Townsend was hyping Sidereal Radiation in 1948

[Jan Lundquist]

He spoke on the benefits of sidereal radiation, to the Optimist's Club of Van Nuys. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the- ... 130347661/

He was quoted by the Pittsburgh Press saying all fish feed at the same sidereal time. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the- ... 130347383/

He was photographed with Lake Securities executive J.F. Butterfield, for the Los Angeles Times article on the relationship w the stock market. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the- ... 130343009/

Curiously though, J. F. Butterfield's claim to fame was as one of the contributors to the 3 Stereoscopic film and later to AutoStereoscopy or improved holography. Did he know Bradford Shank? Did he have a history in the MEP film group at Wonderland? But more importantly, what was Townsend using the publicity to mask? He was

But look at the length of Townsend's middle finger! A certain person in this house swears that it is evidence that Townsend is an Alien-Human hybrid.

[Paul Schatzkin]

And, speaking of Lake States Securities:

https://www.ttbrown.com/files/LakeStatesSidereal.html

[Paul Schatzkin]

But look at the length of Townsend's middle finger! A certain person in this house swears that it is evidence that Townsend is an Alien-Human hybrid.

There's two problems here.

1. Why is he pointing with the middle finger?

2. Why is his middle finger even there? It was supposedly lost in a machine accident in 1936.

I dunno, maybe the photo is just not clear enough... that could actually be the index finger, though if it is then the thumb is awkwardly placed.

And it seems possible that the ring-and-pinky finger on that hand are folded in in a way that makes it look like the middle finger could be missing.

Either way it's an odd f'ing photo.

[Jan Lundquist]

I can see, now, that it is the pointer finger. But something about it still looks out of place. THit's a prosthesis or doctored photo.

But I do want to note that Mr. Butterfield's "Improved Holography" would have been cutting edge when it made it out to the commercial world.

On a tangential, but more interesting subject, I am reading W.B. Smyth's Gone Dark* again. It is his "I wuz there" counter to Moore/Berlitz. He rhapsodizes over what a very big deal it was when the Navy learned to bend light. "

Smyth has hidden quite a few Easter Eggs in his narrative. But he leaves a couple of biggies out in plain sight and I am probably going to blog about them this weekend.

Gone_Dark_50_Years_after_Albert_Einstei.pdf

(644.59 KiB) Downloaded 644 times

* "Gone Dark" 50 Years after Albert Einstein: The Failure of the Unified Field
https://www.academia.edu/11792787/_Gone ... fied_Field

[Jan Lundquist]

Well, duh. What else was Townsend promoting with his compariion of humans to bees in the hive responding to unseen stimulae, but what we came to know as biorhythms. We were told, in the seventies that these were invented by Swedish airline pilots, but they seem to be a direct outgrowth of a study of sidereal times and cycles.

[peter fismer]

Regarding the finger it's his left hand alright but we don't know at what level the amputation of the second finger (index finger) was carried out (see p.159 of the book). He might indeed have used a prosthesis for the photo shot. On the photo p.376, which is shown on the back cover in much more detail, not much of the index finger seems to be missing, maybe just the end phalanx.

Now to Sidereal Radiation: I came across an article by Dr. Takaaki Musha (JBIS, Vol.61,pp 379-384,2008), EXPLANATION OF DYNAMICAL BIEFELD-BROWN
EFFECT FROM THE STANDPOINT OF ZPF FIELD. The HONDA R&D Institute carried out experiments with a HV capacitor and the results are shown in fig. 4 and show a considerable diurnal variation.

There are 2 remarks to make: 1. no explanation for the fluctuations is given. 2. no explanation is given why they measured every few hours.

Why would somebody repeat the same measurement over a whole day? They must have known about the effect and confirmed it but did not want to talk about it.
I tried to contact Dr. Musha on his Gmail address. Return to sender, address unknown, no such number, no such zone.

But here we have independent corroboration and the article shows that people are now looking into zero point effects or vacuum polarisation.
The equations show a force imbalance in highly charged capacitors and 2 independent sources came to roughly the same equation.
Very interesting!

[Paul Schatzkin]

Peter Fismer, I humbly apologize for taking soooo long to approve your post.

No excuses.

Actually, 'sidereal radiation' (whatever the hell Brown meant by that) has been on my mind of late so the input is interesting, useful and appreciated.

I hope discussion will pick up here, which will compel me to logon more often and see new post approval requests in a more timely manner.

Thanks,

--PS

[Jan Lundquist]

I am glad this oversight is on your shoulders, Paul. I thought I had overlooked your post, Peter, and was appalled to have left you hanging for so long.

I think Townsend's amputation was behind the knuckle. If that is a prosthesis, it must have been a rush job, with no time for measurements. And if it is an actual finger, it is a strange looking one. But it appears to me almost as if Townsend is making an ostentatious display of a supposedly missing finger, and I wonder who his imagined audience was.

Good questions on the choice of measurement cycles

Townsend set his electrometer on 20 minute sampling schedules. I saw, somewhere recently, probably in my newspaper clipping collection, that he later said he had built 29 versions of his device. I presume they all used the same cycles, but did they all use the same starting point?

Based on department correspondence from 1943, I am certain that one of them was in use by the USN Communications Intelligence in WWII. This may have been the one, likely to have been at the University of Pennsylvania or the Franklin Institute, that Townsend was directed to transfer from Phildelphia to the Navy.

