TLDR: Bill Moore had it wrong.
In 1939, Atomic pioneer, Enrico Fermi delivered a lecture for the NRL.
Townsend was subsequently assigned to the Philadelphia Naval Yard, working in the hydraulic power plant there. He did such an excellent job that the Director of the Yard wrote to the Navy, asking that his assignment continue on. However, once the US entered the war, he was sent to Norfolk to establish the Radar school there.
Meanwhile, back at the shipyard, the Navy continued its pursuit of the thermal diffusion method of uranium refinement. Once the Army's Oak Ridge Tennessee facility was up and running, General Groves arranged for a group of volunteers to go and get some hands on experience with such a system. They were told it was a dangerous assignment, and it was. One of the steam pipes exploded with irradiated steam. There were several injured. 3 died.
Their internal organs were removed for autopsy before their bodies were returned home for burial.
But, though Townsend may have been there in the very early days of the project, he was long gone by the time this accident happened.
And, needless to say, the report of this true Philadelphia Experiment was kept classified for many years.
Townsend Brown, at the Philadelphia Naval Yard
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PX Another dreaded topiic
In military jargon, the PX is the Post Exchange, where military members and families do their shopping. In the Townsend Brown story, it is the Philadelphia Experiment. The ship mentioned in In the infamous book was the USS Eldrige. "Twigsnapper" pinpointed the USS Cutlass as the ship where the seed of the fictionalized tale was born. However, according to a USN source, the ship in question was the USS Timmerman.
To quote myself once again:
To quote myself once again:
As I mentioned earlier, friend Pladuim, our very own "Recon Marine," has uncovered a great treasure trove of original documents, including ranting letters from the primary source of the disappearing ship story, one Carl Allen, aka Carlos Allende. Today Allende would be diagnosed as schizophrenic and given heavy drugs. Before his illness became apparent, he must have exuded a manic certainty that convinced the story's authors, Berlitz and Moore, that he was telling the truth.
At any rate, once they legitimatized his story by putting it in print, every wack-a-doodle, fruit loop, fringe group investigator in the world swarmed to it. I imagine the Public Affairs office at the Philadelphia Navy Shipyard is STILL getting letters asking about the story of the invisible ship. This answer was offered by Lt. Cdr. A. E. Norton in his November, 1977 letter to Welshman, Alfred Mills:
Mayhap we can spin up a new story and call it THE TIMMERMAN EXPERIMENT?"Until recently, we believed that the foundation for the apocryphal stories arose from degaussing experiments which, although they had no effect on humans, can cause a ship to become “invisible” to magnetic mines. A private researcher has revealed that a more likely genesis of the stories about levitation, teleportation, and other bizarre effects on those crew members arose from experiments with the generating plant of a destroyer escort, USS TIMMERMAN. This ship was part of an experiment to test the effects of a small, high-frequency generator providing 1,000 cycles per second instead of the standard 400 hz. However, the higher frequency generator produced coronal discharges, sparking and other phenomena often found at high frequency power plants. The ship was never teleported, nor did any of the crew suffer lasting effects from the experiment."
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Re: The USS Timmerman
Paul, I just saw your "cursed'?" blog post. If you don't drink, maybe this would be a good time to start.
I'll join you. This Timmerman post is the one I created and lost the other day. It was sourced and everything, but of course, I am having trouble finding the links again.
The letter from Norton, pinpointing the Timmerman as the subject ship is presumably, still in the Gray Barker archives. It was reproduced on the TTB family website. Curiously, I can find no suubstantiating evidence that a Lt. Cdr. A.E. Norton was ever in the Navy. Perhaps he was Naval Reserve?
At the time I was researching this I had better luck finding information on the USS Timmerman.
Let's start with this, which was on Amazon, once upon a time:
And then, there was this, which is no longer on the Tin Can Sailor's site:
Boundary Layer Investigations Aboard the USS Timmerman https://archive.org/details/boundarylay ... w=theater
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)
The letter from Norton, pinpointing the Timmerman as the subject ship is presumably, still in the Gray Barker archives. It was reproduced on the TTB family website. Curiously, I can find no suubstantiating evidence that a Lt. Cdr. A.E. Norton was ever in the Navy. Perhaps he was Naval Reserve?
At the time I was researching this I had better luck finding information on the USS Timmerman.
Let's start with this, which was on Amazon, once upon a time:
And then, there was this, which is no longer on the Tin Can Sailor's site:
And this is still availableFrom A Tin Can Sailor's Destoyer History
The TIMMERMAN almost did not make it into this world. Her keel was laid on 01 October 1945, and at that time, she was intended to be just another standard destroyer of the class. On 07 January 1946, the Bureau of Ships ordered work suspended and what there was of her was transferred to the reserve fleet. This was remarkable due to the fact that many ships were cancelled and subsequently scrapped on the building ways....
When commissioned on 26 September 1952, the U.S. Navy had one of their first completely experimental ships. Her propulsion system was rated at 100,000 Shaft Horsepower and a speed of 43 knots was anticipated. Naval records do not show that she ever exceeded 35 knots, but strong evidence indicates that the 43 knots was achieved and perhaps even exceeded during sea trials prior to commissioning....
The TIMMERMAN was a successful experiment in many ways. She proved that higher steam pressures and temperatures were possible, thus allowing for the development of the 1200 psi plant, which was first installed in the USS FOREST SHERMAN (DD-931) class and other later classes of ships. One of her emergency generators was driven by a gas turbine engine, believed to be one of the first marine installations of a gas turbine. There were other contributions to future ship design such as the aluminum super-structure, raised bow and other experiments, which were classified at the time. Her short life of 46 months was a productive one. She was decommissioned on 27 July 1956 and sold for scrap on 21 April 1959.
Boundary Layer Investigations Aboard the USS Timmerman https://archive.org/details/boundarylay ... w=theater
Last edited by Jan Lundquist on Fri Mar 17, 2023 8:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: More Timmerman
For a more indepth look at the novel systems aboard the USS Timmerman, see
the Experimental USS Timmerman
https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com/20 ... timmerman/
the Experimental USS Timmerman
https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com/20 ... timmerman/
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Re: And now, the USS Cutlass/Ball Lightning story
USS Cutlass research takes me all over the place.
