Alva LaSalle "Beau"Kitselman, Genius Mathmatician

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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Alva LaSalle "Beau"Kitselman, Genius Mathmatician

Post by Jan Lundquist »

I am just beginning to dig into old and new records for Beau. Phil Young maintains The Kitselman Collection at https://kitselman.com.

Bea was the brilliant scion in a midwest family that made its wealth in barbed wire. "Beau" first came to the public eye as a child, when some national magazine/newspaper identified him as one of the smartest children in Los Angeles

He graduated from Babson College at the age of 19, having earned the title of GOAT in at least one class, Reportedly he had also developed a statistical method for stocks analysis by then.

According to family lore, he has said he spent WWII in a hotel room wearing earphones, though his bio states that he was working with Vega in Los Angeles. Beau also read Sanskrit. His book "The Time Teachers" is a translation of an ancient document in that language He was involved with the early computers, and is proclaimed to be the actual inventer of FORTRAN.

Later in life, he was on the West Coast, doing missile math. He is said to have audited classes with mathematician Uspensky at Stanford, though records buried in the Stanford archive record that a 3000 sq.', ten room house was rented to A.L. Kitselman, Jr. "and students" He also has said he spent some time in Hawaii teaching calculus to the dozen students who would build Townsend's Gravitor, ca 1947-49

He loved women and apparently, they loved him, as he had 3 or 4 wives and alimony and child support kept him broke, George, Townsend's SIL, recalls a cutting an insert for Beau's shoes on one of his visits to Catalina. He had not been able to could afford to get the hole in the sole repaired.

He lived his life with gusto. He promoted the Huna teachings of Max Freedom Long in the early fifties,but vibed perfectly with the sexually liberated California New Age scene a decade later. During that time, he was conducting psi research with persons under the influence of magic mushrooms and other psychedelics. To the shock and disapproval of his Mother and current wife, he hoped to turn the family's Pyramid Lake property in Nevada into a tripping spot/retreat center.

He was also friends with the Aldous Huxleys and L. Ron Hubbard, though the two later had a falling out.

He fancied himself a writer, but it wasn't his forte. Beau's novel, The Fuse, reads like the fantasies of a lustful young man.

Somewhere, along the line, perhaps during WWII, he and Townsend became besties and Beau would forever after be Townsend's number 1 booster and promoter.


Sidenote Acting on his desire to repay a debt, Babson would create the Gravity Research Foundation, in 1947 He had become wealthy using Newton’s laws of action and reaction and gravitation, to predict the stock market, and, as his giveback, funded awards to top researchers in the field.
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Re: Beau"Kitselman. Project Mohole

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In the Before Times, when we Brown Hounds gathered in forums, we passed around a boatload of amount of information, much of which is in the wind at the moment. Canadian math whiz and beloved soul, Raymond Lavas, found, somewhere, Beau's full bio, written when he was in his sixties and posted it to the thread entitled A World Class Mathematician at https://www.cosmic-token.com/forum/vie ... ?f=4&t=554

Someone seems to have replaced it with the image below, leading me to locate How an ill-fated undersea adventure in the 1960s changed the way scientists see the Earth. Sometimes there’s success in failure , Byrd Pinkerton Mar 17, 2021 at https://www.vox.com/unexplainable/2227 ... le-podcast

The idea was of drilling into the inner earth was flamed by a quirky group known as the American Miscellaneous Society, "an informal association of people interested in weird ideas in the Earth sciences. (They also occasionally sent each other a big stuffed albatross in acknowledgement of work well done. As far as scientific societies go, it was a fun one.)"

The Society held a breakfast meeting at "a member’s" house in La Jolla, California to talk about the idea they were calling “Project Mohole” — and to figure out how to get to the Moho boundary.

As the project progressed, members met again aboard an old oil ship named the Cuss1 and set sail for Mexico. John Steinbeck joined the group, as a journalist from LIFE magazine. He is on the far left in the 2nd photo. (Is the gentleman in the middle is stuffing his face or hiding his face? I don't know who he is, but he is younger and smaller than Beau.)

According to the resume Phil holds, Beau worked on Project Mohole. He had a home in the Bird Rock section of La Jolla, and was most certainly eccentric enough to have reveled in joining anything known as The American Miscellaneous Society.
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Re: Beau Kitselman & Project Mohole?

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Having attachment trouble. if this works, I will edit them into the previous post later
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Re: Alva LaSalle "Beau"Kitselman, Genius Mathmatician

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He graduated from Babson College
Oh! That's something I didn't realise we knew until now. Okay, so that draws a direct line from Roger Babson and the GRC circle, to Kitselman and.... whatever proto-Scientology / proto-EST / proto-Esalen / Extremely On Brand For California But Way Early stuff he was doing in the 1950s.

