Winterhaven, Cleveland, Praiirie Chickens and Barbers point

Long-time Townsend Brown inquirer Jan Lundquist – aka 'Rose' in The Before Times – has her own substantial archive to share with readers and visitors to this site. This forum is dedicated to the wealth of material she has compiled: her research, her findings, and her speculations.
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Jan Lundquist
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Winterhaven, Cleveland, Praiirie Chickens and Barbers point

Post by Jan Lundquist »

Paul, you and I have been talking about the degree to which the Winterhaven proposal was a complete misdirection. I have not looked at it again, , but I recall it laid out a comprehensive space program. I don't remember much hard science in it. Maybe it was there, and my eyes glazed over during that part. Anyway, the document seemed to me to be created for public consumption.

I believe the final "master plan" for the space program eventually came from RAND, though I am sure they had input from many sources.

But I also believe that Townsend made a significant contribution to HOW our reach for the stars would be achieved. Specifically, I think he took "something" from Cleveland Brush, or if that was a cover assignment for public eyes, then he had achieved positive results from experiments at the then Aeronautical Engine Research Laboratory in Cleveland. (Yup, the one transitioned to NASA, to become the John Glenn/NASA Lewis lab), and was looking to hand it off for further development.

You were right. Now that I think about it, all of this was happening in the Wounded Prairie Chicken period. when Linda and Jo were in Zanesville, surviving by the grace of family goodness. Townsend had been forced into that ignnominius role when he learned that there had been a security leak about the Barbers Point demonstration for President Truman in 1949.

Side note 1: Also in 1949, noted British spy and ringleader of the Cambridge Five, Kim Philby became the head of the DC office of MI6. He and James Angleton, who would become the head the CIA in 1956, were besties.
So when Philby finally defected to Moscow in January 1963, Angleton was shattered. For 19 years, his mentor and dear companion had played him for a fool, while stealing atomic secrets, US plans for the Korean War and countless secrets that had been read by Stalin.
https://www.smh.com.au/world/did-the-ci ... 00b7m.html

Make of that what you will

Side note 2, here: paraphrasing from I forget where:Beau Kitselman has said writtenthat he was in Hawaii [for that Barbers Point experiment?} teaching the Gravitar math (calculus or calculus-plus?) to a dozen students.

Side note 3: The historical records of that trip only tell us that Truman was taken on a tour around the island of Oahu that ended with a stop at Barbers Point A young woman, part of Truman's secretarial detail, reported that she was delighted to be invited along, but the tour was halted midway, by a messenger telling her she was needed back at the base. She was baffled when the urgent need for her return was nothing more than to inform her about the name of partner for that evening's dinner.

Side note 4. Truman's pilot noted that the plane carried a new Command/Communications system that enabled them to communicate with ships (and a submarine) stationed along their flight route. Thus the president never had to go "off line" during the entire Pacific crossing.
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Re: Winterhaven, Cleveland, Praiirie Chickens and Barbers point

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teaching the Gravitar math
What do we think "Gravitar" means in this context?

The word was used for a 1982 arcade game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitar) and is hard to tease out of the Google noise before that, but from personal experience of being a giant nerd as a kid I believe it came from science-fiction via science: I'm pretty sure "gravitar" was a portmanteau for "gravity star", ie, an early term for a black hole in the General Relativity community, along with "dark star", "black star", "frozen star" and similar terms. It's long washed out of the "legitimate" science literature of course, much like "meson" did.

(Not to be confused with "graser" (gravity laser) which would have appeared after at least "maser" in 1953, and turns up in odd Townsend-Adjacent company as well: in the writings of Leon Brillouin ("Relativity Reexamined", 1970), with Brillouin linked to Mankind Research Unlimited alumnus John Carstoiu, while Jerry Gallimore, founder of the US Psychotronics Association cira 1975, claimed to have actually built a graser. And Gallimore became fascinated in the 1970s - as the Russian "torsion physics" people had - with the idea that the General Relativistic gravity field could be the carrier wave for psi. Again, odd gravity-related (and psi/radionics-related) goings-on in a very familiar Townsendian kind of vein, as well as in a circle of people who seem to have crossed paths with him.)