IIRC, I first saw the Cutlass (SS 478) origin story in print in Ball Lightning and Bead Lightning: Extreme Forms of Atmospheric Electricity
James Dale Barry (1980)
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007 ... 757-1710-5 (also available for sale on Amazon, many $$$).
JD Barry appears to be another of those one and done authors who left no discernable traces and who has, apparently, never published any thing else, scholarly or otherwise.
At one time, I had access to the full document and reported that according to Barry, the Cutlass event happened in 1974.
According to history.navy.mil site, however, the SS 478 was in service only from 1945-1973. Even more curiously, the chronolgoy of the ship's activities ends with
I don't know where she was for the subsequent 12 years of her service.. Perhaps she really did go invisible and the navy lost sight of her. (joke. I think)
IIRC, I first saw the Cutlass (SS 478) origin story in print in Ball Lightning and Bead Lightning: Extreme Forms of Atmospheric Electricity
James Dale Barry (1980)
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007 ... 757-1710-5 (also available for sale on Amazon, many $$$).
JD Barry appears to be another of those one and done authors who left no discernable traces and who has, apparently, never published any thing else, scholarly or otherwise.
At one time, I had access to the full document and reported that according to Barry, the Cutlass event happened in 1974.
According to history.navy.mil site, however, the SS 478 was in service only from 1945-1973. Even more curiously, the chronolgoy of the ship's activities ends with
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/h ... s-478.htmlIn the first half of 1959, Cutlass joined in the antisubmarine warfare development work of TF "Alfa" off the Virginia Capes, and in September sailed for the Mediterranean. In November she passed through the Suez Canal to join ships of the Pakistani Navy in exercises off Karachi, returning to Norfolk in December. After continued operations with TF "Alfa," she entered Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in February 1960 for an overhaul which continued until August. Returning to Norfolk, Cutlass operated locally for the duration of the year.
I don't know where she was for the subsequent 12 years of her service.. Perhaps she really did go invisible and the navy lost sight of her. (joke. I think)
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Re: the rest of the Cutlass history is here.
FYI, very detailed recounting of the Cutlass activities, including the last 12 years:
http://www.genserva.com/cutlass/history.htm
http://www.genserva.com/cutlass/history.htm
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PX, Project Rainbow, and the USS Cutlass.
The Moore/Berlitz story says their {alleged } PX incident was an unforseen consequence of Project Rainbow. According the above history of the USS Cutlass, she participated in a different sort of Project Rainbow:
According to Wiki, the later (1956-58) Project Rainbow was a different kettle of paint entirely:
This two year effort kicked off in August of 1956, and there is no immediately discernible connection between this Project Rainbow and the USS Cutlass. Nor between this and the USS Timmeman.
It must be noted however, that by 1956, the Timmerman had completed her propulsion trials and was moved to Philadelphia and ownership transferred to the Naval Reserve. Hypothetically speaking, she was then available to the NRL for further research before being removed from the Naval inventory in 1958. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Timmerman We can only speculate as to whether this research included the HF 400 hz generator experiment mentioned in Lt.Cdr Norton's letter or something else entirely.
SIDENOTE: In one of the unbearable synchronicities that crop up during research into "the facts on the ground", the USS Argonaut (S.S. 475) a sister Tench class sub to the Cutlass was eventually sold to Canada and renamed HMCS Rainbow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Argonaut_(SS-475)
Cutlass left the Canal Zone 6 January 1948 for local operations at Key West, then entered Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in March for overhaul and modernization. Arriving at Key West 7 February 1949 she served as test submarine for Operation "Rainbow" evaluating color schemes to enhance livability, a serious problem in new submarines with long submergence capability.
According to Wiki, the later (1956-58) Project Rainbow was a different kettle of paint entirely:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_RAINBOWFrom Wikipedia, the free encycloped
This article is about the CIA project to reduce the radar cross section of the Lockheed U-2. For the rumored teleportation of a US Navy ship, see Philadelphia Experiment.
Project RAINBOW was the name given by the CIA to a research project aimed at reducing the radar cross-section of the Lockheed U-2 and lowering the chance that it would be detected and tracked by Soviet radars during its overflights of the USSR. However, the Soviets continued to track the U-2 flights in spite of experimentation with various technological fixes.
This two year effort kicked off in August of 1956, and there is no immediately discernible connection between this Project Rainbow and the USS Cutlass. Nor between this and the USS Timmeman.
It must be noted however, that by 1956, the Timmerman had completed her propulsion trials and was moved to Philadelphia and ownership transferred to the Naval Reserve. Hypothetically speaking, she was then available to the NRL for further research before being removed from the Naval inventory in 1958. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Timmerman We can only speculate as to whether this research included the HF 400 hz generator experiment mentioned in Lt.Cdr Norton's letter or something else entirely.
SIDENOTE: In one of the unbearable synchronicities that crop up during research into "the facts on the ground", the USS Argonaut (S.S. 475) a sister Tench class sub to the Cutlass was eventually sold to Canada and renamed HMCS Rainbow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Argonaut_(SS-475)
Re: Townsend Brown, at the Philadelphia Naval Yard
Hi Rose. All of these "rainbow" synchronicities are indeed fascinating, whether or not they lead anywhere.
I find the Cutlass 1974 claim from Morgan et al interesting, but it surely can't have been the birth of the TPX mythology itself, because the Carl Allende marked up "Varo Editions" of Jessup's "Case for the UFO" were floating around in the 1950s, and figures in the UFO scene (I want to say Gray Barker but I'm not sure) were beginning to promote them shortly afterwards.
On a related note, ever since 2005 I have been fascinated by the little text "50 Years After Einstein: The Failure of the Unified Field" which surfaced on Paulo and Alexandra Correra's "Aetherometry" website and allegedly was "two chapters from book titled Gone Dark" by "W B Smyth". Gone Dark itself has never appeared, and neither has Smyth. The fragment purports to be a discussion between characters who seem familiar with the alleged Project Rainbow and the military characters of the era, and there seem to be military history connections worth exploring or at least refuting.
I also notice that the Correras have now pulled down the page, because of course they have, that's just how this whole field (sic) operates. Though it was up there for 18 years, I guess that's long enough.
Have you come across this text, and what do you make of it with your military history background? The things that interest me are the alleged birth of both radar stealth and nuclear magnetic resonance in the 1940s. Both seem somewhat plausible to me, at least more plausible than the usual TPX mythologies.