You could point at Kitselman in the 1950s, and then point at Stewart Brand and Douglas Engelbart in the 1960s, or at Steve Jobs and Mitch Kapor in the 1970s, and almost be seeing the same type of Extremely California person. "Genius tech nerd with mystical/guru inclinations". Just Kitselman being at the leading edge of that curve.

Add JCR Licklider and his 1963 quasi-mystical vision of the "Intergalactic Computer Network" perhaps into that personality profile, although he was maybe more East Coast than California. But there was something interesting going through his head when he wrote that memo, and I'd like to know from where that came. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergala ... er_Network

Edit: Here's Licklider's actual "Intergalactic Computer Network" memo: https://www.kurzweilai.net/memorandum-f ... er-network

I suspect he was a sci-fi nerd making a sci-fi joke (this was 1963, so before Star Trek, so it would have had to be print SF) about how very "alien" each computer system in the pre-ARPANET system of networks was to each other, and less about an Internet that could extend into the actual galaxy.
There is an analogous problem, and probably a more difficult one, in the matter of language for the control of a network of computers. Consider the situation in which several different centers are netted together, each center being highly individualistic and having its own special language and its own special way of doing things. Is it not desirable, or even necessary for all the centers to agree upon some language or, at least, upon some conventions for asking such questions as “What language do you speak?” At this extreme, the problem is essentially the one discussed by science fiction writers: “how do you get communications started among totally uncorrelated “sapient” beings?” But, I should not like to make an extreme assumption about the uncorellatedness. (I am willing to make an extreme assumption about the sapience.) The more practical set of questions is: Is the network control language the same thing as the time-sharing control language? (If so, the implication is that there is a common time-sharing control language.) Is the network control language different from the time-sharing control language, and is the network-control language common to the several netted facilities? Is there no such thing as a network-control language? (Does one, for example, simply control his own computer in such a way as to connect it into whatever part of the already-operating net he likes, and then shift over to an appropriate mode?)
Note that at the time Licklider wrote this (April 1963), even the ASCII code for text was just starting to be specified, that same month. So computers from different manufacturers really did speak alien languages to each other. The ARPANET project (1966-1969) and its packet-switching was the next step, and that took until 1983 to become the TCP/IP we now think of as the "lowest" level of computer communications.

Anyway, Licklider (born 1915) was a contemporary of Kitselman (born 1914) and both only ten years younger than Thomas Townsend Brown.

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Re: Alva LaSalle "Beau"Kitselman, Genius Mathmatician

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Below is a part of a report of a visit 2 colleagues of J.B.Rhine had with Beau Kitselman at his home in LaJolla, they spent a whole day with Beau. It took place in 1961. Beau had voluminous correspondence with J. B. Rhine regarding esp and computer testing in that era.
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Re: Alva LaSalle "Beau"Kitselman, Genius Mathmatician

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Thank you, Phil. It is always interesting to read what people like Beau, Bradford Shank, and Mason Rose had to say in regard to Townsend's story line. I am sure that each was highly conscious of what could be overt and told, and what should be kept covert and hidden, and so I wonder if they practiced intentional obfuscation.

For one thing, Beau would have known that Townsend was not, ever, an Air Force officer. For another, I suspect that "Bell Aerospace" was actually Bendix, and the tests Beau mentioned were among those performed for Wm. Cody.

But, then, it is also possible, as the "need to know" was practiced even among those with top secret clearances, that the stories the men told were heard from Townsend himself.

Nothing is ever solid in the weebly-wobbly rabbit hole world.
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Re: Alva LaSalle "Beau"Kitselman, Genius Mathmatician

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Below is a part of a report of a visit 2 colleagues of J.B.Rhine had with Beau Kitselman at his home in LaJolla, they spent a whole day with Beau. It took place in 1961. Beau had voluminous correspondence with J. B. Rhine regarding esp and computer testing in that era.
Thanks for this, Phil. I didn't know that Kitselman hung out with Rhine, but it doesn't surprise in the least because I knew that Kitselman's name was linked with ESP and computer testing because of at least one DTIC report.