But all that's a 1970s red herring, because in 1949, nobody would have been teaching General Relativity math to workday US Navy radio techs would they? So was "gravitar" in this context some kind of gee-whiz slang term, like "atomic"? Or a technical mathematical term of art of Kitselman's, like the extremely disappointing "phasors" one comes across in electrical engineering?

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Re: Barbers point demonstation

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Who knows, Nate? It wasn't the Vening Meinez gravimeter, and probably wasn't the permanent measurement station that was reportedly moved from the East Coast to the West Coast in 1943.

According to Linda, via Twigsnapper, there were two parts to the 1949 Barbers' Point demonstration, one of a communications type and one on something we assume to be what Beau called a gravitar. I have never seen a picture of one of those, but I have seen a photo of the large ship (not saucer ship) model that was purportedly part of one or both demonstrations.

Beau later expounded on gravitar math with (calculus). A decade later he was in California consulting to the space program. Trajectory calculations were being done according to the (cumbersome) Ouspensky method, but some genius made use of the company computers at night to calculate them more efficiently while the day staff plodded along.

And then came orbital trajectories
Last edited by Jan Lundquist on Wed Feb 08, 2023 12:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Barbers point demonstation

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Jan Lundquist wrote: Tue Feb 07, 2023 10:40 pm According to Linda, via Twigsnapper, there were two parts to the 1949 Barbers' Point demonstration, one of a communications type and one on something we assume to be what Beau called a gravitar... Beau later expounded on gravitar math with (calculus).
Fascinating! And we're absolutely certain that that thing demonstrated in 1949 was a gravitAr, with an A, and not a gravitOr, with an O? Two letters which might perhaps be misread for each other if handwritten? Or might Kitselman have modified the name himself?

Because Townsend's gravitator was sometimes called a gravitor, and from the Projet Montgolfier report annexes, I see that Townsend's whole routine in the 1950s appeared to start out by demonstrating and replicating the old-school gravi(ta)tor. In the Montgolfier case, this was a very simple device: a plexiglass square as the solid dielectric with aluminium foil glued on each side as the electrodes. This was hung vertically, energised with high-voltage low-amperage DC current, and it apparently deflected several millimetres to the side. It made for a very simple, easily replicated initial demonstration.

And this behaviour of the 1950s-style gravitator did seem to obey odd laws in its charge/discharge/deflection curves, involving perhaps diurnal, lunar and sidereal correlations, as Townsend's Differential Electrometer of the same era (but build using 1930s technology) also did. But the data would be quite subtle and noisy, and extracting all the information from it would be tricky.

There would be a big science argument over what precisely this data showed, because diurnal curves (linked specifically to the Earth's rotation with respect to the Sun) could be argued to be thermal effects, though Townsend thought that they might be the same effect that Fernando Sanford observed in 1923 in earth currents, and that there was a link between gravity and the electrostatic field of the Earth. But a lunar relationship really starts to look more like a gravity effect, and a sidereal relationship starts to suggest the unthinkable: either that Special Relativity was wrong and we can observe the Earth's movement through the absolute ether, or that there is some kind of observable Mach effect (the relationship between Earth and the average gravitational/inertial pull of the "fixed stars"). This was long before the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation had been observed, of course.

Either way, that a purely electrostatic device could detect these kind of relationships is still considered unthinkable by modern science, and would also have been seen as unthinkable in the 1950s. So data claiming to show this would be a total battleground. Very contentious territory.

So is it possible that Kitselman's "gravitar math" in 1949 might have been an attempt to seriously analyse these deflection curves with calculus? He'd be the man to do it (carrying on from Roger Babson and Floyd Odlum, who were also interested in these correlations, but had less math and almost no physical science) and Townsend would have the devices and plotter charts which contained the raw data to be analysed.

Nate
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Re: Barbers point demonstration

Post by Jan Lundquist »

Don't ask me about spelling, Nate. I can't even seem to manage prairie, but I think it was Gravitor, after all.

Wasn't it Fernando Sanford who found that earthquake waves propagated faster when they passed through certain plates or subterranean earth layers and slower when they passed through others?

I suspect the 1932 IPY Gravity Cruise was prospecting at all sorts of places for reasons yet unknown. I do hope the 19 photographic records from the survey come to light some day. But at the time of the Barber's point demo, ELF was just being born. It enabled communication with submarines without requiring them to surface first.
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