Memorial Day Reading

Our tall Memorial poppies bloomed early this year, but my research book shipment arrived just in time for this particular holiday.  I am spending it  in the CBI (China-Burma-India) theater, immersed in tales of "Det 101", the first WWII OSS Unit to see combat. Detachment 101 (so named because Detachment 1 sounded rather weak and wimpy) harassed the Japanese army throughout Burma, often from behind their own lines.

Colonel Carl Eifler, the C.O. of the unit, was a Paul Bunyan character, larger than life in both the literal and figurative senses. He bent rules, broke a few in the process and never asked anyone to attempt something he himself wasn't willing to do. He is best known for training and equipping the Burmese hill tribes to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Japanese conquerors, but the depth and breath of his  accomplishments extended far beyond that. Tom Moon, a former member of the detachment and author of This Grim and Savage Game: The OSS and U.S. Covert Operations in World War II, has written an eminently reading book, rich in details that could only have been known to someone close to the action.

My dear forum friend, Merlin, was a young pilot in this same theater, flying supplies "over the hump" from the base at Assam in India, into Burma and China. With the Japanese ability to attack these supply flights by launching Zeros from hidden jungle bases, I can't imagine that there were ever many routine deliveries.  Our generation and all those that follow us will always owe you and yours a huge debt, Merlin. We won't forget.

Cold War Spooks: the quiet warriors

I am reading  Cold War Spooks: Naval intelligence forces intercept Russian communications --On Land, as well as under, above and on the seas.

Author Tony Seidel spent four years as a Communications Technician with the U.S. Naval Security Group which was (until 2005) responsible for collecting communications out of the ether and sending them back to the NSA for processing.  His "fictional" story of this service is convincingly authentic and offers fascinating insights into the day to day life of those quiet Cold Warriors. (Or should I say, Code Warriors?)

Thank you, Tony, and all those who wore the quill and lightening bolt patch, for your silent service in a dangerous time.

Darn it.

Glitch Announcement

Space Watch

A certain Kiwi friend of mine has shared a photo from his collection of space oddities. All he can tell me  is that it is a shot taken by a weather satellite in the early eighties. Unfortunately he saved the picture, but did not save the source URL.

With that image in mind, I took a moment to watch an Ed Grimsley Video of an alleged space fleet in action. The video shows the night sky, as seen through night vision binoculars. I was skeptical at first...yawn, dust particles, been there seen that.  However, what appears to be an indisputably large triangle-shaped craft, traveling at a hella fast speed can clearly be seen toward the end of this clip.  I have done a bit of research on these reported sightings, and so far have not found any creditable alternate explanation.

And from another bit of space news:

Electrostatic ion engines are becoming popular in space missions.

Instead of relying on burning large amounts of heavy liquid propellant for thrust, they use solar power to ionise a small supply of xenon gas.

A high voltage applied across a pair of gridded electrodes sends the positively charged ions rushing at high speed towards the negative electrode.

Most ions pass through the grid, generating thrust.

That's about as succinct a description of Townsend Brown's "Fan" technology as I've ever read.

Yes, Virginia, We CAN teleport people

Quantum teleportation has been much in the news lately. Meanwhile, in the Quonset Hut forum, Linda has quietly admitted to her own teleportation experience  which those of us who read DEFYING GRAVITY have known about for a while.

I find it interesting and downright synchronicious that blogger Will Sheephogan is speculating on the topic in his blog today.  You see, Will Sheephogan is the son of Bill Uhouse. Bill Uhouse, a former US Marine and a space systems flight simulator engineer, was at Cape Canaveral in the mid-fifties, and at Groom Lake later. He came forward in 1994 with a story of crash-recovered  (living) Aliens . He said had been given  permission and instructed to talk about all of the subjects he covered, except for one fact, which he had been specifically told not to divulge. That fact was the name of the ONE engineer that the off-world Kingman Crash survivors chose to lead their team of human researchers and co-workers.

On top of this there has long been a rumor in  the UFO community that Eisenhower met with representatives of an extraterrestrial race while he was president.  A retired state legislator from New England has recently come forth with testimony claiming that he saw documentation of such a meeting.  At the end of the transcript of his speech, the honorable Henry McElroy acknowledges and thanks a handful of people, of whom Mr. Uhouse  is one, for paving the way in the disclosure movement.

As if this all weren't a spicy enough stew leading us to conclude that humans are not alone in the universe, Robert Sarbacher also had a son who has said  that his father essentially admitted the same thing to him, although Dad left Sarbacher, Jr. with the impression that he was talking about his disappointment in not being chosen to work with alien BODIES, not living representatives.

