie reviewers Kirkus Reviews, Writer’s Digest competitions, and others.

So I published Tesla’s Words and went on a speaking tour of Serbia, the nation of Tesla’s heritage, where on every TV station I spoke about shocking and forgotten details which had been hiding in plain sight:

A quote from The Autobiography of Nikola Telsa.
Follow @teslaswords for more quotes with source.

Here, at the age of 62, Tesla describes what he sees from the back of his eyelids when trying to sleep on a nightly basis. He tells us the “affliction” was much worse in his childhood, but it never completely went away. His experience of flashing lights, in particular, re-occurred throughout his life:

A quote from The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla.
Follow @teslaswords for more quotes with source.

When he was young, the barrage of symptoms was most severe, and he described visions so powerful that he lived inside cities within his mind. He claimed to meet people and maintain friendships in a complex dream world.

Here is another category of the visions he describes:

A quote from The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla.
Follow @teslaswords for more quotes with source.

Here Tesla describes seeing a hallucination in his waking, sober hours, and trying to touch it, only to realize it is not there.

What does any of this mean? Nobody knows. This aspect of Tesla’s life is oddly glossed over in every film and biography, despite coming directly from Tesla’s autobiography. No one has asked a medical expert for their opinion. The topic has simply been overlooked.

One of the biggest reasons why this information might have remained hidden for so long is because Tesla’s memoirs are admittedly dry and hard to read at first glance. In them, he tells a magical story of biblical proportions about his path to becoming history's greatest engineer. But he goes on tangents, often struggling to stick to one idea at a time:

One moment he is 6 and in the next sentence he is in his 30s.
In the next sentence, he talks about his childhood again, then his 60s, then again his 30s. The document is hard to follow, and there is evidence that the publication was rushed while the editors were frustrated with Tesla’s inability to meet deadlines. (Tesla’s autobiography is free to access: read it here.)

In my masterpiece drama, Tesla’s Words, I preserve his original quotes, but weave them into a story that provides all the context.

As one of the world’s last classically trained actors of the Russian Stanislovsky method, I spent years collecting dramaturgical research of the time period while methodically analyzing Tesla’s life, his viewpoints, his favorite literature, his childhood and other experiences, his relationships, his motivations, and his written works.

I brought him back to life.

“A startling peek into the mind of a true genius.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Ellis is an extraordinary talent. His communication skills are fascinating.”
—Dr. Branimir Jovanović
Nikola Tesla expert, author, & aerospace engineer

“…Reading of this book was a spiritual experience.”
—Dr. Vujo Knezević
Neurosurgeon;
Tesla Forum of Western Australia

5/5 stars
"TESLA’S WORDS is a short book… yet readers will learn as much about Tesla from this as they might from a scholarly 600-page biography."
—IndieReader

“Tesla in his own words. Great read by Ellis Oswalt.”
—John Nosta
WHO Roster of Experts; Google Health Advisory Board;
former Chief Creative Officer & Chief Strategic Officer of Ogilvy CommonHealth