By the time COMINT was becoming a thing, it was well known that certain atmospheric weather conditions could either weak havoc with, or empower radio signals. Where these conditions were known and effects understood, it was possible to calculate and distribute the compensatory transmission/reception factors to all subordinate radio intercept stations.

It is feasible that the effect of galactic cycles/sidereal radiation) was also used as a factor in those calculations. I think it also played a factor, later, in missile engineering, as It was "insider" whispered, back in the seventies, that Raytheon missile engineers kept "astrological clocks" at their desks. No one grokked sidereal time, back then so astrological clocks it was.

Writing about the seventies reminds me of the works of Carlos Castaneda who chronicled his experiences with his indigenous shamanic teacher, "Don Juan." Castaneda was taught to become are of various "power spots" in the vast desert of Northern Mexico, In another paradigm, perhaps, these would be points where certain ley lines meet.

How very tricky it would be to locate those coordinates in a spinning, tilting orb of energy, but how very useful it would be to be able to do so. And, with that thought, my brain breaks down completely.

[natecull]

Townsend set his electrometer on 20 minute sampling schedules

It's possibly a coincidence, or convergent evolution, but Maurice Allais's pendulum precession experiments (which also showed diurnal correlations, some of them possibly "sidereal") also ran on a 20 minute sampling interval. Modern replications of Allais also seem to use 20 minutes. If I understand correctly, the protocol was to let the pendulum run for 14 minutes, then capture it, reset it, then launch it precisely on the 20 minute mark.

Why 20 minutes in both experiments, especially since the electrometer presumably didn't need the long mechanical runtime and manual catch/reset protocol? Not sure. Maybe the electrometer did in fact need an extended "cooldown" or reset interval? Perhaps it's just a convenient chunk of time to catch multiple samples within an hour while not wasting paper? It would give you 72 samples in 24 hours.

It is feasible that the effect of galactic cycles/sidereal radiation) was also used as a factor in those calculations. I think it also played a factor, later, in missile engineering, as It was "insider" whispered, back in the seventies, that Raytheon missile engineers kept "astrological clocks" at their desks. No one grokked sidereal time, back then so astrological clocks it was.

Bruce Cathie, in the 1970s and 1980s, wrote several very confused books in which he claimed that atomic weapons had to be detonated at specific places and times on the "world grid" (a concept he derived from ley lines) in order to explode. This bizarre argument has never made any sense to me at all.....cos the whole thing with nukes is that their big boom did NOT require spatial finesse.... but perhaps it was a garbled Chinese Whispers interpretation of that Raytheon gossip, which might have been more about the gravity spatial environment input to the *inertial guidance* system of missiles. (And possibly also... sensitive changes to that gravity environment over time?)

Because we now know how important it was that the guidance systems be carefully calibrated, and presumably this meant that sub-launched ICBMs indeed had to be launched from specific known locations. Whisper this idea into the head of someone like Cathie, and he might have easily seized on the wrong end of the ballistic trajectory entirely.

There's another, more coherent, New Age writer whose name I'll look up later, who has a theory that the mountains on Earth (whether or not created by continental drift) appear over gravity anomalies, and that those anomalies were there *before* the mountains, and form a kind of "nervous system" of Earth. And that the pre-existing anomalies might explain why some mountains are considered "spiritual". That's a weird idea, but it's at least an idea that has a few more handles with which it could be grasped. It's also an idea that might have appeared in the community of military gravity-mappers, if some of them also had esoteric interests.

Edit: The writer I'm thinking of is Richard Leviton. ( http://www.blueroomconsortium.com/visio ... graphy.asp )

Not only are there a great many sacred sites on Earth, and not only are they distributed uniformly around the planet, but when seen as a whole, they express a pattern. That pattern is a template of the galaxy. More accurately, that pattern is an edited, condensed version of the galaxy. The galaxy, astrophysicists estimate, contains perhaps 100 billion stars. That's too many - too rich an infusion - for a planet, or at least, for our planet. So we have a smaller amount.

The number may seem fantastic or improbable, but there are about 57,000 different stars represented across the surface of the planet. These stars correspond to the Earth's many thousands of holy sites and they are made present by way of large energy canopies called domes. The stars are selected on the basis of their magnitude (or brightness), from Earth's vantage point, and in terms of their function and status in the galaxy.

I'm not sure now if the idea of his "domes" being primordial gravity anomalies is actually his, or if it's something I read into his ideas from the outside. To be honest his claim of there being an *exact* correlation between "sacred geography" sites on Earth, and the galactic sky map, is something I find quite hard to believe. But it's an interesting theory that potentially sparks new directions of thought. It's a long-running theme in esoteric communications (going back at least as far as the Victorian Spiritualists, who were as happy to talk to what they thought of as extra-terrestrials as they were to ghosts), that "Earth is holding back development of the whole universe" in some way that is hard to understand. If there is some kind of preexisting holographic mapping between Earth and the stars, then that might explain some things. Going back to Abraham, even. Of course, this is all still at the level of "subtle energies" which are very easy to misunderstand, and aren't especially open to scientific testing, at least yet.

Edit 2: Looks like at least as of his 2019 novel "Orogenies of Light" Leviton really does have that idea of Domes being primordial anomalies. https://www.amazon.com/Orogenies-Light- ... 78-0170457


Nate

[natecull]

Okay, linking back from "Still Thrashing about in the Hawthorne Weeds" ( see viewtopic.php?t=713 ):

There are either one, or two, JF Butterfields. Both active in Los Angeles between the 1940s and 1980s. We have photographs of both. Are they the same person, or different?