So, as regards this whole teleportation thing, one might be tempted to say of Linda's story, post hoc, ergo propter hoc (I confess, I have always wanted to use that in a sentence):

"Well if she teleported it must be that we were given alien technolgoy and that is how we eapfrogged so far ahead of whatever the admitted level of applied science is today."

I would rather blame all the superpsecret advances on dead Nazis, personally. It's hard enough for the human race to get along all by our widdle self without finding out that we aren't the only fish in the cosmic sea. We just don't seem to handle Different well.

But Alien Beings in underground labs make for a helluva cover up.

So Much to Say, So Little Time

THE GOOD-BYE MAN chapters will hold at #25 for a while, but if I were to continue with my suppositions about Townsend's activities in years covered by these chapters, I would say that upon completing his obligations to the Navy's Vanguard Program, he next brought his noted "radar detection" expertise to the development of  GRAB, perhaps the very first satellite designed for Space-based Electronic Intelligence (ELINT)gathering.

This ELINT satellite system was proposed by NRL in the spring of 1958. In parallel with exploratory development by NRL, the Office of Naval Intelligence obtained endorsements endorsements of Project Tattletale from elements of the executive and legislative branches of the US government. With positive recommendations from the Department of State, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency, President Eisenhower approved full development on 24 August 1959. By then, the project had been placed under a tight security control system (Canes) with access limited to fewer than 200 officials in the Washington, DC area. Development and interagency coordination proceeded as the GRAB (Galactic RAdiation and Background) experiment. 

The NRL Naval Center for Space Technology [NCST] designed and built the GRAB satellite and a network of overseas data collection facilities. The first launch was approved by President Eisenhower in May 1960, just four days after a CIA U-2 aircraft was lost on a reconnaissance mission over Soviet territory. The GRAB satellite got a free ride into space in June 1960 with the Navy's third Transit navigation satellite. GRAB carried two electronic payloads, the classified ELINT package and instrumentation to measure solar radiation (SolRad). The SolRad experiment was publicly disclosed in DoD press releases on this and subsequent launches. Four more launches were attempted, and one was successful on 29 June 1961.

And on another note, we have recently been talking about advances in artificial intelligence over at the Hut, it tickled me to encounter this cybernetic question/koan over at Intangible Materiality this morning:

"Do Androids dream of electric sheep?"

I'm now inspired to write a new guidebook: Buddhism for Androids: What is the sound of one gate closing?

A Chunk of Chapters and a Hunk of Speculation

You will find a run of new chapters over at THE GOOD-BYE Man covering the next ten years of Linda's life.  Although it was during this span of time that Townsend's career seemed to go dark, I think there is much that we can deduce about it from known facts.

While Townsend  continued his association with Dr. Sarbacher and his work in the lab in Washington, D.C., he also signed a consulting contract with Sud Ouest, a French aerospace firm. Townsend set up a Gravitor-type research project in their facilities and initiated the follow-up work to be conducted in his absence. Jacques Cornillion, the firm's representative in the United States, kept Townsend abreast of the  progress they made, reporting  that successive demonstrations were given to ever more important people, all the way up through the French military and to the cabinet level of government. Based on reported test results, it seems highly likely indicate that the Biefield-Brown effect was shown to occur in a vacuum, an outcome which bode extremely well for the future of space propulsion technology.

After 2 short trips to France, Townsend returned home and then left again fo parts unknownand was gone for the remainder of 1956 and into the early winter of 1957, during which time, the Naval Research Lab was actively planning and building its own satellite program, a program which would be supported by tracking radar located in radio frequency "quiet spots" around the world. My large chunk of conjecture is that Townsend was actively involved in this project.

From the Navy's own historical summary

Between 1955 and 1959, NRL conducted the first American satellite program called Vanguard. The program was initiated to represent the United States in the International Geophysical Year (IGY). IGY was a cooperative international scientific effort…. The nation's leaders in science decided to participate in the IGY by placing an artificial satellite in orbit. Following this decision, a competition was held to determine which U.S. government agency would build and launch the satellite. The plan submitted by NRL was selected due, in part, to its success with the Viking Program. NRL's pioneering task was to design, build, launch, place in earth orbit, and track an artificial satellite carrying a scientific experiment….

And why do I think Townsend had anything at all to do with this, you ask? (Oh please, please, please, do ask!). Because, oh curious one, after disappearing for most of 1956, Townsend popped up again in early 1957 in Umatilla, Florida. The family spent a leisurely few months there and the only work-related travel Townsend undertook during this time was the occasional day trip, 'to see about a construction job.' And let us not forget that his Washington cohort, Dr. Sarbacher was heavily involved with with missile guidance systems.


