The Antigravity Handbook by David Hatcher Childress, 1985

[natecull]

So I finally stumbled on what appears to be an original 1985 edition of "The Antigravity Handbook" by David Hatcher Childress. Actually, it's the 1988 third printing, so some of the end matter is later than 1985, but the important part to me is that it contains a Bibliography giving a snapshot of what was going through the minds of the Weird Physics subculture at that point - before The X-Files and the Internet had muddied things up. Yes, the book itself is a pile of unfiltered craziness. What interests me most in all this the impression this particular subcommunity had of Townsend Brown - and where they might have got that impression from, and who they might have been hanging out with.

The URL I found is here. It might or might not work for you. Good luck.

https://hyiq.org/Downloads/Nikola%20Tes ... ndbook.pdf

The Bibliography section is what I consider the most valuable for its social-network snapshotting properties, so here it is in its entirety.

Alternative (003)
Leslie Watkins (1977. 1978)
Avon Books, New York, NY. (originally a television series in Britain.)

Good lord. Literal science fiction (and satire at that), which the UFO community hypnotised itself into believing was true. This is a low point even for the UFO scene.

The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility
Charles Berlitz & William L. Moore (1979)
Ballantine Books, New York, NY.

Ground zero for the TPX myth, sigh. (Wasn't the first book written about it, but the first one to be heavily promoted). And to introduce Townsend's name.

Harmonic 695, The UFO and Anti-Gravity
Bruce L. Cathie and Peter N. Temm (1971)
Quark Enterprises LTD 158 Shaw Rd., Oratia, Auckland, New Zealand
Telephone 818-4291

The Pulse of The Universe, Harmonic 288
Bruce Cathie (1 977)
Quark Enterprises LTD 158 Shaw Rd., Oratia, Auckland, New Zealand

Harmonic 33
Bruce Cathie (1968)
Quark Enterprises LTD 158 Shaw Rd., Oratia, Auckland, New Zealand

The Bridge To Infinity
Bruce Cathie (1983)
Quark Enterprises LTD 158 Shaw Rd., Oratia, Auckland, Newzealand
Also available through Adventures Unlimited Press.

Yeah, hard nope on these. I tried to read them and they are just... not a healthy kind of thinking.

Introduction And Information Compendium
Volume 1- Antigravity And UfO's
Volume 2- Paranormal Phenomena
Volume 3- Energy
High Energy Electrostatics Research (or HEER) (1982)
P.O. Box 5286 Springfield, VA. 22150 R. A. Nelli, Director

Interesting, I wonder who Nelli was?

The Hollow Earth
Raymond Bernard (1977)
Health Research, Mokelumne Hill, CA. 95245

Nope, I'm not doing the Hollow Earth myth. That can stay in the Shaver Mystery corpus where it belongs.

Moongate: Supressed Findings Of The U. S. Space Program
The Nasa Military Cover-Up
William L. Brian 1 1 (1982)
Future Science Research Publishing Co.
P.O. Box 06392 Portland, Oregon 97206-0020

Nope, not doing Apollo denialism either.

The Cosmic Conspiracy
Stan Deyo (1978)
West Australian Texas Trading
P.O. Box 71 Kalarnunda, Western Australia 6076 or
William Collins PW. LTD.
G.P.O. Box476, Sydney, N.S.W., Australia 2001 or
Emissary Publications
P.O. Box 642 South Pasadena. CA. 91030

Very notable because Deyo latched onto Townsend Brown like a dog with a bone and uncovered/pubished things like the Bahnson footage, but his 1978 thesis that left-wing Masonic elements in the US government were definitely going to stage a global coup by 1983 using Townsend Brown powered flying saucers while pretending to be aliens.... has not aged well.

Flying Saucers - Serious Business
Frank Edwards (1966)
Bantam Books, Inc., 271 Madison Avenue, New York, NY. 10016

Run of the mill UFO book.

Somebody Else Is On The Moon
George Leonard (1976,1977)
Pocket Books, a Simon & Schuster Division of Gulf & Western Corporation
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY. 10020

More moon conspiracy nonsense, sorry.

The Roswell Incident
Charles Berlitz & William L. Moore (1980)
Grosset & Dunlap ( A Filmways Company) New York, NY.

Sigh. The other William Moore book that burdened us with a very distracting modern myth that's actually the least interesting UFO case ever.

The House Of Lords UFO Debate
Lord Clancarty (Brinsley le Poer Trench) (Crown Copyright) (1979(?))
Open Head Press
2 Blenheim Crescent, London W11 ANN, Great Britain, in association with:
Pentacle Bcoks
6 Perry Road, Bristol 1, Great Britain

Yep, Brinsley le Poer Trench is a great example of the British aristocracy's abiding interest in the weird. He is worth looking at as a person, just to track the lines of influence.

Ramayana
Retold by William Buck (1976)
University Of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

Mahabarata
Retold by William Buck (1973)
University 01 California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

These are there because of the Theosophical-inflected "UFOs are ancient Indian Vimanas" myth. Weird as it is, it's possible that did have had some credence in the US military-adjacent community. Oppenheimer quoting "I am become Death" is very much this sort of thing, if not quite this very specific idea itself.