Here's a PDF copy which is probably the easiest form to read:
https://www.academia.edu/11792787/_Gone ... fied_Field
and a Wayback copy of the original HTML frame formatting:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210828053 ... index.html
A representative sample:
Edit: The few references to Townsend Brown:
p20:
I find the Cutlass 1974 claim from Morgan et al interesting, but it surely can't have been the birth of the TPX mythology itself, because the Carl Allende marked up "Varo Editions" of Jessup's "Case for the UFO" were floating around in the 1950s, and figures in the UFO scene (I want to say Gray Barker but I'm not sure) were beginning to promote them shortly afterwards.
On a related note, ever since 2005 I have been fascinated by the little text "50 Years After Einstein: The Failure of the Unified Field" which surfaced on Paulo and Alexandra Correra's "Aetherometry" website and allegedly was "two chapters from book titled Gone Dark" by "W B Smyth". Gone Dark itself has never appeared, and neither has Smyth. The fragment purports to be a discussion between characters who seem familiar with the alleged Project Rainbow and the military characters of the era, and there seem to be military history connections worth exploring or at least refuting.
I also notice that the Correras have now pulled down the page, because of course they have, that's just how this whole field (sic) operates. Though it was up there for 18 years, I guess that's long enough.
Have you come across this text, and what do you make of it with your military history background? The things that interest me are the alleged birth of both radar stealth and nuclear magnetic resonance in the 1940s. Both seem somewhat plausible to me, at least more plausible than the usual TPX mythologies.
Here's a PDF copy which is probably the easiest form to read:
https://www.academia.edu/11792787/_Gone ... fied_Field
and a Wayback copy of the original HTML frame formatting:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210828053 ... index.html
A representative sample:
Note that the document does not take the position that Einstein succeeded (because it thinks his unified field was wrong - and that's also the mainstream physics understanding of Unified Field theory today, that it was a dead end), but trying to harness nuclear spin (and this perhaps leading to the invention of nuclear magnetic resonance) seems potentially plausible to me. If this is science fiction, it's well-written hard science fiction of the kind I like. Obviously the problem with unified field stuff is the massive amounts of energy needed, so if you could use some kind of resonance trick to amplify the energy levels, that seems like just on the borderline of what was conceivable in the 1940s. It wouldn't really have been any more weird than trying to do nuclear fission. Now, though, and even after the 1970s, it just seems utterly inconceivable. But in the 1940s the sky was a lot more wide open for weird physics takes.I think it was Taylor who came up with the idea to send Lieutenant Commander [F.L.] Douthit to liaise with Einstein. It might have been von Neumann who gave it to Taylor. Anyway, by June '43, Einstein had become a consultant for the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance in a hush-hush NRL project whose precise purpose was to test whether light could be bent by a man-made artificial gravitational field. The project was called RAINBOW, and the proposal was written by Einstein, von Neumann and Taylor. Gunn, [E.O.] Hulburt, Gebhard[t] and [O.] Veblen also contributed to it. It permitted Einstein to go, once more, over the problems that he'd faced with his unified field theory - but having a practical goal in mind this time - to see whether it would be possible to distort the electromagnetic perception of a ship's location, or even render it entirely invisible, by manipulating the gravitational field of the ship, or around the ship.
J - How was this to be achieved?
W - Nobody knew, that's why Einstein had to write the darn thing and come up with a way to implement it. At first, Einstein told von Neumann and Taylor that he had to think about it. Meanwhile, Taylor discussed the task with the Radio and Radar Divisions - which is when someone suggested that intense electromagnetic fields could interfere with nuclear spin. Someone else added that this could be the basis for spacetime distortion and for creating magnetic and optical camouflage.
J - This was at a meeting?
W - Yes, a meeting of the responsible Section chiefs at the NRL. It might have been Hulburt, the chief of the Heat and Light Division, and the head of the Special Developments, Lorenzen. Hulburt was brought in because the project concerned the optical image of a target, as much as the magnetic and radar images.
Edit: The few references to Townsend Brown:
p20:
p30:J - Tell me about the magnetic countermeasures program.
W - This was a joint Anglo-American Navy project that goes back to 1939, when the Germans began laying magnetic mines with aircraft. At the time, Captain [Hollis M.] Cooley was still director of the NRL, and he answered to Bowen who was in charge of the Navy's Bureau of Engineering. Gunn was already the Technical Director and chief of several Divisions - one of them, Electricity and Magnetism, that took over that problem. With the shift of the NRL from under the Bureau of Engineering back to the Secretary of the Navy - if I recall, hmmm, under the auspices of the Bureau of Ships - Bowen became NRL Director, and a major effort was initiated to develop countermeasures and understand the basic science behind them. The Naval Ordnance Laboratory [NOL] also got involved, through Commander [J.B.] Glennon, Officer-in-Charge of the NOL, with Dr.s [R.C.] Duncan - in charge of scientific matters - and [R.D.] Bennett and [F.] Bitter in charge of degaussing. Duncan had asked [Vannevar] Bush for help, and Bush had recommended Bitter, from MIT, to serve as scientific liaison between the Navy Bureau of Ordnance [NBO] and the Royal Navy. Bitter had the rank of Navy Commander during the war.
J - Did [Lt.] Townsend Brown have a role in this project?
W - He was the junior officer in charge of magnetic mine sweeping.
p34:J - All right, first the degaussing story...
W - Yes... Under the direction of [W.] Gerlach (11), German naval research into torpedo and mine fuses successfully developed a murderous magnetic proximity fuse. They had also begun a comprehensive program of countermeasures, which focused on ship degaussing. By early 1940, the [US] Navy's Bureau of Ordnance, with Neumann and Veblen in charge of solving this problem, was working on its own countermeasures, prompted by British reports of the new magnetic German mines. So Francis [Bitter] was sent over from MIT. Remember that America was not yet at war with Germany. As I recall, it was in November of '39 that the first magnetic mine was captured - right in the Thames Estuary - and defused, just as Bowen took charge of the NRL. A secret NBO salvage operation led by [T.T.] Brown brought back the mechanism of another captured magnetic mine and Francis [Bitter] discovered that when the residual magnetism of a ship distorted the local geomagnetic field of the sensor, it activated the magnetic needle of the trigger. Francis and his colleagues started to wonder how much of the ship's residual ferromagnetism was left over from the permanent magnetization induced by the local magnetic field during the ship's construction, and how much was magnetization induced by the motion and heading of the ship once at sea. The Royal Navy was already developing empirical methods to cancel this residual magnetism. So, a joint NBO/NRL mission was formally sent to England, where Bitter, Brown and the other members of the team studied the work being done by the British with boats they called "electric tail sweepers".
