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!

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.
,
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.





.

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.

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.

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.

The Hidden Hand: Britain, America, and Cold War Secret Intelligence

As I finished this book by British historian, Richard Aldrich. I found myself nodding along on several of the points he made, specifically in regards to Signals Intelligence. My summation of them:

Cold War Historians are  allowed to study only what our governments chose to release. Take SIGINT. While smaller agencies fought over whatever clandestine operations were left to operate at wars' end, SIGINT became the focus of a top secret Anglo-American treaty signed by Truman.  By 1947, it was clear that this was to become the single most significant and costly of all of the intelligence activities.


And almost all SIGINT stories were withheld from the public archives for many years. Even now, what we get is only a bone intended to keep us busy and distracted from what we are not getting.

You tell it, Brother.

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?

NROpen House

The NRO recently threw a gala 50th celebration of these programs, displaying the 'birds' themselves for public viewing (for  one day only):

Saturday's spysat unveiling was attended by a number of jubilant NRO veterans who developed and refined the classified spacecraft and its components for decades in secret, finally able to show their wives and families what they actually did 'at the office' for so many years. Both of the newly declassified satellite systems, GAMBIT and HEXAGON, followed the U.S. military's frontrunner spy satellite system CORONA, which was declassified in 1995. 

SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper

In SEAL TEAM SIX Harold Wasdin describes the repetitive selection processes that winnow out 99% of the would-be applicants to the best of the best of US Special Forces.  In his case, as in so many others, a harsh  childhood with a father who beat him mercilessly enabled him to develop a grit-your-teeth endurance that  would see him through the  rigorous physical training courses he would complete on his way to the topmost echelon of SEALdom.  The first course, for all  would-be SEALS, is held at the Basic Underwater Demolition School (BUDS) on Coronado Island,

Because Morgan/JD once said that while he and Townsend enjoyed swimming together, Townsend focused on the pleasure of it and he, Morgan, on how to blow something up, I have assumed that it was at BUDS that he developed such an interest. But Harold's story, though I am only halfway through it, has  put another  piece of the Morgan narrative together for me. I now know that when Juan-Carlos refers to Morgan's people as "the Indians,"  he is using the nickname the Red Team component of SEAL TEAM SIX selected for themselves, in homage to the original American exemplars of bravery, stealth, and cunning.(At the time Wasdin went through the program, SEAL Team Six actually included four individual 16 man teams, known by color. It was the  Red Team which always got first draft from the trainee course graduates.)

If Morgan was involved in it (and he would have been in the prime of his career at the time the teams were formed) the naming of this team may also been a tip of the hat to a predecessor group, the special operations axillary unit that Iain Fleming headed in WWII, known (by those cleared to know) as "The Red Indians."  It is common knowledge that Fleming, who  lived next door to  Sir William in Jamaica after the war, drank martinis with him and modeled many of his James Bond stories after him but I suspect there were some other hidden functions in that 'neighborly' relationship.  Whether or not Morgan ever knew about them is another story to be investigated some other time.

On another note, Wasdin also says the CIA's nickname in  Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) circles is "Christians in Action."   I just have one question: If the CIA gets to be the Christians,  who plays the Lions? Any ideas?

They are (NOT) just about kerfluffled out, I think.

The forum poster known as Linda Brown and the forum poster known as Mikado have (for now) reached some sort of not-so-amicable agreement and retired to their respective corners.

To sum up months of public yammering: Linda thought the Resolute Voyages nee Quonset Hut forum was hers (as in set up, paid for, and gifted to her) to make decisions with.  It wasn't. She ranted. He raged over her raving. She was banned. I forget exactly what the final why was, but  it is irrelevant, anyway.

What is important (to me) is that  the new joint offer an inviting place for people of all nations to come in and sit a while, swapping their knowledge and experiences for our stories. The energy that comes from  joining together like this in these virtual spaces drives the engines of eternal creation.

Edited on 09/18/11 to add

resigning myself to the fact that there is never going to be peace between these two, and with best wishes for all involved I have resigned from one forum and locked myself out of the other.