Mysteries Of The Unexplained
Reader's Digest (1982)
The Reader's Digest Association, Inc.
Pleasantville, New York/Montreal

Pop culture.

New Horizons In Electric, Magnetic And Gravitational Field Theory
W. J. Hooper, BA, MA, PhD, (1974)
(President and Director of "Electrodynamic Gravity, Inc.)
Electrodynamic Gravity Inc.
543 Broad Blvd. Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, 44

Hooper is fun. He's the "motional electric field" guy, which might or might not be related to Townsend's "electrogravitational" forces. I wonder how he came to his ideas?

Future Physics And Anti-Gravity
William F. Hassel, PhD
MUFON Symposium Proceedings of 16.1 7 July 1977
4625 Slark Ave., Woodland Hills, CA. 91364

I forget who Hassel is, but MUFON is one of the central connecting points of the 1970s weirdness scene that admired Townsend Brown, or at least the myth they built of him.

Energy Unlimited - A Case for Space
Arthur C. Aho (1968)
Souih Antelope Valley Publishing Company
Littlerock. California

I don't recall the name Aho so he's possibly interesting.

Mysticism And The New Physics
Michael Talbot (1980)
Bantam Books, Inc.
666 5th Ave. New York, NY. 10103

Talbot's squarely in the 1980 New Age camp and reasonably mainstream as I recall. Jack Sarfatti and his "Fundamental Fyziks Group" probably crosses over with Talbot at some point.

No Earthly Explanation
John Wallace Spencer (1974)
Phillips Publishing Company
23 Hampden Street, Springfield, Massachusetts 01 103

Probably a UFO book.

Flying Saucers Have Landed
Desmond Leslie B George Adamski (1953)
The British Book Centre, Inc.
420 West 45th Street, New York 36, NY.

InsideThe Space Ships
George Adamski (1955)
Abelard-Schuman, Inc.
404 Fourth Ave. New York 16. NY.

Ugh, Adamski. And yet! What was up with Townsend having a Scoutship model, and exactly when again? Linda's memory of that model suggests Townend having an "in" into either the Adamski circle, or the slightly wider circle of engineers who were (unaccountably) fascinated by Adamski.

Clear Intent: The Government Coverup Of The UFO Experience
Lawrence Fawcett, Barry J. Greenwood (1984)
Prentice-Hall Inc.
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 07632

UFO's Past Present 8 Future
Robert Emenegger (1974)
Ballantine Books A Division Of Random House, Inc.
201 E. 50th Street, New York, NY. 10022

Beyond Earth: Man's Contact With UFOs
Ralph Blum with Judy Blum (1974)
Bantam Books, Inc.
666 5th Ave. New York. NY. 10103[/quote]

Generic UFO books of the era.

Gods Of Aquarius (UFO's And The Transformation Of Man)
Brad Steiger (1976)
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
757 Third Ave. New York, NY. 10017

I have a surprising amount of time for Steiger. He was a good reporter on the "woo" side of the UFO experience. Which to me is a lot more easy to justify (people having weird visions) than the "nuts and bolts" thesis which requires there to be secret hangers with actual flying discs in them.

Somebody Else Is On The Moon
George Leonard (1976)
The David McKay Company, Inc.
750 Third Ave. New York, NY. 10017

Why is this in there twice? Still nope.

One Hundred Thoudand Years Of Man's Unknown History
Robert Charroux (1963)
Berkley Publishing Corporation
200 Madison Ave. New York. NY. 10016

Hmm, Theosophical-inspired, probably, in the "ancient civilizations" genre.

Our Mysterious Spaceship Moon
Don Wilson (1975)
Dell Publishing Co.,Inc.
1 dag Hammarskjold Plaza New York, NY. 10017

Secrets of Our Spaceship Moon
Don Wilson (1979)
Dell Publishing Co.. Inc.
1 dag Hammarskjold Plaza New York, NY. 10017

More Moon conspiracy stuff, not interested.

From Outer Space
Howard Menger (1959)
Pyramid Books Mail Order Dept.
9 Garden Street Moonachie. NJ. 07074

Classic Contactee stuff, which is Townsend-Adjacent via Adamski, but not otherwise.

Messangers of Deception
Jacques Vallee (1979,1980)
Bantam Books, Inc.
666 5th Ave. New York, NY. 10103

Vallee is Vallee. A giant in both the cult and UFO scene (Vallee had French Rosicrucian roots), as well as in Silicon Valley investing (and so has probably single-handedly been a linking point between those worlds). His "Forbidden Science" diaries are probably the most interesting thing he's written.

Space Frontier
Dr. Wernher von Braun (1963,64,65,66,67,69)
Fawcett World Library
67 West 44th Street, New York, NY. 10036

I highly doubt that von Braun was building UFOs or he wouldn't have been so gung-ho about chemical rockets.

Mysteries of Time and Space
Brad Steiger (1974)
Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
1 dag Hammarskjold Plaza New York, NY. 10017

More Steiger.

The Total UFO Story
Milt Machlin (1979)
Dale Books, Inc..
380 Lexington Ave., New York, NY. 10017

Probably just another UFO book.

