Confusion over Cornillion/Bergier and Twigsnapper/Sarbacher

"The Man Who Mastered Gravity" was published in March, 2023. Use this space to share your thoughts, comments, praise and/or cries of outrage.
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Jan Lundquist
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Confusion over Cornillion/Bergier and Twigsnapper/Sarbacher

Post by Jan Lundquist »

Paul, I see at the time of your first draft, you believed that Townsend and Jo were living in Jacques Bergier's home in Washington during the Embassy Laundry period. Linda has told me that the home was Mr. Cornillion's, which she remembered because the name called up an image of a man holding an ear of corn on his knee. By his own recounting, we know that Jacques Cornillion was an antique dealer, which fits with Jo telling that Linda could not live with her parents because the owner was afraid a child might damage his fine antiques.

Lest anyone think he and Bergier were one and the same, after Cornillion released notes on Townsend's Paris trips, someone, perhaps Trickfox aka PeeTee/Ramond asked, if he were Bergier and he replied, vehemently, it seemed to me, that he was not that Russian!

And, here's a conjectured connection. Helen Towt was given credit for helping to arrange the Paris trip. (We have been told that "Twigsnapper" even gifted her with a leather coat in appreciation for her help) Helen's father was an antiques dealer in Zanesville, so it is quite possible that she and Cornillion had a common interest and common connection prior to the time Townsend and Jo taking up residence in his (alleged) home.

Also, from what I have been told, the gentleman who rescued Linda when she went walkabout in Washington was "Twigsnapper," not Sarbacher, and that is how he first came into her life.
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Re: Confusion over Cornillion/Bergier and Twigsnapper/Sarbacher

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Jan Lundquist wrote: Wed Mar 29, 2023 9:19 pm Paul, I see at the time of your first draft, you believed that Townsend and Jo were living in Jacques Bergier's home in Washington during the Embassy Laundry period. Linda has told me that the home was Mr. Cornillion's, which she remembered because the name called up an image of a man holding an ear of corn on his knee. By his own recounting, we know that Jacques Cornillion was an antique dealer, which fits with Jo telling that Linda could not live with her parents because the owner was afraid a child might damage his fine antiques.
Here is where things start going from the 'rabbit hole' to the 'briar patch.' Had I heard that story prior to meeting Mr. Cornillon just before he died, maybe I could have asked him if he lived in a house full of antiques. I believe I still have the recordings I made of the afternoon I spent with him.
Lest anyone think he and Bergier were one and the same, after Cornillion released notes on Townsend's Paris trips, someone, perhaps Trickfox aka PeeTee/Ramond asked, if he were Bergier and he replied, vehemently, it seemed to me, that he was not that Russian!
It might even have been... me. Because I have a vague recollection of Mr. Cornillon telling me that himself. It's only been like 20 years, I can't imagine why my recollection is not stronger.
And, here's a conjectured connection. Helen Towt was given credit for helping to arrange the Paris trip.
Where did that intel come from? That's the first I'm hearing...
(We have been told that "Twigsnapper" even gifted her with a leather coat in appreciation for her help) Helen's father was an antiques dealer in Zanesville, so it is quite possible that she and Cornillion had a common interest and common connection prior to the time Townsend and Jo taking up residence in his (alleged) home.
And people wonder why I ran screaming out of the room with my hair on fire in 2009...??
Also, from what I have been told, the gentleman who rescued Linda when she went walkabout in Washington was "Twigsnapper," not Sarbacher, and that is how he first came into her life.
Hmm. It's easy to reach a point where all of these personalities begin to run into each other.

The individual I am quoting actually has THREE identities through all of this: Morgan (of whoever it was writing to me under that name) first introduced him to me as 'Boston.' When I introduced the character in the book I named him O'Riley. And when he showed up on the forums he used the handle 'Twigsnapper.' Hell, it's even been suggested elsewhere that Linda and Morgan and O'Riley and Twigsnapper (along with, as you've pointed out, some of the 'sock puppets' on the old forum) were the same person. At some point I'll have to go back and figure out who told me that story, if it came from Linda or 'Boston/O'Riley/Twigsnapper' (BOT? A BOT?!?! Did all this input come from a BOT????)

So, I dunno. I think the way I overcame the impasse I arrived at in 2009 was... just come up with a version of things and run with it, however uncertain I was of the veracity.

Maybe the book should come with a disclaimer: "Pretend it's all fiction."

