The Anti-antigravity Man

Linda reports that she was surprised  that she had to stop and think about how to answer when someone asked her "Who was Townsend Brown?"  

The Townsend Brown I know was a scientist first, a spook secondly, and a family man in the time left over to him. Those who follow his scientific work  sum it up as 'electrogravitics,' but he also worked extensively with electrohydrodynamics and has been quoted as saying that the (EHD) technology could be tweaked for propulsion, communications, and power generation.  (Reported in Defying Gravity, the Parallel Universe of T.Townsend Brown).  Perhaps  Townsend understood all of those  tweaks, but they are beyond the reach of most of us -- although that fact never stops me from speculating about the subject and since I see one (small) part of his legacy in today's plasma actuator technology used for subsonic drone and spacecraft propulsion.


Another answer to this same question, often given by those who know his name but not his work is that he was the Antigravity Man. But Townsend never used nor liked that term, so  I prefer to think of him as the Anti-antigravity Man.

On a more down-to-earth but related note, John Reese Roth began serving his  sentence recently.

No, No, I don't Wanto go.

A few years ago there was an Internet Meme

A BookNote

Book formatting has got me in a half-nelson and I surrender. Time to call in the professional formatters who can put text, photos, footnotes, and bibliography all together for a print version of The Good-Bye Man. 

And dare we ask for  all of that in a Kindle version?.

$$$.

Note to Linda:
Sell more dogs.

Thank you, Ralph Steiner, Whitley Strieber, Hank Mills, Sterling Alllen and George Noory, in absentia

 From an interview with Ralph Steiner, taken by Whitley Strieber on Coast to Coast AM radio on December 27, 2011 and transcribed by the fine folks at Pure Energy Systems Network.

Thomas Townsend Brown was another inventor who came up with many different technologies. His focus for many years was on "electrogravitics", or manipulating gravity with the use of high voltage electric fields. He built disks that were basically very high grade capacitors. When charged with high voltage electricity (50,000 volts or more), they would produce an artificial gravitational field around themselves, and move towards their positive pole. He performed many demonstrations in which large, heavy disks were charged up with high voltage DC power, and spun around the pole they were tethered to at very high speeds. Objects inside of the disks were claimed not to experience inertial effects. For example, small and fragile glass vials placed inside of the disks would not break, despite the fact calculations showed they should.

The military was so interested in his work, an official report was even composed about how his technology could be used to develop faster than sound fighter aircraft. This report was not discovered until many years later, and may have never been meant for the public to see.

Although the full story of his life is complicated, it strongly seems like he was forced out of electrogravitics research. However, even after his death, individuals in the private sector are working on electrogravitics and are trying to replicate his work. In secret, the military could have very well continued the research, combining it with information gathered from crashed extraterrestrial space craft, such as the one that was obtained from near Roswell, NM in 1947. Most of the "UFOs" we see in the sky are probably not extraterrestrial, but are our own experimental craft being tested. Perhaps they are not experimental any more. The government has had over sixty years to develop the technology after all!

Dream Works: The Tapestry

Earthboppin's Dreams/Visions/Prophecy Forum is one of the  few boards that I check on a daily basis. A handful of gifted precognitive dreamers have posted there since earthquake predictor Jim Berkland changed his site, their former gathering place, to a for profit operation. One of their most  visionary dreamers is a  M.C. Young.

Many of  her dreams continue to repeat themselve and from time to time she reposts them as part of what she calls "The Tapestry." They seem to  be part of a  bigger picture which has been set in motion,  but has not yet played out. The name comes from a dream of a large sailing vessel first posted in 2006 and again in the thread linked below.

...standing upon the beach looking up at this enormous vessel as it sat half on land and half in the water. It was much, much larger than it looked from my view above it. This vessel was the size of a modern day oil tanker, like the EXxon Valdez.....

Only this vessel I saw was completely black, appeared very ancient, and was amazingly large.

The one with me said, "This Ship is symbolic of a Global Alliance. The Sea is symbolic of many peoples and many nations. This ship has been tended by unseen hands which symbolize the nature of the Storm upon the Sea."

I did not understand this last sentence and said so.

....Then this one with me said, "Go look at the "Tapestry" and pay close attention to the larger picture. Remember what you see here."

  http://earthboppin.net/talkshop/theend/messages/26637.html

I imagine Linda will  have a post about this up in the Cosmic Token soon. In many ways, it resembles a vision of her own that led to the design of the ship logo used for the Resolute, a forum which is closed to registration for the time being.