Regards, Nate- OK. But back to the magnetic countermeasures: there were also all sorts of problems with the tail sweeper method - the problem of poor dielectrics for insulating the high-current electricity from the water, the heating of the water, --
W - More like vaporizing, yes - Bitter's turbulent system mostly took care of that. And the NRL Chemical and Light, and Heat, Divisions worked very hard on the dielectric problems - as did [T.T.] Brown himself.
Going on a journey, somewhere far out east
We'll find the time to show you, wonders never cease
We'll find the time to show you, wonders never cease
Re: Townsend Brown, at the Philadelphia Naval Yard
p44:
"W" thinks that William Moore's "Dr Franklin Reno" is Louis A Gebhard, saying he died in 1968.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... 48756d615/
https://www.nytimes.com/1971/09/21/arch ... bhard.html
Louis A Gebhard of the NRL, prime person of interest in the TPX mythos, wrote a 470-page NRL report in 1979 titled "Evolution of Naval Radio-Electronics and Contributions of the Naval Research Laboratory", which is available here.
https://www.navy-radio.com/manuals/nrl-history.pdf
p50:J - Yes, Allen's first letter to Jessup dates from January 1956. The policy of denial comes in full force after the debunking carried out by the CIA [H.P.] Robertson- [D.]Menzies panel [in 1953] and just as [T.T.] Brown and [USMC Maj. D.] Keyhoe were preparing to create the Flying Saucer Discussion Group - which later, in October of that year, led to the National Investigative Committee on Aerial Phenomena, NICAP, supported by Rear Admiral [D.S.] Fahrney and Admiral [R.H.] Hillenkoetter, who ten years earlier had been the first Director of the CIA. I don't think that the USAF was happy with what all these Navy people had done - in creating NICAP...?
But that claim about Townsend doesn't seem to match his 1942 departure date, does it.- So this problem must have joined the other countermeasures problems that Lorenzen's Section was working on?
W - Yes, Hulburt was the chief scientist in charge of the RAINBOW experiments, data gathering and analysis. He operated largely through Lorenzen's hands-on approach. Ship procurement and project logistics were left to Commander [William S.] Parsons. [T.T.] Brown, now made a Lieutenant Commander, was placed in charge of the electric and magnetic equipment used to generate the fields. Duncan, Bennett and Bitter from the NBO/NOL were in charge of degaussing and the electromagnetic transmitters. The long- term target of the experiment was to produce magnetic, optical and radar invisibility, that's how it was sold in the end. Einstein and Infeld did the preliminary study regarding expected local distortions of space curvature. But afterward, the calculations for the gravitational and nuclear-magnetic effects were made by Einstein, Taylor and Hulburt, correlated by Gebhardt, Bitter and Berkner, and checked by Neumann and Veblen. The required strength of the total field -- if it was to bend light and produce an electromagnetic mirage -- was anticipated by some of the models to be incredibly high.
And therefore that claim is extremely wrong.Brown himself, who had been aboard the USS Eldridge, suffered a nervous collapse.
"W" thinks that William Moore's "Dr Franklin Reno" is Louis A Gebhard, saying he died in 1968.
This death date of 1968 is definitely not correct, which brings W into suspicion, although he talks fluently about physics. The Washington Post reported Gebhard's death on 7 November 1981:J - Well then,that would make Dr. Franklin Reno - Lou Gebhard, then!?
W - Right you are!
J - So [G.E.] Simpson and [N.R.] Burger, in their novel "Thin Air", were barking up the right tree when they first named him Rinehart?
W - Yes, that was a superb clue from a very poor and sensationalized account. You'll find very little, if anything, about Taylor's assistant and co-worker, and one of the inventors of radar. But Rinehart was an excellent choice because, you see, his real name is not Gebhard, but Gebhardt - Louis Alfred Gebhardt - with the t at the end like 'Rinehart', or like the real German name for Rinehart, which is 'Rheinhardt', which has the same ending 'dt' as 'Gebhardt'. And he didn't die in 1977 or '78, but ten years earlier - in '68.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... 48756d615/
But there's perhaps an excuse. W is quite likely confusing Louis A Gebhard of the NRL with another Louis A Gebhard, head of the mathematics department at Williston Academy, who retired in 1968 and died in 1971, as reported by the New York Times. It's weird that there are two separate academics with identical name! And yet this seems to be the case.Dr. Louis A. Gebhard, 85, a former superintendent of the radio division of the Naval Research Laboratory and an early researcher in radio and radar, died Thursday at Greater Southeast Community Hospital after surgery for an abdominal disorder.
Dr. Gebhard, who was born in Buffalo, got his radio operator's license in 1910. During World War I, he served in the Navy at the Great Lakes Naval Radio Station. In 1919, he moved to Washington and joined the old Naval Aircraft Radio Laboratory. In 1923, he transferred to the Naval Research Laboratory and remained there until his death.
In the course of his career, Dr. Gebhard developed inventions on which he held 92 patents, according to the NRL. In the 1930s, he helped develop the first radar to become operational on Navy ships. For this he received a Certificate of Merit from President Truman in 1946.
From 1945 until 1966, Dr. Gebhard was superintendent of the laboratory's radio division. From 1966 until last year, he was a consultant in the electronics division. He then was a consultant in the technical information division.
https://www.nytimes.com/1971/09/21/arch ... bhard.html
Louis A Gebhard of the NRL, prime person of interest in the TPX mythos, wrote a 470-page NRL report in 1979 titled "Evolution of Naval Radio-Electronics and Contributions of the Naval Research Laboratory", which is available here.
https://www.navy-radio.com/manuals/nrl-history.pdf
Going on a journey, somewhere far out east
We'll find the time to show you, wonders never cease
We'll find the time to show you, wonders never cease
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Re: Townsend Brown, at the Philadelphia Naval Yard
Hey guys,
This stuff is all terrific.
