After “meeting” Townsend through Paul and Linda, I began researching the history of clandestine signals organizations operations, beginning with Elizabeth Friedman cracking the bootleggers code, until the end of the Cold War.
Though I have an extensive library from the time, the best histories of the post WWII period have been written by James Bamford and much of my alternate San Antonio narrative comes from his work.
When Townsend packed for his last off-island trip, Linda was told that he was going to San Antonio. From that story, someone extrapolated that he was headed for San Antonio, Cuba, in the heart of the alleged UFO hot spot. To my knowldege there is no real evidence for that, circumstantial or otherwise.
I can only work from the facts on the ground, and here they are as I know them:
Townsend was a signals man from his earliest years in the family lab.. Before he joined the Navy Research Lab, before he ever joined the navy, he wrote to the lab director about his measurements of ultraviolet radiation from distant stars.
As he well knew, that was a topic of special interest to the director. That letter didn't get his foot in the door, but his later demonstrated radio prowess did. The Lab was the happening place at the time,but it was still the late 1920’s and technology was primitive. The arrival of radar, WW 2 and and computers would stir things up, quite a bit, in the both military and the commercial world.
The 1953 public debut of the FORTRAN language made IBM’s fortune. With its arrival, Computers became more useful and accessible to a wider audience. But for a brief time, in the interim, post war period, computers had been rare and closely held secrets.
If you will, a brief digression here: Following on the heels of the Army’s Eniac computer, devoted to calculating ballistics trajectories. came computers Abel and Brutus. Abel was a digital computer, Brutus. analog. Formulas were calculated and translated manually from one to the other. I believe Townsend’s mathematically-inclined, multi-lingual BFF, Beau Kitselman, had one of the few minds capable of envisioning how that might be done more efficiently. Someone, probably Beau himself, has credited him with being the originator of FORTRAN and I can easily see how that might have been the case.
Back to the narrative: Once the scientific community mastered both radar and computers, there was a plethora of signals needing to be captured, measured, filtered, analyzed, recorded and posted.. Thus, the National Security Agency was created and charged with the management all of these activities. (It has been said that the name was meant to obscure their actual function as the National Signals Agency.)
Space surveillance activities were hidden in the Pentagon as unit C-1000, until they emerged as part to the new and secret for decades, National Reconnaissance Organization in 1960. This group was charged with launching classified satellite programs and missions.
Sometime after the its 1952 establishment a delegation of NSA cryptographers, and cryptologists were transferred from the D.C. area to a more secure and protected site at Brookings AFB near San Antonio, TX.
As to what the unit’s purpose was, I do not know. Perhaps they were transitioned to the NRO. Perhaps they communicated with extra terrestrials, or traveled through wormholes to escort off-world ambassadors to this planet. Or, perish the thought! perhaps their work was much more routine. That is not relevant to this hypothesis.
All we have been told is that when Dr. Brown arrived at his destination, the guys were really glad to see him. I can’t recall If “Morgan” used the word honored, but if these were the same guys, I feel they would have seen him as a revered elder, one of the originating members of a shared super-secret club that had never existed before in the history of the world. From this organization perspective, it makes perfect sense that when Doc Brown would have packed up his final set of lab papers, he was taking them to be placed in the archives there.
So that’s my version. Here’s what I think about the San Antonio, Cuba narrative:
- if he was in San Antonio, Cuba ,he was on foreign soil belonging to Russia’s closest ally in this hemisphere.
If he was visiting with denizens of the deep, off the coast, that was a rough trip on a frail old gentleman with one lung.
If he was picked up by a UFO…perhaps we will know about it in a hundred years.