--PS
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Re: Confusion over Cornillion/Bergier and Twigsnapper/Sarbacher

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Where did that intel come from? That's the first I'm hearing...
I heard it from Linda. Thanks to the parts of her journal that were in Book 1, I felt like i knew the characters of her life and we used to muse about them at length. This story is also in her unpublished memoir, The Good-Bye Man..
The individual I am quoting actually has THREE identities through all of this: Morgan (of whoever it was writing to me under that name) first introduced him to me as 'Boston.' When I introduced the character in the book I named him O'Riley. And when he showed up on the forums he used the handle 'Twigsnapper.' Hell, it's even been suggested elsewhere that Linda and Morgan and O'Riley and Twigsnapper (along with, as you've pointed out, some of the 'sock puppets' on the old forum) were the same person
I fell into the Before Times forum, just before it all fell apart and was entranced and stimulated by the depth of discussions, and breadth of contributions from the various members, but I could understand your frustration with a story handed to you by Mysterious Insiders on the Net, the new MIN in Black. In the end, you handled the story superbly and It's a ripping good one, regardless of how it came to you.

Those of us who failed to turn back in time, will be forever searching for the truth hidden in the outward tale that, as Nate points out, someone has gone to great lengths to revive. Everybody loves a good and worthy quest.
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Re: Confusion over Cornillion/Bergier and Twigsnapper/Sarbacher

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Jan Lundquist wrote: Thu Mar 30, 2023 5:12 pmI could understand your frustration with a story handed to you by Mysterious Insiders on the Net, the new MIN in Black.
Is "MIN" an acronym for something I don't know, or did you just mean "Men In Black"?
In the end, you handled the story superbly and It's a ripping good one, regardless of how it came to you.
That is very gratifying to read. Thank you.

--PS
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Re: Confusion over Cornillion/Bergier and Twigsnapper/Sarbacher

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Mysterious Insiders on the Net i.e. the "Morgan" and "Twigsnapper" characters, This is what we know of them based their own statements.

"Twigsnapper" always described himself as the bodyguard at the door type, while the important discussions were going on inside. I suspect he had a long and successful career in the security services business.

"Morgan" wrote of "the organization" he now calls home" which would seem to me to one of the US Clandestine services, of which we have a plethora these days.

Unless you have a better name for them, I will continue to think of these two as the MIN in Black.
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Re: Confusion over Cornillion/Bergier and Twigsnapper/Sarbacher

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Jan Lundquist wrote: Fri Mar 31, 2023 9:49 pm Mysterious Insiders on the Net
🤦🏻‍♂️ Love it.
"Morgan" wrote of "the organization" he now calls home" which would seem to me to one of the US Clandestine services, of which we have a plethora these days.
With little more than nothing to go on, I always surmised that Morgan had something to do with NRO, The National Reconnaissance Office, which manages satellite / space intel.

And would likely be the first to make contact with any, ummm... visitors.

But then we're down that rabbit hole again.

--P
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Re: Morgan, as I imagine him.

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It's a rough and simplified analogy, but I think of the NRO as the conductor on the bus. The NSA is the driver, the military and clandestine service are the passengers, and the space reconnaissance technology is the bus. Though their budget is large, their organization is probably the smallest of them all.

My imagined career arc for the "Morgan" character who communicated with you is that he began his career in as hired security for whatever firm was charged with guarding Townsend's secrets. Sometime during the Viet Nam war, he joined the USN and ultimately became a part of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU / SEAL Team 6).

According to one of his messages,, he spent some as a ride-along on USAF patrols over Alaska.. Perhaps he was acting as an interpreter of Russian Comms. He may have seen action in South America, during the Reagan Years. He seems to have been deployed to Afghanistan, before being sidelined with a knee injury.

According to another of his messages, he spent some time in the DC bureaucracy. IIRC, when I researched the given organization, it fell under the purview of the Joint Special Operations Command. If you want detailed insights into the clandestine work of JSOC, see the links below, but be prepared for the Acronym Avalanche. Wading through it, you can see into the life of those warriors who are the elite of the elite:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Sp ... ns_Command

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellige ... t_Activity

Continuing on, with my imagined character, If he was a DEVGRU/Seal Team Six member, then he was a part of the "Gray Fox" group, the first "boots on the ground during the war on Afghanistan.

Gray Fox

Gray Fox was the codename used by the ISA at the beginning of the War in Afghanistan. Its members often worked closely with Joint Special Operations Command and the Central Intelligence Agency.[21]

In 2002, Gray Fox operators served alongside Delta Force and DEVGRU in the mountains of Afghanistan.[22] Gray Fox intercepted enemy communications and trekked to observation posts with special operations units. Their efforts may have saved more than a hundred 10th Mountain Division and 101st Airborne Division soldiers fighting near Takur Ghar in Afghanistan's Shahikot Valley during Operation Anaconda.[citation needed]

The unit helped spearhead the search for Saddam Hussein and his family after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Gray Fox operatives sometimes work under the broader umbrella of "Joint Special Operations Task Force 20", which also included DEVGRU, the Army's Delta Force, and 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Saddam Hussein was eventually captured during Operation Red Dawn.[21] Under the command of Colonel Michael K. Nagata from 2005 to 2008, Gray Fox continued to operate in Iraq and Afghanistan alongside US Special Operations Forces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellige ... t_Activity

However, if they live long enough, all warriors age out of the profession, sooner or later. The young and lucky make it to 20 years and retire. The wise and crafty may see many years of active service, before beginning their second careers. It is at this point, knowing that the Morgan character must now be in his seventies, that my arc goes all fuzzy and I have no idea where he went from Afghanistan.
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Re: Confusion over Cornillion/Bergier and Twigsnapper/Sarbacher

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Hell, it's even been suggested elsewhere that Linda and Morgan and O'Riley and Twigsnapper (along with, as you've pointed out, some of the 'sock puppets' on the old forum) were the same person
I may have been one of the ones who suggested that, or if not, I certainly am now.