It's a work in progress

It's still in the construction stages, but feel free to drop by The Sword and The Teapot and share a noggin of brew or two.  Now open for business at the http://www.cosmic-token.com/forum

Every Ship Needs a Captain

Tom Beale, who would be something like Josephine's great nephew, has been churning out artwork for the new site. This splendid image with Townsend on deck is hot off his metaphorical press:

Moral Compasses

Linda asks: "Now that Mikado has effectively taken over does that mean that he has the moral responsibility now to keep all of the discussions going.... as was the initial intent?"  

Social behaviors such as adherence to a moral code are group driven: everyone in the group operates according to a moral compass that point to the same star.  But different groups have different teachings and values, so I have to say that although I have no idea what  his initial intent was when he bought the TTownsendBrown domain name and offered it up as as a forum host site. I do know that whatever Mikado does, he will do according to his own moral compass.  Of that I have always been certain.

Watch This Space

Those who wish to continue the recently interrupted forum discussions are invited to join Linda and Rose  in the new place. It should be up and running in a few days, and I will be posting the new address here. In the mean time, feel free to use the comment space below for any messages you wish to pass along to the group at large.

MI-5 and SOE Documents: Taking Down the Norwegian Heavy Water Program

Available as a free download from BACM's Paperless Archives

102 pages of British Intelligence MI5 - Special Operations Executive files on Knut Magne Haugland.

Knut Haugland (September 23, 1917 - December 25, 2009) was also known by the codenames N.7 and Primus. Haugland is best known for his role in Operation Gunnerside, which ended what the allies suspected to be a German nuclear bomb project. The 1943 destruction of the Nordsk Hydro plant in Telemark, Norway ended the manufacturing of heavy water for use in German projects. Heavy water can be used in one type of reactor, in which plutonium can be bred from natural uranium.

Hold the presses! Scratch Stalin's Nazi Mutant Children

Unlike most of the speculation on the truth of the Roswell story, this one is based on demonstrable science.  Assuming all statements are true, the only hole a skeptic might find would be in the chain of evidence. AFIK, Isotope ratios have been considered pretty reliable:

Test confirms Roswell debris is not from this earth

The test was done on tiny particles of aluminum ound at the crash site. Although it proves nothing, I  should note that the Washington, D.C. address that Townsend used throughout the 1930s was in the same building as the Aluminum Association of America then at 900 19th St. NW.

An Afternoon with George

I had the  pleasure of hanging out and swapping stories with George this afternoon. George is one of the last living bridges to Townsend in the flesh. And I am one of the very few people who have been able to read Townsend's early history in the fragile pages of records themselves, so we had much to share with one another.

George spoke of his day spent touring Stanford campus with Townsend.  Lunch was attended by  several professors who, in his recollection and estimation, though they came from many disciplines, all seemed most differential to his father-in-law*.  He also recalls that he had a startling interactive learning experience in the plant intelligence lab. Here he demonstrates a plant cringing in fear when he (mentally) zapped it with destructive intent.  He said  that Townsend's comment about the work in that particular lab,which he seemed quite cognizant of, was that they were "on the right track" but George felt as though he was saying they were still missing something and it was almost as if Townsend knew what it was.

And, in return, I tell him of having seen and read Townsend's own research action plan for1928 which included demonstrating his work via a  model ship. The construction of the model and the demonstration my have been held first for Charles Kettering, the depression intervened and that it was almost four years later before the correspondence in his Naval records indicates that he wowed his NRL bosses with a demonstration of a boat that was somehow propelled without batteries.  A couple of months later, Seaman Brown became Lt.jg  Brown of the Naval Reserves Engineering Bureau and silent running was never heard from again until fifty years later when Ronald Regan and Tom Clancy made submarines fashionable reading.
Huh.

George never saw Townsend get angry. And he says that though Townsend's mind was always in science, he was also a man who absolutely reveled in the natural world. When I asked about his since of humor, what made him laugh, George tells me that most often it was something he saw in the way nature had constructed herself. I remember a vignette of him that Linda once shared.

Whenever Townsend had a cat or kitten who let him hold her upside down in his lap, he would play with her paws, and flex her toes, causing her to sheathe and unsheathe her claws. "Just look at that!" he would say."Isn't that wonderful?

George also said Townsend was also capable of being very  boyish when he was teasing Josephine to get her attention.  I like knowing that about him. And I like knowing that in return, Josephine had a favorite shtick with him, which she brought out when they were in a Naval town. "Sailors!" she would exclaim at the first sighting in (what I imagine to be) a tone of lascivious delight.