Now that the book is actually in the world (can't believe I can actually say that!), part of my plan from here is to post stuff on the ttbrown.com website that visits various aspects of the story with links to selected chapters that I'll put online elsewhere. I've already started doing that in some cases.
For the past few months I've deep-dived into the Dark Arts of Search Engine Optimization and Keyword Research. "The Philadelphia Experiment" is one keyword phrase that generates some traffic, so this might be one of the threads I start with.
I have stashed all the reviews and comments the manuscript version generated on Amazon, and one of the criticisms was that I never addressed the Philadelphia Experiment. OK, fine... I'll do that as part of the sidebar 'marketing' routine.
So keep up the good work here, and don't be discouraged that it's just a handful of us. We've just left the starting blocks.
Thanks,
--PS
This stuff is all terrific.
Now that the book is actually in the world (can't believe I can actually say that!), part of my plan from here is to post stuff on the ttbrown.com website that visits various aspects of the story with links to selected chapters that I'll put online elsewhere. I've already started doing that in some cases.
For the past few months I've deep-dived into the Dark Arts of Search Engine Optimization and Keyword Research. "The Philadelphia Experiment" is one keyword phrase that generates some traffic, so this might be one of the threads I start with.
I have stashed all the reviews and comments the manuscript version generated on Amazon, and one of the criticisms was that I never addressed the Philadelphia Experiment. OK, fine... I'll do that as part of the sidebar 'marketing' routine.
So keep up the good work here, and don't be discouraged that it's just a handful of us. We've just left the starting blocks.
Thanks,
--PS
Paul Schatzkin, author of 'The Man Who Mastered Gravity' https://amz.run/6afz
.
It's "a multigenerational project." What's your hurry?
.
"We will just sail away from the Earth, as easily as this boat pushed away from the dock" - TTB
.
It's "a multigenerational project." What's your hurry?
.
"We will just sail away from the Earth, as easily as this boat pushed away from the dock" - TTB
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Re: Carlos Allende had a beautiful mind.
Paul, as you said, now that the book is out (Thanks for the link, btw. I have bought it, but have not re-started it yet) the real work begins.
Nate, I think Carlos Allende/Carl Allen heard a couple of stories about the PNY accident at the Thermal diffusion uranium refinement facility. that killed two members of the visiting Oak Ridge delegation. This wasn't made public until this century, but rumors would have flown at the time. Atomic energy expert Arnold Kramish, who was a private in the visiting party, has left a first hand account of the accident.
I picked both of these up from https://www.y12.doe.gov/sites/default/f ... 01-03.pdf and -17.pdf.
Unfortunately I have not been able to locate the originating source document.
This story was buried until this century and even now, detailed narratives seem to come and go. According to one, the internal organs of the dead were removed for autopsy, before the bodies were shipped home for burial. I believe this would have actually happened and given rise to the unsourced original report that the sailors (in the alleged PX incident) lost half of their bodies in the ship dematerialization/rematerialization process.
Which brings me to the other half of the origin story for Allende's fantastical claims. He knew, at least, by 1956, if not earlier, that ship degaussing methods were being used to make ships magnetically invisible to mine proximity fuses and had also intuited or learned later that radar invisibility was also a quest. But by the time of his "deathbed confession, 30 years later, his story had expanded to include two weeks under personal the tutelage of Einstein for the purpose of understanding invisibility which was a side effect of Einstein's quest for a space drive. (Wonder if Allende was a Star Trek fan?)
"Death Bed Statement" of Carlos Allende https://windmill-slayer.tripod.com/alia ... e/id3.html
Nate, I think Carlos Allende/Carl Allen heard a couple of stories about the PNY accident at the Thermal diffusion uranium refinement facility. that killed two members of the visiting Oak Ridge delegation. This wasn't made public until this century, but rumors would have flown at the time. Atomic energy expert Arnold Kramish, who was a private in the visiting party, has left a first hand account of the accident.
I picked both of these up from https://www.y12.doe.gov/sites/default/f ... 01-03.pdf and -17.pdf.
Unfortunately I have not been able to locate the originating source document.
This story was buried until this century and even now, detailed narratives seem to come and go. According to one, the internal organs of the dead were removed for autopsy, before the bodies were shipped home for burial. I believe this would have actually happened and given rise to the unsourced original report that the sailors (in the alleged PX incident) lost half of their bodies in the ship dematerialization/rematerialization process.
Which brings me to the other half of the origin story for Allende's fantastical claims. He knew, at least, by 1956, if not earlier, that ship degaussing methods were being used to make ships magnetically invisible to mine proximity fuses and had also intuited or learned later that radar invisibility was also a quest. But by the time of his "deathbed confession, 30 years later, his story had expanded to include two weeks under personal the tutelage of Einstein for the purpose of understanding invisibility which was a side effect of Einstein's quest for a space drive. (Wonder if Allende was a Star Trek fan?)
And, spoiler alelrt, Morris Jessup did not unalive himself:Allende maintains that in October of 1943, he was in a convoy of ships sailing to Algeria. "They did experiments then. I say they must have done it 144 times. I don't know. At least a thousand men have seen the ship become invisible. They radiated the target ship with electromagnetic beams. It started out as an experiment in degaussing ships so they wouldn't attract mines, and in making ships invisible to radar. But Einstein took it farther than anyone expected. He made the ship invisible to your eyes.
"Einstein was on the test ship the DE168. I was on the U.S.S. Feurseth. We were in a military convoy with many, many ships. I was on the bow. There is a place where you can stand on top of thick covers, about a foot above the deck. That's where I was. The railing was curved. I hooked my left hand under the railing and leaned out as far as I could. The force field was under my nose, you might say, really it was under my chest and neck. It had spread out from the target ship. I reached into it with my right arm. It kicked. Curiosity -- they say. That's why I did it. You might say I was satisfied. I had my question answered -- for the moment.
"The visibility of the force field is what disturbed Einstein and the defense investigators. As the ship became invisible the force field became visible. They couldn't figure it out. That's why Einstein came to me. He saw me put my arm in. He wanted to know what I saw, what I had felt, if I smelled anything, and why I had done it. He sort of gave me an intelligence test -- you might say. Once he realized that I did it out of a deep scientific curiosity, he spent time with me. He gave me a rapid course in the physics of invisibility during the next two and a half weeks.