Challenge To Science: The UFO Enigma
Jacques & Janine Vallee (1966)
Ballantine Books A Division of Random House. Inc.
201 E. 50th Street, New York, NY. 10022

It's nice to see Janine Vallee's byline on a book for once!

Profiles of The Future
Arthur C. Clarke (1958,59,60,62)
Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
49 East 33rd Street, New York 16. NY.

Clarke was certainly into the "woo" for quite a while until he claimed to have become a skeptic. 2001: A Space Odyssey has very strong "1960s UFO conspiracy subculture" vibes all over it, what with the whole "HAL went crazy because the government hid the truth about aliens" plotline.

Rockets, Missiles, And Men In Space
Willey Ley (1944,45,47,48,49,51,52.57,58,61,68)
The Viking Press Inc.
625 Madison Ave. New York. NY. 10022

I've forgotten the significance of this one, but the name's familiar. Some mention of electrogravity during Townsend's 1950s promotional period maybe?

Harmonic 33
Captain Bruce Cathie (1968)
A.H. & A.W. Reed Ltd.
65-67 Taranaki Street, Wellington, New Zealand

UFO's And Anti-Gravity: Contact With Earth (Harmonic 695)
Bruce L. Cathie And Peter N. Tamm (1971)
A Walnut Hill Book Strawberry Hill Press
616 4th Ave. San Francisco, California 94121

Still nope, Cathie.

We Are Not The First
Andrew Tomas (1971 )
Bantam Books, Inc.
666 Fifth Ave. New York, NY. 10019

Probably more Atlantis / lost civilization stuff. Which did seem to have some buy-in among some of Townsend's friends. Lucien Geradin, from the French bionics scene, I think was one of those.

Spacecraft Propulsion: New Methods
Hannes Alfven
Science April 14, 1972 pp. 167-168

Now that one is interesting. Alfven is very Townsend-adjacent in his thinking. I'm not sure I'm familiar with this specific article.

Should The Laws Of Gravitation Be Reconsidered?
Maurice F. G. Allasi
AeroISpace Engineering, Sept., 1959, pp. 46-52
Oct., 1959 pp. 51 -55, Nov., 1959 pp. 55

That'll be Allais, of the Allais Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allais_effect

The Future Of Aeronautics-Dreams and Realities
John E. Allen
The Aeronautical Journal, Sept., 1971 pp. 587-607

Not sure what this is. Name rings a vague bell.

Soviet Efforts Should Be Closely Watched (Concerning Gravity Research)
William S. Beller
Missiles and Rockets, Sept. 11, 1961 pp. 27

Consultanls Report Overrides Dean Space Drive
William S. Beller
Missiles and Rockets Jun. 12, 1961. pp. 24[/quote]

Ah, so Beller was into the Dean Drive thing. A pity that washed out.

The Electric Field Rocket
H. C. Dudley
Analog, Nov.. 1960

Hmm!

Gravitational Machines
F. J. Dyson
Gravity Research Foundation Essay, New Boston, New Hampshire, 1962

Okay yes the early GRC scene was fun.

See Also:
Interstellar Communications
W. A. Benjamin, N.Y.. 1963, pp. 115

Unknown.

Provocative Study Question's Einstein's Theory
Ryan Aeronautical Magazine. Outdated.

Unknown.

Breakthrough Foreseen in Early '70's
Missiles and Rockets, Feb. 15, 1965

Rockets and Missiles still at it as late as 1965.

Kinetic Gravity
Charles F. Brush
Science. Mar. 10, 1911, pp. 381-386

Oh hi there, one of Townsend's intellectual mentors!

Impact/lmpulse Drive
Harry W. Bull
American Journal Rocket Society No. 29, Sept. 1934, p 7-8

Mysterious New Aircraft powered by Reaction Motor
Harry W. Bull
Popular Science Monthly, Jan., 1935, pp. 27

Unknown.

(Letter) Construction details of Wilbur Smith's magnetic sink coil.
Analog. Dec. 1971. pp. 172

So Analog magazine was often surprisingly supportive of weird physics, but being "science fiction and fact" I guess that went with the scene. Wilbur Smith was one of Townsend's friends, but his ideas seem mostly unrelated. I wonder what put Smith back on the Analog radar in '71?

Final Report on the Dean Drive
John W. Campbell
Analog, Dec., 1960. pp. 4-6
Instrumentation for the Dean Drive
John W. Campbell
Analog, Nov. 1960, p. 95-96
Report on the Dean Drive
John W. Campbell
Analog, Sept. 1960 pp. 4-6
The Scientific Lynch Law
John W. Campbell
Analog, Oct., 1961 pp. 4
The Size of the Solar System
John W. Campbell
Analog, Jun., 1960 pp. 176
The Space Drive Problem
John W. Campbell
Analog, Jun., 1960 pp. 83
The Ultrafeeble Interactions
John W. Campbell
Analog, Dec. 1959 pp. 160
You Must Agree With Me
John W. Campbell
Analog, May 1960, pp. 177

Yeah, Campbell is famous among science fiction editors for being quite a believer in a bunch of weird science claims. So Analog was his backyard. Ok. That's why they were one of the few magazines who continued to be interested in odd propulsion claims well into the 1980s.