* And they ALL called him Dr. Brown.

Don't let the name scare ya

Al Jazeera posts this thought-provoking opinion piece by Pablo Escobar: Why the US won't leave Afghanistan

The Carpetbagger Newsletter

Issue 127 is now available online.

Today's News Roundup

Afghanistan drawdown

Homeland Security beef-up

Today's History Assignment:

Intelligence Support Activity

Brownmillerite

My writing partner for my other historical project had a strange dream in which she clearly saw the word "Browmil" written.  Thinking that it is a message from the Collective Unconscious, I have been searching for variations on it.

Wicki thinks this "Brownmillerite" is an interesting one, although only a chemist is likely to know why. Anyway, I am posting this in the expectation that it means something to someone in this quantumly entangled world.

Brownmillerite is a mineral with an interesting structure. Its chemical formula is Ca₂(Al,Fe)₂O₅. It is named for Lorrin Thomas Brownmiller (1902-1988), chief chemist of the Alpha Portland Cement Company, Easton, Pennsylvania.

The Brain is Boggled

Approximately $6.6 billion in cash was likely stolen after being flown to Iraq during the months that followed the U.S.-led invasion....

The Pentagon admitted last year that it could not account for over $8.7 billion in Iraqi reconstruction funds, and that about $2.6 billion of it was sent out without any documentation at all.

A billion here, a billion there...

Be Safe, Kiwi Friends

Battered Christchurch has been hit again, this time with a 5.5 quake.. Check in when you can, South Islanders.

Genesis

This quote is from a packet of source documents pertaining to the creation of "Advanced Intelligence Centers in the U.S. Navy.

MEMORANDUM FOR ADMIRAL F. J. HORNE.

Subject: Radio Intelligence Organization

June 20, 1942

Through the piping times of peace extending over a period of some twenty odd years Radio Intelligence struggled and was never allowed out of the closet. Politically it was illegal to have such an organization and for anyone to devote his time to the subject was committing professional suicide.

Now that the war is in being, many activities are desirous of having a finger in the pie....

The author (Naval Officer, Joseph Redman, assistant to the the Admiral in charge of Naval Communications) goes on to discuss the logical command authority for such a new form of intelligence collection, saying "Radio Intelligence cannot thrive and function efficiently except under the direct control of Naval communications."  He gives the following reasons:

• All Kana trained operators came from Naval Communications
• The intercept equipment was specified, procured, and maintained by Naval Communications.
• Only those familiar with such equipment and operation could perform Traffic Analysis
• The Direction Finding organization was entirely a matter of radio communications
• Naval Communications was knowledgeable in the communications network and world-wide crytographic aids used to facilitate the exchange of information.
• Emerging disciplines being developed within Naval Communications included:
• "TINA" unexplained acronym, described as the identification of radio operators by the characteristics of their hand-sending, a process involving "tape recordings, accurate measurements and mathematical analysis"
• RFP; radio fingerprinting, identification of enemy transmitters
• Distance measuring to enemy transmitters by use of ionospheric data.

Townsend's particular expertise would have been needed for the last of the three disciplines listed above.  Redman said it consisted of mathematical computations which were enhanced by "complete knowledge of the performance of the radio waves which vary through the period of the sunspot cycle, the seasons and diurnal changes." 

The author went on to say, "these functions are new and being developed here', but they nucleus of two trained units was being transferred to the operational commands in the Pacific. Bet ya dollars to dinars that Townsend's soon-to-follow separation from the Atlantic Radar School (and ostensibly, from the U.S. Navy) was somehow connected to this new organization.

The Thomas Drake Affair: Justice Done

NSA whistle-blower Thomas Drake to plead guilty in plea deal

For those who care....or wanna make something of it.

Looks like a private network to me. AFIK, I'm not on it.

OrgName: UUNET Technologies, Inc.
OrgId: UUDA
Address: 22001 Loudoun County Parkway
City: Ashburn
StateProv: VA

Progressing toward Perfection.

Having at last achieved the 'fresh eyes' needed to reread The Good-bye Man objectively, I can now see many sentences that could be streamlined or clarified. Yayee! The best part of writing is this stage of  putting the final, final, final finis on the words.

