Documented as claims: Tesla described the beam weapon to reporters in 1934 and again at his birthday press conferences, named it teleforce, and said he had made the essential discoveries decades earlier. The New York Times covered the announcements. What never appears in the record is a demonstration, a blueprint release, or a working component. Tesla's peace-ray negotiations with governments produced letters, not hardware.
The fuel for every later version: Tesla died January 7, 1943, and the Office of Alien Property seized his papers, reviewed by John G. Trump, MIT, who reported the death ray material as speculative and containing no new workable principles. The FBI later released its Tesla files under FOIA. The seizure is real; the report is real; the legend treats the review as cover-up and the cover-up as proof.
Teleforce's real career was mythological: it became the template for the Tesla weapon, Bearden's scalar canon, the Saryshagan claims, and the modern directed-energy conversation, which, in a final irony, became real hardware (lasers, microwave systems) without any Tesla lineage. The death ray that never existed named a category that eventually did.
Was teleforce suppressed, stolen, or simply never built?