1. J F Butterfield who was photographed with Townsend Brown for an article of 1 July 1948 in the Los Angeles Times, as the director of Lake State Securities of Los Angeles.

2. A James F Butterfield (September 25, 1920 - June 26, 1983) who was doing 3D television experiments in Mexico in the 1950s, filed a patent for the Battelle Memorial Institute on colour television in 1963 (and patents on stereo microscopes in 1974), and is the "Father of 3D television" and was deeply involved with the View-Master Corporation.

James F Butterfield would have been 28 in 1948. He would also have been 25 in 1945. He would have fought in WW2.

"Stereo" JF Butterfield's obituary: page 25 (27 in the PDF) of Stereo World, Sep/Oct 1983

https://stereoworld.org/wp-content/uplo ... _V10_4.pdf

JAMES F. BUTTERFIELD
September 25, 1920 - June 26, 1983

It is with great personal sadness that I write of the passing of James F. Butterfield, the father of the 3-D TV industry. My wife, Susan Pinsky, and I were personal friends. with Jim, and were lucky enough to work with him on various 3-D projects for about a year. So, for those of you who didn't know Jim, here is some background on his 3-D accomplishments:

James F. Butterfield was a pioneer in the area of three dimensional television. Although he didn't invent the idea, his early interests in both 3-D and television led him to 3-D television experiments on Mexican broadcast television in the early 1950's. For 2 years, from 1954 to 1955, he was responsible for a daily experimental 3-D program. The system was quite simple, utilizing a beam-splitter attachment in front of the TV camera lens and producing side-by-side images on the TV screen. The viewing device was a beam-splitter in reverse which channeled the two separate images to each eye.

In subsequent years Jim refined this system into one which was practical for military and industrial use; in remote materials handling, for example. This culminated in the development of a stereo video microscope which has been effectively used in eye surgery for many years. Butterfield's nventions culminated in over 50 U.S. and foreign patents on subjects as varied as 3-D radar, 3-D TV X-rays, video picture discs, color television, stereoscopic motion pictures and, of course, three dimensional television. He held the position of U.S. delegate & chairman of a study group on Stereoscopic Home Television at the 1980 C.C.I.R. International Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. He wrote and presented many papers on the subjects of stereoscopic television and autostereoscopic film and TV displays at technical symposiums and conferences. He never stopped writing or inventing, his mind was always whirling with ideas, improvements and imaginative perceptions.

In 1979 Jim became one of the founders of 3-D VIDEO CORPORATION. Taking advantage of some new developments in electronics, color TV, and the old anaglyph system, Butterfield and his associates developed a practical anaglyph TV system which received FCC approval for standard broadcast television. While the anaglyph method left something to be desired, 3-D on broadcast TV came to the eyes of millions of viewers, probably more than any other 3-D method in history.

Jim left 3-D Video in February, 1983 and started a new company, 3-D Pictures Corporation. He was one of the few individuals that had seriously made a career out of the 3-D process, and will be missed by all who have worked with him.

With Susan Pinsky's permission I end with the follow ing thoughts which she wrote the day she learned of Jim's passing:

"I feel fortunate to have known Jim Butterfield. He was an unusual man who generated excitement and interest all around him. He was a man of dreams and visions.

''Jim's dreams produced inventions and ideas that left the world with something special that had not been there before he arrived. He gave the world of medicine a great tool with his Stereo Video Microscope. Through his many decades of work in 3D TV he brought the excitement of depth into
millions of living rooms around the world. But he was much more than these. To me he was a remarkable man.

"Jim was a trusting soul with a childlike naivety. If he had an idea to do something he just tackled it, sometimes succeeding, other times just learning valuable lessons. In my year at 3D Cosmic Publications I learned many lessons. The greatest one was in appreciating an opportunity while
it existed. Jim gave me one of the finest opportunities in my life, and I will always be grateful for the confidence and support that I received from him. It was an experience that was thrilling and exciting every minute. Even through the ups and downs we all endured during that busy period in this
current 3D resurgence, that year will always remain a highlight in my life. And it will be Jim Butterfield that I thank every time I look back.

"Knowing Jim before 3D Video was also a marvelous experience. He was there as a supporting factor while David & I published "Reel 3-D News". We were honored and flattered to be included when Allen Lo and Mr. Okoshi visited Jim's offices. The evenings spent in Jim's own home watching 3D TV were both fun and educational. Jim Butterfield has been a determining factor in the turning points of both David's and my 3-D careers and interests. We owed much to him and will never forget the multitude of contributions he has made to this marvelous field and to our own personal lives.

"Our personal sadness at his passing on will be felt for a long time."

-David Starkman

[natecull]

I'm not convinced that they are the same person. But 634 South Spring Street definitely is in Los Angeles. (Odd that the company should be called "Lake States Security" when it's not located in a state with a lake.)



Wikipedia gives some hints about Mexico and the James F Butterfield who was involved there:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHGC-TDT

XHGC signed on May 10, 1952, broadcasting a Mother's Day event organized by the Excélsior newspaper, but regular programming began on August 18, 1952. The station was established by Guillermo González Camarena, a Mexican engineer who was one of the inventors of modern color television; the station's calls reflect his surnames. González Camarena was director and general manager of XHGC until his death in 1965, and XHGC's concessionaire remained Televisión González Camarena, S.A., until November 30, 1994.