Electrogravitics-What is-Or Might Be
A. V. Cleaver
Interplanetary Soc. J. Brit. Vol. 16 pp. 84-94. 1957

Is the Rocket the Only Answer
A. B. Cleaver
Interplanetary Soc. J. Brit., June 1947, pp. 127

Cleaver was one of Townsend's friends, I think. Was that second one really 1947, or actually 1957?

How to Make a Flying Saucer
Wlliam D. Clendenon
Flying Saucers, Jun., 1964, pp. 36-47

Okay.

Brass Tacks (Letter on solid state space drives.)
James E. Cox
Analog, Aug., 1968 pp. 174-175

Volume 1, No. 1&2. Jan.-Jun., 1969
James E. Cox (Editor)
Journal of Space Drive Research and Development (JOSDRAD)

Where the Reader Has His Say (Four types of space drives.)
James E. Cox
Flying Saucers, Feb. 1968 pp. 43-46

I feel like I have probably researched Cox at some point in the past and that he was someone who was "inspired by" Townsend rather than being connected to him.

Indirect Physical Evidence
Roy Craig (1969)
Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects
Bantam Books, N.Y., Jan., 1969 pp. 97-115

Good luck with that.

Antigravity Craft- Nature's Antigravity Devices
Guy J. Cyr
Sacred Heart Rectory
321 S. Broadway, Lawrence, Mass. 01843

Not sure who Cyr was.

The Fourth Law of Motion
William 0. Davis
Analog, May 1962 pp. 83-104

Davis sounds familiar. Not sure if there's any Townsend link though.

Victory & Stine, Some Aspects of Certain Transient Phenomena
American Physical Society Bulletin (Abst.), Apr., 1962

Probably Transient Lunar Phenomena, which are a fun piece of space history, but don't seem to happen today now that we have better telescopes looking at the moon.

Brass Tacks
Norman L Dean
Analog, Jan.. 1964 & May, 1963

Space Drive Rebuttal (Letter Dept.)
Norman L. Dean
Missiles and Rockets, Jun. 26, 1961 p. 6

Ah, so there's "Dean Drive" Dean involved with Missiles and Rockets.

Interstellar Transport
Freeman J. Dyson
Physics Today, Oct.. 1968 pp. 41 -45

Dyson's name - like that of Carl Sagan - always seems to come up just on the edge of the UFOs and antigravity scene without quite being linked to it. It would be interesting to know what he really thought.

Satellite Loses Weight
Frank Edwards
Strange World
Tomorrows Physics (1 966) and The Momentor (1 970)
John W. Ecklin
2721 S. June St.., Arlington, Va. 22202

Unknown.

Space Propulsion by Magnetic Field Interaction
J. F. Engelberger
Spacecraft J., pp. 347-349, 1964

Unknown.'

A Self Propelling Mechanism
Lewis Epstein
The Physics Teacher, Vol. 8, pp. 332, Sept., 1970

Unknown.

Flying Saucers, Propulsion and Relativity
Gordon H. Evans
Fate. pp. 67-75

It's probably not *great* science if it's in Ray Palmer's Fate Magazine.

Major de Seversky's Ion Propelled Aircraft
Popular Science, Aug.. 1964, pp. 58-64

I'm a big fan of de Seversky, him being conveniently located in the "US-based expat Russian spy game, so, William Stephenson / Ilya Tolstoy" ballpark, and the Ionocraft looking so much like the Fan, and his Electron-Atom Corporation seemingly appearing in the 1950s, but I've never found anything *directly* linking him to Townsend. But I continue to hope that there's a link.

Inertial Drive
Arthur Farall
Product Engineering, March 14, 1966, pp. 63

Unknown.

On the Possible Relation of Gravity to Electricity
Michael Faraday
Brittanica Great Books, Vol. 45, pp. 670-673

That's Faraday's original "electrogravity" concept, of which Townsend must have been a big fan because that's pretty much his idea as out lined in "The Structure of Space". So, who was linking Faraday to Townsend in 1985? Tom Bearden would be my guess.

Force Field Shows Propulsion Promise
Missiles and Rockets
Jul. 11, 1960, pp. 27

I wonder who this one was: Ed Hull, or someone else?

Guidelines to Anti Gravity
Robert L. Forward
American Journal of Physics 31, 1963. pp. 166-170

Forward, even more so than Dyson, seemed to tread on the very edge of the antigravity scene without quite (publically) jumping over, though I don't imagine this one is too speculative.

Particles That Travel Faster Than Light
Gerald Feinberg
Scientific American Feb., 1970, Vol. 222, No. 2, pp. 68

Ennh, I imagine that'll be basic "tachyon" theory, which is perfectly legitimate (if completely speculative - it's just "the solutions of Special Relativity with imaginary mass"), but not really Townsendian in my opinion. I mean, he was obviously *aware of* the tachyon speculation ("a stable full of ponies that travel faster than light"), but his personal theories and devices do not engage with tachyon theory at all.

Zero Thrust Velocity Vector Control For Interstellar Probes:
Lorentz Force Navigation and Control
Robert L. Forward
AIAA Journal. Vol. 2, No. 5, May, 1964, pp. 855

Forward again, skating right on the brink of saying the unthinkable. This one is possibly interesting - there were always whispers about "Lorentz force" being something important, is it because of this article?

