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.