Townsend Brown, at the Philadelphia Naval Yard

[Paul Schatzkin]

.
Trickfox was insistent that the B2 bomber incorporated some unusual mathematics that had evolved from Townsend's work.

And Morgan said that when he visited in Josephine in her final days, her first remark to him was "They made bombers, didn't they..."

Interestingly the family archives at also hold a letter sent to Townsend, around. this time, addressed to "Dr. Townsend Brown, Department of Physics, University of North Carolina." I had wondered if he had reconnected with the old gravity crews there.

The name of Bryce DeWitt also came up in that context, and there was some reference to that in the Bahnson chapters. There was also quite a bit cut out, so... something else to take another look at when I get around to compiling more 'outtakes.'

--P

[Jan Lundquist]

Let's not forget Institute Founder, Millionaire Babson, applied the principles of physics to predicting the stock market moves. And we can't talk about Babson without mentioning that Beau Kitselman graduated from Babson College, which is still in operation today, ranked as the best college for entrepreneurship by U.S. News and Reports.

Beau was always a better mathematician than entrepreneur, however. And he was always, always one of Townsend Brown's most fervent followers.

Take a look at his stated interests and activities between 1960-1978.

Study in field of electrohydrodynamics (based on work of T. Townsend Brown, Oliver Heaviside and Sir James Jeans) with a view to identifying GRAVITY as a second-order dielectric phenomenon, development of continuum transmission as a means of making predictions, computing motion of pipe hanging 18,000 feet in Mohole Project, (*) computing osmosis processes, etc.

https://www.kitselman.com/index.php/man

[natecull]

Study in field of electrohydrodynamics (based on work of T. Townsend Brown, Oliver Heaviside and Sir James Jeans) with a view to identifying GRAVITY as a second-order dielectric phenomenon, development of continuum transmission as a means of making predictions

Have I posted the Mankind Research Unlimited brochure from around 1975? "Electrohydrodynamics" appears as a study subject in that group, which makes me wonder if Kitselman was involved as a consultant there. Since we know that Kitselman had been active in parapsychology as well as other esoteric subjects, it is possible that "continuum transmission as a means of making predictions" *could* refer to the speculative concept which was getting a lot of airplay around the 1970s in psychic research groups like MRU, that "ESP was maybe carried by the gravity rather than EM field". (This would explain, for example, why you can't block ESP with a Faraday cage, even if a Faraday cage could maybe help "quiet the mind" by blocking out other noise, and can certainly rule out cheating.) Jerry Gallimore's "Handbook of Unusual Energies" from around this time works this idea, and in "The Stargate Conundrum", Chapter 3, Philip Coppens pushes the inception of the idea back a decade earlier:

As early as 1965, Puharich had written about his “hunch” that there was a relation between psychic ability, and hence the mind, and gravity. This is again Maxwellian. To test his prediction, Puharich carried out an experiment under changing gravitational conditions and his choice fell on the different lunar periods, because the sun-moon system affects the gravitational forces, as visible in the tides. He proposed that perceptual psi would increase around full moon and new moon, but decrease at the half-moons, an idea that was confirmed by the experiments.

I don't know that "maybe the mind runs on gravity" actually ever helped improve the predictive accuracy of ESP. Apart from phases of the moon, it doesn't really give any lever for applying maths, and the biggest problem is that ESP just doesn't seem to be affected by distance in the way that gravity is. But if nothing else, the idea probably helped get ESP research some funding because it pointed at a potential physical mechanism, and any mechanism is better than no mechanism when you're trying to attract scientific interest.

On the other hand, it's possible that the "predictions" were of merely mechanical systems, and that "continuum transmission" was just some personal mathematical calculation technique. With Kitselman, it's hard to tell, since his interests were so broad.

Edit: I'm still catching up, I see Jan already got there in August. viewtopic.php?p=22015#p22015

By 1961 had developed a statistical method whereby “continuum transmission” may be added to the repertory of predictive methods; verified this in 1961-1963.

So whatever "continuum transmission" meant to Kitselman (and I'm still not sure - the term does seem to get occasionally used in optics, for example), it presumably meant it no later than 1961.

Iona Miller's MRU website is still up, in all its Weebly glory.

https://ionamiller.weebly.com/mankind-r ... mited.html

One place that the "what if ESP is linked to gravity" conjecture found its way into pop culture is the Japanese animated TV series "Mobile Suit Gundam" (1979), often considered the "Japanese Star Wars" for its influence on the genre. One of the major plot elements in Gundam is that ESP is more prevalent in orbital space colonies, because they're outside of a gravity field. It's an obvious extrapolation from the New Age obsession with mountains as being "more spiritual" places, and I've often wondered if a similar (but unstated) idea is behind a lot of the modern obsession with space colonisation: "if we just get into orbit, we'll turn into super-smart people because low gravity is *literally* magic". This idea appears again in Vernor Vinge's "Zones of Thought" universe (ie A Fire Upon The Deep, 1992), where the fringe of the Galaxy is filled with transcendent godlike beings because light travels faster there. "Getting out of the gravity well" is therefore seen as a spiritual imperative for the species, and the fall into high gravity is very literally the Gnostic Fall into Matter.

