Who is removing material from the Thomas Townsend Brown Family website and why?

[Jan Lundquist]

The termites that ate away several posts on the old Cosmic Token forum seem to be infesting the Thomas Townsend Brown website. At least two, possibly four, documents have been removed from the family archives.

Two of Townsend's letters to Caltech, both of which I read recently, have been removed. The links are now 404.
https://www.thomastownsendbrown.com/misc/index.htm

Other documents seem to have been erased, link and all.

[natecull]

I'm wondering this myself. And the Wayback Machine isn't helpful in this case, because although it can show us the front page as it was in various years, it doesn't seem to have archived some of the Letters pages.

Sigh. Always, in this subject, there is capital-D Drama among the protagonists.

Nate

[Paul Schatzkin]

I guess the 'sheep dipping' has resumed?

Can you say what's missing?

Didn't you (Jan) create that website for/with Linda back at the end of the Before Times?

Might she still have access?

Should we be scraping?

--P

[Jan Lundquist]

Paul, no, that family website was created by Andrew Bolland and I am not sure Linda has, or ever had, access to the site.

In addition to the letters mentioned above, there are other photos and documents still listed but with 404 links.

But I believe there two other important docs missing without a trace. When I am hyper-focused on whatever subject I am researching in the moment and see something interesting on a completely different subject I make a mental not of where I found it, so that I can come back to it later. But I read through many documents, so though I remember that I found these at the TTB site, it is possible that I am mistaken.

There is, out there, somewhere, a proposal from the TTB Foundation in 1938 and related to radar development. 1938 was the year TTB Foundation was established in Columbus and it was also the year, when after a long dry spell, the Navy received significant funding for further radar research.

INFORMATION INTErLUDE: Nate, fyi, Columbus, the state capitol of Ohio, is 60 miles from Zanesville. It was/is also the home of two institutions of tangential interest to our story. In 1952, during the same period of time that the Cady Report was being written, it was the home to the USAF organization that contracted with Venning Mienescz for the report entitled The Gravity Problem of the Mapping and Charting Research Laboratory at Columbus and Related Problems. The other was Battelle Labs, which I had previously confused with the Bartol Labs of the Franklin Foundation in Philadelphia. Battelle is credited with development of the fuel used for the first nuclear submarines.

The second proposal that I have seen under the TTBrown Foundation name, and cannot locate, was a for satellite development. It was dated a few years before the Winterhaven proposal. we now know the USN submitted two different proposals for Satellite programs in the late 'forties, so this would be important to retrieve.

The Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics formed a "Committee for Evaluating the Feasibility of Space Rocketry" on 9 October 1945, and the committee prepared a satellite development proposal, which the Bureau turned over to industry for refinement. Based on this effort, the Navy submitted its first satellite-development proposal on 7 March 1946

And snip:

In mid-1948, the Navy then proposed to undertake a joint project with the Air Force to develop earth-orbiting satellites, a proposal that was rejected by the Air Force.

Source:

From the Sea to the Stars: A Chronicle of the U.S. Navy's Space and Space-related Activities, 1944-2009 Sponsored by
Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy (C3I and Space) Dr Gary A. Federici Revised and updated edition, 2010
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/l ... bookmark39

[natecull]

In 1952, during the same period of time that the Cady Report was being written, it was the home to the USAF organization that contracted with Venning Mienescz for the report entitled The Gravity Problem of the Mapping and Charting Research Laboratory at Columbus and Related Problems. The other was Battelle Labs, which I had previously confused with the Bartol Labs of the Franklin Foundation in Philadelphia. Battelle is credited with development of the fuel used for the first nuclear submarines.

Battelle seems to keep cropping up in gravity-research related contexts, and I can't quite remember what those contexts were now. Was it named in Winterhaven perhaps? But I know that it's been a thing in the Townsend Brown lore for a while.

The Mapping and Charting Research Laboratory that you've found in that 1952 report, though, is a player that's new to me.

My general feeling is that Townsend was a person who had many personal contacts with scientists and CEOs at high-end Navy-linked defense labs, and that he had solid and boring "paying jobs" in that defense sector that were mostly NOT about his personal electrogravitic / electrohydrodynamic white whale. (I mean "boring" in the sense of not overturning mainstream fundamental physics: nuclear submarines and satellites and SIGINT were certainly not boring fields in themselves!) But every now and then he would be able to convince some of those individual scientists or CEOs to investigate his extremely off-the-charts ideas. And that the results of those investigations were usually borderline, but would attract enough interest, temporarily, to invoke commercial secrecy and/or classification, until the experimental results failed or some other physicist came in and looked at the "rig" and went "that's ridiculous, it's completely against known physical theory" and tossed it out. And that this pattern happened over and over again.

I like this pattern because it's very similar to what happened with ESP/psychotronics, which seems a bit better documented than Townsend Brown. Many things that didn't work, some things that did work but didn't scale, many cycles of hype and disbelief, all backed by generally private funding because the official stance was always "this is not possible".

It's possible that one of those iterations around the hype/disbelief cycle "caught on" and something resulted that was finally understood and actually classified. My feeling would be that if that happened, it would have been in the 1970s, following Rand taking delivery of the Fan, but again... who knows. If the usual pattern held, it might have just been one person at Rand who liked Townsend and it might have gone no further.

I keep thinking about Raymond's hint about "electrostatic cooling" (InterProbe, wasn't it?) and how that was used in the F117. Which is interesting, though of course we have no actual knowledge that electrostatic cooling came from Townsend's work and wasn't an independent invention. It does feel similar, though.

Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

My general feeling is that Townsend was a person who had many personal contacts with scientists and CEOs at high-end Navy-linked defense labs, and that he had solid and boring "paying jobs" in that defense sector that were mostly NOT about his personal electrogravitic

You and I are clearly on the same wavelength about many aspects of his story. His trail through the evolution of 20th century Communications and Navigation (radiation, radio, RADAR, reconnaissance etc.) is crystal clear to me. Propulsion, somewhat less, but Aliens, Anti-gravity, and FTM's will have have to find their own researchers.

[natecull]

You and I are clearly on the same wavelength about many aspects of his story. His trail through the evolution of 20th century Communications and Navigation (radiation, radio, RADAR, reconnaissance etc.) is crystal clear to me. Propulsion, somewhat less, but Aliens, Anti-gravity, and FTM's will have have to find their own researchers.

Thanks Jan. I appreciate the groundedness you bring to this study very much.

One of the things that gets me though - since I'm just now rereading Structure of Space after losing track of it for many years - is how was it that Townsend was able to focus and function so effectively as an electrical engineer in the world of extremely high-performance military radio, when his ideas about what was "really" going on at the physical level were so.... extremely pre-Einsteinian?

This is a man who, as of 1943, and no matter what he might have said in the 1950s when he helped jumpstart the Relativity renaissance, seems to be definitely an ether theorist, not a relativist. (Although even that judgement is problematic: he relies heavily on the concept of "ether", but he doesn't necessarily say anything about how it is affected by relative velocities, so maybe he thought of his idea of ether as being still compatible with Einstein?)

Then, he doesn't seem to care much about magnetism at all, or thinks of it as separate from electricity, another non-relativistic aspect of his thought. And finally he remained obsessed throughout his life with Faraday's very particular idea of electrogravity, abandoned since 1859. ( see Andrew Adler's 1986 article on Faraday: https://www.academia.edu/43077909/Micha ... trogravity )

How was he able to think clearly (and mostly successfully) about electricity and radio when he had such a nonstandard mental model of it?

Nate