Solar Sailing
R. L. Garwin
Jet Propulsion, 28, 1958, pp. 188-190

Meh. There's nothing particular interesting about solar sails, they're perfectly mainstream physics.

Otis T. Carr and the OTC-XI
Rchard Gehman
True, Jan. 1961

.

Nope. Not touching Carr, he was just a crazy man.

Electrogravitic Propulsion
Lucien A. A.
Interavia, Vol. XI, No. 12, 1956

One of Townsend's 1950s "electrogravity" publicity series. I imagine this'll be Lucien Geradin. I'm still not sure exactly to what point Townsend was orchestrating all the hype directly (as part of his "wounded prairie chicken act?") or if (as he appears to say in, eg, the Montgolfier report) he was just pleased that it was happening. Was it *all* an act, though, or was it a legitimate and straightforward attempt to pitch his technology to people in a position to listen? "Interavia" and "Missiles and Rockets" was a very different crowd from Mason Rose's "The Institute of Social Psychology", but just as public a venue... perhaps even more public... if the intention was to deliberately attract, eg, Soviet spies.

Elevators and Levitators
Cedric Giles
Journal of the American Rocket Society
Dec., 1946, No. 68, pp. 34-39

I wonder what this one was?

Essays on Gravity
Gravity Research Foundation
New Boston, New Hampshire

Our old friend Roger Babson.

The Electromagnetic Cases
Richard Hall
UfO Evidence
Nicap Publication, 1536 Conneticut Ave., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036

NICAP, but I guess not really interesting.

The General Limits of Space Travel
S. von Hoerner
Science, 137, pp. 18-23, 1962

Unknown. I imagine it's probably prosaic.

Towards Flight Without Stress or Strain ...or Weight
Intel. Washington, D.C.
Interavia, Vol. XI- No. 5, 1956, pp. 373

Probably the one "Townsend and friends" article of all the 1950s ones that's lit the most people's heads up.

An Explanation of the Operating Principles of the Entropy Space Drive
Robert Jones
Space World, Jan., 1965, pp. 48

The Jetless Drive
Robert Jones
Amateur Rocketeer, Feb., 1964, pp. 16-19

Some Preliminary Evidence of a Mechanically Producible Directional Force
Field
Robert Jones
Journal of Space Drive Research and Development (JOSDRAD)
Jan.-Mar., '1969, pp. 10-11

Abstract of above report.
Robert Jones
American Journal of Physics, Nov., 1969

Can't remember if I found out much more about Robert Jones or not, but I think just one of the many interesting random folks who have claimed to have some kind of inertialess drive, and not especially Townsend-adjacent. Presumably he was linked to James Cox, if they were both involved in "JOSDRAD". It is really fun to see the term "Space Drive" in its full science-fictional glory appearing as early as 1969.

Well, that was a bit disappointing. Alfven and Allais are perhaps the two who seem to cross Townsend's orbit the most, of the famous people that we don't yet know for sure have any connection. They just seem to have a sort of sympathetic vibration with his ideas, if you know what I mean. And Allais being in the French scene in the late 1950s - and winning a Gravity Research Foundation prize! - makes me wonder. There must have been connections drawn, among the aerospace people who were watching all this "gravity" stuff, right?

R A Nelli is worth briefly following up to see if it's anyone I remember. Seems to be this Raymond Nelli, born 1938
( https://radaris.com/~Raymond-Nelli/1236394446 ) who wrote this ( https://books.google.co.nz/books/about/ ... edir_esc=y ) So I'm guessing that Nelli (who would've been 44 in 1982) had a company called High Energy Electrostatic Research, and also happened to write a book about UFOs. It's probably not likely to have any world shaking Townsendian secrets in it, but it's the sort of thing that, if any copies exist, one would like to eventually see end up in a decent library (eg some place like Archives for the Unexplained) just so all of these old loose ends can be tracked down.

But Allais: hmm. So he was an ether-head, like Townsend. I wonder if it was Allais, more than anyone else, who made people in the weird physics and/or esoterics scenes quietly start murmuring about "the new ether theory" by the 1960s?

Allais summarized his experimental work in English in his 1999 memoir on behalf of NASA.[5] He detailed his aether hypothesis in the books L'Anisotropie de l'Espace, published in 1997,[30] and L'Effondrement de la Théorie de la Relativité, published in 2004.[35] A book on Allais' scientific legacy has been edited in English in 2011,[36] yet his aether hypothesis has not gained significant traction among mainstream scientists. Nevertheless, after Allais' death in 2010, experiments on the Allais effect continue.[37]

For what it's worth, a fan page for Allais (now offline) : https://web.archive.org/web/20190817064 ... index.html - including some translations (https://web.archive.org/web/20190731135 ... aisdox.htm)

The intriguing comment:

a series of three articles on "Should the Laws of Gravitation be Reconsidered?" which appeared in AeroSpace Engineering in 1959. Allais wrote these articles extremely carefully. In fact they contain much information and ideas not available elsewhere in his pendulum-related writings. I am told that this publication was sponsored by Wernher von Braun, who was quite interested in the eclipse effect and its possible implications for celestial mechanics.

