Close Encounters of the Weird Kind

A very long time ago before I understood the limitation of using rationalist thinking to find a Unified Field Theory of UFOdom I was a card carrying MUFON member. I have since given all of that up,  and tend to agree with Jacques Valle that "the UFOs are physical manifestations impossible to understand outside their psychic and symbolic reality. We are not witnessing an invasion of beings from elsewhere. It is a spiritual system that acts on humans and uses humans." (I would like to thank Jose Antonio Caravaca whose UFO Mimetic and the Theatre of Deception: the 1966 William Laxton Incident is responsible for bringing that apt quote to my eyes again.)

Howsumever, I also believe that many of the more famous contactee cases were theatrical manipulations carried out by the US Intelligence community.  In The Pied Pipers of the CIA, Phillip Coppens makes strong claims in this regard, and this refrain is picked up again in Contactees or Secret Agents? by Nick Redfern.

I believe the sunspot explanation only on alternate Tuesdays.

Ruppelt...white ink

 After WWII he became a navigator in the Iowa Air Reserves and entered Iowa State College, earning a BS degree in aeronautical engineering in 1950. With the outbreak of war in Korea, he received a recall to full-time duty from the Air Force and came into Intelligence at Wright- Patterson AFB in early 1951. Given work immediately on classified projects by Lt. Col. Rosengarten, Ruppelt soon gained a reputation at ATIC as a problem solver.
Although he would prove to be the best administrator of a UFO project the Air Force would ever have, he did not have the credentials or rank that would normally be drawn upon for what on the surface seemed a very important intelligence assignment. Only 28 years old at the time, Ruppelt was not a career officer. Still a 1st lieutenant by that fall, it is very odd that any non-career tracked officer would be put in charge of a project as important as one involving possible aerial intrusions into United States air space.With the outbreak of war in Korea, he received a recall to full-time duty from the Air Force and came into Intelligence at Wright- Patterson AFB in early 1951. Given work immediately on classified projects by Lt. Col. Rosengarten, Ruppelt soon gained a reputation at ATIC as a problem solver.
http://www.ufocasebook.com/1951fortmonmouth.html

"Captain Edward J. Ruppelt" by Michael Hall and Wendy Connors

Cold Fusion, again

It's looking better all the time:

The most recent test that took place on October 6, 2011 in Bologna, Italy, was supposed to address many of the concerns about the previous tests, and be performed in a way that would put to rest many issues that had been discussed continually on the internet. Despite showing clear evidence of excess energy -- which is absolutely fantastic -- this most recent test failed to live up to its full potential. It was a big success in that it validated the claim the E-Cat produces excess energy via cold fusion, but it was not nearly as successful as it could have been. Or as successful as we, the outsiders looking in, would like for it to have been.

And, oh, yeah...

A bit about the newly-introduced-to the story, Richard Luker. He was a Lt. in the USN in 1921, when his sub was sunk by a pilot boat named Philadelphia ( Evening Public Ledger of Feb 2, 1921) Thank you, Friend Safe.)  And, just coincidentally, he shows up again 39 years later in DARPA. (Once I would have quipped 'old dude' but I am chary of making such declarations now that they might well be applied to me.)

Is that almost 40 year span a normal USN career length or was part of his service, like Townsend's, spent in the Naval Reserve? And where did he report in the Naval Bureau Command structure that was in place at the time?

About those Cites

For those who missed it, the citation list below contains not one, but two, papers published with NASA blessings:

Assymetrical Capacitors for Propulsion. Francis X. Canning, Cory Melcher, and Edwin Winet Institute for Scientific Research, Inc., Fairmont, West Virginia, NASA/CR—2004-213312. October 2004

This (apparently exploratory) study was then followed by:

Force Characterization of Asymmetrical Capacitor Thrusters in Air.  TJ Drummond, Frontiers of Propulsion Science  (eds: Marc G. Millis, NASA Glenn Research Center Eric W. Davis, Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin ) Published by AIAA, © 2009

It appears that these studies were inspired by the meticulous work of Bahder and Fazi in Force on an Asymmetrical Capacitor, published in 2002. All serious researchers into the Biefeld-Brown effect should start with that document, and Townsend's summary report on his many years of research.  Serious students in the life of Townsend Brown need to go much deeper in order to get to know the man inside the enigma.

First was ARPA, then came DARPA, and now we have --tada --IARPA!

Prophecy by gestalt data base analyses is the only way I can describe this Intelligence Data Analysis procurement program reported on in today's NYT. 

Washington Watchers...how about that latest advanced research acquisition agency, huh?

Scholarly Cites

For those interested in the scientific side of the Townsend Brown story, these citing references were located by Google Scholar just last year. I'm sure the list is longer, now.

Biefeld Brown Effect and Space Curvature of Electromagnetic Field. A Macknickas. Parallel Computing Laboratory, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University

Experimental Studies and Parametric Modeling of Ionic Flyers. (Winner, Best Conference Paper, 2007 IEEE/ASME Int. Conf. on Advanced Mechatronics, Zurich, Switzerland) Chor Fung CHUNG and Wen J. Li,.