In 1954, XHGC was one of the first stations in the world to broadcast an early version of 3D television, in which two of the same picture appear side by side on the screen, combined into a single 3-dimensional image using special glasses. This version of 3D television was developed by an American inventor, James Butterfield, and tested in Mexico on XHGC.[4]

[4] PC: Technical Modification for XHGC-TDT "Fun With 3D-TV Down Mexico Way", TV Guide, October 30, 1954.

It's very hard to find a good trustworthy original source for Guillermo González : lots of low quality social media copy-pasting. I'll try the "Yucatan Times", through that's an "online-only newspaper".

https://www.theyucatantimes.com/2023/01 ... -color-tv/

Camarena seems to have been a very big deal in Mexico.

In 1947 the Secretariat of Communications and Public Works authorized him to make experimental transmissions on the air, with the permit XE1GC (the last acronym in reference to his surname). Of course, all the equipment had been designed and built by himself. However, when he did not see concrete results to obtain a television concession, he decided to send a letter to the then president Miguel Alemán Valdés, explaining the reasons why he should obtain the required license, to put his inventions at the service of the Mexican people.

This system was based on the black and white of the time and there was no international standard, so the price of these devices was unaffordable for many. Aware that television should be enjoyed by the general public, in 1963 he created his Simplified Bicolor System, which, as its name suggests, was simpler and more affordable.

[Jan Lundquist]

Nate, the man with Townsend certainly looks to be in his late twenties, so unless there were two J.F. Butterfields in LA who were close in age, he may be the same man as the older one in the photos. All I can see iis that he and the older gentleman both have long ears, but so do many other people.

The fact that his interest was in movie technology also indicates that he may have been part of the Wonderland Lab crew. Bradford Shank was willing to play at being one of Townsend's partners, for the brief time he was in LA between Hawaii and the East Coast. If the Butterfield in question was part of the MEP film crew, perhaps he was similarly drafted as a prop for this photo op.

When Townsend was involved, whatever was going on at the surface level, most certainly served unknown objectives on another level.Perhaps Townsend was hoping to gin up sidereal radiation interest and research from other folks. Or, perhaps the photo was meant to be a vetting of this Butterfield, for some unknown reader?

[natecull]

I agree Rose, if this is the same Butterfield than Wonderland Lab does make a lot of sense for his origin.

A Santa Maria Times article from May 8, 1948, proves that Townsend's "JF Butterfield" was definitely a "James F", so that's one step closer to a connection.

https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/630219529/

Bv VIRGINIA MacPHERSON CP Hollywood Correspondent Hollywood, May 28. It wont be long, a scientist predicted today, before movie studios will be consulting invisible squiggles from outer space for the proper time to release pictures.

They can do it by sidereal radiation, James F. Butterfield says. Thats sort of like sun spots only not quite. And it just about hits the publics receptive cycles on the nose. "Sidereal radiation, in words you can spell, is a bombardment of rays from the stars and the space between the stars.

For some reason nobody knows about, they have a tremendous effect on mans physical and mental processes, Butterfield says. You cant see em and you can't feel em. But yotf can measure em. The sidereal radiation recorder looks like a pot-bellied black stove with dials and meters where the fire ought to be. Inside a recording drum on top, electric sparks burn holes in a piece of paper.

Butterfield and his helpers at Lake States Securities Corp. chart these holes day by day and come up with the pulse beat of the universe. One look at the chart and they can tell you when the public will be in the mood for a Bette Davis mellerdrammer or a Rita Hayworth musical a murder mystery or a comedy. Whether you feel optimistic or pessimistic, Butterfield explains, depends on the intensity of sidereal radiation. He says he can tell you and will what will be doing in the stock market next month.

In February, he pointed, out, we predicted the stock market would have a strong upsurge in March. It did rise sharply despite some of the most pessimistic news in recent years.

A 1947 Catalog of Copyright Entries shows Lake State operating as early as late 1946, in Laguna Beach:

https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=QD4 ... es&f=false

lakestate-copyright-1946.JPG (10.91 KiB) Viewed 17347 times

Edit: And as Paul pointed out back in August, we've got that actual brochure! It's in the Gray Barker collection, along with its sibling "Sidereal Radiation and the Stock Market".

http://www.thomastownsendbrown.com/petro/lake_sec_1.pdf

http://www.thomastownsendbrown.com/petro/lake_sec_2.pdf

Yup, "a pot-bellied black stove with dials and meters where the fire ought to be" is the best description of this variant of the Differential Electrometer. Big ol thing.

Things I notice glancing at this brochure again (it's been years since I last did):

* as well as the "Foundation-owned" building at 634 South Spring Street, Los Angeles, Lake State Securities was also in the "Union Commerce Building, Cleveland, Ohio" and "715 South Coast Blvd, Laguna Beach, California". I mean yeah, that's literally just the Townsend Brown Foundation, it's not even trying to be a different organization (although technically it was)

* a foreword ("the following report deserves serious consideration") by "Robert Lewis Turner", whoever he was

* "Collaborating physicists have suggested that these rays are electrically neutral particles of energy (possibly neutrinos) which strike the Earth more or less from all directions. Careful studies have revealed that, whatever they are, they come with the greatest intensity from that part of the sky in the general direction of the constellation Hercules. Because they appear to come from one fixed point among the stars, the effect is called sidereal radiation"

So Townsend was already thinking about neutrinos as a possible explanation in 1946.

