Interesting find! The reporter, John H Lyst, would four years later become editor of the Indianapolis Star:
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/in ... =144899350
During a 45-year career at The Star, Lyst covered everything from the police beat to the collapse of Communism. Named editor in October 1979, he had shaped the newspaper's opinion pages until his retirement in June 2000. In a retirement tribute, the newspaper editorialized that at a time "when shouting is often confused with debate, Lyst has offered the newspaper's readers a quiet wisdom and an unwavering dedication to the art of listening." Prior to his appointment as editor, Lyst was a business writer and financial editor known for his column," Money, Jobs, and People," selections of which were syndicated nationally by the North American Newspaper Alliance. Honored with a CASPER award in 1969 for a series documenting the difficulties of finding jobs for the hard-core unemployed, he remarked the column might have been more appropriately named "People, Jobs, and Money" because "I always try to put interesting people and the interest of people first." The column ran five days a week for eight years and four days a week for four more years, winning numerous awards including the 1976 Lester Hunt Award for investigative reporting.
Meanwhile, his article:
Gallimore, 37, brought together at Indianapolis a group of researchers in April, 1975, for the formation of a new group called the United States Radionics Congress. After its 1976 meeting on the American University campus at Washington, D.C., the congress changed its name to the United States Psychotropics Association.
Psycho
tronics, actually, with an N. Although it was the 1970s, so I suspect liberal usage of psychotropics was also involved.
Yep, that's the group I keep talking about as being the circle that was fascinated in the 1970s by Townsend Brown: Jerry Gallimore's USPA. I've read in some potted biographies that Gallimore was a crystallographer for the US Navy, so there are clear Navy/CIA links to his circle.
Note that "psychotronics" is specifically a USSR term for psi/ESP, and that the people who were most interested in that term were Russian-speaking US people with military affiliations who were worried about the Soviets potentially winning a "psi race". See also, the group around Mankind Research Unlimited (
https://ionamiller.weebly.com/mankind-r ... mited.html ), another slightly earlier 1970s group who overlapped with the USPA circle.
It doesn't surprise me that USPA started as a Radionics group - but that to me would point strongly to it being an offshoot of Meade Layne and Riley Crabb's "Borderlands Sciences Research Foundation", because BSRF were into UFOs and psychics and various esoteric Forteana, but were always super interested in Radionics (in very particular, the work of Ruth Drown).
I don't think that Jerry Gallimore is Waves Forest, because IIRC Gallimore died in the 1980s. However WF would very likely have been part of the BSRF / USPA circle, before their specific cluster of ideas spread into the wider 1970s New Age scene and became unexamined stock furniture in popular counterculture mythology.
WF in "Space Juice" describes himself as being "young" in 1975, which I think would be younger than 37:
The first version of this story I ever heard was from Riley Crabb in 1975... Riley and Judith were very generous with their time and information; I gathered there weren't as many young people seriously into this stuff in those days. Riley had a lot of fascinating esoteric stories and advice, and so did Judith, although the advice I mostly recalled from her was that, for energetic balance, I should spend less time studying and more time with my girlfriends. In following her suggestion I might have over-corrected for a while; it was the 1970's after all.
He also talks about illustrating the magazine "Energy Unlimited":
In 1978, I learned about Viktor Schauberger, and much else, from Walter Baumgartner in LA. He and Kathleen Joyce had just started publishing the magazine Energy Unlimited, and they reprinted my free energy article in the second issue. I drew a few covers for them and ran another long story in the Spring 1981 issue, called New Ocean Technologies, part of which applies to the section after this.
Flickr has a cover of April/June 1978 Energy Unlimited, which is signed "W.F.":
https://www.flickr.com/photos/esaruoho/ ... otostream/
A 2011 eulogy for Walter Baumgartner by Jeanne Manning, suggests that the USPA circle's obsession with Viktor Schauberger was because of Baumgartner - which he got perhaps from Walter Russell. If so, then it's a strand in the Free Energy mythology which doesn't come from the 1970s USSR "psychotronics" scene, but from much earlier.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120101064 ... be-missed/
It may be worth investigating Marcel Vogel, since he's one of the otherwise well-known scientists with unusual beliefs who keep turning up all around the US military-industrial-weirdness complex.
Credibility-wise, Marcel Vogel was way up there. He developed the magnetic disc coating for hard drives, and the liquid crystals that led to every modern flat-screen display, and years earlier he came up with the highly reflective highway stripe paint that helps millions drive more safely at night.
He's also the one who gave Chris Bird and Peter Tompkins a huge mass of exotic science information that led to their book The Secret Life Of Plants in 1973. That book, with some two hundred references, gave me more leads than any other source up to that point, on the subjects I was seeking to understand.
