Fate of Tesla's papers: Trump report, "Project Nick", PBS, 2026-10-08

Google (Chrome) and PBS page (curl). Investigator (STEP I).

Queries

• "John G. Trump" 1943 report Tesla papers "Office of Alien Property" full text "speculative"
• "Project Nick" Tesla Craigie Wright Field 1945 OR 1946 OR 1947 record source

Found

• No full text of John G. Trump's 1943 report was found online. Every result (PBS, History.com 3 May 2018, Nikola Tesla Legend, social media) quotes the same sentence. PBS "Tesla - Master of Lightning: The Missing Papers" (2000 documentary site) [web: https://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_mispapers.html] gives it as: Tesla's "thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results." It says Trump's examination took three days. Trump (NDRC/OSRD) had an institutional stake as the government's evaluator.
• The same PBS page says: copies of Tesla's papers "on particle beam weaponry" were sent to Wright Field (Patterson), Dayton; an operation "code-named 'Project Nick'" was "heavily funded" under Brig. Gen. L. C. Craigie to test the concept; details were never published; the project "was apparently discontinued", and the copies disappeared. PBS gives no source. Searches found the same story in Project Censored (P. Phillips), mindjustice.org, Waking Times, Medium and Facebook posts, and an archive.org "Nikola Tesla 01" text; the story appears to trace to Margaret Cheney's Tesla: Man Out of Time (1981) [memory, medium; not verified]. No Air Force record of a "Project Nick" was found.
• Bears on claim 6: the 1983 airtel in the folder (Wright-Patterson staff seeking Tesla's papers) is the one primary document near this story. "Project Nick" is documented in one popular source chain (PBS 2000, probably Cheney 1981), no primary record found yet; silence in Air Force records found online is not contradiction. Records that would decide it: Air Materiel Command / Wright Field records 1945-1948 in NARA RG 342 (US Air Force commands), Brig. Gen. Laurence C. Craigie's papers, and the OAP case file on Tesla (NARA RG 131, Office of Alien Property), which should hold Trump's report and his 30 January 1943 covering letter [memory, medium for the RG numbers].
• PBS also says in 1952 the remaining papers were released to Sava Kosanović and taken to Belgrade; access by Western scholars was hard under Tito. Consistent with the 1981 FBI letter in the folder (claims.md).