Giants have trod the ground here. Zebulon Pike, legendary explorer of the unknown West, gave his name to the majestic white- capped peak just outside of town.

President Dwight Eisenhower came here to carve America`s ultimate nuclear war command center, the awesome North American Aerospace Defense Command

(NORAD) bunker, into the granite underneath Pike`s Peak`s neighboring summit, Cheyenne Mountain.

Most impressive of all, the man who invented radio and who discovered the way that the world transmits its electrical power did much of his creative work here.

But, wait. Weren`t we taught that radio was invented by an Italian named Guglielmo Marconi? And that the legendary Thomas Alva Edison devised today`s electrical power system in his New Jersey laboratories?

''We were taught wrong,'' said Toby Grotz, president of the International Tesla Society based here in honor of a little-known flamboyant genius named Nikola Tesla.

Two years before Marconi demonstrated his wireless radio transmission, Tesla, a naturalized Yugoslavian immigrant, performed an identical feat at the 1893 World`s Fair in Chicago.

On June 21, 1943, in the case of Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. vs. the United States the Supreme Court ruled that that Tesla`s radio patents had predated those of the Italian genius.

To be sure, Edison invented the incandesent light bulb. But he powered it and all of his other projects with inefficient direct current (DC)

electricity.

It was Tesla who discovered how to use the far more powerful phased form of alternating current (AC) electricity that is virtually the universal type of electricity employed by modern civilization.

And now, there are indications that Tesla also discovered many of the devices which the United States military-industrial complex is seeking to develop and build for the Pentagon`s controversial Star Wars antimissile defense system.

Grotz and other Tesla experts speculate that recent puzzling reports of immense clouds forming within minutes over Soviet arctic territory are indications that the Soviet Union is testing devices for transmitting energy over large distances developed nearly a century ago by Tesla.

Of particular interest to Tesla researchers, said Grotz, is a widely reported April 9, 1984, event in which at least four airline pilots reported seeing an eruption near Japan that appeared to be a nuclear explosion cloud that billowed to a height of 60,000 feet and a width of 200 miles within just two minutes and enveloped their aircraft.

In late July the Cox News Service reported that all four of these planes had been examined by the U.S. Air Force at Anchorage, Alaska, and were found to be free of radiation despite the fact they had flown through the mysterious cloud in question.

Grotz said that such clouds could form if someone were attempting to implement Tesla`s plans for broadcasting energy by ''creating resonances inside the earth`s ionospheric cavity'' calculated in Colorado Springs during 1899 experiments by the electrical genius.

Each year about 400 members of the Tesla Society, sanctioned by the prestigous International Institute of Electric Engineering (IIEE), meet here where the wizard of electricity carried out his most startling lightning-crackling experiments to discuss one of the strangest stories in the annals of American science.

It is a story of tormented genius. It also is the story of a little-known but intensely bitter feud that pitted Edison and the fabulously wealthy financier J.P. Morgan on one side and Tesla and his ally, the equally powerful George Westinghouse on the other. And, finally, it is a spy story.

Many in the Tesla Society are convinced that foolish U.S. bureaucrats shipped the secrets needed to build Star Wars that Tesla discovered to communist-controlled Yugoslavia shortly after World War II, thereby allowing the Soviets an enormous head start in the quest for a particle beam weapon that is deemed essential to building any missile shield.

In an interview between sessions at this August`s Tesla symposium, Grotz explained that Tesla was drawn to Colorado Springs because he needed both the dry climate and the furiously powerful lightning storms that so often come tumbling down the sides of Pikes Peak and Cheyenne Mountain.

''Tesla dreamed of supplying limitless amounts of power freely and equally available to all persons on Earth,'' said Grotz.

And he was convinced he could do so by broadcasting electrical power across large distances just as radio transmits far smaller amounts of energy, explained Grotz.

The same energy beams, of course, could be directed at the speed of light to destroy enemy planes and missiles as well as to supply electricity, he noted.

Such investigations take one into the realm of the most complicated question facing science today, the so-called Unified Field Theory that Albert Einstein himself confessed was beyond his abilities, acknowledged Grotz, an engineer for the Martin Marietta Aerospace company in Denver.

Tesla believed that he could broadcast power by producing vibrations in the atmosphere that were perfectly in phase with the natural vibrations that exist in thunderstorms, said Grotz.

Then, anyone with a receiver could simply tap into broadcasts and acquire elecricity just as they receive radio or TV broadcasts.

On a hilltop just where the prairies sweep up to the foot of the Rockies, Tesla erected a gigantic version of what is known as the Tesla Coil, a device that produces dramatic arcs of electricity by rapidly changing its resistance. Nearly every natural history museum and high school physics lab in the world sports a Tesla Coil capable of making delighted students` hair stand on end or of arcing dramatic sparks from the fingertips of someone who, standing firmly on a rubber mat, holds the other hand over the coil`s top.

At the corner of Foote and Kowia streets in Colorado Springs, Tesla erected a coil 122 feet high. Tapping into the entire city electric system, the electricial genius sent millions of volts of current into the structure and bolts of man-made lightning leaped as much as 135 feet into the brooding sky to mingle with other bolts created in nature.

The first time he threw the switch, the entire city was blacked out when the giant Tesla coil burned out the power company`s main transformers. Subsequent tests created artificial clouds around his installation and caused lights to burn as much as 26 miles away, according to news reports of the time.

The Colorado Springs artificial lightning bolts created during the single year that Tesla lived here, 1899-1900, have never been duplicated, said Grotz. The experiments established that lightning storms as they swooped down the Rockies and then rumbled across the plains into Kansas were resonating at a frequency of 7.68 cycles per second.