Talking balls of light may soon be appearing over battlefields

A SPECIAL project team within the Pentagon say they are close to developing a new system that burns balls of plasma into the air — and manipulates them to create the sound of human voices.

YOU’RE cold. You’re hungry. You’re scared.

You’ve been holed up in a trench for weeks, fighting a desperate battle against unknown odds.

Suddenly, you’re bathed in an pulsing, eerie ball of light.

Then you hear a disembodied voice ...

“Lay down your arms. Surrender.”

A religious experience?

Perhaps, in the past.

In the future, it’s just another weapon.

The Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) is on the brink of developing a laser system that burns balls of plasma into the air — and manipulates them to create sound.

“I’m trying to get a little plasma ball to speak to you,” the head of the JNLWD’s technology division David Law told The Military Times and Defence One at a recent exhibition in Washington DC. “We’re this close to getting it to speak to us.”

It’s an intriguing piece of technology.

One laser, called a femtosecond laser, shoots out pulses of light to create small balls of plasma — a highly charged bubble of gas.

A second laser, a nanoslaser can be shot at this plasma ball to generate a variety of effects. Users can tune this laser for a variety of outcomes: light, sound, heat.

It can already produce enough tailored sound to be a serious source of battlefield confusion, such as a volley of gunshots coming from an unexpected direction. They also want to use the device as a ‘noisemaker’ — similar to the grenades used by police and troops to stun and disorient opponents.

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But the Pentagon researchers are currently working on refining the system enough for them to replicate a human voice. It hopes it will be ready for deployment within three years.

Such a variety of specifically-targeted uses could be applied to crowd control, hostage situations, covert operations as well as battlefield psychological warfare.

But it’s just one non-lethal system the Weapon’s Directorate is developing.

Another uses microwaves to disable vehicle electrical systems. One uses dazzling lights to disorient targets. Then there’s one specifically designed to restrict people from accessing a given area by using radiation tuned to heat only the outer layers of a person’s skin.