So despite his big chemical rockets, allegedly von Braun *was* aware of at least one spooky gravity-related claim, right about the same time that Townsend was drumming up publicity for exactly this sort of research. Hmm.

The English translation of Allais' 1999 "report to NASA": https://web.archive.org/web/20190806172 ... report.pdf

Regards, Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

That is a very cool thing you have done, Nate. Bibliographies are where the good stuff hides. but in this case, we have to dig through he largest pile of horse hocky ever gathered in one place, in order to get to one place.

Alfven's name leaps out because of his reputation as the father of Electrohydrodynamics. and the Electric Universe theory.

In 1938, he published his answer to the question of the potential for cosmic (sidereal) rays arriving from directions counter to the spin of the earth were able to warp space. (my highly highly simplified interpretation). See On the Sidereal Time Variation of the Cosmic Radiation Hannes Alfvén Phys. Rev. 54, 97 – Published 15 July 1938 https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10 ... sRev.54.97

His conclusion:

...even a small sidereal time variation of the cosmic radiation would imply such great magnetic fields as to bend the paths of cosmic-ray particles in curves of radii small compared with interstellar distances

Townsend took his sidereal observations dark that same year. Or, at least when Lt. Cady asks for it in 1952, he is told that the only electrometer data set currently available in Los Angles was from 1937, I am not claiming the two events are connected....but I would be remiss not to pointi out the timing.

Another name that jumped out at me, but not one I recall seeing before:

New Horizons In Electric, Magnetic And Gravitational Field Theory W. J. Hooper, BA, MA, PhD, (1974)

His motionally induced electric field theory certainly seems to have crossed into TTB and electric universe territory:

When all his experiments indicated that the motionally induced electric field was incapable of being shielded by ordinary electrostatic or magnetic shielding materials, he pondered the possibility that this field was akin to gravity, which has characteristics similar to an electric field except for its inability to be shielded.

http://www.rexresearch.com/hooper/gibson.htm

Townsend observed this inability to be shielded in his lab and understood how it could be used for secret communication. I wish I could grasp it, even half as clearly.

[Jan Lundquist]

Still working through the bio, Nate. Some of those older articles look very interesting, but quick searches are turning up dry holes.

Allais And Allais being in the French scene in the late 1950s - and winning a Gravity Research Foundation prize! - makes me wonder. There must have been connections drawn, among the aerospace people who were watching all this "gravity" stuff, right?

There absolutely was. I recall that Ed Hull was a member of the British Interplanetary Society, and believe it was one of their articles that kicked off the 1957 rash of PR about gravity research. The journals of the various aerospace societies would have been poured over by Industry looking to be in on the next big thing.

Thank you for the links to Allais translated work. His Wicki bio is very sketchy on what he did during the physicist stage of his life.

Re: Nelli: I would say he has been wiped from the web, but it may be that he never made it. I would love to know if he was ever a student of WB Smythe at Caltech. Smythe, teacher of several Nobel Laureates wrote the original book on static and dynamic electricity.

[Paul Schatzkin]

So I finally stumbled on what appears to be an original 1985 edition of "The Antigravity Handbook" by David Hatcher Childress. ....Yes, the book itself is a pile of unfiltered craziness. What interests me most in all this the impression this particular subcommunity had of Townsend Brown - and where they might have got that impression from, and who they might have been hanging out with.

Nice sleuthing there, Nate. It took a while to download the whole thing but I've got it on my own HDD now.

"Unfiltered craziness...." Yeah, that's what I seem to recall reading of it, too.

But, jeezus, this compendium you've worked up the Bibliography? That is some Yeoman's work there.

And reminds me that I need to work up my own online bibliography one of these days.

Foolishly, perhaps, I jettisoned lot of the books I gathered during The Before Times (but I did make a comprehensive list, and that much I still have). I guess I was just so fed up with the whole thing at the time, I wanted to clear space in the house. There are several books I think of from time to time that I kinda wish I still had. Most notably, I had a hardcover edition of Agnew Bahnson's The Stars Are Too High and I would like to see that again now.

But that's not what I came to talk to you about tonight....

I opened the "Antigravity Handbook" PDF and started scrolling through it and was quite amused/startled to see this as the opening epigram:
.

.
My memory may be fuzzy about this, but I seem to recall Linda telling me that Father Teilhard de Chardin was one of her father's favorite philosopher/authors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Te ... de_Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin May 1881 – 10 April 1955) was a French Jesuit priest, scientist, paleontologist, theologian, philosopher and teacher. He was Darwinian in outlook and the author of several influential theological and philosophical books.

When Linda first shared that factoid about her other, I got a copy of The Phenomenon of Man, which she'd said was Townsend's personal favorite. [ https://amz.run/7TZy ].

That is one of the few books from The Before Times that I did hang on to, and I have had it on my reading stack for quite some time, but those times when I've opened it, I have yet to find the droid that I'm looking for...

--PS

[natecull]

(Paul)

I got a copy of The Phenomenon of Man, which she'd said was Townsend's personal favorite

Heh, that's funny because I also have a copy of The Phenomenon of Man. From my late vicar friend, the one who was into parapsychology, and whose personal library resembles a snapshot of pretty much all the popular New Age writers of the 1970s. (Jung, Colin Wilson, etc... and also de Chardin).