Mrs. Friedman's Coasties

A few posts ago,  I mentioned "Mrs. Friedman" and her Coasties; radiomen and cryptographers who tracked and broke coded communications between bootleggers and smugglers during prohibition. 

Getting My Arms Around the OCTOPUS

Got an hour or three? This article,  a repeat from a 1991 issue of the Technical Consultant,  touches upon just about every imaginable conspiracy theory, and quite a few proven ones. (The Iran Contra affair, the CIA's role in Nicaragua, the Inslaw/PROMIS case,  Murder in Rancho Mirage, and many more.)

But if you are short on time, the  points most relevant to the Townsend Brown story are included herein, beginning with the arrest of a weapons systems engineer.

“The Washington man is MICHAEL RICONOSCIUTO who is now waiting for a trial in a Washington jail on conspiracy to sell drugs charges, charges which Riconosciuto claims are manufactured. Indeed, the charge made against Riconosciuto were made one week after Riconosciuto authored and signed an affidavit describing his role in modifying the pirated software. [INSLAW/PROMIS]

Reconosciuto claimed that

...enhanced fuel-air explosive weapons were created and tested in league with Meridian Arms at the NEVADA TESTING RANGE which matched the explosive power of nuclear devices.These enhanced weapons gained their power from polarizing the molecules in the gas cloud by modification of the electric field, a technology developed from exploring Thomas Townsend Brown’s suppressed work, a knowledge which Riconosciuto claims he gained from working at LEAR in Reno, Nevada.

This claim has been supported by former F.B.I. Special Agent, Ted Gunderson who worked with Riconosciuto  as a private investigator.

“The so-called drug operation broken up in Washington State was an electrohydrodynamic mining operation claimed Gunderson, using Townsend Brown technology. A videotape viewed by this journalist revealed metallic powders and apparent processes unrelated to drug manufacture. Indeed, a government analysis of soil samples revealed the absence of drug contamination, but a high concentration of barium. Barium is often found in high voltage related work.

Vorticular Madness

From Richard Sauder's lengthy blog post entitled Vorticular Madness Of The Dark Magicians

Interestingly, it is the case that Zanesville, Ohio, the hometown of T. Townsend Brown, also popped up in my research as the proposed site for a deep underground military excavation back in the early 1960s. Given Ohio's close connection to the UFO phenomenon through Wright-Patterson AFB, and through the life work of T. Townsend Brown, it would not surprise me in the slightest if an underground base was constructed far below Zanesville, Ohio that is somehow related to or connected to UFOs or UFO research.

Of Spooks and Sock Puppets

Oh dear.

I am feeling moved to make a comment on the Linda-Mikado situation. Here it is:

I am absolutely certain that Mikado knows [and has always known]  more than he cops to, beyond what he has admitted about his own use of sock puppet characters. (Merlin, Ridgerunner, Bulwark, for those keeping score).

I am also absolutely certain that he is wrong when he claims that Linda has no spooky friends.  She does and I could tell you how I know that but then they would have to kill me.

 She is also well aware that some of those friends, the ones who seem to be helping to push her Dad's story forward, might actually be using her father's  Lifework as counterintelligence bait. If so, then it is fitting, she says, since (we have been told) Townsend was an instrumental part of many CI operations.* 

THERE! That should hold me on this topic for several months now.

Another Dad story.

I never set out to be a curator of curious, cryptic tales but this appears to be my destiny since I fell into the Parallel Universe.  I had just finished giving Paul's book proposal a scrub (at his request), when I reconnected with a long lost BFF, first met in the early seventies when we were young analysts working for the DoD.

Her father had passed away a couple of years earlier and she was now interested in researching his WW II history and subsequent career.  J Q. knew that he had been a Tech Sergeant and radioman in the Signal Corps, but almost nothing else. At the behest of her more mystical sister,  she made a telephone appointment with one of the psychic medium participants in a University of Arizona research project. 

Some of the clues to Dad's history that came through the  telephone reading were easy to validate.  For example, "someone named Paul would be a help" to her quest.  Presumably that help was I, now historically hooked on the SIGINT entity (that  sprang forth, like The Alien, from the breast of World War II), and just about to embark on research for The Good-bye Man..

