How much of the Tesla signal and missing papers story is actually established?

Tesla’s Colorado Springs experiments are real, and he wrote about receiving signals he could not explain. The leap from that to a confirmed transmission from somewhere beyond Earth is speculation, not an established finding. His interpretation is worth noting, but it is not proof of what caused the signals.

There was government review and custody of some of his papers after his death. The more dramatic details about a missing notebook, a precise count of trunks, and a specific number still unaccounted for need documentation before they should be repeated as fact.

The story tends to bundle several different things into one mystery. Tesla’s unusual signal reports, his financial difficulties, and the handling of his papers are separate questions. A tidy tale about a funder stopping everything because wireless power could not be metered is a simplification, not a demonstrated explanation for the project’s end.

I’d look for inventories, correspondence, or records that spell out what was taken and where it went. Without that, “twenty trunks vanished” is a claim, not a settled conclusion.

Short version: intriguing, but don’t treat the spooky version as the documented one. Tesla could have been sincere about what he thought he heard and still have misidentified an ordinary or natural source.

Wireless power was a serious ambition, but that doesn’t make every later claim about why funding ended true. Keep the confirmed events separate from the dramatic explanations attached to them.