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.

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.

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.

Have some Hors D'Oeuvres with that Campaigne

Linda has reminded me  that Twigsnapper once pointed her toward Howard Campaigne, saying it was he who had sent him away from Townsend's side before his (TTB's) WWII mission imploded. Supposedly, Campaigne objected to Townsend's bodyguard and escort being a Royal Marine.

Mr./Dr. Campaigne's own recollections of that time, if not  of that particular event, are posted here as a downloadable .pdf.

To  sum up: As a newly minted (1938) Ph.D. and mathematics faculty member at the University of Minnesota, Campaigne liked to  play around  with crytoanalysis systems in his spare time. He offered up one of his designs to the Army and they told him all of their crypto work was co-ordinated with the Navy, and he should go through them.

When war broke out in Europe,  he was offered a commission in the US Navy.  Toward war's end he was at  Bletchley Park working with the Brits on TUNNY, a machine intended to help break the German High Command's FISH code.  His particular area of interest was in learning how to replicate the FISH technology and he was sent on one of the very first Technical Information Commitee (TICOM) missions to collect classified crypto information before it fell into the hands of the Russians.

ABOUT TICOM

 Colonel George A. Bicher, the director of the U.S. Signal Intelligence Division in Europe, conceived of TICOM in the summer of 1944. The organization was so secret that even today, more than half a century later, all details concerning its operations and activities remain classified higher than Top Secret by both the American and British governments. In 1992, the director of the National Security Agency extended the secrecy order until the year 2012, making TICOM probably the last great secret of the Second World War.

 BODY OF SECRETS -- ANATOMY OF THE ULTRA-SECRET NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

Campaigne was in Paris on May 2nd, and  on  his assignment the next day which was  the day the war ended. He says:

A. Now there some other teams in northern Germany and I never did find out what all they got, but they did get things.

Q. Was it a combined British/American team?

A. Yes. Yes. Joint combined, my team when we went over the second time I had a British solider, an Intelligence Corps officer, and I had a British Navy officer and six or eight enlisted men ot various types.

This narrative seems to place his first trip at War's end, at the opposite end of Germany from Townsend's concurrent northern expedition. However, Mr. Twigsnapper has also been known to give out [wrong] information just to point someone in a desired direction.

Is it possible that , not understanding the joint command nature of the TICOM situation until his second assignment, Campaigne simply heard about Twigsnapper's presence  and had him removed via transmittal of a radio order from London?

But why? Linda's hypothesis is that he somehow knew in advance that the meeting ahead was compromised (from Bletchley's big ears? ) and ordered Twigsnapper away before he could fulfill his mission directive of killing Townsend rather than allowing him to fall into enemy arms.

head hurts now.
moving on...

Anyway Campaigne retired as a reserve Captain with the Naval Security Command, but spent the bulk of his professional career in the crypto end of signals intelligence, working on progressive and  sophisticated computer systems from  ATLAS forward.

Although he missed out on  LIL ABNER, "the brute'. Campaigne says that the  program was conducted in parallel with ATLAS development by a (censored) organizational counterpart. He would have been referring to the design bifurcation of the first computers commissioned for the newly born twin INTS: COM and SIG.

LIL still seems to be a well-hidden topic; however, I seem to recall that someone claimed that it was created for ECM/ECW (electronic countermeasures and warfare) purposes. This makes complete sense as these elements are at the the heart and soul of the SIGINT functions, and this particular section of the good Dr. Campaigne's story is  more heavily redacted than the rest of his tale.
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One other activity Campaigne was quite proud of was his contribution (in the very early fifties) to the selection of optimum radio intercept locations around the world.  at the same time He was working on this project, Brown's propulsion and communications demonstration was being held at Pearl Harbor, reportedly for the benefit of President Truman.

History says that Truman's meeting with General MacArthur was set for Wake Island at the General's convenience. (Since when do generals dictate terms to Presidents?)  Truman flew from San Francisco to Hawaii, for an overnight stay before proceeding to Wake. The pilots' logbooks in the Truman libary mention that that they had used an impressive new com system  that allowed them to remain in constant in touch with the Naval and Coast Guard ships (and submarine) strung out across the Pacific on the first leg of the journey.

Campaigne's mention of the power of antipodal reception points makes me wonder just what the distance range of the new system might actually have been.

And finally, Campaigne delivers this juicy tidbit:

One of the things that happened in '57 to '59 is that we gave some money to a joint program on satellites. And it got down to the Pentagon, they said what in the hell is NSA doing with satellites? And they wouldn't leave it alone,

And THAT wrangle ended in the NRO compromise. Satellites would not belong to either the NSA or the Pentagon, but to an entirely new agency. Which is .99999 percent likely why Townsend was attending regular meetings in Chantilly, Virginia in the summer of 1960. Chantilly was to become the home of the new agency.

All in all,  .06 degrees of separation between the Townsend's and Howard's work, I'd say.

Musing about Miethe

After former Nazi Colonel Miethe was exiled from Egypt in the early fifties, UFO lore has him in Canada, heading up the AVRO flying saucer program. Of course rumor also has it that after the US bought the technology, it turned out to be a total bust.

