George Kittle’s season came to an end last Sunday when the star tight end tore his right Achilles tendon, adding to the 49ers’ seemingly never-ending list of injuries.
The injury was inopportune timing for San Francisco, which was still a long way from locking up its win over Philadelphia and now heads to Seattle to take on the Seahawks in the Divisional Round on Saturday, but it also added fuel to the fire of a wild conspiracy theory taking hold online.
The theory centers around the 49ers’ practice facility, which is connected to Levi’s Stadium and sits just north of an electrical substation in Santa Clara, Calif.
While grumblings about the substation on social media have been going on for months, the claims took off earlier in January when self-described circadian health and biophysics expert Peter Cowan went viral on X, claiming the 49ers’ injury problems are sitting right under their nose.
“Low-frequency electromagnetic fields can degrade collagen, weaken tendons, and cause soft-tissue damage at levels regulators call ‘safe,’” Cowan, who runs a wellness center that specializes in “harmonizing your electromagnetic environment,” wrote at the beginning of a lengthy post.
In early December, Cowan went to the city-owned Silicon Valley Power’s Mission Substation and claimed to have calculated an elevated level of “milligauss,” which is a measurement of the strength of a magnetic field.
Cowan later argued on his Substack that the substation represents a “chronic” environmental factor unique to the 49ers — a claim injury data does not fully support.
The tight, ready-made theory for why countless star 49ers over the past few years like Christian McCaffrey, Nick Bosa, Fred Warner, Deebo Samuel, Jimmy Garoppolo, NaVorro Bowman, Kittle and many others have gone down with devastating injuries struck a nerve, with Cowan’s original post garnering 22 million views and counting.
The answer doesn’t appear so clean-cut.
Cowan is right — the 49ers have been among the NFL’s most-injured teams in recent years.
Heading into 2025, San Francisco led the league with 101.5 average “adjusted games lost” per season over the past decade, according to longtime injury analyst Aaron Schatz.
The second- and third-most injury-riddled teams over that period, the Giants (94.8 AGL) and Commanders (91.9 AGL), respectively, weren’t far behind, though, and there isn’t any known electrical substation near their facilities.
“It’s not a huge outlier,” Schatz told The Post. “…They led the league, but not by leaps and bounds.”
The 49ers have practiced at the Santa Clara facility since the late 1980s, well before moving into Levi’s Stadium in 2014, but injury concerns tied to the site are a relatively recent phenomenon.
In 11 seasons before 2013, San Francisco ranked among the healthier teams in the league, undercutting the idea that the facility itself has long been a problem.
The 49ers won three Super Bowls in seven seasons after moving into the facility, and have since featured two of the most durable skill players in NFL history — Jerry Rice and Frank Gore.
The scientific community is iffy — at best — on the topic, but not everyone is throwing Cowan’s claims out the window.
NYU radiology professor Christopher Collins was dismissive of the idea that the substation could be causing 49er injuries, telling SFGate that he “honestly can’t imagine” the possibility.
Collins told the outlet that an MRI is “the closest [he] can get to explaining how some sort of electromagnetic field could be related to injuries. But there’s really no way that could happen with power lines in this situation. It’s just not possible.”
Frank de Vocht, an EMF at Bristol Medical School, said the theory was “nonsense” in a conversation with the Washington Post.
University of Albany environmental health professor David O. Carpenter had a different take.
In an email to The Post on Friday, Carpenter wrote that he did “not find it to be a crazy hypothesis,” but stopped short of declaring that “EMFs are responsible for the injuries suffered by the 49ers.”
“No one wants to believe that something that we are all exposed to and something that is such an integral part of our life can be dangerous in excess, and that is part of the reason it is ignored,” he continued.
Joel M. Moskowitz, a UC Berkeley public health researcher who studies EMF exposure, told The Post he “would not rule out a synergistic effect from extremely low frequency EMFs.”
While 49ers wide receiver Kendrick Bourne joked about “that power plant” after Sunday’s win, it appears some NFL players are – and have been – legitimately concerned.
Former 49ers guard Jon Feliciano, who played 16 games for San Francisco in 2023 and spent the 2024 season on IR with the team, said players have long believed something was going on with the substation.
“[The substation] was definitely a conversation the whole two years I was there,” Feliciano said in a video posted to Instagram this week.
“I truly believe in it … The top-tier athletes are definitely taking that s–t into concern.”
He apparently isn’t alone.
Some agents told the Washington Post that some players “had real concerns about EMF,” and speculated that it could give the 49ers trouble attracting outside talent.
“They’re gonna have to move [the practice facility],” one agent told the Washington Post.
With next month’s Super Bowl in Santa Clara, the substation conversation may just be starting.
If the 49ers can pull off two road upsets starting Saturday night, they’ll have a chance to hoist the Lombardi Trophy just yards from the substation.
Kittle won’t be on the field, though.
The blame is anyone’s guess.