"Einstein and his team were using the Navy for their research. The whole group was Jewish. Steinmetz wound the coils on the beam generator. It was based on the work of Tesla, but only Steinmetz could make the winding. That little drawf -- a hunchback -- was the world's best researcher.
What Einstein really was working on was a starship propulsion system. You have to realize that this was before rockets. This was before NASA's space program. This was Einstein's test of space travel -- starship drive at faster than light.
"Are you afraid for your life?" I asked. "Always," he said. "I am perpetually in hiding. Foremost from Communist sources. One thing I will say about Jessup is that he did not commit suicide. Since this is my final statement, I will tell you that I met him about two years after his supposed death. We talked all night long. He had killed the man who was sent to kill him, and taken the man's identification. That's why there was no autopsy.
Is Allende afraid of the U. S. Government? "No, not at all. They have given me some of the best protection I've ever seen. They have guarded my life. The U. S. has done a wonderful job, and I compliment them for such beautiful protection all this time. You see, my dream is the same as NASA's. My dream is for the United States to travel to the stars. If we build starships using Einstein's theory, we will never be short of natural resources like aluminum or copper, or iron. We will regain our number one position in the world.
"But right now there are only four men in the United States who understand Unified Field Theory. I am one of them -- but I am not a scientist. My knowledge is from experience and from time with Einstein. He taught me what he could and made me understand.
"Death Bed Statement" of Carlos Allende https://windmill-slayer.tripod.com/alia ... e/id3.html
Re: Townsend Brown, at the Philadelphia Naval Yard
I'm about 20% through so far. It's definitely a much slimmer read than the old one! I'll have more to say once I've finished it.Paul, as you said, now that the book is out (Thanks for the link, btw. I have bought it, but have not re-started it yet) the real work begins.
The thing for me has always been: what do we know, what can we prove, about Townsend's life? With the secondary questions of: what exactly was his conception of the Universe? He admired Einstein, but didn't really follow Einstein's ideas or methods, and even his own physical ideas seem murky. And then: how and why did Townsend' myth grow so large among the people who were seeking for "more than Einstein" in the 1950s through 1980s? People who were trying to find wrenches to throw into the "wheelwork of the universe". Especially when, on the face of it, there doesn't really seem to be much there in Townsend's scientific achievement list to build a myth on? Or at least not much "above the surface". Plenty of shadows and depths there, and then the recurring Greek chorus from the spy world of characters like "Morgan", which has been going on for decades.
In case it isn't clear: one of the reasons that "W B Smyth"'s take on TPX fascinates me is because I wondered in the 2000s, and still do now, if Smyth was maybe one of Morgan's friends or aliases. The time period is about the same. And the angle seems similar: US Navy adjacent people trying to establish Navy credentials in an inter-service dispute for something that can't yet be acknowledged but is an important matter of honour and pride (against who, I wonder? USAF and now Space Force?)
And Morgan's constant emphasis that we need to look at the private industrial networks of the inter-war period that preceded and underlay (and still underlie) the formal post-WW2 US military/science system are also very familiar from the UFO world. The claim that there are things that are "so highly classified that they're not classified at all" - moved in to the private sector, or perhaps never moved out of the private sector, so that government classification (and all its red tape and recordkeeping) doesn't apply. This is all a familiar story to me. We see something very similar in the UFO and ESP/psi research communities: again and again, it was industrial CEOs who funded research that was too embarrassing for the military or universities to touch. See for example, the 1968 Douglas Aircraft UFO project, which was Stanton Friedman's origin story. The current new generation of "UFO Disclosure" figures (Tom DeLonge, Louis Elizondo on one axis, Jeffrey Kripal, Diana Pasulka on another) seem to be repeating this same theme: look at the private companies, not the official mil-sci establishment.
If the Johnson/Stephenson "Caroline" link to.... wherever it links to.... is just a tall tale Morgan told us, it's a tall tale that has been going on for many decades, and I think William Moore was very familiar with it too. But where it's heading, what's the punchline, and who it benefits: that's what I still don't get. And while they now feel like old friends because of that familiarity, I still can't say that I entirely trust Morgan's team. While I wouldn't go so far as to say I think Morgan is a liar, I would say he and his friends are very persuasive and very slippery and love to create impressions by withholding important facts, and I don't even know if "O"Reilly" and "Twigsnapper" are or ever were real people and not aliases. I think there were a lot of sockpuppets and fake identities on the old forum (and on Linda's forums), and much drama, and.... so again, I wonder what "Morgan"'s deal is, and why he and his friends would talk so very much about things they apparently can't talk about? What is the impression that they were trying to convey - and why were they trying to convey it?
In the world of online scams in 2023 there is now the term "pig butchering", which describes hands-on, long-term deception operation involving fake identities who are performed online - the evolution of the "Nigerian prince" scam. These are commercial scams done by organized crime groups in bulk. "Morgan" and friends, however, were potentially backed by state-of-the-art military intelligence services and were communicating with a small handful of people, so.... you might see where I'm coming from? It seems it would be quite trivial to run a deception operation involving creating fake identities and performing them for years. Of course, Morgan might be a straight arrow and completely truthful in all of his communications! But he is not, sadly, always described as being that kind of person in all of the accounts of him - even Linda's diaries. And even if there was a real and 100% honest "Morgan" at one time, there might have also been multiple versions of this character. Again, impersonation and fake identity creation is trivial to do on the Internet - so trivial that it's done at scale today.
For the sake of future historians, I do hope that Morgan's original communications have been archived somewhere safe? Including all the email metadata, if possible.
Regards, Nate
Going on a journey, somewhere far out east
We'll find the time to show you, wonders never cease
We'll find the time to show you, wonders never cease
- Jan Lundquist
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Re: Townsend Brown, at the Philadelphia Naval Yard
Nate, sorry, I wasn't ignoring your question on my feelings about the Gone Dark paper. It has the charm of being written by an apparent insider who paid attention to the ebb and flow of organizational power and influence during the period of time when that abrasive outsider, Vannevar Bush, was cementing his control of the military R&D programs. He's right about many of the events of the day, but probably wrong on his interpretations of what was actually happening. Wilhelm Reich does not crop up in any of the credible scientific or military histories that i have seen any where else. Until it does, I will consider this just another story.