More from the Navy site:

In 1957, because suitable satellite-launching facilities were not available, NRL constructed the first complete satellite-launching facility at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Central control of this facility was maintained at the main NRL site in Washington, DC. Critical functions involved in attaining orbit had to be performed many hundreds of miles from the launch pad. NRL had developed in 1956 the first satellite-tracking system, called Mini track, which provided the first down-range instrumentation for determining the orbit of a satellite. This system evolved from NRL's work on phase comparison and angle tracking and used a series of fan-shaped, vertical antenna beams.

And perhaps you can guess just what small, sleepy, Florida town lies a short 90 miles inland from Cape Canaveral? 




 

 

Eleven UP

Chapter 11, Will it Move? has been posted to THE GOOD-BYE MAN. It consists of Linda's recollection of times  spent with her Father on overnight outings to Washington D.C. in 1955, including her presence at a very special demonstration attended by Dr. Robert Sarbacher, Bill Lear, and 8 men in uniforms. Although she remembers thinking that the most pompous of the men was a General, I believe, based on a report from Mr. Twigsnapper, that quite possibly he was an Admiral, perhaps even Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, who would later assume leadership of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), the UFO research organization which Townsend would create the next year.

The Indomitable Jacques Bergier and The Morning of the Magicians

T

THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS, coauthored by Louis Pauwls and Jacques Bergier in 1960, was a seminal book in my woo-woo education. As one Amazon reviewer has written, it is one of the few books that dared to ask such questions as:

Are we all in a collective conspiracy to hide the truth, is science such a conspiracy? Do secret societies exist and do they have an influence upon history? What special knowledge did the ancients possess that we may not possess now? What role did secret societies play in the origins of Nazism, and in the Nazi Black Order? How were the Nazis able to rise to power and what did such a phenomenon represent amidst our modern world? What is the historical meaning of the atomic bomb? What does the future promise for our civilization? And, Do [sic] supermen live amongst us men, and if so, have they always? 

The paperback copy that I had was already ten-years old when it came into my hands in the seventies and I had not read anything else by Bergier until my forum friend Geoff  gifted me with SECRET WEAPONS, SECRET AGENTS this past winter.  First published in 1956, it tells of how the French underground alerted the Allies to the nature of the Pennemunde weapons research. 

Bergier was later captured, imprisoned in a concentration camp, and tortured on a daily basis, but he never broke and never gave up anyone in his network. For this he gained the eternal admiration and respect of warriors like Mr Twigsnapper, no slouch in the courage department himself and this 1955 picture of Twigsnapper, Townsend and four sailors in front of Fouquet's in Paris, (discussed in a previous post) was taken just down the street from Msr. Bergier's office, and the original photo has a  Msr. Bergier's underground ID code on the back in penciled numbers, leading me to wonder if he was not the photographer.

Now a new edition of THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS, released in 2007, is introducing a whole new generation of readers to the same extraordinary suppositions and conjectures that piqued my interest so many years ago. It would be most wonderful if Mr Bergier's returning popularity  encouraged some adventurous publisher to release new translations of his other work as well. I think they would find an audience eager to read them.

Resuming Our IRregularly Scheduled Programming

2010 is the Year of the (Rose) Family.

Between The Astrologer and myself, ours is spread over three coasts (four, if you count Hawaii separately) and it takes a bit of co-ordination and planning  to visit with everybody. We have just finished our NorthEastern loop, arriving in the cool of a beautiful spring and leaving with the early arrival of late summer-like humidity reminding us of why we enjoy living in the desert.

I also spent far too short a time at the National Archives* in College Park and at the Strand used book store in  Manhattan, looking into WW II Signals Intelligence and Cryptography. One particularly great find was David Stafford's 1987 book, Camp X, which fills in a bit more about the Hydra network and  Pat de Forest Bayly's  role in creating the technology for it.

Anyway, long story short: we went; it was all good; and now we are home again until the next cycle begins. We will be putting out the next chapter of THE GOODBYE MAN in a day or two. In the meantime, you should soon start to see signs of life here at HONK again.

*Lesson Number One about visiting the National Archives: Don't bother bringing a pen scanner, you can't use it in the textual records department, no matter who told you you could in an email before hand..

*Lesson Number Two: If you have only a few days to spend, plan them so they include a Thursday and a Friday when the Archives are open until 9:00 pm.