Project Montgolfier: Townsend Brown and Jacques Cornillon in France, 1957

Long-time Townsend Brown inquirer Jan Lundquist – aka 'Rose' in The Before Times – has her own substantial archive to share with readers and visitors to this site. This forum is dedicated to the wealth of material she has compiled: her research, her findings, and her speculations.
Post Reply
natecull
Keeper of the Flame
Posts: 437
Joined: Sat Mar 22, 2008 10:35 am
Location: New Zealand

Project Montgolfier: Townsend Brown and Jacques Cornillon in France, 1957

Post by natecull »

I uploaded the Project Montgolfier report to the Internet Archive, in case everyone hasn't managed to find a copy.

Raymond "Trickfox" Lavas' English translation (125 pages):

https://ia902602.us.archive.org/16/item ... Report.pdf

The original French (151 pages):

https://ia601609.us.archive.org/30/item ... French.pdf

Note that even the English version contains many "Annexes", which were not on the website version and have pretty much all of the technical detail.

Regards, Nate
Going on a journey, somewhere far out east
We'll find the time to show you, wonders never cease
User avatar
Jan Lundquist
Keeper of the Flame
Posts: 350
Joined: Sat Jan 14, 2023 7:19 pm
Spam Prevention: Yes

Re: Project Montgolfier: Townsend Brown and Jacques Cornillon in France, 1957

Post by Jan Lundquist »

Thank you, Nate, for rescuing this. I hope Jess is okay.

And much gratitude to Jacques Cornillion for spilling his story of the encounter, and to beloved Trickfox for the translations. I know little about the surrounding historical events in France, at the time, other than that their first nuclear reactor plant became operational in 1956 and, in the same year, SudOest began serious research efforts that would lead to the eventual development of the supersonic Concorde.

According to "Twigsnapper" the Paris trip that was memorialized with this photo, taken on Townsend's birthday, had something to do with the Lionel "Buster Crabb" disappearance "across the pond" in the Portsmouth harbor.
TownsendParis.png
There is much that is hinky in the detailed facts of the Crabb story but this summary will have to do, lest we go too far off track, too soon.
MI6 recruited Crabb in 1956 to investigate the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze that had taken head of state Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin on a diplomatic mission to Britain.[8] According to Peter Wright in his book Spycatcher (1987), Crabb was sent to investigate Ordzhonikidze's propeller, a new design that Naval Intelligence wanted to examine. On 19 April 1956, Crabb dived into Portsmouth Harbour and his MI6 controller never saw him again. Years later, a Russian who had been on board Ordzhonikidze claimed that the Soviets were expecting him that night (after being tipped off about the British operation by a mole) and that he dived into the dark and dirty waters beneath the Ordzhonikidze, hunted down Crabb, and slit his air hose and his throat with a knife. Crabb's companion in the Sally Port Hotel took all his belongings and even the page of the hotel register on which they had written their names.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Crabb

For some reason Pathe news was there to film Crabb's dive. I have seen the footage, and it evokes a poignant sadness, to know he will never be heard from again.

SIDENOTE: Henri de la Falaise, Gloria Swanson's 3rd husband and her partner in the formation of a 1939 venture devoted to rescuing European scientists from the Nazis, was once employed as the American and European representative for Pathe and directed a couple of films for their American RKO subsidiary.

I have been told/led to believe that the cocky and fashionable young blade in the nifty suit is Twigsnapper, himself. The remainder of the characters are sailors, wearing what (I think) are uniforms from the East German navy at the time. I have seen the original photo. Penciled in the back top left corner is “99/020/562 3/18/56". The first sequence was the underground code number,used by "Verne" aka French Resistance war hero, Jacques Bergier (author of the 1960 Morning of the Magicians and the less popular, 1956 Secret Weapons, Secret Agents.). The second marks the date it was taken.

