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!

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.

Stripping Away the Hype

The [persistent] conjecture that NSA publications prove that Alien communications have been received  is taken on by Micah Hanks in Cryptic Communication from the Cosmos: Proof of Extraterrestrials in Radio Signals?  

Long story short: The 'communications' in question were conceptual exercises, NOT  proof that the NSA holds emails from ET.

THAT evidence has not yet been declassified.

The Others

Townsend Brown believed that he was in touch with an intelligence,

Another of the Wiped Ones?.

Has anyone seen Ning Li lately? If you find her, would you drop a clue on Wiki?

Ning Li is an American scientist best known for her controversial claims about anti-gravity devices. She previously worked at the University of Alabama, but left to form her own company AC gravity LLD.[1]Little is known of what became of AC Gravity or its initial activities, the current whereabouts of Ning Li are still unknown.

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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Medium Well, Thank You.

I foresee a future where an insurance company will pay for a mediumship reading,

From

Can Mediums Really Talk to the Dead?by Julie Beischel, PhD and Dean Radin, PhD published in the Noetic Now Journal

OSINT* turns up the darnedest things.

Today's unusual find comes from a materials manufacturer in Tula, Russia.

The product is license (new nanotechnology) and advanced material. This new material (plates of special matter) can be used to provide active (non-reactive) propulsion method due to different air pressure acting to plate of AF-material from different sides of the plate. The new material named Active Force Material. This method does not require any power input.

Tula's prior claim to fame has been as the home and burial place of Leo Tolstoy.  And somewhat   less well known, also as the character we called Tula in Linda's memoir.

*OSINT = Open Source Intelligence)

A Nostaligic Stroll Down (pre)Memory Lane

World War II and Korean Aircraft

Rat Patrol Radio

Dare We Hope?

“We will try to resolve their differences,” said a Turkish diplomatic source speaking on condition of anonymity, adding that all countries in the region have a duty to work for peace in Afghanistan."

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.