An invention that remains to be proven: Marconi's "death ray"

Guglielmo Marconi, publicity photo, unknown author, source http://www.si.edu/copyright/, free use

The Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi, physicist, inventor and businessman (1874-1937), who was close to Mussolini, is said to have designed a mysterious weapon in Italy in the 1930s that was financed by the duce...

These facts, which are not reported anywhere in the official history - and which remain to be proven, given the scarcity of sources - were described by Mussolini's widow, Rachele, in her memoirs in 1973.

She recounts how her husband, the dictator, told her, as she was about to leave on a trip to Ostia one day in 1936, to be on the road between Rome and Ostia between 3 and 3:30 p.m. in order to witness a mysterious phenomenon that was about to take place ....

And it was indeed the case: it was about 3 p.m. when the car that was driven by her driver stopped on the road where she was driving. At first she thought it was a simple breakdown, but she soon realized that all the other cars around them had also stopped and could not start.

Her driver got out and, like the other drivers, lifted the hood of the vehicle to find the source of the problem. But no one seemed to be able to solve it.

Rachele Mussolini remembered her husband's words and told her driver that if by 3:30 p.m. the car was still not operational, they would call a tow truck. And that's right... It was around 3:30 p.m. that the driver and all the other drivers around him managed to start their cars and were able to continue their journey.

As soon as she returned home and told her husband the facts, the duce would have revealed to her the key to this story: an ultra-secret experiment invented by the scientist Guglielmo Marconi, who would have found a way to disrupt, at a distance, the electronic circuits of the engines thanks to waves in order to render any type of vehicle non-operational in case of war.

Marconi would have already carried out this type of experiment, assisted by the physicist Adelmo Landini (1896-1965), in March 1930, on board his yacht Electra equipped as a laboratory ship...

Reality or legend, Robert Charroux specifies that it was Pope Pius XI who, having heard about the 1936 experiment, insisted that Mussolini put an end to what he considered to be "satanic research" and demanded the destruction of all the files related to it.

Let us remember that Marconi's death, which occurred the following year, has always been considered as suspicious...

Sources :

Robert Charroux, Le livre de ses livres, chapitre "A la recherche de l'insolite", Robert Laffont, 1985, pp. 141-142

Rachele Mussolini, Mussolini sans masque. Souvenirs recueillis par Albert Zarca, Fayard, 1973