Uh-huh.

Read about it here

So how does Miethe relate to Townsend, you ask?  Only in the following tangential ways:

1.Linda Brown recalls Townsend speaking of  the characteristics of "our" ufos in the period of time the AVRO prototype was being tested.

2. Linda has told Twigsnapper's account of driving up to a Russian labor camp with Sarbacher, and securing the release of a prisoner, a former German rocket scientist. (A very 'Caroline' type of operation)

3. Sarbacher and Townsend later worked closely together, with Sarbacher even accompanying Townsend to and from the airport on his journeys to France, where he was doing advanced lifter experiments.

Mix those elements together and what do you get?  That's right...a totally Miethe-less soup!

But somehow, I see him in the center of it. It makes a  certain statement when a person is important enough to be wiped from the public record.





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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.

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

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.

Kudos to you, Professor Sudarshan.

Known for:

Optical coherence and Sudarshan-Glauber representation, V-A theory of the weak force, Tachyons, Quantum Zeno effect, Open quantum system, and contributions to the Spin-statistics theorem

In case you don't know what prompted this post, faster than light particles (Tachyons) were in the news this past week or so.

"The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN, which hosted the portion of the experiment in Switzerland. Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics at Surrey University in the U.K. told London's Telegraph that he would "eat [his] boxer shorts on live TV" if the results of the experiment proved correct.

In 1956, Townsend was telling Linda that the Creator has some slow ponies in his stable, but he also keeps  a section for those Faster than light thouroughbreds, too. Tachyons were a pretty new idea then, but I find it interesting that Townsend's 'stable' made room for them, too.

Adamski Never Grows Old.

The UFO Iconoclast has revived the Adamski discussion.  I think most posters in the information rich discussion that follows  would say his photos were faked, but the single most important point is buried many replies down:

Why DID he choose the shapes and designs he used?

There's something else going on in the whole Adamski thing...

What that something is makes for an interesting study, if one can get by the excoriation heaped upon the charlatanry of Mr. Adamski.

And why DID Townsend have Chip's father draw sketches of the photos when the book came out?

Kingman, 1953

Every time the Roswell Crash gets revived, the Kingman story is never far behind.  This dramatized version of Arthur Stancil's account has prompted me to revisit my last post on the topic.

Today, I tend to think that all of the Townsend pointers are simply the legacy of his "hide in plain sight" philosophy.  Even Keyhoe's book cover seems to be saying "This is the Birthplace of the Hoaxed UFO stories."  As always,  what interests me the most is what these hoaxes were created to hide.

Townsend, Project AZORIAN, Project DUMAND, and Project JENNIFER

To continue with the Project Azorian discussion I started yesterday, the reason we knew exactly where the Soviet Submarine sank was because we had the Pacific Ocean wired by then.  Signal scooping had come a very long way since the base at Barking Sands was reactivated in 1947-48 and converted to a big U.S. ear on the Pacific rim.

My second foundational belief about what Townsend did after WWII (with the work on Kaui being the root from which all else sprang) is based on something Mr. Twigsnapper has said: Townsend had a vital interest in communications security. I believe he was instrumental in the establishment of the Navy's COMSEC group and for tucking them away on an air force base in San Antonio,Texas, where no one would think to look. And conveniently removed from Admirals.

Poor Townsend suffered greatly in his life because of abysmally bad security. He lost his finger because of it,  he saw his work at Pearl Harbor sold out to a Soviet mole because of it, and knowledge of his work at Martin Decker ended in Soviet hands because of it, when imprisoned British spy, George Blake, managed to escape..

So, Townsend would have played a large part in creating  a sophisticated and secure communications network and in the expansion of it afterward. He would also have played a large part in the creation of the communication signals network used by the Azorian project. Aaaand,  from my reading of the DUMAND papers, its first sensors were supported by the physical infrastructure of the network. Or at least they were, until, as Townsend would later tell Linda, the fish ate them.

But to my knowledge the  true code name for the entire Azorian project was not released before 2010. Until then, those who were aware of the secret mission  knew only that Townsend was involved in it and that it was named "Project JENNIFER; as his private salute to the birth of his granddaughter. But the NSA article indicates that JENNIFER was a separate but overlapping project, and one which seems to be more inline with Townsend's interests.

Security policy and procedures were in accordance with the basic _____ agreement, which placed security management responsibility for the new security system, code-named JENNIFER, with the Dirctor of Security, CIA, acting for the DCI. The Director of Security in turn, delegated everyday security responsiblity to the Chief of the _________ at CIA and directed him to establish compartmentation procedures to insulate JENNIFER data from data relating  to other programs.

          http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarc...kevault/ebb305/doc01.pdf

Project Azorian and the CIA; then and now

The CIA's  Project Azorian has come up for discussion on the never-ending  notebooks thread that continues at the History Channel's UFO board., 

For the uninitiated, the cover story for the Azorian  was that Howard Hughes was developing a deep sea mining vehicle called the Glomar Explorer, to retrieve manganese nodules from the ocean floor.  The project was actually initiated to retrieve a sunken soviet sub carrying nuclear missiles. Those who want to know more about the when's and why's of this project are invited to read the  article, Project Azorian The CIA's Declassified History of the Glomar Explorer first published in1987 in the NSA's inhouse intelligence journal.