(Remember that Townsend's Differential Electrometer didn't actually measure a spatial distribution of particles like a telescope, rather it measured a floating electric charge that appeared to vary both cyclically and semi-randomly with time. Similarly to Maurice Allais' pendulum experiments, and I think Erwin Saxl's charged pendulum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Saxl ). The "sidereal" correlation and "Hercules" would come out of doing a statistical analysis on the data points and based on a cycle which appeared to match Earth's rotation against the stars, which is not quite the same as its rotation with respect to the Sun.)

* "Related Sidereal Phenomena" section looks *very* useful

E. Esclangdon, Comptes Rondus 182, 921 (1926); 183,116 (1928).
Kolhorster, Steinke and Buttner. Zeits f. Physik 50, 808 (1928)
Harlow Shapley, Nature 122, 482 (1928)
Karl G Jansky, Electronics 6, 173 (1933)
H B Maris, Physical Review 54, No 6, 478 (1938)
Dayton C Miller, Reviews of Modern Physics Vol 5, No 3 (1933)

Miller of course is famous for repeating the Michelson-Morley experiment for years and claiming a positive result, which was contrary to Relativity.

I don't know the others, except Jansky is the guy who invented Radio Telescopy! I remember researching him on Linda's site circa 2016. A very interesting guy. His particular "sidereal radiation" is presumably the radio waves coming from the center of the galaxy. (Townsend knew that whatever he was sensing, it was *not* radio waves, but still seemed to be coming from the sky.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Guthe_Jansky

After a few months of following the signal, however, the point of maximum static moved away from the position of the Sun. Jansky also determined that the signal repeated on a cycle of 23 hours and 56 minutes. Jansky discussed the puzzling phenomena with his friend, astrophysicist Albert Melvin Skellett, who pointed out that the observed time between the signal peaks was the exact length of a sidereal day; the time it took for "fixed" astronomical objects, such as a star, to pass in front of the antenna every time the Earth rotated.[5] By comparing his observations with optical astronomical maps, Jansky concluded that the radiation was coming from the Milky Way and was strongest (7:10 p.m. on September 16, 1932) in the direction of the center of the galaxy, in the constellation of Sagittarius.

Jansky announced his discovery at a meeting in Washington D.C. in April 1933 to a small audience who could not comprehend its significance.[6] His discovery was widely publicized, appearing in the New York Times of May 5, 1933,[7] and he was interviewed on a special NBC program on "Radio sounds from among the stars".[4] In October 1933, his discovery was published in a journal article entitled "Electrical disturbances apparently of extraterrestrial origin" in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers.[8]

Jansky was the same age as Townsend Brown, but died way too young in 1950 (age 44).

Other quotes are interesting:

"The late Alfred Biefeld of the Swasey Observatory, a classmate of Einstein at Polytechnikum at Zurich, declared: "This strange and decidedly new effect is of extreme interest in the evaluation of the theory of relativity... its importance cannot be denied.""

Well yes. A violation of Relativity would be important, if it could be experimentally supported. The current scientific consensus is that no such supporting experiments have ever occurred. The question is, did Biefeld really say this, and if so, when, and in what context?

And Miller himself got involved! So that's interesting. Miller, Allais and Townsend Brown were all tracking the same sort of thing. But I didn't know that Townsend actually corresponded with Miller.

"Dayton C Miller, who was associated with Michelson and Morley in making the original tests for the ether-drift, said, "The observed characteristics are notably similar to the residual phenomena of ether drift, an explanation of which was never permitted by the theory of relativity. Brown's discovery may necessitate fundamental changes in Einstein's interpretation."

Yep, Miller's on the money there. Of course that's a big "if". Yet, as with Allais and the recent replications of him, "nevertheless it moves", or seems to.

Ok so one slight difference between Townsend's electrometer and Miller's stuff: Townsend measured something that seemed to come and go quite a lot, sometimes with "bursts". Miller, and the Allais replications, I think had more smoothness to it. BUT even Allais reported anomalies during eclipses, and I suspect Miller's data *was* a bit chaotic. The noisiness of the data is probably one reason why it was never accepted by the physics community (though the main reason was that they were expecting an ether-drift signal of a certain strength based on ether calculations, and Miller's data did not show that strength, so it was all tossed out). Townsend made the assumption that the noise in his signal was an actual signal with influence on crop and human biology (and sociology). This might be the case, and would be interesting if so.

One fascinating factoid is that in "New Age" circles there has always been a constant repeated refrain (in "channelled" information that "the Earth is entering a new region of space that will have effects on human society"). This feels very similar to what Townsend was claiming in the strong "stock market" version of his Sidereal Radiation claims. I wonder which actually came first: the esoteric claim, or Townsend's sidereal radiation claims?

* "The latest recorder was placed into operation July 18, 1946, at the post-war radiation observatory of the Townsend Brown foundation at Laguna Beach, California".

Townsend started his recorder in July, and had the Lake States Security Corporation marketing material copyrighted by December. 1946 seemed to be a fast year for him.

And the other mini-biography on psychological cycles (which was a legitimate field of interest for historians and economists at this point, especially after the 1929 stock market collapse.. and I forget where astrology was at this time. The Theosophists had started rebooting astrology in the 1870s through 1920s, I think. When did sun-sign newspaper columns start appearing?)