I feel like throughout the 20th century there was quite a lot of thought (and some scientific effort) by religious and esoteric groups together, thrown at the idea of, to put it bluntly, "The Second Coming of Christ", understood as less of a single *person* returning but an entire species-wide / planetary consciousness shift. De Chardin's version of this is "The Omega Point" but it's a familiar pattern; literally, the "New Age" in the New Age Movement. This also got mashed up by astrologists with "the Age of Aquarius". Helena Blavatsky I think wasn't very keen on the idea (she was much more interested in Buddhist ideas of very long cycles of evolution, like millions of years), but post-Theosophists like Alice Bailey and Rudolf Steiner really leaned hard into it. And so did religious and political groups all over the spectrum, and science fiction fandom also. With so much radical transformation happening on a planetary scale all through the 1900s, it would have been hard to avoid the conclusion that some kind of species-level "awakening" was in process.

I grew up with the Evangelical Christian version, but I've lost count now of the number of esoteric books I've read which are also haunted by this dream. It's like it's being broadcast at our subconscious from somewhere, and everyone hears it differently.

In the post-1970s New Age scene - and accounting for a lot of the conspiratorial craziness in books like Antigravity Handbook, and also in the UFO scene - there's a deep sense of anger and fear that "the planetary awakening / Shift / Disclosure has been hijacked by evil elites", and that's often what drives the search for publication of weird "suppressed" technologies. Unfortunately, that feeling often leads to very bad source-checking, to doom spirals, and to scary mob/cult psychology which can go in very bad directions.

"The Singularity" is the specifically Silicon Valley version of the Omega Point, substituting in AIs (and venture capital billionaires) for the human spirit. I feel like that's a bit of a toy version with the most interesting parts snipped out. But I also almost feel like much of ARPA's post-WW2 research is best understood with an Omega Point kind of belief/hope in the back of it. So much effort went into "augmenting human consciousness" and I'm not sure it was *entirely* military thinking that was pushing them in that direction. I do have to wonder if behind it all there wasn't a feeling of ".... the Russians are tough, sure, but maybe there's Something Out There that we really, really need to raise our game as a planet in order to face".

From about the 2010s - maybe ever since the Great Recession of 2008 - we seem to have hit a point in Western consciousness where we're all very depressed, angry and fatalistic about the future, with economics and politics and religion and technology all seemingly having divided rather than united us. And yet... people are still having weird spooky experiences, and not all of their experiences are doomy.

(Jan)

Alfven's name leaps out because of his reputation as the father of Electrohydrodynamics. and the Electric Universe theory.

In 1938, he published his answer to the question of the potential for cosmic (sidereal) rays arriving from directions counter to the spin of the earth were able to warp space. (my highly highly simplified interpretation). See On the Sidereal Time Variation of the Cosmic Radiation Hannes Alfvén Phys. Rev. 54, 97 – Published 15 July 1938

Ok that's interesting! I knew Alfven had weird electric cosmology ideas but I had either forgotten or didn't know that he was talking specifically about "sidereal time" and cosmic radiation in the late 1930s. That does at least give a framework perhaps for Townsend's use of those terms.

In the science-fiction scene of the 1930s and 1940s (eg EE Smith's "Lensman" novels) there is a lot of talk about "harnessing cosmic energy" as the next big step after atomic energy. I'm guessing that was inspired by the scientific conversation around cosmic rays, and the hope that they were something more than just the stray random particles that they seem to be understood as today.

Theosophy was at its peak of social influence by the late 1920s, and Theosophists were absolutely *obsessed* with the idea of the mystical significance of "space" - "Fohat" and "Akasha" and similar concepts - as being a massive source of godlike energies. I'm sure that this idea seeped into high social circles including physicists. Combined with Einstein apparently being able to "solve" gravity just by doing mathematical operations on geometry... it must have led to a lot of hope for huge breakthroughs beyond the atom.

The failure of this confidently predicted breakthrough to occur - like the failure of atomic energy to be clean and cheap, or of human spaceflight to continue beyond the Moon - was a huge psychological shock, and where there is psychological shock, there is mistrust and anger. We know very well how badly science as a social institution is at dealing with the fallout from the overselling of nuclear and space, from climate change, and from ongoing world wars, but I think we've forgotten "cosmic space energy" because it was such an early hype bubble. But it probably quickly got re-wrapped up into "gravity control". Which (Townsend Brown and his 1950s publicity stunts aside) got hyped up to the mainstream in the 1960s with the GR Renaissance, and then delayed but still boosted by String Theory in the 1980s... but now there's almost no social-trust gas left in that tank. What remains is the suspicion that "of course the elites cracked infinite energy and hyperdrives by (somewhere between 1947 and 1980) and they've been just lying to us and laughing as our world burns ever since", and you really can't run any society on that level of trust. I mean, seriously, we're in a very dangerous place right now if this has become a commonly held belief.