This newer and cleaner version will be up Monday, and will  mirror the forthcoming print edition.  If you own the ebook, you can, of course, always download later versions at no charge.

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.

Everything is related to everything

The old is new again.

Layers upon layers

 From the NY Times book review section:

...Ms. Jacobsen will eventually address the U.F.O. issue with which conspiracy theorists eagerly associate Area 51, but her book is not science fiction. It’s much more levelheaded. It is an assertive account, revelatory but also mystifying, of the long-hidden United States weaponry and espionage programs to which she says Area 51 is home.

Self Publishing: Tinkerer's Delight, Perfectionist's Downfall.

I am learning on the fly about how to format e-books. Which means getting deeper into the use of document styles than I ever wanted to be.   But it is incredibly easy to download and upload files....which is maybe not such a good thing because I could tinker with something forever and sometimes fixing one problem causes another...

The next self-publishing hurdle is that of reformatting The Good-bye Man text and adding pictures and document scans,and produce paperback books via Amazon's CreateSpace program.  Available soon. We hope.

The Story in the Footnotes or Why I Blog.

The Brown saga touches upon so very many topics tangentially, that blogging about them is my way of jotting notes to myself that I can never misplace.  Today, I just want to quote from  this Quonset Hut post, in which Linda responds to Mikado's question about a seeming time contradiction in her perceptions of events.

There is only one answer to that.

Its an answer that is so preposterous right now everyone but a very few would laugh off of their chair if I mentioned it. It is also the truth of things... whether some want to accept it or not.

The man I met when I was nine is a man I know now.... he brought the " set" back to my Dad then after taking it away in the fifties.... for safekeeping.... The man who rescued my Father in the thirties... is a man I know now.....

http://www.ttownsendbrown.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=841&start=30

I spy, with my little eye...

And, speaking of Signals Intelligence, from the American Chronicle, which attributes it to Psyche Leaks at Starpod, although I'll be danged if I can find it on the page they link:

NSA-related sources first revealed the existence of the NSA paranormal program to investigative author Gus Russo, in 2007.

According to Russo's sources, the NSA considers the use of 'psychic information' as a legitimate form of signals intelligence, suggesting a transmission medium may have been confirmed by NSA scientists. During the cold war, several Soviet scientists claimed so-called torsion fields stored and transmitted human perceptions, allowing for "remote viewing" of distant locations. In the 1970s the CIA sponsored research into remote viewing and later the American Defense Intelligence Agency tasked a small group of psychic intelligence officers against targets in the Soviet Union. Some of the DIA STAR GATE psychic spy files were released through the CIA in 2004. 

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.

Step right up, folks! Git yer tickets here! Manned trip to Mars!!

NEW YORK (AFP) – Private US company SpaceX hopes to put an astronaut on Mars within 10 to 20 years, the head of the firm said.

"We'll probably put a first man in space in about three years," Elon Musk told the Wall Street Journal Saturday. "We're going all the way to Mars, I think... best case 10 years, worst case 15 to 20 years."

Circles in Thin Ice

Recent high altitude imagery of the deepest lake in the world, courtesy of NASA

:
Linda reminds me that the work which lead to the building of giant neutrino particle detectors was originally done as part of Project DUMAND.The Soviet group worked at the edge of Lake Baikal and the US project continues at the South Pole as Project Amanda. Perhaps the Soviet group  completed their 'scope in 2009 when these circles were first observed.

What's particularly interesting to me is that the two of us (Linda and I that is) were just talking about the "glitches" her father observed with his constantly running sensor network. These glitches always come in pairs: after the initial one arrives, there is another, much stronger one in an exact span of time.

As I reread the DUMAND documents, I see that they say, "... The second (decay) burst would be typically twice as bright as the first ($\sim 10^{11}$ photons), and both would be detectable at distances of hundreds of meters in the ocean." Now I wonder if Townsend's rock sensors were reacting to neutrino bursts?

More on I-4, (as we, the acronym savvy, have deemed it)

For those who want to know more about current state of affairs concerning the Internicine Interrelationships in the Intelligence Industry

And still more.

McRaven: JSOC and beyond 

War Games

Intelligence watchers are up in arms over Petraeus's nomination to head the CIA:

From this morning's Washington Post article: "Gen. David H. Petraeus has served as commander in two wars launched by the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. If confirmed as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Petraeus would effectively take command of a third -- in Pakistan."