I am going to keep plodding along here at ground level, triangulating what I can, where I can. I do not have the details readily to hand, but I do note that he mentions the power struggle between Vannevar Bush and Harold Bowen. I have suspected that what drove Townsend to rage quit the Navy was that Bush had ignored the Navy's history of ground breaking research in the fields of RADAR and atomic energy, and given the prize plums to the Manhattan Project, US Army Signal Corps, and several university labs.
Townsend may or may not have been part of the resignation wave Bush boasted about, saying:
Bowen, a long time acquaintance/mentor, of Townsend/s had been the head of the Naval Bureau of Engineering from 1931 to 1939 and it was the BuEng (in Naval Parlance) which directed the assignment of Naval Reserve engineers on their annual periods of service. From 1939 Bowen was the head of the NRL:
Townsend was directed to transfer "his equipment" to the Navy in July of 42, The MEP was formally established in August, 1942, and Townsend was out the door in September.
I am going to keep plodding along here at ground level, triangulating what I can, where I can. I do not have the details readily to hand, but I do note that he mentions the power struggle between Vannevar Bush and Harold Bowen. I have suspected that what drove Townsend to rage quit the Navy was that Bush had ignored the Navy's history of ground breaking research in the fields of RADAR and atomic energy, and given the prize plums to the Manhattan Project, US Army Signal Corps, and several university labs.
Townsend may or may not have been part of the resignation wave Bush boasted about, saying:
p. 97 https://www.nasonline.org/publications ... nnevar.pdf"I remember one time when a section walked into my office and resigned as a body," he wrote. "I still do not know quite what the row was about. So I just told them, One does not resign in time of war. You chaps get the hell out of here and get back to work, and I'll look into it.' "
Bowen, a long time acquaintance/mentor, of Townsend/s had been the head of the Naval Bureau of Engineering from 1931 to 1939 and it was the BuEng (in Naval Parlance) which directed the assignment of Naval Reserve engineers on their annual periods of service. From 1939 Bowen was the head of the NRL:
https://military-history.fandom.com/wik ... _Bowen,_Sr.Bowen was the Assistant Chief of the Bureau of Engineering from 1931 to 1935 and then the Chief of the Bureau of engineering from 1935 to 1939.[12] While there Bowen was a champion for research and development (R&D) of high pressure, high temperature steam propulsion.[7] A technology said to radically change maritime steam turbine operation, increasing the speed and range of Navy ships in World War II.[13]
Bowen was Director of the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) from 1939 to 1941. According to Amato, in "Pushing the Horizon", a history of the Naval Research Laboratory, Bowen's leadership of NRL was mixed. He championed vital research, such as Radar, yet his personality conflicts with key figures like Vannevar Bush and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox ultimately excluded the Navy and NRL from the Manhattan Project.
Townsend was directed to transfer "his equipment" to the Navy in July of 42, The MEP was formally established in August, 1942, and Townsend was out the door in September.
Last edited by Jan Lundquist on Wed Mar 22, 2023 4:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
- Paul Schatzkin
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Re: Townsend Brown, at the Philadelphia Naval Yard
Well now, that IS a lot to digest...
Nate, your perspective has always been very... what's the word... Precise? Acute? Incisive?
For example, I've kept close at hand this summary that you offered back in March, 2008, shortly after the original Epilogue was posted:
viewtopic.php?p=13280#p13280
...which begins:
![🤦🏻♂️](//cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/twitter/twemoji@latest/assets/svg/1f926-1f3fb-200d-2642-fe0f.svg)
That summary you posted in 2008 gets to most of the major possibilities.
I still have to get my head on straight re: how we digest the rest of this monster (one bite at a time?).
In the meantime, I want to address this:
I do have all the original communications/files, but given the rapid evolution of digital technology and the equally rapid obsolescence of dated formats, access gets more difficult with each passing generation of technology. This is a problem of our times, generally. I mean, I still have a handful of 5-1/2 floppy discs from from 80s and 90s I can't do a thing with.
All of my correspondence with Morgan, Boston/O'Riley/Twigsnapper, Linda etal, was conducted using the Eudora email program on Windows. I migrated to the Apple/Mac platform starting in 2007 but was still running Windows in a Parallels window for at least another year. I exported the folders with all of those messages onto an archival hard drive here in The Garret, and those files are backed up locally and remotely. So the 'data' is safe, but retrieving the info is... umm... problematic at best.
As I was working my way through the rewrite over the past year, I managed to get all of the Morgan emails exported into a searchable spreadsheet. It does make for some interesting - if at times obtuse- reading. It's all there, but some of it is mixed up with a lot of HTML code (an artifact of the Eudora iteration). A couple of times I had to dump the marked up text into a Wordpress document so that I could see through the code.
I tried to do the same with the Boston/O'Riley/Twigsnapper ("BOT"? I love me some acronyms!) stuff but that didn't work as well.
Here's an illustration of of how all this evolving technology does not serve us:
In addition to all the Windows/Eudora-generated email folders, I stored a lot of my notes and research using MS Office OneNote. I still have all those files, too. But they were generated a version of OneNote from 2007. In order to even get them into a format that can be imported into the current version of OneNote, they first have to be exported from the original format into the format that came after that, which I think can then be imported into the latest version.
A couple of months ago I put a work request on 'Fiverr.com' (the source of my cover design and layout for the new version) for somebody to execute the multi-generation extraction / restoration, and got exactly zero responses. I may have to go on eBay and buy a laptop that runs WindowsXP from the 'aughts.
So, yeah, all the original stuff still exists, and I think sometimes of creating an online archive, as you say, for 'future historians.' But first the 'data' has to be retrieved / converted into a 2020s readable format.
And if I ever hear from Linda again, I would like to get her permission to post 'Structure of Space' online in its entirely in a searchable format. That might be the best insight we can get into what was lurking in the inner recesses of TTBs mind.
But that proposition is a whole other can of worms.
--PS
Nate, your perspective has always been very... what's the word... Precise? Acute? Incisive?