Unfortunately, that 1938 Alfven article is still paywalled for me, but glancing at the abstract, I don't think he's arguing that space, as such, is being warped. I think he's just arguing that we can't prove the origin of cosmic rays based on where they appear to occur in space: because if they were from a source moving relative to the Earth, they'd generate a magnetic field and this field would bend them until it cancelled out their relative motion with the Earth. Unless I'm missing something, it's not an argument about actual spacetime warping.


Regards, Nate

[Paul Schatzkin]

Damn, Nate.

That's a lot.

But gets to the heart of several matters that too often swirl unformed in my own head, like some gaseous cloud star cluster...

I will probably have to read this one several times, and ponder at considerable length to see if the several things you've touched on here can give any shape to that swirling cluster.

I'm out of town this weekend but as always have keyboards and screens with me.

Wish me luck?

Thanks,

--PS

[Jan Lundquist]

Nate, you are probably correct.

I can sorta understand that anistrophy in crystals, that they exhibit properties with different values when measured along axes in different directions"

But Alfven and successors are all talking about cosmic rays and high energy physics. It seems to me that these rays must exhibit different values of speed, density, diffusion etc. at different points on their path, so does that make them anistrophic by nature?

The question that I have is whether or not Townsend' thought his electrometers were recording deviations in arrival times at different locations that could not be accounted for by planetary acceleration and rotation? If he did, did he think they pointed to a black hole location,or did he envision something more local and useful?

[natecull]

Whew, back after Christmas and New Year. I hope you all had a happy and relaxing holiday.

But Alfven and successors are all talking about cosmic rays and high energy physics. It seems to me that these rays must exhibit different values of speed, density, diffusion etc. at different points on their path, so does that make them anistrophic by nature?

Wikipedia defines anisotropy as "the structural property of non-uniformity in different directions" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropy), which seems about what I roughly understand. So I think it's more about what is observed from the Earth rather than what is actually happening to the cosmic rays.

Obviously even to the naked eye the local sky is not isotropic at all because we're in a galaxy that's pancake-shaped (100,000 lightyears across and 10,000 lightyears thick), and so we see the Milky Way in one direction and not in another. But the expectation used to be that the universe, at large scales outside our galaxy, should be flat and smooth and also that light should not be affected by the speed or direction of Earth's movement. Discovering the Cosmic Microwave Background in 1977 changed that a bit, as I think are new distant star observations from eg Gaia, which seem to be showing a lot more large-scale structure than expected.

But I think the anisotropy that Allais is talking about is the very old-school, pre-Einsteinian one of "Earth's movement through the cosmic ether" which should in principle be undetectable. But Allais felt he was detecting it - and I think Townsend Brown at various times also claimed to detect Earth's motion through absolute space with gravitators or the Differential Electrometer.

The question that I have is whether or not Townsend' thought his electrometers were recording deviations in arrival times at different locations that could not be accounted for by planetary acceleration and rotation? If he did, did he think they pointed to a black hole location,or did he envision something more local and useful?

I'm not sure entirely what Townsend believed, his ideas were fluid. He was careful to state only that he observed a "sidereal correlation", the source of which would be up to future research to prove.

But I think he was open to the idea that he was detecting Earth's *absolute* movement, as opposed to *relative* movement. Acceleration and rotation would come into relative movement, I think (like the Sagnac Effect in GPS), but linear or practically linear movement (ie of the Sun in its very long duration orbit around the center of the galaxy) shouldn't be detectable. Although since 1977, I think it's now believed that we do in fact detect this movement relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background, but the CMBG is still not considered to be an "absolute" reference frame so it's okay.

The center of the galaxy is currently believed to be a very large black hole 50,000 light years away. I'm not sure that the center of the galaxy was much interest to Townsend as such.I don't think he felt that he was detecting "gravitational waves from black holes" as is currently fashionable due to LIGO, but rather that he was detecting either "space itself" or a high-frequency radiation that was "gravity itself", both of which are kinda non-Einsteinian ideas.

Patrick Cornille, a French researcher whose name sounds familiar but I forget from where, writes in this 2020 paper ( https://www.academia.edu/95342721/A_Rev ... ted_Forces )

Sometimes, it is useful to do an historical review on a given subject as done hereafter to discover a thread between different experiments done by physicists around the world on a long period of time namely 149 years. This thread was discovered for the first time in 1999 in our review paper [1] concerning experiments showing that conductors submitted to high voltage or with high currents passing through them are moving without the help of an external observer. This paper will address this subject by giving a common explanation to the effect, namely the motion results from the violation of the Newton’s third law due the magnetic force if we assume that the capacitor has an absolute motion defined with respect to vacuum. This paper has important implications concerning the interpretation of physics and applications to electric propulsion.

I don't know that I agree with all of Cornille's evaluation (for example he gives more credence to "the Searl Effect" and other discredited fringe claims than I think is wise) but yeah, that idea that "the movement of capacitors" might have something to do with "absolute motion with respect to the vacuum" does seem to crop up in Townsend's ideas. Absolute motion is something that Einstein forbids us to think about. Yet Townsend also seemed to like General Relativity, although he didn't have the maths to actually use it. It is quite hard for me to hold those two ideas together (believing in a clear violation of Relativity while still believing in Relativity) but Townsend seemed to do this a lot.

Regards, Nate