Unified Model of Bivacuum, Particles Duality, Electromagnetism, Gravitation & Time. The Superfluous Energy of Asymmetric Bivacuum.  A Kaivarainen, CERN

Force on an Asymmetric Capacitor. Thomas B. Bahder Chris Fazi (Quantum Cryptography, NSA)

Explanation of the Anomalous, Weak, Long-range Acceleration of Pioneer 10/11 by new Physics. Xingliu Jiang, Xiaoping Zhou, Jianchuan Tan, Liying Want and Junli Yu. University of Beihang (Department of Physics and School of Jet Propulsion)

On Electrodynamics of Uniform Moving Charges. Andre Wasser (online via Google)

Generating Lift Using a Two-dimensional Assymetrical Capacitor. Michael Wong, published in the UC Davis McNair Scholars Journal

Force Characterization of Asymmetrical Capacitor Thrusters in Air TJ Drummond, Frontiers of Propulsion Science  (eds: Marc G. Millis, NASA Glenn Research Center Eric W. Davis, Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin ) Published by AIAA, © 2009

Replication of the Trouton-Noble Experiment Robert Gabillard, Christian Semet, Patrick Cornille, 2, and Christian Bizouard3 Chinese Journal of Physics 2010

Non equilibrium Conditions of Electrolysis and Abnormal Nuclear Phenomena Xhan Lijun - NUCLEAR PHYSICS REVIEW, 1997 - ... 1, JIANG Xing-liu,YI Li-zhi,LIU Rui,LE Xiao-yun(School of science,Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Assymetrical Capacitors for Propulsion. Francis X. Canning, Cory Melcher, and Edwin Winet Institute for Scientific Research, Inc., Fairmont, West Virginia, NASA/CR—2004-213312. October 2004

Back to Rose Hackett

Like many of the women in this story, not much is known about Rose Hackett. In some ways, the first NICAP office manager was a woman ahead of her time.  As a 1957 membership list shows, though  married to Duncan Cameron Campbell, she used Hackett as her professional name.

Linda recalls that she was multilingual. And NICAP-related correspondence from that time paints her as highly capable but, alas for the desired organizational image, an enthusiastic recruiter of contactees. And contactees were thought of as the very last type of people NICAP wanted to trot out  before Congress in their attempt to break the Air Force's dog-in-the manger with-all the tasty data attitude.

I do know that Rose continued to send Townsend copies of incoming UFO reports long after he was (in popular belief) "fired" from his job. Linda, at age 12 or so, was given stacks of them to sort, and told to pick out those that wobbled, for "those are ours."

I also know that Rose corresponded with Gray Barker, and, possibly at Townsend's request, sent him a thick (and interesting) packet of information regarding Townsend's work (now archived at the Qualight site.) The last I saw of  Rose was in a letter from Townsend, congratulating her and "Lee" (whoever that was) on their retirement move to Prescott, Arizona.

I hope you lived long and prospered in that beautiful place, Rose.

Is it worth noting that Bill Moore (Not Townsend's attorney,  Bill Moore, but the the PX Bill Moore) operated his press out of Prescott? Probably not. But just in case and for the record:

At one time, Bill Moore, the Philadelphia Experiment author, operated his publishing house out of Prescott, Arizona. And that fact may or may not be relevant to a phrase found in a 1953 letter from Townsend to Josephine.

In keeping with his habit of referring to people by an informal code, based on where they were located, he told her that he was sceduled to meet with "Prescott and Williams", and that he expected this would be his hardest test yet. Once upon a time I thought this mention bore some relationship to the Bill Uhouse story of aliens demanding to work with only one scientist, but I am now (or at least, currently) skeptical of that idea, and looking for more grounded theories.

Townsend and the Black Knight

I see that The Professor went fishing in the same archives and landed an even bigger bear.

But first, a little background. The "Black Knight" satellite remains one of the most intriguing  stories of the early years of the space age.  Beginning in 1957, a  mysterious satellite was observed for some long period of time, circling the earth in a then-impossible orbit. It was determined to be neither ours nor the Russians' and, as far as I know, no reasonable explanation for it has yet been found.

In the first of a series of three articles, The Professor makes the case that the object crashed, parts of it entered the Earth's atmosphere in 1960, and Townsend Brown, with high level approval, whisked them away before the Project Blue Book/Air Force folks got a grip on what they were.

I can easily believe that.

Part Two

Part Three

Archival Ecstasy

Have I mentioned how much I love digging in historic archives?  I'm tracking the story of  NICAP's first office manager, the  multilingual, highly capable Rose Campbell Hackett,  Her husband Duncan Cameron Campbell (or maybe it was Cameron Duncan) had died the year Keyhoe  issued a NICAP newsletter, and he included a published sympathy note. I know I have that around here somewhere.

Anyway, I went hunting a bird and ended up bagging a bear.  For your reading pleasure, Townsend Brown's 1971 recollections on the 15th anniversary of the founding of NICAP.

The Big Study: Townsend turns up in unusual places.

Meet Another (ENIGMA) Code Guy

Joe Desch was more than just another code guy. According to the linked series of articles, he was the man who saved the Allies' bacon after the Germans went to a 4-rotor Enigma machine. The Bombe on which it was broken was his design, created under an NCR contract to the US navy. Read it.