Hi, I'm Jan, aka Rose

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Jan Lundquist
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Hi, I'm Jan, aka Rose

Post by Jan Lundquist »

Testing
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Paul Schatzkin
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Re: Hi, I'm Jan, aka Rose

Post by Paul Schatzkin »

Hi Jan.

Looks like it's working.

Howzit?

--P
Paul Schatzkin, author of 'The Man Who Mastered Gravity' https://amz.run/6afz
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It's "a multigenerational project." What's your hurry?
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"We will just sail away from the Earth, as easily as this boat pushed away from the dock" - TTB
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Jan Lundquist
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Re: Hi, I'm Jan, aka Rose

Post by Jan Lundquist »

Paul, Jess, Nate, Phil...it's good to see you all here again.

I am a historian by virtue of my undergrad degree, but my first real job out of college was as a systems analyst for the US Navy. (There was a severe shortage of computer science graduates in 1972). I had visibility to some of the advanced electronics and computer systems that were in the works at that time and the common thought around the research labs was that it would be fifty years before our most secret and cutting edge developments migrated into public applications and awareness. I have now lived long enough to see that migration from beginning to end and it has given me a unique perspective on Townsend's story.

I came to The Parallel Universe just as Paul was posting his last chapters of the book, of which I am a proud owner.

And then...the forum went poof, but Linda Brown and I had discovered we were nearly neighbors. We became great friends, and I edited her memoir of her life as the daughter of one of the most fascinating characters of the 20th century. it is a good tale in itself, but has none of the scientific threads that Paul has adroitly strung together.

The thing about Townsend, that keeps bringing me back to the subject, is that when you think you have scraped up all that is known about him, some new fact emerges, such as the off-hand statement by Tom Valone, in the abstract to his 2015 Review of Electrogravitics and Electrogravitation Propulsion, published in the international journal of Geosciences, that he corresponded with Townsend in 1981, "while he was at the University of Florida." Say whaat?

I don't quite know what to make of that, nor what to think of the role he played in a report uncovered by Michael Swords (Ph.D). It seems that sometime in the very early sixties a piece of space metal fell from the sky somewhere in New England. When laboratory tests showed that it exhibited some highly anomalous performance characteristics, arrangements were made for the Air Force to conduct further testing. But before they could collect the material, Townsend, with the full blessing of the U.S. Navy, scooped in and ferreted it away. The assumption seems to be that the metal was from a crashed UFO, but it is not inconceivable to me that it might equally well have been an artifact of a secret Navy rocket or satellite research program.

After all, it was but a scant few years earlier that Townsend had left Bahnson for an extended vacation in a small town in Florida, 60 miles inland from Cocoa Beach. Quite a pleasant drive if one wanted to visit the beach occasionally. And if that someone had technical knowledge of concrete and cement characteristics from growing up in the family construction business, augmented with missile launch, and tracking from participation in the creation of the Pacific Missile Telemetry range, he just might have some valuable input to the ongoing construction of the Navy's satellite rocket launching facilities at Cape Canaveral.

For the record, however, there is absolutely no evidence that Townsend was involved with the Pacific Missile telemetry range. He only relocated his family to the most remote and rurual Island in the Hawaiian chain, in 1947 to be closer to his pineapple cultivation research. wink, wink.

We will never know Doctor Brown's whole story, but when I trace his path through the twentieth century, I always find him in near proximity to many well known, and some lesser known, significant events of the time. And the story editor in me is driven to locate the narrative that connects them. But how do we make sense of a man who was not only fish and fowl; but may have been Flubber and Flipper, as well. He was Navy, he was CIA. He was a scientist, but sometimes a counterintelligence operative (CIA Directorate C, occasionally on loan to Directorate D, according to Morgan). And, while I cannot prove that mastered gravity, I am pretty damn certain that he had a role in the development of some arcane signals communication technologies. (Don't get me started on his ashtray products.)

I could rattle on about the TTB conundrums that we encounter at every turn, but I will stop there. Happy New Year, Guys. And Paul, all the best to you, as you go through this final push. I'm looking forward to the new book with great anticipation.

(Blame typos on the fact that I am writing this at 3 am, and my proofreading ability, never the best, clocks out at midnight.)
natecull
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Re: Hi, I'm Jan, aka Rose

Post by natecull »

Hey Jan! It's great to hear from you.

I hadn't heard that Michael Swords story and it's interesting! I have a fair bit of respect for Michael, mostly from reading his blog (http://thebiggeststudy.blogspot.com/ )

Would be interesting to wonder if that 1960s chunk of metal had been what launched all the "UFO recovered materials" legends ever since.

Townsend Brown's "electroculture" reseach in Haiwaii intrigues me because it sounds so very similar to what Christopher Bird would later become famous for in 1973 with "The Secret Life of Plants". Bird was allegedly CIA, and his co-author Peter Tompkins was OSS, and at least Bird would go on to be a core member of the US Psychotronic Association, whose focus was on reverse-engineering alleged Russian psi technology. That Russian reverse-engineering link also seems to be a big part of the Townsend Brown circle.

I've lost the reference, but I feel like either Bradford Shank or Mason Rose was also interested in the role of electric fields on plants and the human body, around that same Hawaii period?

It's just such a very specific interest that it makes me think that it's probably not a coincidence. I mean other than that the 1970s Psychotronics people were also heavily Navy/CIA and that it was them who - after Mason Rose, Bradford Shank, Beau Kitselman, Ed Hull, Meade Layne and Riley Crabb - became the group most loudly singing Townsend's praises in the 1970s, and presumably they didn't just accidentally stumble on his name out of nowhere.

Nate
Going on a journey, somewhere far out east
We'll find the time to show you, wonders never cease
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Jan Lundquist
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Re: Hi, I'm Jan, aka Rose

Post by Jan Lundquist »

hey there, Nate.

Thank you for the link. That is where I read the story originally.

What a string of names, some of whom I had forgotten about!

Brown most certainly moved in an overlapping Venn circle with the Stanford CIA psi research. George Leach recalled seeing plants in the basement, as part of a tour of the building. IIRC, the majority of the building was devoted to more hardcore research.

Tangentially related, I once found a Robert Sarbacher patent for "an electric muscle suit" or some such. I went to search for it and now see that a much large trove of references is available, though not that one in particular.

For example, there is a new archival entry in the archives of UFO researcher, Arthur Bray Fonds, at the University of Ottawa;
https://biblio.uottawa.ca/atom/index.ph ... r-steinman and 3 folders of correspondence from Robert Sarbacher, between 1960=1968 in the archives of film star Gloria Swanson, held at the University of Texas. Curiously, below Sarbacher is s a folder of correspondence between 1960-64 with Bradford Schank. https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/ ... adid=00154.

One enterprising redditor tried to get their hands on some of the Fonds papers, but did not get very far:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/ ... ct_magnet/

AFIK, no one has queried UT.
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