SIDENOTE: Unfortunately, I did not give my source for this information, when I first discovered it, but Fouquet's was located just down the street from the address given at the time for Bergier's office. It is possible that it was he who took the photo, but it amuses me to think that he is the waiter in the background.
User avatar
Paul Schatzkin
The White Rabbit
Posts: 140
Joined: Tue May 20, 2008 12:50 am

Re: Project Montgolfier: Townsend Brown and Jacques Cornillon in France, 1957

Post by Paul Schatzkin »

natecull wrote: Tue Mar 21, 2023 10:26 am I uploaded the Project Montgolfier report to the Internet Archive, in case everyone hasn't managed to find a copy.
.
Thank you for doing that, Nate.

I will probably address a website/blog post to that subject in the not too distant future.

One of the recurring themes that drifts through my cerebral cortex from time to time is the recollection that there were at least three verified occasions when observers of Brown's gizmos reported something... inexplicable?... in the vocabulary of contemporary physics:

1. The Biefeld affidavit we found in TTB's naval records.
2. An entry in Agnew Bahnson's journals (I wonder where those are now?)
3. The above referenced Montgolfier Project and Jacques Cornillon's testimony.

If was some kind of dazed and confuzed conspiracy theorist, I might surmise that somewhere in those observations is the key to the whole cosmology that eludes us.

--PS
Paul Schatzkin, author of 'The Man Who Mastered Gravity' https://amz.run/6afz
.
It's "a multigenerational project." What's your hurry?
.
"We will just sail away from the Earth, as easily as this boat pushed away from the dock" - TTB
natecull
Keeper of the Flame
Posts: 437
Joined: Sat Mar 22, 2008 10:35 am
Location: New Zealand

Re: Project Montgolfier: Townsend Brown and Jacques Cornillon in France, 1957

Post by natecull »

3. The above referenced Montgolfier Project and Jacques Cornillon's testimony.
The full Annexes, and Cornillion's cover letter, in the Montgolfier report are fascinating reading, at least to me. Quite honest (often brutally so) about what experiments worked and what didn't, and about what forces were "interesting" vs what forces were expected electrostatic stuff. Townsend definitely made a distinction between "dynamic counterbary" vs "static counterbary" and told Sud-Oest at one point that static was classified while dynamic was open - then it seems he later retracted that. What he actually demonstrated, and what Cornillion's team replicated, actually included at least three modes: a simplified solid-state "gravitator" using Plexiglas and tinfoil; propulsion in air; and propulsion in vacuum. Which of these were "static" and which were "dynamic", I wonder?

The "static" Winterhaven aspect of "beneficiation of gravitational isotopes" also appears in the full report (though just as something mentioned by Townsend, not as something tested in the French lab), and one of the intriguing throwaway statements is that a material which Townsend considered a potential gravitational isotope is common loess. Fine volcanic yellow clay-like soil - we have heaps of it here in the Canterbury Plains of New Zealand, the hills are made of it. According to Wikipedia ten percent of the Earth's surface is covered in loess. I can see why Townsend considered it: because it's very lightweight, blows everywhere... and a material being suspiciously light for its mass is of course the defining characteristic of his conception of "gravitational isotope". So the stuff might very well hide in plain (sic) sight. It's probably mostly silicon so could be a dielectric, and we see Townsend coming back to the sand concept in the 1970s. This is assuming of course that Townsend wasn't just barking up an empty tree with that particular concept of his (plenty of other famous scientists have been, or at least have been so regarded by their colleagues).

Part of the trick of using air as a dielectric seems to me that it could "replenish itself" and avoid the old problem, since the 1920s, of the dielectric somehow becoming "saturated" and no longer exhibiting the deflection or propulsion effect. So I'm not sure that there's entirely a strict separation between the "gravitator" vs "fluid dielectric" concepts in Townsend's mind. Whether vacuum as a dielectric behaves in this regard as a fluid like air, or as a solid like Plexiglas, seems to be an interesting question.

I wish we had any documents from what happened at the General Electric facility at King of Prussia in 1959, since that's the third collaboration in the late 1950s and it's successfully remained below the radar. I imagine the results would have been similar to Bahnson and Sud-Oest - thin, sketchy, just on the borderline of provable vs imagined - but I don't know that.

Regards, Nate
Going on a journey, somewhere far out east
We'll find the time to show you, wonders never cease
User avatar
Jan Lundquist
Keeper of the Flame
Posts: 350
Joined: Sat Jan 14, 2023 7:19 pm
Spam Prevention: Yes

Re: Project Montgolfier:GE King of Prussia

Post by Jan Lundquist »

It would be very interesting to know about the GE work at King of Prussia. Some history on the facility:
Known to the world as The General Electric Company’s Missile and Space Vehicle Department at the Valley Forge Space Technology Center, it was clearly the biggest thing to happen to Upper Merion Township since the Schuylkill Expressway met the Pennsylvania Turnpike less than ten years earlier. On a grassy hill overlooking the gradually disappearing farmlands in King of Prussia, the 900,000 square foot facility rose in 1960 as the first major industrial complex in the area, comprising some 131 acres. It would be the first of many businesses to locate in and around Upper Merion, due mainly to its proximity to major roadways, which earned the township the nickname “the Hub of the East.” Today, Lockheed Martin occupies the facility, which has changed very little externally, from its original design.
https://www.kophistory.org/ge-comes-to-town/

My years working on black programs
by Robert E. Andrews
Monday, November 18, 2019
CORONA: 1958–1960

One day, a fellow draftsman in my group told me I was to come with him to a meeting. We went to a remote area in the building where there was very little personnel traffic. I didn’t know it even existed. We came to a locked door and he had a key to open the door. Inside was a GE employee who introduced himself as a security agent. I thought I was going to lose my Secret clearance. Instead, he told me I was going to be briefed on a highly classified program called CORONA. He told me that what I was about to learn, I could not discuss with anyone who was not also cleared for this information. I could not talk about this with family, friends, or other GE employees forever. He asked if I accepted those conditions and after I did, he gave me a brief overview of the real purpose of Discoverer, which was to carry a camera into space to photograph the Soviet Union and then return the film inside the GE-built reentry vehicles.

The security officer also gave me instructions about meeting the others cleared on the CORONA program. My friend who brought me to this briefing was of course a member of this closed society. There was a formal procedure to follow. To meet someone new, you must have a third party that knows you and the other person are both cleared. This must be done in a closed “black” area. The third party gives the introduction: “Robert Andrews, this is a formal introduction to John Jones on Program C”. A handshake follows. Note that the word CORONA is shortened to C. I don’t believe I ever heard CORONA spoken again.
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3833/1
User avatar
Paul Schatzkin
The White Rabbit
Posts: 140
Joined: Tue May 20, 2008 12:50 am

Re: Project Montgolfier: Townsend Brown and Jacques Cornillon in France, 1957

Post by Paul Schatzkin »

Wikipedia has a pretty thorough account of 'Project Corona'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)

I only had time to skim through it, but got the sense that Townsend Brown's invisible fingerprints are all over it.

--P
Paul Schatzkin, author of 'The Man Who Mastered Gravity' https://amz.run/6afz
.
It's "a multigenerational project." What's your hurry?
.
"We will just sail away from the Earth, as easily as this boat pushed away from the dock" - TTB
User avatar
Jan Lundquist
Keeper of the Flame
Posts: 350
Joined: Sat Jan 14, 2023 7:19 pm
Spam Prevention: Yes

Re: Project Montgolfier: Townsend Brown and Jacques Cornillon in France, 1957

Post by Jan Lundquist »

Yes, it does. Townsend Brown seems to have been the Forrest Gump of the US Signals/Surveillance/Space programs, always nearby at critical moments in all that superceded HUMINT.
User avatar
Jan Lundquist
Keeper of the Flame
Posts: 350
Joined: Sat Jan 14, 2023 7:19 pm
Spam Prevention: Yes

Re: Project Montgolfier: Before Corona, there was GRAB

Post by Jan Lundquist »

The Beginning of SIGINT Collection From Space

Grab evolved directly from NRL’s Vanguard program. Laboratory officials had discussed plans for using technology from Vanguard to develop space systems for electronic intelligence collection at least as early as 1957, along with other military missions such as communications, navigation, and scientific measurements of atmospheric and space phenomenon that might affect military operations. NRL had previously developed crystal video technologies deployed on submarines to intercept and analyze Soviet radar sites. Passing time as he was stuck in a Pennsylvania snowstorm in March 1958, Reid D. Mayo, an NRL engineer, came up with the idea of mounting a solid state version of the periscope-mounted radar detector in a Vanguard like satellite. Returning to Washington, he proposed the idea to Howard Lorenzen, chief of the NRL electronic countermeasures branch. The lab began developing the project for the Director of Naval Intelligence. (McDonald and Moreno, 2005)

When President Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on 1 October 1958, most NRL technicians working on Vanguard transferred to what is today’s Goddard Space Flight Center....


Grab (“Galactic Radiation and Background,” a name referring to the satellite’s cover as a research project measuring radiation in space) was equipped with both scientific instruments and a receiver that detected pulsed-radar signals emitted from Soviet air defense systems. The Air Force launched Grab 1 on a Thor Able Star vehicle on 22 June 1960, becoming the world’s first successful reconnaissance satellite. Launched into a 600 mile high, 63.4 degree inclination orbit, Grab passed over the entire territory of the Soviet Union. As the satellite detected signals from air defense radars, it transmitted a corresponding signal to a ground control “hut” that was within line of sight of the satellite, but in friendly territory. he signals were recorded on tapes, which weresent back to NRL, and ultimately, the National Security Agency and the Air Force
Strategic Air Command for analysis.
https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/document ... dition.pdf
User avatar
Jan Lundquist
Keeper of the Flame
Posts: 350
Joined: Sat Jan 14, 2023 7:19 pm
Spam Prevention: Yes

Re: Cornillion on Rose and Shank

Post by Jan Lundquist »

Wow, I took quite a detour from the Project Montgolfier topic in last few messages in this thread. Back on track, now. Cornillion's report is such a treasure!

Montgolfier Report, page 108 https://ia902602.us.archive.org/16/item ... Report.pdf
I must admit being perplexed by Dr. Mason Rose who is a prominent Hollywood psychologist. I asked him ‘what the devil did psychology have to do with flying saucers’. Dr. Rose provided the following astounding explanation: He explained to me that he was a specialist in ‘Biological Electric Fields’ and that he had met and been associated to T. Brown during his field research studies. Together they found out that there is an electric field running upwards through the cell-bodies of Human beings, Animals, and even Plants. This electric field is influenced greatly by the earth’s local electric field. An individual’s nerve impulses are affected by electric field impulses, and laboratory tests have shown significant correlations between the local gradient electric field variations and various biological electric fields. This led to the discovery that an artificial electric field running through the soil of seedling plants increased their growth rate by a factor of two (2).

Dr. Rose was a member of the air quality management district of Los Angeles and was in charge of the ‘Smog’ assessment program. They had discovered that the most pernicious effect of smog was not ‘smoke’ by itself, but rather, it was the ‘ill-effects’ attributed to the local electric field gradients. Dr. Rose is a credible source because he is also a member of the Federation of American Scientists.

After I had absorbed this information Dr. Rose suggested we meet the next day with someone who had a more intimate relationship with T. Brown. This resulted in our second meeting at Dr. Rose’s residence. There, Dr. Rose presented me to a prominent nuclear physicist named Dr. Shank. (When I met T. Brown later on, he told me Dr. Shank had worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during the Second World War). After this meeting and upon further study of the documentation, -I concluded that I was indeed meeting serious people and not amateurs or hoaxers.
User avatar
Paul Schatzkin
The White Rabbit
Posts: 140
Joined: Tue May 20, 2008 12:50 am

Re: Cornillion on Rose and Shank

Post by Paul Schatzkin »

Jan Lundquist wrote: Sun Apr 30, 2023 4:36 pmAfter this meeting and upon further study of the documentation, -I concluded that I was indeed meeting serious people and not amateurs or hoaxers.

THAT is the kind of testimony that we need more of!!

I must confess that I have not spent as much time with the Montgolfier/Cornillon report as I would like to.

This past week I went through the entire manuscript several more times to make the necessary corrections and fixes. My editor Mike Williams found about a hundred things that needed fixing, and they're all fixed now.

Nate, you'll be pleased to know that among other things we fixed that 'wandering' Chapter 70. And jeezus.... how did I miss THAT?!?!

Anyway, the new files have been uploaded to Amazon and Ingram, and you guys who bought early have the rare 'misprinted' edition.

Now I am starting to promote the book on Amazon, and sales are steady if still small. I hope to get more interest going over time by revisiting things like Montgolfier and Cornillon.
Paul Schatzkin, author of 'The Man Who Mastered Gravity' https://amz.run/6afz
.
It's "a multigenerational project." What's your hurry?
.
"We will just sail away from the Earth, as easily as this boat pushed away from the dock" - TTB
User avatar
Jan Lundquist
Keeper of the Flame
Posts: 350
Joined: Sat Jan 14, 2023 7:19 pm
Spam Prevention: Yes

Re: Project Montgolfier: AHA! Cornillion's two homes

Post by Jan Lundquist »

We have no proof that Cornillion maintained two residences, but it appears that he did.

Cornillion himself reports that he met Townsend in Washington and invited him to dinner at his home. Presumably this was the home that Linda heard about during the Embassy Laundry era. P. 111, when Jo told her that Mr. Cornillion was their prickly landlord who did not want children in his house.

But, then Cornillion says that he planned to meet Townsend in Philadelphia the next week, perhaps for dinner at his home near there, once Townsend completed his business at the Franklin Institute. P. 112.

So, it seems to me that Cornillion and Townsend had some sort of a prior relationship, even though Cornillion's report on their meeting was written to make it appear that they were meeting for the first time.
natecull
Keeper of the Flame
Posts: 437
Joined: Sat Mar 22, 2008 10:35 am
Location: New Zealand

Re: Project Montgolfier: Townsend Brown and Jacques Cornillon in France, 1957

Post by natecull »

I'm working backwards through the last several months of comments I missed so if I'm a little out of sync that's why.
Paul wrote:This past week I went through the entire manuscript several more times to make the necessary corrections and fixes. My editor Mike Williams found about a hundred things that needed fixing, and they're all fixed now.

Nate, you'll be pleased to know that among other things we fixed that 'wandering' Chapter 70. And jeezus.... how did I miss THAT?!?!
YAY!!! That's great news! I will treasure my early misprinted edition. If you and Mike have already fixed the alternate-universe Alice quotations, please ignore my comment from yesterday. (Though they do give a very interesting Rabbit Hole vibe to the whole thing.)

Rose wrote:Dr. Rose provided the following astounding explanation: He explained to me that he was a specialist in ‘Biological Electric Fields’ and that he had met and been associated to T. Brown during his field research studies. Together they found out that there is an electric field running upwards through the cell-bodies of Human beings, Animals, and even Plants.
Yes, I found this section of Cornillion's report fascinating! The Townsend/Rose electroculture and "human electrical field" interest seems to smell quite strongly of Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird's 1973 "Secret Life of Plants", don't you think? But 20 years earlier.

Also, Mason Rose's thing about smog and "local electric field gradients" feels very similar to the early 1980s talk about "air ionizers" and particularly "positive vs negative ions" (the positive ones were unhealthy, apparently; I am not sure if that was ever proven medically. Where did that rumour come from? This was well before Sharper Image, or at least well before the 1990s.) They were supposed to be great for precipitating cigarette smoke out of the air (which they were, but the problem was they precipitated ash onto your carpet). And I keep thinking about how either Twigsnapper or Morgan claimed that Townsend built an air ionizer / smoke precipitator for Winston Churchill's plane. And then I think about Electronatom corporation, which yes, Major de Seversky was running in the 1960s, but, I'm almost sure I saw a mention of that name in the 1950s FBI report into Townsend. With the suggestion that Electronatom existed in the 1950s, was doing air ionizing smoke precipitators, and was possibly a very literal Townsend "ashtray product".

In fact the trail for that one is probably here on this forum somewhere, I think I wrote up my findings here and not on Linda's one. Not sure I want to plunge my head into all those old conversations right now, but that was my strong gut feeling: a Townsend-Electronatom link before de Seversky.

I may be completely wrong on that, of course. I would love to track down that reference to find out.

Regards, Nate
Going on a journey, somewhere far out east
We'll find the time to show you, wonders never cease
Post Reply