I don't think the mind actually works on gravity at all (at least not in the physical layer of our universe; I think the esoteric idea of "subtle worlds" or higher-dimensional spaces is a thought worth considering, but those are very different from measurable physical altitude and gravitation). But it would be a legitimate argument if we didn't have any contrary data.

Regards, Nate

[natecull]

Here's a 1984 article about "The Philadelphia Experiment" (on the occasion of the film based very loosely on the book), including an interview with William L Moore in which even he says he "doesn't buy" the story that he himself amplified. I found it by searching for Moore's now-forgotten outfit, "The Fair Witness Project".

https://www.mcall.com/1984/08/24/real-p ... n-mystery/

EAL ‘PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT’ SHROUDED IN MYSTERY
Author
By Morning Call | Staff Report
PUBLISHED: August 24, 1984 at 4:00 a.m. | UPDATED: October 1, 2021 at 11:18 p.m.

“The Philadelphia Experiment” – the granddaddy of stealth technology results were far different from those portrayed in the movie.

According to legend surrounding “The Philadelphia Experiment,” in 1943 a Naval battleship and its crew was “teleported” from the Philadelphia Navy Yard to Norfolk, Va., and back.

“The bottom line is ‘Who’s going to buy that a ship disappeared?’ I don’t buy that, except I think I know how it got started,” said William L. Moore, who with Charles Berlitz (author of “The Bermuda Triangle”), wrote “The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility,” from which the movie’s title is taken.

Moore explained that a legitimate concern during World War II was protecting United States’ shipments of war materials:

“The big fear was that the Germans were going to develop a weapon for which we would have no defense. That weapon was a radar-guided torpedo.”

Albert Einstein, among others, was consulted for the top secret “radar invisibility” project. Moore emphasized that the experiment did not attempt “optic invisibility.”

At the Navy Yard, personnel were stationed on a noncommissioned ship, the USS Eldridge, which was 95 percent complete. Cables from a power plant on shore transmitted a broad band of low-frequency energy which made the ship “disappear” from the radar scope, said Moore.

“Someone came up with using a ship as a massive antenna and energizing the ship with low-frequency waves and using that to transmit a tremendous pulse that would either blow out the radar or confuse it,” explained Moore. “And it worked. It worked beautifully.”

But, Moore said, the idea proved impractical because of the power required and its effect on the sailors. The project was apparently dropped because the Germans didn’t develop a radar-guided torpedo and World War II was near an end.

“The very low frequency affected the minds, the central nervous systems of the people who were too close to it – similar to the effect of the psychedelic drug LSD – and short-circuited the brain,” according to Moore.

“The effect on each individual was different, which accounts for all these different stories. Vertigo, nausea, dizziness, all the way up to virtual hallucinations. Some men passed out. Other men – their optic nerve was affected, similar to a flashbulb going off in their face.”

Moore said he located two people who were on the ship and four people who knew people who were on the ship. There was no crew roster. The people on the ship were not told about the experiment. “When this effect hit them, they were never told what had happened. Some of them were hospitalized. Two of them jumped overboard and drowned, they were so disoriented.

“The families were simply told they died during the course of an activity. They were never told why. Why that was I don’t know.”

Following publication of Moore’s book, a Navy veteran who was part of the experiment contacted him. The man told Moore:

“I was on the ship. They told me to throw certain switches and I did. Something hit me like a football tackle and I was flat on the deck. And suddenly I was in Norfolk. And the next thing I knew they were carrying me off the ship back in Philadelphia on a stretcher and I was six months in the hospital.

“It was the same spot I was at two weeks earlier. That’s how I recognized it.”

Moore said that the man had experienced “an obviously induced flashback.

“That’s how the story got started,” said Moore. “It was that story which inspired the film – which is strictly fiction.”

The Navy didn’t originate the experiment, Moore said. Records of the experiment, kept by the National Defense Research Committee, headed by Vannevar Bush, were transferred to the military division of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., according to Moore. He said there are rows and rows of unindexed files, which he found impossible to go through.

Spokesmen for the Navy have consistently said that an experiment in which a ship would be “teleported” could not have been possible except in the realm of science fiction.

Vincent Gaddis’ 1965 book “Invisible Horizons,” which mentions the experiment, initially attracted the interest of Moore.

Moore is a founder of the Fair-Witness Project, a non-profit group to investigate UFO sightings, psychic phenomenon – a kind of “Ghostbusters.”

Moore wrote another book with Berlitz, “The Roswell Incident,” about a UFO “flying disc” which allegedly crashed in 1947 in New Mexico. Moore said that there was wreckage and an official Air Force press release confirming the incident which was later retracted.

Moore plans to publish a paper on “The Philadelphia Experiment” but is not planning a followup book. An updated edition is available as a Fawcett- Crest Ballantine paperback.

A nationwide search for survivors of “The Philadelphia Experiment” is under way. USS Eldridge crewmen D.J. “Don” Myers, Harry Enton, Charles W. Dwyer and a crew member known only as “Walker” are being sought.

Anyone with information about the whereabouts of these men is urged to contact Philip Little of West Coast Detectives, North Hollywood, Calif., (818-980-7393)