* Emotional Cycles in Man - Journal of Mental Science - by Rex B Hershey, University of Pennsylvania
* Cosmic Terrestrial Research - The Scientific Monthly - by Harlan T Stetson, MIT
* Periodic Inspiration in Poetry and Music - The Poetry Review - by J H Douglas Webster
* The Long Waves in Economic Life - Review of Economic Statistics - by N D Krondatieff
* Mainsprings of Civilization - John Wiley and Sons, Inc - by Ellsworth Huntington, Yale University
* Putting Cycles to Work in Science and Industry - by Edward R Dewey, Foundation for the Study of Cycles
* Diurnal Potentials in the Maple Tree / The Meaning of Bio-Electric Potentials - Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine - by H S Burr, Yale University
* Growth Correlatives of Electromotive Forces in Maize Seeds - by Oliver E Nelson, Jr and H S Burr, Yale University

Krondatiev ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave ) is now well known, though not taken seriously; the others maybe not so well known.

Harold Saxton Burr (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Saxton_Burr) is the author of "Blueprint for Immortality" (1972) ( https://archive.org/details/harold-saxt ... e/mode/1up ) and seems to be anticipating both Townsend's "electroculture" interests in Hawaii (if we take that as a genuine interest and not a cover, though it might have been both) and Christopher Bird's "The Secret Life of Plants", which seemed to attract a small but elite fanclub in the Navy/CIA psi scene by the 1970s.

The second version of the pamphlet, "Sidereal Radiation and the Stock Market", adds an extra endorser: "Dr H B Maris of the Naval Research Laboratory"

H B Maris seemed to have similar "cosmic influence" interests to Townsend Brown, so I can see why he might endorse Townsend's theories. In 1932 ( "Work related to terrestrial magnetism and electricity of the Naval Research Laboratory" https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com ... 01p00158-1 ) Maris was wondering if terrestrial magnetic storms are caused by comets.

H. B. Maris completed a list of magnetic storms for the years 1839 to 1930 and found that certain storms, about one-fourth of the total number, had a semi-annual period and not the period of solar rotation. He concluded that these storms may be of non-solar origin and due to the passage of the Earth across the planes of comet orbits; a complete analysis is under way. Dealing with the remaining three-fourths of the storms, he drew the average curve of the seasonal frequency and found that this was well accounted for by the ultraviolet-light theory of magnetic storms (see Phys. Rev., v. 39, 504, 1932).

There's an even more intriguing 1939 paper by Maris in "Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union":

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com ... i003p00353

Evidence of a sidereal barometric-pressure Wave

Humphreys [Physics of the air, 1929, p. 229] has shown that the daily tide in barometric pressure is subject to seasonal variations. This fact is well illustrated by Figure 1 which shows average daily barometric-pressure curves for each month of the year at Key West, Florida, averaged for the 14 years 1891 to 1904. Obviously, if we could neglect changes for other hours of the day and plot pressure values of the peak at 10 a.m. against sidereal hour-angle, the strong maxima of December and January as against the weak maxima of June and July would give a sidereal maxima for 10 a.m. between December and January at sidereal hour 3. However, if all of Humphrey's data for these curves are plotted against sidereal hour-angle, a maximum is obtained for sidereal hour 21, which falls exactly on a January minimum. The data of Figure 1, therefore, suggest the existence of a sidereal barometric-pressure curve which is independent of seasonal variations of the solar-pressure curve. The form of this curve would obviously be distorted by seasonal variations of the solar curve, and in this particular case the solar curve decreases the amplitude of sidereal curve nearly 50 per cent.

And this was previously posted in 1938 in the "Science News" section of Science Vol. 88, No. 2283 (Sep. 30, 1938), pp. 8a-10a (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1664637 )

DAILY CHANGE IN THE PRESSURE OF THE AIR

The US Naval Research Laboratory reports a new, and a previously undetected, factor which may upset weather forecasting. Changes in barometric pressure -- one of the basic effects used in forecasting storms and their centers of action -- have now been found to occur with a daily cycle which fluctuates with the hours of the day as determined by star time.

Dr H B Maris, in a report to The Physical Review, points out that the barometric pressure not only has tides due to the sun -- as has long been known -- but also shows stellar pressure tides. The greatest sidereal effect seems to come in high lattitudes, in the northern hemisphere, in the vicinity of a line drawn through Sitka, Alaska. At this lattitude the sidereal pressure change may be as great as .167 millimeters of atmospheric pressure. This seems small, but it amounts to one thirtieth of the entire barometric change that occurs in common storms. Since many of the storms that sweep over the United States arise in northern lattitudes any errors, due to the new effect, which may occur in forecasting there have repercussions southward in this country.

Dr Maris states that "The positions of the troughs and crests of the pressure wave, as viewed from a fixed star, shows a drift to the east with change in lattitude toward the south. This effective time lag suggests that the driving force is applied in the northern hemisphere."

(The Physical Review paper itself pings, but I can't get even an abstract without paying.)

Back to the "Stock Market" pamphlet: "Under an exclusive license the Lake States Security Corporation leases Sidereal Radiation Recorder Model M-29 from the Townsend Brown Foundation. Funds are therefore returned to the Foundation to support further scientific research... In order to introduce the subject, Lake States Security Corporation is currently offering a weekly chart service to a limited number of subscribers at cost. The right is reserved to terminate this service at any time and refund on a pro rata basis when a future investment trust program is organized which, for obvious reasons, restricts the user of the radiation data."