I thought the specific report I was thinking of wasn't this one, but when I Google "dtic kitselman" today the only hit I see is a citation in this 1963 report:

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0414809.pdf
Testing for Extrasensory Perception With a Machine
WILLAM R.SMITH
EVERETT F. DAGLE
MARGARET D. HILL
JOHN MOTT-SMITH
Kitselman. A. L., "How to Use a Digital Computer as a Means of Studying the Nature of Time". Privately distributed. 1961
And I also see this Rhine citation:
Rhine. J. B., The Reach of the Mind,William Sloan Assoc.. New York. 1947
The significance of Rhine publishing a book called "The Reach of the Mind", of course, is that Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff called their first 1977 book describing what became STAR GATE, "Mind-Reach". So I guess they were Rhine fans and their book title is a deliberate homage. Again, not surprising since Rhine was pretty much the only scientific name in parapsychology, but still. There's an unbroken lineage there of military-adjacent ESP interest which isn't always well publicised. And Kitselman and Townsend Brown appear to be both nodes in that lineage.
I suspect that "Bell Aerospace" was actually Bendix
That may well be, but Bell has its own entry in the "weird science club" of the 1940s-1960s because of Arthur M Young's interest in psychic studies. It doesn't seem impossible to me that where there were aerospace engineers who were interested in ESP, there may have also been aerospace engineers interested in UFOs and in gravity control. These interests seem to cluster together.

(Exactly why these three subjects cluster together, even as far back as the 1940s, is the question, and I assume the answer involves shared circles or projects that ESP, UFO and gravity-hackers must have been part of. One of those circles being Borderland Sciences Research Foundation, but it still doesn't seem enough to explain the full linkage. One could of course make the conceptual leap that many in the UFO underbrush do, and that's to say that "there was a UFO replication project" which brought together these subjects. A simpler explanation is that the classic 1950s UFO sighting experience seemed to display both ESP effects and what looked like gravitational propulsion, so this coincidence naturally inspired "replication" attempts combining the three. But, there might be a more fundamental sociological explanation, which is to say that some people who were already interested in both gravity and ESP came into collision with the UFO world and found justification for their beliefs there. It's very interesting to me that Townsend circa 1980 (in his letters) specifically said that he had NOT had a UFO sighting personally. Yet he seems to have overlapped with the Contactee community: according to Linda, he was interested enough in the Venusian Scout Ship in the early 1950s to build a scale model of it for his experiments.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_M._Young
Young had become profoundly disturbed by the development of nuclear weapons at the end of the Second World War and decided that humanity needed a new philosophical paradigm.

In August 1946 Young recorded in his notes the idea of the psychopter – the helicopter as the "winged self", a metaphor for the human spirit.[1] By October 1947 Young felt his work at Bell was complete, and he turned to the next phase of his career as a philosopher of mind (or soul). In 1949, the Franklin Institute awarded him the Edward Longstreth Medal.[2] In 1952, Young and his wife Ruth organized the Foundation for the Study of Consciousness in Philadelphia, the forerunner of the Institute for the Study of Consciousness.

Also in 1952, Young and Ruth participated in seances conducted by Andrija Puharich's Roundtable Foundation.[3
Of course if Young himself had left Bell by 1947, he probably wasn't the connecting node there between Townsend Brown and Kitselman in 1961. But what about Lawrence Dale Bell? As his employer, he seems like he can't have been completely unaware of Young's ideas.

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Beau Kitselman ca. 1961

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Nate,

I have a trail of drafts behind me started as replies to your posts. I come back to them when I find another thread for the tapestry we are weaving, but as you know, once started, the weaving tends to go on a bit..

This response will be short and sweet though, as it is in regards to "Kitselman. A. L., "How to Use a Digital Computer as a Means of Studying the Nature of Time, Privately distributed. 1961[/

That year seems to have been on of personal significance to him. From his Vita, written in 1978, two years before his death:
By 1961 had developed a statistical method whereby “continuum transmission” may be added to the repertory of predictive methods; verified this in 1961-1963.
and
In 1961 prepared a report on para-prediction which led to Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory [AFCRL} Project 4610, which appeared in May of 1963.
and again, in his 1960-1978 work summary,
development of continuum transmission as a means of making predictions
As you know, sources surface for a while and then submerge again. It seemed to me that those which bobbed up as AFCRL Project 4610 described very early communications research, must of which was based on newly computerized statistical methods. From that starting point, the topic would grow, becoming the focus of the the first, but certainly not the last, IEEE Symposium on Communications Research in 1965.

It seemed to me that the newly formed AFCRL communications group focused on such things as codebreaking cybernetics, speech recognition. and the applications that would make these efforts possible. But ithese were all meat and potatoes stuff to Beau. He had been developing weighted probability algorithms since 1939

He was also conducting ESP tests on volunteers from a college population. This too was a study for the AFCRL Communications group.

At the time I was able to track it contractually, I saw that it followed the typical pattern of being funded for two years and then disappearing. I think we can be certain that this work popped up again at Stanford as Project Stargate.
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Re: Alva LaSalle "Beau"Kitselman, Genius Mathmatician

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Nate,

I have a trail of drafts behind me started as replies to your posts. I come back to them when I find another thread for the tapestry we are weaving, but as you know, once started, the weaving tends to go on a bit..
And I apologise for being away for six months, because these are fascinating threads and the tapestry is as large as ARPA, I think. The 1940s-1970s were a time when scientists dreamed big dreams about challenging the frontiers of the universe and expanding the human mind. The Internet and the desktop GUI computer both came at the end of those dreams, but even weirder dreams were on the table in between.

