found in the archives of Gray Barker in the Charleston, W. VA, library. These records were located by a young, recently separated, Reconn Marine from West Virginia. "Plad" was another of the merry mystery chasers I met f2f in 2012.
I remember "Pladium" posting those papers! That was such a score!
What I'm not sure I mentioned at the time, is that as soon as I saw them I realised that I had read those same papers back in either the late 1980s or early 1990s, but had forgotten. (There's such a whirl of sources for Townsend Brown primary source documents that it frustrates me - I wish we had a central library of documents somewhere.)
Anyway, someone, or several someones, in the pre-Web "back of Popular Mechanics mail order fringe science advertisement" scene of that era had already been chasing up much the same Townsend Brown family trails that we have been, and selling the results in little photocopied document packs by mail order. One of those trails was the Gray Barker documents.
I've never been entirely sure who was the source of that particular one. I did a quick search in the back pages of 1980s Popular Science, and it seems that Rex Research, Information Unlimited, and Tesla Book Co were the major advertisers there. All three of those are still online.
On the way I noticed that Tesla Book Co were involved in publishing some very short papers by Rolf Schaffranke (in "The New Tesla Electromagnetics", 1986, mostly written by Tom Bearden, who I don't much care for). Shaffranke is more famous in Townsend Brown circles for writing the 1977 "Ether-Technology" which features circa 1973 letters from Townsend himself, as well as reprinting the 1952 Mason Rose article "The Flying Saucer" and mentioning some key names in Townsend's 1950s gravity research promotion circle. I think Schaffranke really is the main person who pushed Townsend's name into the "mainstream" of post-1970s fringe science, such as it is.
If you haven't yet read "Ether-Technology", here it is:
https://archive.org/details/rho-sigma-e ... 5/mode/1up
Sidebar: Shaffranke is an interesting and elusive fellow. Unverifiable claims to have been present at Peenemunde and then a consultant for NASA aside, he seems to have been involved with the American Society of Dowsers in 1967, with Edgar Cayce's ARE in 1970, and George van Tassell 's organization circa 1970 and 1977, including writing an introduction to Heironomus Galen, which means he was in the Radionics circle, or one of them. (Borderland Sciences, who seem to have oddly close links to Townsend Brown, also were linked to Radionics.)
I guess the question I have is: why were a lot of psychic and Contactee type organizations so interested in Townsend Brown? As well as major-league rocket scientists and spies? That's quite a diverse collection of fans that he attracted; I imagine they wouldn't all have sat well in the same room together.
To reinforce my assertion about just what a vortex of Townsend-Adjacent Weirdness both Schaffranke and Borderland were (and in fact so closely linked as to be one vortex), here's the Borderland journal for May-June 1978. Right next to an obituary for George Tassell himself.
http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/jou ... n_1978.pdf
"ETHER-TECHNOLOGY: A RATIONAL APPROACH TO GRAVITY CONTROL”
"One of your Associates suggested I call your attention to my privately printed book, "Ether-Technology", which has been very well received in England and her former colonies, and elsewhere in Europe where experiments already conducted are presently under evaluation by Japanese interests, by Messerschmidt-Bolkow-Blohm in West Germany, which is closely associated with Sud Aviation in France, of SST-Concorde fame.
"From what I have been able to learn about Victor Schauberger's (implosion vortex) model and the writings of his engineer son, who is still working in Austria, I am certain Victor stumbled more or less by accident upon the Ether-propulsion mode when his first model went through the ceiling of the aircraft hangar. However, this occurred by the end of the war (World War II) and certainly was not used in any kind of secret weapon. Nor has it been used ever since, to my knowledge.
"The U.S. Navy has presumably already used Radionics for the experimental location of submarines. I learned this recently while in London. Lt Col Tom Bearden, Army Missile Center, Huntsville, Alabana has a new book which could stir up interest in that sort of thing."
Rolf Schaffranke
Virginia Beach, Virginia
Mr. Schaffranke writes under the pen name Rho Sigma". His book is published at $5.75 a copy by Tarohelm Press, PO Box 7, Lakemont, Georgia 30552. We are adding a copy to the BSRF Reference Library and look forward to studying it ourselves. We remind you of the BSRF brochure, No. 2-Q, on Victor Schauberger’s Ether-motor, "Implosion Instead of Explosion", illustrated, $2.00
It's an interesting claim about the US Navy and Radionics and submarines. It might even be true. However with this group of excitable people, it's not
necessarily true. However, nor would it be a difficult thing for someone somewhere in the Navy to have done.
I don't really get the Schauberger thing, it's always seemed nonsense to me and remains so (and nonsense without even a clear connection to electromagnetic energy of any kind), but this is definitely where his name, along with that of Tesla, gets linked with Townsend Brown in the fringe literature.
And of course Schaffranke turns up in Christopher Bird's "Secret Life of Plants" (1973) (in association with Hieronymus, of course), linking him to Bird's particular military-psi-adjacent weirdness vortex. But again, all these vortexes are so close and overlapping as to largely be one vortex.
A German-born engineer, Rolf Schaffranke, working as a propulsion expert for American corporations contracting with NASA in Huntsville,
Alabama, who as a young student watched the launching of the first man-made rocket, the V-2, from the secret German base at Peenemunde, wrote of Hieronymus’ experiment: “Sounds absolutely crazy. Yet it really happened. Numerous observers are firmly convinced that the experiment is repeatable. Repeatable anywhere, any time, with as many witnesses present as desired.”
Nate