In modern terms then, Lake States was a "startup" with aims to grow -- I can imagine something similar to "AI" plays in Silicon Valley today -- but was starting small and trying to not *quite* fall on the wrong side of stock market law. And presumably James F Butterfield was the one paying the lease to Townsend Brown, and hoping to make back his lease costs from subscribers. I don't know but I would imagine that the scaling up to a full trust never happened and that he probably lost money on this deal.

Or, possibly, Lake States while being a real operation might also have been some kind of spy honeytrap? It's hard to know with so many military people involved.

MEANWHILE THE BUTTERFIELD WHO MIGHT WELL BE THE SAME BUTTERFIELD (because he seems to share a similar interest in technology and psychology)

An October 1968 Popular Electronics article about the "Stereo" James F Butterfield! It gives some more details about what he was doing in 1953: not quite the same as his Mexico stereo TV experiments, but a very weird colour-over-black-and-white TV concept. He didn't get to start a company based on it until 1967, but he got the idea in 1953.

https://www.n5dux.com/ham/files/pdf/Col ... 20Isnt.pdf

Color TV-That Isnt.pdf

(284.14 KiB) Downloaded 438 times

CAN AN ORDINARY black-and-white TV receiver reproduce a color image? "No," you say. Wrong! Believe it or not, the answer is a resounding yes -provided the telecast is in "electronic" color using the Color-Tel subjective color process.

Developed by James F. Butterfield, Sherman Oaks, California, electronic color is a remarkable TV broadcasting technique using relatively unknown optical principles to transmit a monochrome picture that appears to be in color when viewed on an ordinary black-and-white TV receiver. Actually, no color appears on the TV screen-it exists only subjectively in the brain of the viewer. Although most viewers see colors, there are some viewers who do not-for reasons not completely understood. On the other hand, normally color-blind people frequently report being able to see the
electronic subjective color display.

In 1953, Butterfield consulted a Dr. Derek H. Fender and asked the famed eye expert to help analyze the Benham disc phenomenon so that it might be used to generate synthetic color codes.

TV Applications. When Butterfield and Fender had completed their tests, the next step was to apply their theory of subjective color to TV broadcasting. This resulted in the development of the Color Translator, a special TV-camera attachment that contains a modified form of the Benham disc.

A blog article on Butterfield's Color-Tel "subjective color" process: https://theanalogage.blogspot.com/2016/ ... color.html

On July 25, 1967, television viewers with black-and-white TV sets were startled to see flashes of color on their monochrome screens for about ten seconds during a 60-second soda-pop commercial. A letter to a columnist in the September 14, 1967 Detroit Free Press asked, "Before I see an eye doctor, let me ask Action Line: Is it possible to pick up color TV on a black and white set? I SWEAR I saw a Squirt soft-drink commercial in color. Not pink elephants Green Squirt!" The image was described in the newspaper column as a red, green and blue sign that had flashed on the screen.

A viewer in Chicago told Popular Photography magazine (July 1968), "I saw pink! It knocked me for a loop...the letters S-Q-U-I-R-T looked greenish or light turquoise...and it kept up for maybe 10 seconds." (Meanwhile a viewer in San Francisco claimed he didn't see anything colorful.)

It was the national debut of an experimental television commercial using a special production process that would give the optical illusion of color. The commercial first aired a few months earlier locally on KNXT, the CBS-owned television station in Los Angeles, and viewers there were just as stunned. Squirt and its advertising partner Color-Tel Corporation of Los Angeles, at the time decided to make no prior announcement of this experimental commercial, preferring to see just how viewers would respond. And respond they did. Within hours, thousands of viewers were asking if they really saw what they thought they did, color on their black-and-white TV screens, according to Popular Electronics magazine (October 1968).

The burst of color was not "living color" (as NBC frequently touted in the 1960s), but something called "subjective color." The process was developed by James F. Butterfield of Color-Tel, a corporation founded in Los Angeles in early 1966. It gave the illusion of color by pulsating white light in a particular sequence for each color with a rotating device attached to a regular black and white TV camera lens. Butterfield had found in his many years of research that the human brain perceives colors through complex electronic codes. Butterfield was able to figure out the individual codes for the colors red, green and blue, and by pulsating white light in predetermined patterns with the device on the camera lens, could induce the brain of the television viewer to perceive color. Beyond that, ordinary monochrome equipment could be used in filming or taping, broadcasting and viewing.

There were a few drawbacks. The images were nothing at all like true color TV. It didn't have the intensity or range of colors. As the technology currently stood, the effect could only be used on still images. The "subjective color" could only be seen in about one-fourth of the TV screen area, and, because it relied on flickering light, there was a lot of flickering. It was also found that some people could not perceive the colors at all, yet some people diagnosed as color-blind could see the colors.

Nonetheless, Popular Science, in its August 1968 issue, saw many possibilities for the technology, particularly for special effects. "Color will appear in cartoons, commercials and special presentations. Polka-dots on a clown's suit will be seen as red flashing dots. You'll see the designs and lettering on a cereal box in pulsating green and blue. A girl will plant a kiss on a boy's cheek--and a red lipstick print will appear on your screen."