The medium also told  J.Q. where she would find Dad's secret diary from the spring and summer of 1944. It was indeed in the promised location and hough he fulfilled his pledge to divulge no secrets, he managed to leave some more hints to his Army career.  Other clues took more time to unravel. 

The first question Dad asked of his daughter when they met in the session was "Have you broken my code yet?" (Apparently,  ingrained habits of speaking cryptically are as eternal as life itself).  I  expanded my  research to incorporate the Army crypto side and found  confirming records of his 1944 tranfer from the European theater to Arlington Hall. That and a certificate of appreciation from Military Intelligence for February - April, 1945, indicate [to me] that he might have been part of a peacetime transition planning effort for hand off of vast communications networks, systems, and codes.

Rich fodder for the project that would follow The Good-Bye Man. And it was all served Medium Well. 

Mason Rose

Mason Rose and Townsend Brown were compadres and more for a brief period of time in the 1950's.  I know that Rose, a psychologist, published a popularized version of Brown's research, most likely written for him by Beau.

I know that Jacques Cornillion was most intrigued by Rose's thoughts on the electrical nature of the body, as he proclaimed in a letter to his employer, National de Construction Aeronautiques du Sud-Ouest,  the French aircraft firm that sponsored Townsend's Paris experiments.

Cornillion also noted  that Rose was one of Townsend's business partners and Bradford Shank, formerly of the Manhattan Project, was the other.

Those facts represented my entire knowledge of Mason Rose until tonight's dinner with a friend who mentioned that his therapist in the seventies, and friend for many years thereafter, was Mason Rose! Mason, as it turns out, was not only a "psychologist to the stars" in those years, he also had enough clout in places like Edwards AFB, to able to call the C.O. directly to request a gate pass so that he and Allen could watch the first Space Shuttle landing close up.

Allen described him as a man who was very good at compartmentalizing his life. No doubt. Too bad many of those compartments are forever closed to us.

"Mrs. Friedman"

Every cryptohistorian knows the name of William Friedman but almost no one is familiar with the contributions of  "Mrs. Friedman" who must have been an unusual woman in her own right.

Early army cryptologist Solomon Kullbeck recalls meeting her  while undergoing his Friedman-directed OJT in the foundational techniques of code making and breaking.  He reported that the older couple sometimes invited the trainees over for what he described as "charming' social gatherings.

But "Mrs. Friedman" also held a day job.Prohibition had turned rum running into a  profitable business based on the ability to plan, co-ordinate, and carry out complex naval operations. The Rum Runners were the single biggest users of coded communications in the period between the wars and the Coast Guard  had its own crypto unit just to break them. Our dear, unsung "Mrs. Friedman"  headed that 3-man  service.

Kullbeck said that Mr. Friedman would sometimes bring in real world problems from "Mrs. Friedman's" unit and ask his trainees to develop solutions for them.  One such  assignment was to solve 'double-transposition' codes, codes which the Coast Guard unit had already met and mastered before Kullbeck and company ever saw them.

All of this makes me think that Mrs. F, and her team of Coasties need further investigation. At the very least, does not "Mrs. Friedman" deserve to have her name known for posterity?

But as always, when delving into things crypto, one story leads to another.  In this case, recall if you will that it was a Coastie radio intercept station that caught the wee-hours German tranmissions from a sub off the coast of Norfolk VA, sent with a distinctive ALK at the end.  It is quite possible that this designation indicated A. L. "Beau Kitselman, who told his youngest daughter that he spent his war years in a Norfolk hotel room breaking codes. I've written about that event and linked to the Radioman's story in at least one other place.

And that story seems to link back to Townsend's  in a quirky sense. As the head of the Atlantic Fleet Radio/Radar/Radar Material school, Townsend had taken over the Cavalier Hotel in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area to use as a training facility.  But that's not the quirky part. This is:

The FBI reported that Townsend's abrupt departure from the Navy was due to an act of "self-confessed" homosexuality in a Norfolk hotel during the war.  What better way to explain why he may have been seen slipping into the same hotel room again and again late at night?

And, going way out on a limb here, perhaps this story also brought about an intended side benefit.   What better way to catch the attention of a prurient, but repressed J. Edgar Hoover and ensure that his office kept a close watch on a man who was a valuable national asset? Oh, to have just one day in the FBI vault where his most secret files were stashed!