Yes, Project 4610 is the one I was thinking of. I didn't find it because it doesn't specifically mention Kitselman, the link is in reverse, from Kitselman's CV.

DTIC has a *lot* of Project 4610 documents. It appears to have been (or been part of) the Communications Sciences Laboratory.

https://discover.dtic.mil/results/?q=ca ... gsc.page=1

I don't know if I got to explore all of those when I was first looking at them, back around 2016. But the entry that made me laugh then, is still there.
research-nate.JPG
"Twigsnapper / Morgan", or whoever was posting as them, used to go on about a "special tunnel diode" invented around this time, without ever explaining what made it so special. I doubt this particular tunnel diode is the one, but this one is a glimpse of what was going on in the world of tunnel diodes in Project 4610, 1962/1963. "Experimental Tunnel-Diode Converter for Conversion of X-Band Frequencies to UHF" https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0404287.pdf

1959, "A CONCISE BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE LITERATURE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE" by Alice M Pierce (24 pages). This was the very early era of Lisp, "General Problem Solver"... and the Perceptron (the first neural network machine learning system), which had just been described in 1958. Marvin Minsky didn't like neural networks, and I don't like them either, but (waves hands at Chat-GPT) it turns out they can do things when you brute-force enough data into them. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/trecms/pdf/AD0607640.pdf

4610 seems to have been doing a lot to do with radio and speech processing. By 1964, it's listed as the "Communications" project of the Office of Aerospace Research. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0610023.pdf

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Re: Alva LaSalle "Beau"Kitselman, Genius Mathmatician

Post by Jan Lundquist »

I see it: Research NATE! LOL

It's great to have you back, but RL must always be your/our priority.

Yep, that's the correct 4610. Where speech and processing all began.

I, too, remember some vague references (as they all were) to the tunnel diode. Invented by Esaki in 1957, "is an application of the p–n junction in a way that requires a quantum mechanical view of matter in a special form. The tunnel diode is a p–n junction formed between a degenerate p-type material and a degenerate n-type material. The variation of current with voltage for the diode is controlled by quantum mechanical tunneling between the two sides of the diode."

Well, now I understand EVERYTHING.

I wish.

If Gamow came up with the proof for quantum tunneling, then I suppose Esaki's diode ia an extension on his work?

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Re: Alva LaSalle "Beau"Kitselman, Genius Mathmatician

Post by natecull »

Jan Lundquist wrote: Mon Dec 11, 2023 3:36 pm Yep, that's the correct 4610. Where speech and processing all began.
So looking at the index of Projects and Tasks around that time, I see the 4600s seems to be stuff to do with "electronics", and 4610 specifically about electronic communication - and even more specifically, about speech processing, vocoders, modulation, perceptual encoding, and statistical techniquest to find out the smallest number of bits to send to get a good voice communication channel. Very familiar stuff from computing today - the dawn of MP3 I guess - and of course this would be a great place to sneak in ESP research under the radar if there was a sympathetic sponsor, since that's also about getting signal through a noisy channel.

ESP research would need a bland name to avoid drawing attention to itself, and pretend to just be about abstract error-correction statistics. I wonder if maybe that's where the term "continuum transmission" might have come in, specifically from 4610? Like "remote viewing", it's just technical-sounding enough to seem like it could be about radio stuff, as long as nobody pokes too hard for details.

In 1961 ( https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0271756.pdf ) it seems like the core of 4610 was the Communication Sciences Laboratory of the Electronics Research Directorate at CRL (10 under 46, I guess) which would make sense. Then there were various "Tasks" under 4600 - 460000, 460010, 460020 etc. And by 1964 other laboratories are involved.
I, too, remember some vague references (as they all were) to the tunnel diode. Invented by Esaki in 1957, "is an application of the p–n junction in a way that requires a quantum mechanical view of matter in a special form. The tunnel diode is a p–n junction formed between a degenerate p-type material and a degenerate n-type material. The variation of current with voltage for the diode is controlled by quantum mechanical tunneling between the two sides of the diode."
As I recall from 1980s hobby electronics, I think the common everyday transistor mostly does work on quantum tunnelling, or something similar. Certainly the FET (Field Effect Transistor) does. P and N junctions are Positive/Negative, usually some form of "doping" a material chemically to give it more or less electrons. 1980s transistors were all about the NPNs vs PNPs (you had to wire them up differently). A transistor is basically just a grown-up diode (which is just a grown-up "cat's whisker" crystal) with a third lead attached.

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