For example, I've kept close at hand this summary that you offered back in March, 2008, shortly after the original Epilogue was posted:
viewtopic.php?p=13280#p13280
...which begins:
Ain't the the f'ing truth....I kind of wish we had a Wiki here... so many names, events, and organisations to juggle.
Most of the material will be familiar. What is different is the context that I've set it in (as an extension of the Farnsworth bio) and a couple of assumptions I decided to run with in the 2nd half.
The thing for me has always been: what do we know, what can we prove, about Townsend's life?
That summary you posted in 2008 gets to most of the major possibilities.
I still have to get my head on straight re: how we digest the rest of this monster (one bite at a time?).
In the meantime, I want to address this:
The answer is mostly yes, with some qualifications.For the sake of future historians, I do hope that Morgan's original communications have been archived somewhere safe? Including all the email metadata, if possible.
I do have all the original communications/files, but given the rapid evolution of digital technology and the equally rapid obsolescence of dated formats, access gets more difficult with each passing generation of technology. This is a problem of our times, generally. I mean, I still have a handful of 5-1/2 floppy discs from from 80s and 90s I can't do a thing with.
All of my correspondence with Morgan, Boston/O'Riley/Twigsnapper, Linda etal, was conducted using the Eudora email program on Windows. I migrated to the Apple/Mac platform starting in 2007 but was still running Windows in a Parallels window for at least another year. I exported the folders with all of those messages onto an archival hard drive here in The Garret, and those files are backed up locally and remotely. So the 'data' is safe, but retrieving the info is... umm... problematic at best.
As I was working my way through the rewrite over the past year, I managed to get all of the Morgan emails exported into a searchable spreadsheet. It does make for some interesting - if at times obtuse- reading. It's all there, but some of it is mixed up with a lot of HTML code (an artifact of the Eudora iteration). A couple of times I had to dump the marked up text into a Wordpress document so that I could see through the code.
I tried to do the same with the Boston/O'Riley/Twigsnapper ("BOT"? I love me some acronyms!) stuff but that didn't work as well.
Here's an illustration of of how all this evolving technology does not serve us:
In addition to all the Windows/Eudora-generated email folders, I stored a lot of my notes and research using MS Office OneNote. I still have all those files, too. But they were generated a version of OneNote from 2007. In order to even get them into a format that can be imported into the current version of OneNote, they first have to be exported from the original format into the format that came after that, which I think can then be imported into the latest version.
A couple of months ago I put a work request on 'Fiverr.com' (the source of my cover design and layout for the new version) for somebody to execute the multi-generation extraction / restoration, and got exactly zero responses. I may have to go on eBay and buy a laptop that runs WindowsXP from the 'aughts.
So, yeah, all the original stuff still exists, and I think sometimes of creating an online archive, as you say, for 'future historians.' But first the 'data' has to be retrieved / converted into a 2020s readable format.
And if I ever hear from Linda again, I would like to get her permission to post 'Structure of Space' online in its entirely in a searchable format. That might be the best insight we can get into what was lurking in the inner recesses of TTBs mind.
But that proposition is a whole other can of worms.
--PS
Paul Schatzkin, author of 'The Man Who Mastered Gravity' https://amz.run/6afz
.
It's "a multigenerational project." What's your hurry?
.
"We will just sail away from the Earth, as easily as this boat pushed away from the dock" - TTB
.
It's "a multigenerational project." What's your hurry?
.
"We will just sail away from the Earth, as easily as this boat pushed away from the dock" - TTB
- Jan Lundquist
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Re: Townsend Brown, at the Philadelphia Naval Yard
Paul, perhaps there is an archivist somewhere within the Vanderbilt U. library system than can help you sort out the retrieval issues?
Nate, I want to acknowledge your bolded statement from Smythe
A secret NBO salvage operation led by [T.T.] Brown brought back the mechanism of another captured magnetic mine
By saying "brought back" I thought perhaps Smythe was saying that this was part of the mission of the USS Nashville. However the dates don't match. The Nashville gold retrieval occurred in 1938. The first reported capture of a German mine was November, 1939. The 1940 Tizzard mission to the United States was for the purpose of handing off accumulated weapons research from GB to the US, to ensure its continuation should Britain fall.
This does not mean that Smythe is wrong, just that i have been unable to triangulate any supporting evidence for his claim.
Also, I think, somewhere, you mention the secrets revealed by "Morgan"....as far as I can tell, he revealed nothing that was not already known at the time. He even referenced james Bamford in one of his messages and these two books have been immensely helpful to me.
Bamford, James (1982). The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization. Viking Penguin.
Bamford, James (2001). Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. Doubleday.
Also, re: the Ball Lightening monograph, written by James Dale Barry, I think your response indicated that you attributed it to "Morgan"...perhaps because Linda had settled on James Dave Barrett as her pseudonym for the Morgan character. The publication date of 1980 certainly makes it possible that the document was written at the behest of, or with the assistance of Townsend, toward the end of his life, but from what i know of "Morgan", he did not/does not have the type of science background that would have stirred an interest in the subject.
Nate, I want to acknowledge your bolded statement from Smythe
A secret NBO salvage operation led by [T.T.] Brown brought back the mechanism of another captured magnetic mine
By saying "brought back" I thought perhaps Smythe was saying that this was part of the mission of the USS Nashville. However the dates don't match. The Nashville gold retrieval occurred in 1938. The first reported capture of a German mine was November, 1939. The 1940 Tizzard mission to the United States was for the purpose of handing off accumulated weapons research from GB to the US, to ensure its continuation should Britain fall.
This does not mean that Smythe is wrong, just that i have been unable to triangulate any supporting evidence for his claim.
Also, I think, somewhere, you mention the secrets revealed by "Morgan"....as far as I can tell, he revealed nothing that was not already known at the time. He even referenced james Bamford in one of his messages and these two books have been immensely helpful to me.
Bamford, James (1982). The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization. Viking Penguin.
Bamford, James (2001). Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. Doubleday.
Also, re: the Ball Lightening monograph, written by James Dale Barry, I think your response indicated that you attributed it to "Morgan"...perhaps because Linda had settled on James Dave Barrett as her pseudonym for the Morgan character. The publication date of 1980 certainly makes it possible that the document was written at the behest of, or with the assistance of Townsend, toward the end of his life, but from what i know of "Morgan", he did not/does not have the type of science background that would have stirred an interest in the subject.