The article was declassified by them in 2010, apparently in response to the then-forthcoming book:  Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of K-129, which paints the CIA in a favorable light.

Thought I have yet to read the book, I have read the redacted CIA files on the subject and there are many fascinating aspects to the story. One of the most intriguing lies in the connection of Project Azorian to the Sept 11, 1973 overthrow of the Democratically elected Marxist President of Chile, Savadore Allende.  The Explorer and her USN warship escort just happened to be in the Valparaiso harbor on that particular day, passing through on their way up the Pacific coast to the Catalina trials. This  "happenstance" would certainly seem to reinforce the common belief that  what was presented then as a military coup was actually initiated and supported by the CIA.  They were noted for such things in those years.

But most people simply remember the Explorer as the first "commercial" vehicle of her kind. Now, some 23 years after the article, 35 years after the project, the NSA archivist dismisses the  CIA's underwater engineering contributions, giving  credit to the US Navy for much more "cutting edge" deep sea achievements. Actually,  it is an unfortunate reality of engineering that before cutting edge work can be conducted in extreme environments,  a lot of basic component engineering must be done first. It's not glamorous work, but it's necessary.

However, putting that argument aside, if that archivist's comment was not picked up by some congressional underling and presented as an "informed opinion" in the 2011 black budget slicing and dicing battles --which of course might have been the reason the statement was made to begin with-- then some elected offical's assistant was  asleep on the job.

I TOLD you so!

If Townsend were alive today, he might be tempted to say I told you so. Not that he would...that's not his style. So let me say it for him: "Told you so, told you so. neener neener."

(PhysOrg.com) -- A dramatic and surprising magnetic effect of light discovered by University of Michigan researchers could lead to solar power without traditional semiconductor-based solar cells.

The researchers found a way to make an “optical battery,” said Stephen Rand, a professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Physics and Applied Physics. In the process, they overturned a century-old tenet of physics....


Light has electric and magnetic components. Until now, scientists thought the effects of the magnetic field were so weak that they could be ignored. What Rand and his colleagues found is that at the right intensity, when light is traveling through a material that does not conduct electricity, the light field can generate magnetic effects that are 100 million times stronger than previously expected. Under these circumstances, the magnetic effects develop strength equivalent to a strong electric effect.

Who was Thomas Townsend Brown?

A scientist, yes. 

That would  have been his most instantaneous response to the question. He had a prodigious capacity for wonder and and equally prodigious ability to  imagine and envision the physical forces at work at the subatomic level. 

His career  path began with the US Navy and then continued with the CIA's Section D, the Signals Intelligence group which preceded the founding of both the NSA and the NRO.*  I believe that his work for them brought forth a plethora of techniques for every stealthy thing from fancy eavesdropping to hiding in plain sight. His chosen occupation was  hard on his wife and family but he was invaluable as an Operative-at-Large for the U.S intelligence community.  

The scope of his accomplishments may never be known, but some have placed the impact of his still-classified work on a level of importance with the discovery of fire.

I don't know if anyone will ever be able to substantiate that claim. After all, but for the publication of the Philadelphia Experiment, he might have slipped through history unnoticed--except by the rare electroculture gardener. ; )  All records of his "official"activities after 1942 have been well "weeded" from the official records. 

However, after observing the unusual level of support and resources put forth toward recovering his story, I can see that he was a man who inspired great admiration and devotion among those who worked with him.  And, though he himself would shun the public recognition, those he mentored are determined that he will not go unremembered. I find that kind of  allegiance says quite a bit about who Townsend Brown was in the short time he walked the earth. 

ETA on Feb 2, 2012
*Can I prove this? No, of course not. I can only say that my conclusions are based upon what I know of his career, events and places occurring in parallel with the advances in surveillance technology I find a pattern that makes great sense to me. 

The Paris Report in English, at last, courtesy of Raymond

Townsend was once hired as a consultant, by Southwest Aviation....the French company, not the one that bases its current claim to fame on giving out free peanuts when other carriers are charging by the smile.

Doc Brown made two trips to Paris, in 1955 and again in 1956 and Jaques Cornillion, the American representative of the company (Société National de Construction Aeronautiques du Sud-Ouest (S.N.C.A.S.O.)/Sud Aviation) saved all of the  correspondence and reports from these ventures. Mr. Cornillion passed away recently but before he died, he authorized the publication of these original documents. Some of them can now be found in their original language at the Projet Montgolfier website.

Raymond Lavas, a French Canadian forum member (aka PeeTee, aka Trickfox,  has been translating the report for public consumption. "Tricksie" is is a tenacious medical miracle who entered the Townsend Brown story before Paul and Linda ever took up the keyboard quill. He has just completed his translation of the body of the lab summary report and is starting in on the appendices now. Thank you, Tricksie, for all you do.

Raymond has also invited anyone fluent in both French and laboratory physics to help verify his translations and interpretations. If you know of anyone who can help, pass it on....