WF appears to have walked away from his 1978 meeting with Townsend Brown with a *very* different interpretation of Townsend's involvement in the "Philadelphia Experiment" than what I would have taken from Townsend's words:
But Brown's “oblique confirmation” did happen, during our next visit. The Philadelphia Experiment by William Moore and Charles Berlitz had recently appeared, with a chapter about “The Force Fields of Townsend Brown” [Chapter 10, page 81], so of course I had to ask about it. His answer was intriguing: “I don't think the Navy is ready for invisibility experiments”.
He added that he really would have preferred they hadn't named him in their book without asking, as he was getting a lot of questions. The last thing I wanted was to add to his discomfort on the matter, so I left it at that. I did not then and still don't have the ruthless temperament to be an investigative reporter in any conventional sense. And since there is some potential risk for those involved in the subjects that mostly interest me, I've always tried to take a comparatively gentle approach.
So, to me, that's *not* a confirmation. If Townsend Brown told me "I don't think the Navy is ready for invisibility experiments", I would take it to mean literally what it says: *the US Navy is literally not ready because neither the US Navy nor anyone else on the planet has the technology or even the underlying physical theory for invisibility*. That would accord with everything that common sense and the known history of science and WW2 tells us. Unless one was specifically and previously sold on the idea that TPX *must have* happened... what else would "not ready" mean other than, literally, *not ready*?
The other part of the confirmation went like this: Later in our visit he pulled out a huge volume called Who's Who In Frontier Science and Technology, and showed me his listing, observing my reaction as I read it. Seeing that I hadn't yet caught the detail he intended me to notice, he xeroxed the page and gave it to me to study again later.
This was clearly not about pointing out his fame. At no point in our visits had he showed any awards, commendations, photos of him with prominent figures or any of that. Besides, he knew I was already as impressed as I could possibly be with any human.
So the key point jumped out at me later, when I had time to re-read his Who's Who listing. It provided the complete chronology of his career, except for one crucial omission. After his role in heading up the US Navy's research and development on degaussing equipment and related magnetic field manipulation, which lasted partway into 1943, there's a two-year gap with no mention of what he was up to. Right when the “Philadelphia Experiment” was alleged to have happened.
Yeah, but, we know that that gap was when Townsend had quit the Navy, don't we? He was on the opposite side of the country working for Lockheed/Vega.
Was Townsend perhaps trying to tell WF "look, I can't tell you what I was doing in 1943 because classified, but, it certainly didn't involve Philadelphia"? And that was taken to mean the exact opposite?
I got to meet with Townsend Brown a few more times after that, and he was always amazingly kind, patient and encouraging. He never appeared to show any bitterness about the world being denied the benefits of his discoveries, and the future that might have been. And I never came up with a way to ask about how his ideas might actually be getting implemented in classified projects, without violating whatever nondisclosure agreements he was still under. When he relocated to Avalon on Catalina Island I lost contact. It was reported that in October 1985 he moved on to that great laboratory in the sky.
Having read all of "Space Juice", I find WF's ideas even in 2019 to be almost a perfect capsule of all of the 1970s "High Weirdness by Mail" stuff that I first stumbled into in the 1980s. Townsend Brown figures large in this mythology but I feel that the ideas jump more *from* Townsend to... strange things, rather than being about what Townsend was actually thinking and doing.
This cluster of ideas includes: there is a pre-physical, psychic/awareness reality from which physical reality is created (I believe this). Then that there's an "ether" by which the psychic/physical interface is mediated (I believe there must be such an interface, but it doesn't have to involve a Victorian conception of a mechanical hydraulic ether). Then that Townsend's electrostatic-gravity ideas are proven beyond doubt (I don't think they are; there's interesting hints, but I don't see full proof yet). Then that, following from this, the Earth must have weird things going on beneath our feet (I feel like this is trying to smuggle Hollow Earth theory in and I don't understand why, I have no interest in Hollow Earth mythology at all). Then, that the many proposed antigravity and alternative health technologies proposed in the last century must all be true (I don't believe they are), but they aren't being used. From this, the leap is made that *of course, there is a giant conspiracy which has all of these technologies and is using them, and so it must be cosmically evil with plans to enslave us all*. At this point, I have fully noped out.
Yet this has now become a standard belief in the New Age and "wellness" community, as well as in one major political party in the USA.
I worry about where this casual assumption of an evil global superpowered truth-suppressing conspiracy came from, and where it's going. I think what this belief has done to the New Age scene from the 1970s to right now is pretty bad (see antivax and QAnon); but if it continues along this trajectory, the default assumption of a conspiracy in popular thinking could get *much much worse* in the future.
