> "Researchers working with high-power laser weapons discovered that they could create a glowing ball of fire in the sky by crossing the beams of two powerful infrared lasers. The beams were invisible to the naked eye, but where they intersected, their electric fields became so intense that they ripped apart molecules in the air, creating a plasma…By moving the laser beams around the sky, the researchers found they could shift the plasma ball back and forth at very high speed,” Mullins wrote in 2000.

> So far so strange. What makes it stranger is that by pulsing the lasers they could modulate the crackling sound produced by the plasma to carry coherent speech: in effect, a talking fireball. The idea was that the device would be used for psychological operations, with a seemingly divine voice commanding opponents to flee or surrender.