Popular Electronics (October 1968) went on to report, "Right now, Color-Tel engineers are checking into the possibility of using electronic color for such things as color radar displays, color computer readouts, and perhaps even color sonar pictures. It may be true that, in its present stage of development, Butterfield's process is nothing but a scientific curiosity — however, 25 years ago, so was television."

Popular Science predicted, "You can expect color on your black-and-white TV by this fall [1968]." But there was one giant flaw in that rosy prediction. By 1968, black-and-white TV was well on the way out. The vast majority of programming (outside of old movies and TV shows) were being broadcast in "living" color by then, and while most U.S. households still had black-and-white TV sets (color sets were big, bulky and expensive in those days), more and more homes were purchasing color television sets every year. Had James F. Butterfield perfected the process ten or fifteen years earlier, in the 1950s when 90 percent of television broadcasts were black and white, it might have had more of a serious impact.

Although James F. Butterfield had many patents to his credit before his death in 2013 [sic], it appears this experiment didn't go as far as the press of the time might have suggested it could. Color-Tel last renewed as a corporation in 1972, and we can not find any evidence of other "subjective color" broadcasts beyond the Squirt commercial.

Butterfield died in 1983, not 2013. This blogger seems unaware of that.

So who was Butterfield's collaborator, Derek H Fender? His obituary from New York Times, 9 June 1997: (https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/09/us/d ... brain.html)

Dr. Derek Henry Fender of the California Institute of Technology, a biologist who studied eyesight and the functioning of the brain, died on May 28 at his home in Altadena, Calif. He was 78.

He suffered a lengthy illness, said a spokeswoman for the institute, where Dr. Fender taught from 1966 until his retirement 20 years later as professor emeritus of biology and applied science.

Much of his research was based on innovative uses of contact lenses to determine the eye's position during his experiments.

He discovered that the eye sees as a result of a series of flicks and that the brain is limited in the complexity of the visual design patterns it can identify. He also found that the visual system is more acute in looking at vertical objects than horizontal ones.

To learn more about how the brain works, he devised an electrode-studded helmet with which he investigated the visual cortex, in the back of the brain, and the propagation of brain waves.

Born in England, Dr. Fender trained and taught at the University of Reading, where he also received a doctorate in physics in 1956. His interest in his specialty derived from service with the Royal Signal Corps in World War II, when he helped to improve radar by developing control systems for antennas and antiaircraft guns.

He is survived by his wife, Sue; a son, Antony, also of Altadena, and two granddaughters.

A WW2 radar expert, like everyone else in the post-war tech scene. I'm guessing then that Butterfield was one too.

Fender was 78 in 1997, meaning he was born in 1919. Same generation as Butterfield: just one year older. Also, if Fender only earned his physics PhD in 1956, then he wasn't in fact *Dr Fender*, and possibly not yet a "famed eye expert", when he consulted with Butterfield.

By 1971, Fender is at Caltech with a very strong "Dr Emmet Brown in the throes of mad science" game. His brainwave helmet is glorious and makes me think of Douglas Trumball's "Brainstorm" (1983):

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/2850/
https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/2850/1/brain.pdf

Watching the Brain at Work

Caltech's Derek Fender is trying to find out what goes on in the brain when it's thinking, and what patterns nerve impulses follow when they are activated by light.

What goes on in the brain when it's thinking? What patterns, if any, do the nerve impulses follow when they are activated by a simple stimulus such as a flash of light? In short, how does the brain work?

The problems in answering questions like these seem at first to be nearly insurmountable. For example, the inherent fragility and complexity of the brain itself, as well as the electronic speed of its activities, defy investigation. Even if direct observation were possible, the observer wouldn't be able to see anything, since the brain's activity occurs through countless electrochemical circuits at electrical potentials on the order of millionths
of a volt.

Nevertheless, Derek Fender, professor of biology and applied science, and his graduate assistant Robert Kavanagh, have found some preliminary answers to the question of how the brain works. Through an apparatus they have designed and assembled in the Booth Computing Center, together with some computer software painstakingly developed over the past 24 months, they have reached the threshold of being able to visually follow the
interactions among the parts of the brain as it performs some low-level perceptual and cognitive processes.

The technique with which Fender "sees" what happens in the brain involves using a helmet bristling with electrodes that are linked up to an IBM 360-75 computer. Looking like an exotic hair dryer, the helmet is custom-made for each subject, air-conditioned, and vacuum-fitted to the head so that each electrode makes a good contact with the scalp. The brain waves are picked up, recorded on digital tape, and transmitted to the computer. The computer in turn is programmed to translate the digital signals into a visual pattern on a cathode ray tube - somewhat like a television tube. The result is a picture of the brain waves - a contour map of the peaks and troughs of electrical activity as "seen" through the top of the subject's head.

Each picture on the tube is photographed and ends up as a frame in a movie, which is then studied to see how the brain waves emanate from the various regions of the brain. Fender and Kavanagh have made two such movies, each a little over a minute long, representing the brain
wave activity in a quarter of a second-but slowed down 250 times.

Fender and Kavanagh have studied the brain wave patterns of 27 people. One of the things their investigation has already shown them is that perception of a simultaneous light flash and clicking noise will stimulate activity in three distinct locations of the brain. One area analyzes visual images. The second analyzes sound signals. Fender thinks the third area is the one that tries to decide whether the flash and the noise come from the same place.

https://digital.library.ucla.edu/catalo ... _ssort+asc

Researcher Derek Fender fitting apparatus for measuring brain waves on head of test subject at Caltech, 1974

Nate