I don't see the proof for a conspiracy that WF sees. Rather, I see a lot of interesting speculations, many of which are wrong, and a lot of proposed magical devices throughout history, many of which just don't work (or always hover right on the edge of replication). If there is a superscience conspiracy, these do not provide the proof of one, for me. Also, I grew up with this conspiracy idea and frankly I'm kind of tired of it; it's not new to me and in my opinion it doesn't lead anywhere. Various overlooked missing threads in science, sure. Investigate those. The mind-body problem, yep, keep banging on that door, it's important. But don't walk around assuming as your default mental set that *of course* there are superpowered black magic space emperors running Earth in alliance with reptilian aliens from underground cities. That is a recipe for mental bad-place-ness.
But I am interested in why so many people in and around the BSRF / USPA circles in the 1970s felt this conspiracy idea so strongly, back when it *was* new. Especially when many of these people held day jobs in the US Navy, CIA, Air Force, or related military/intelligence/science organizations. The conspiracy might or might not exist... but the implications of 50 years of conspiracy thinking among active military people or military contractors... that's something very real and considering David Grusch's claims, appears to be still ongoing.
Edit:
I found Tom Valentine's 1977 "The Life and Death of Planet Earth" on Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/TheLifeAndD ... 6/mode/1up
The dedication page is interesting.
This book is dedicated to an organization and a person. The organization is The Stelle Group, a gathering of courageous people who are striving toward the ultimate frontier of human perfection and an optimum civilization. The person is Kathy Redmond, who worked tirelessly to curb my over-exuberance, to uplift my downers, to sharpen my syntax, and generally to bring about a better book .
It is vital that each reader fully understand that, although I am a member of The Stelle Group, I do not necessarily speak for the other members or
the governing body. The conjecture in this book is entirely my own and does not necessarily correspond with the thinking of my organization. It is
a tribute to the spirit of our community that each individual member is not only permitted, but encouraged, to think for himself and express his
individualism. In this organization, though we all seek the same goals of egoic advancement and a better civilization, we each maintain total individuality.
Ok so why this is interesting is because Stelle, as I've mentioned before, is David Hatcher Childress's (Adventures Unlimited / The Antigravity Handbook) old cult. One of the many post-Theosophical groups. Childress didn't create it, but like Valentine he became a member. Then Stelle went through a breakup in the 1970s/1980s and is now just a town with some nice solar panels and hippie publishers.
Anyway, Stelle as a group certainly did have a very conspiratorial view of the world. I wonder if they were perhaps more influential in New Age scenes (and particularly the kind of New Age scenes that overlapped with the US military) than I'd realised?
Specifically, Stelle's influence on the Weird Scene now goes back to 1977 for Valentine, not 1985 for Childress.
1977 was a *ridiculously* fertile year for the New Age / Free Energy / Psychotronics scene. A whole bunch of weird-physics books dropped or were in progress at that time. To say nothing of Star Wars and Close Encounters. Also, 1977 had been picked as an "end of the world" date by several alleged prophets (spoiler: they were wrong) and 1975 had also been Theosophy's "quarter-century review" year (2025 will be the next one). It was a very busy period in the collective human imagination, in other words.
A second quote from WF's Riley Crabb section that caught my eye on reread:
I have some doubts about that version, starting with the very premise that any spontaneous nuclear exchange is even possible, or it probably would have happened long ago. I suspect there are specific harmonic requirements as to the exact timing and placement of thermonuclear detonations, and the actual “weapon” has always been just the threat of the possibility, a global bluff and psyop for conditioning human beliefs and compliance, and a suitably expensive cover story for much weirder black projects.
This particular and very unusual theory (that nuclear explosions can only occur at "harmonic" times and locations) comes straight from my fellow New Zealander, Bruce Cathie. I have tried to read Cathie and all I get is an enormous headache and a sense that the writer had some major psychological issues. In my opinion, none of Cathie's ideas follow logically from each other, and his thesis does not accord with my common sense understanding that, actually, nuclear weapons are very real and very blunt weapons that can be detonated wherever, and that the Cold War really was about the USA and USSR trying to intimidate each other using them.
But the question of "how did we manage to survive the Cold War without starting a nuclear war?" is a good one.
A third observation, from Iona Miller's MRU page:
PSYCHOTRONICS: Czech term for “parapsychology” (excluding the study of survival), but embracing certain phenomena that are not now generally accepted as parapsychological. According to (the late) Larissa Vilenskaya (1983, p. 107), the term was first proposed with the analogy of “bionics” in mind, to refer to “the field dealing with the construction of devices capable of enhancing and/or reproducing certain psi phenomena (such as psychokinesis in the case of ‘psychotronic generators’ developed by Robert Pavlita) and later embraced some other phenomena.” [Dale & White, 1977]
The claim about the word "psychotronics" being a deliberate reference to "psionics" is interesting to me, because it's been my feeling that the people working in the field of bionics (in the 1950s/1960s) as it was being created seemed to be very open to the Weird. These people were often radar and sonar people. I'm thinking particularly of Townsend's colleague Lucien Geradin, but also the novelist Martin Caidin comes to mind.
Nate