That assessment seems a bit hyperbolic but I can't deny that the Pentagon has been conducting a determined encroachment into the Intelligence arena for the past decade. Unfortunately, judging from the reports of returning officers, even when the CIA's paramilitary teams were blessed with some Pentagonian/Department of Defense acronym and sent out into the field, they were not always well-received by Service Special forces at the front lines..

I don't think  that putting the good general into a bureaucrat's job is the right fix for this type of operational turf war. But more importantly, if Petraeus's nomination is approved then who shall have the job of saying no to Caesar?

Does NSA Document Verify ET Existence?

From The Anomalist, which also has embedded links to the referenced material:

Online radio host Kevin W. Smith of The Kevin Smith Show believes he has located a document with a background indicating it was omitted from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, intentionally, by the National Security Agency (NSA), one of the United States' most secret organizations, if not the most secret such organization of all. Did NSA cryptologists decode 29 messages "from outer space"? According to Smith, "Apparently, these messages had actually been received via the Sputnik satellite, but no one had any idea how to decode them at the time." 

But as my friends over there so intelligently ask, 

And, since the Sputnik venture was a Cold War project of the Soviet Union, why would we think the messages had anything to do with contact from an alien race and not code concocted by the Soviet Union?

Premium Distribution, update report

As I feared, TGM has been bounced out of the Smashwords premium catalog because the footnote format did not transfer to all file types. Html coding is required. grrr.

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.

Waiting on Premium Distribution

The Smashwords ebook has been sent for the human vetting that determines whether or not the file meets the standards of the BIG distribution catalogs. The single largest technical hurdle has been in finding a workable way of presenting footnotes within the available file formats. If I have succeeded the book should pass through this last stage easily and any reported problems will be ones I can fix.

If not, well, then we will have to call upon a representative of the world's newest occupation: a professional book coder. I'm collecting names, just in case.

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. 

Next.

Early comments from the pre-readers  who have been following our "journey to bookdom."  Thank you, to all of you who have seen multiple drafts by now, for the willingness to try to see it all again through fresh eyes.Our current plan is to eliminate as many typos as possible between now and April 9, and submit the final version for sale through the Premium e-book distributor catalogs.

• It reads so easily, so effortlessly, and from a dyslexic such as myself, there is no higher praise.

•  I'm two thirds of the way through reading the book. It flows very well, and other than some typos, I think it's very well put together.

•  And thank you for the pleasure I experienced in reading The Good-Bye Man. It flows along at a lively clip and immediately and smoothly transports back to those times and experiences. I recall that TTB had a masterful way of naturally selecting just the right words to convey his thoughts and concepts. Your book likewise conveys itself to the reader with an artful and soulful touch.

The Goodbye Man free for a limited time only.

Enjoy!

To Our Japanese Friends

日本語

私達の中心があなたのために壊れる一方で、奇跡のために祈る。

Praying for miracles in the Land of the Rising Sun, even as our hearts break for you.

To My Russian Visitors: Privyet . Nyet, Spasiba !

По-русски

Всегда хорошо хотя оно, для того чтобы встретить людей от других стран, я должен добросердечно просклонять ваши подарки.

 I have no idea what that says. This is what I put into BabelFish:  

Always good though it is to meet people from other countries, I must kindly decline your gifts. 

Further translation:

Danged Russian Spammers.

The Earth's Quarantine Has Been Lifted

My search for more information about NRO badges led me to this  November article.  It looks like an epic work and I've bookmarked it for future reading. 

One question, though: If our "quarantine" has now been lifted, does that mean that the Adjustment Bureau has taken off the training wheels (again)?

The Black Knight, again.

Speaking of Philip K. Dick and The Adjustment Bureau brings to mind the Black Knight Satellite story, one of my favorite space mysteries from 1960. It was only recently that the NRO launched a comparable satellite into orbit. NRO watchers are having quite a go at deciphering the Mission badges accompanying these recent Delta Heavy launches.  They are superbly cryptic!

Whitehall? The Adjustment Bureau?

