Truly profound inventions change the paradigm of the society into which they are born. While it would be nice to think that everyone on the planet has humanity’s best interests in mind, the world’s elite often have a greater interest in maintaining the status quo. For this reason, some of our most brilliant minds’ inventions have been suppressed.

Nikola Tesla’s inventions fell into this category. Known as the father of electricity, Tesla’s genius was particularly disruptive to the ruling powers of his era. Here are five of his inventions that were hidden:

1 . The Death Ray

Calling it the “Teleforce”, Tesla claimed to have invented a death ray as early as the 1930s. Capable of generating intense, targeted beams of energy “that could be used to dispose of enemy warplanes, foreign armies, or anything else you’d rather didn’t exist.” The invention was never constructed, partly because Tesla believed it would be too easy for people to destroy each other.

He proposed that a nation could “destroy anything approaching within 200 miles… and will provide a wall of power that could make any country, large or small, impregnable against armies, airplanes, and other means for attack.” Claiming that efforts had been made to steal his plans, he eventually destroyed the blueprints.

2. Tesla’s Oscillator

As early as 1898, Tesla claimed to have built a device capable of creating earthquakes. A small, oscillating machine, it matched the frequencies of whatever it was attached to, and nearly shook Tesla’s laboratory building to the ground when first tested. Seeing its potential for destruction, Tesla destroyed it with a hammer and claimed ignorance of its purpose.

3. Free Electricity

Funded by JP Morgan, Tesla set out to build a wireless transmission tower, the Wardenclyffe Tower, in New York. Morgan wanted the tower to transmit wireless communication across the world, but Tesla had other ideas in mind.

Wanting to transmit messages across the ocean to ships at sea, Tesla wished to test his theory that the Earth could conduct the signals. If it worked, the planet’s natural harmonics could have been used by anybody to produce free electricity. Of course, free electricity generates no profit — so the powers that be pulled Nikola’s funding. Abandoned in 1906, the project never became operational.

4. Flying Saucer

Tesla informed the New York Herald in 1911 that he was hard at work on a “flying machine.”

“My flying machine will have neither wings nor propellers. You might see it on the ground and you would never guess that it was a flying machine. Yet it will be able to move at will through the air in any direction with perfect safety, at higher speeds than have yet been reached, regardless of weather and oblivious of ‘holes in the air’ or downward currents. It will ascend in such currents if desired. It can remain absolutely stationary in the air, even in a wind, for great length of time. Its lifting power will not depend upon any such delicate devices as the bird has to employ, but upon positive mechanical action.”

5. Electric Airships

Proposing electrically-powered airships, Tesla imagined a world where planes could draw their power from the atmosphere itself. Drawing up plans for unmanned airships as well, Tesla created blueprints for the prototypes of what have become today’s drone ships.

It’s been suspected by many of Tesla’s devotees that the FBI stole his work and research. Recent developments in the Freedom of Information Act have confirmed much of this. See the video below for more on Tesla’s brilliance: