Townsend in Wonderland

[Jan Lundquist]

Townsend "left" the Navy and the East Coast toward the end of 1942 and, supposedly, took a job with Vega (Lockheed) Aircraft in Burbank. But his first residence on Wonderland Avenue places him quite near a large, mysterious complex at the end of the street on Lookout Mountain Dr. Even Wikipedia can't say when it was built, nor for what purposes.

Either

The 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m²) facility was built on 2.5 acres in 1941 as a World War II air defense center to coordinate Los Angeles area radar installations

OR

The facility had been constructed on two acres of land in 1943 at a cost of $132,000 to house the Los Angeles Flight Control Center.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lookout_M ... ce_Station


Wonderland and Lookout Mountain are in the Laurel Canyon area of the Temple Hill neighborhood,

where Townsend also intended to build a grand lab:

TempleHillPlans.png (129.81 KiB) Viewed 9 times

For the full announcement, see the Temple Hill Lab Thread. The photo there shows Townsend in his Naval uniform, though the announcement does not claim affiliation. I am not sure what to make of that. Actually, I am not sure what purpose this announcement was meant to serve.

Linda has related that Jo had settled nicely into the Wonderland neighborhood, when Townsend suddenly and abruptly had her find a place far away and drop her new friends completely. Which one might naturally do to protect ones family from being connected to classified work. But then why draw attention to is all over again.

Was this a prairie chicken feint: "just some disgraced navy guy down in Laguna Beach, claiming that he's financing this big operation"

Or was it truth hiding in plain sight? After all, lot of money seems to have passed through the Townsend Brown foundation over the years.