On the day he  encounters  The Adjustment Bureau for the very first time.Matt Damon boards the bus at the corner of Whitehall and So. Ferry Streets. Whitehall, just coincidentally, holds a special place in the Brown history, too. That was the name of Townsend's firm at the time he submitted the Winterhaven proposal. Something in that proposal, or in Townsend's presentation of it, caught GE's interest in the very early fifties. And it was just a very few years later that GE became the Prime Contractor for the long-running Keyhole spy satellite programs.

I give the filmmakers  big kudos for tackling the topic of fate vs. freewill in this remake of a Philip K. Dick short story. My favorite line in the movie occurs when Richardson, a Bureau "case worker," lectures David Norris (Damon):  Do you have any idea how many opportunities you people squander by giving in to impulse?  

Truer words have never been spoken. Anyway, to make a long story short: Love wins in the end and beware of people wearing hats.

What We Did Today

 Author Photos in the making

OK, I've had my fun.

I have to admit I enjoyed being all cloak and daggerish in the preceding posts. But having had my fun with my pun,  I   now owe an explanation to those who are new to the whole Brown saga:

Juan is the name Paul used in DEFYING GRAVITY, for the character who went through Camp Peary. Perry oh heck, The Farm, with JD/Morgan. As I have heard their story, one of them subsequently followed a straight CIA career path, while the other passed through military service and the NSA.  But  in aviation parlance,  they continue to cover  each others "six." It's another one of those loyalty things. Some folks just have it embedded in their genes.

Juan Says

"The 'Indians' have a great compassion for crazy people. My group, not so much."

Observations from afar

The Hut Forum Kerfluffle continues behind the scenes. Oh my.  I'm sitting on my hands with a strip of tape over my mouth  and not saying nothing to nobody.It's really much safer that way.

But the gist of what's going on as I see it, is that in her eagerness to get the discussions back on track, Linda put up some thoughts about the way it was going to be done, and who would do it, without bothering to get consensus from the crowd.. Rather than taking her suggestions as a work in progress and still open for discussion, some reacted by flinging around dictums and ultimatums and huffs.

That's fine. We all deal with shocks in our own ways. But here is what makes all of this so very interesting. Members of the Townsend Brown forums come from a  whole bunch of Alphabet agencies and they have become friends with other members.and are happy to lend an ear to any who want to vent..  But if in the process of that venting, a certain loyalty and confidentiality line is crossed--well, it might just turn out to be Juan of those days.



And apparently it did, yesterday.



(Does that help explain the echoes you hear, Navigator?)

I knew my cat was an alien.

Hut Cat, you are going to love this:

From a post etitled Russian flight controllers claim to have spoken to an alienon the Above Top Secret forum today:

The Russian aviation workers are heard in the control tower trying to make contact with the ship.

A radar shows the UFO moving rapidly through the skies while surrounding planes in the air travel much slower.

'I kept hearing some female voice, as if a woman was saying mioaw-mioaw all the time,' he told the pilot of a passing Aeroflot flight.

(By the way, I speak excellent Cat if anyone needs a translator)

IPUs? We doan' need know stinky IPUs.

In the late Forties and early Fifties, the US Army led  an ad hoc UFO investigations committee called the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit. Over time, this "Unit" was replaced by all sorts of more official but later disbanded investigations such as the Condon Report and Project Blue Book.  Oddly enough, once earthlings became space travelers themselves, governmental interest in the UFO topic seemed to wane.

Many UFO researchers insist that  it continues to exist and that it is masterminded by an organization buried under a quilt of ultra secret clearances. MJ-12, a purported outgrowth of Eisenhower's original UFO advisory group, is the one some believe to be in charge now. Like every other "belief" in the UFO field, this one has ardent devotees who are not going to be at all happy with the conclusions of John Alexander's latest book. UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities.  One reviewer says "the highly decorated officer...[spent] a quarter of a century going through the top levels of the U.S. government and military searching for the group of people who were allegedly responsible for UFO information and the supposedly decades-old UFO cover-up. His conclusions: ... there is no such group and no cover-up." (Las Vegas Weekly)

 I am far more intrigued by his idea that disclosure about UFOs has already occurred on official levels. Apparently (as his logic seems to go) the subject has been found too complex to yield itself to up to research modeling, and the government is throwing investigations back on civilian shoulders.

From what I have read, experienced, and believe, I would have to say that NOW we are beginning to get somewhere. The first sign of wisdom is knowing that we we don't know.