The 2008 Cutlass quote I posted yesterday under the name "James Barrett" was, I'm sure, written by Linda. Another interaction I had with "Twigsnapper" made me think it was also Linda writing.

I don't know how many identities Linda actually had, though I know she had at least the "Elizabeth Helen Drake" character to start with so was no stranger to posing online with a false identity.

Then there were, I think, others not on Linda's team who also had multiple sockpuppets and were using them to derail the whole project for some reason I didn't understand.

I enjoyed my interactions with Linda but I never entirely understood how she thought.

(Not her mysticism, which I do understand, but her constant urgent hints about research directions mixed with a baffling reluctance/fear to actually follow up on those hints - something Morgan seemed to also do. Why hint at all if you don't want the hints to be followed?)

And then whatever it was that actually happened offline between her, George, Andrew, "Mikado", and one or more iterations of the "Morgan" character, draped in stories about trips through teleporters and time travel, I don't even know what that was all about and feel like it's maybe not my business. But the fallout from all those burned relationships seems to cast an ongoing shadow.

And yet I stand by my personal memory: I read about Linda and "Morgan"'s relationship - including his death in a vehicle crash and suspicion that it was faked - in some fringe publication somewhere on the New Age / free-energy zine circuit, sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Who published that information, what did they know, and when did they know it?

(I've been thinking it was a little photocopied 'zine/dossier thing, of which there were many, but it might have been a brief article in Duncan Roads' Nexus Magazine. I don't have the desire or justification at present to pay Nexus money to go search their entire back catalogue, but that might be a thing worth doing.)

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Re: Confusion over Cornillion/Bergier and Twigsnapper/Sarbacher

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And yet I stand by my personal memory: I read about Linda and "Morgan"'s relationship - including his death in a vehicle crash and suspicion that it was faked - in some fringe publication somewhere on the New Age / free-energy zine circuit, sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Who published that information, what did they know, and when did they know it?
Now that is strange. I can understand why sciencey folks were talking about Townsend in those days. The fact that the "True Romance" was also a hook indicates that "Morgan's" backstory was known and being told as well. I wonder what his then-name was.

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Re: Confusion over Cornillion/Bergier and Twigsnapper/Sarbacher

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(I've been thinking it was a little photocopied 'zine/dossier thing, of which there were many, but it might have been a brief article in Duncan Roads' Nexus Magazine. I don't have the desire or justification at present to pay Nexus money to go search their entire back catalogue, but that might be a thing worth doing.)
Perhaps some day, a curious reader with a subscription will do this.

How were you getting your 'zines and photocopies then? i hope they come to light in some physical "Gray Barker" type archive somewhere.


'
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Re: Confusion over Cornillion/Bergier and Twigsnapper/Sarbacher

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How were you getting your 'zines and photocopies then? i hope they come to light in some physical "Gray Barker" type archive somewhere.
Funny you should mention Gray Barker, because one of those 'zines was in fact the Gray Barker Townsend Brown archives from Clarksburg-Harrison library! They've been there quite a while, I guess. All it needed was anyone to walk in and photocopy them. And now that's happened at least twice. As well as that, I'm sure there was one which was someone pulling a library trace on scientific papers with the word "electrohydrodynamics" (as I did in 2016 via Google), and another one which was personal biographical details on Townsend Brown himself.

So what happened was a family member became a UFO fan in the mid-1980s (I think from reading "The Philadelphia Experiment") and began hunting documents. This continued until the late 80s; from mid-1989 to late 1993 I lost touch with that person, and so I think it must have been late 93 or early 94 when they showed me their latest acquisitions.

I believe there were three main sources of "odd documents" in our house;

1) The Christian book circuit (we were church kids). This included specifically "The Cosmic Conspiracy" by Stan Deyo, who for some reason became obsessed with Townsend Brown and his saucers in the late 1970s. Deyo was from Texas and attended but washed out of at least the Air Force Academy prep school, if not the Academy itself. There were a bunch of other general conspiracy books from the church scene whic h are irrelevant and best forgotten. But several of them argued the case, even back in the 1970s, that there was some conspiracy between the US government and aliens/entities as part of the "End Times" scenario. So naturally, we wanted to try to find out all we could about this "conspiracy", what it involved, and whether it was real.

2) A major local bookshop which at the time had a sideline in "occult" and "New Age" books. This shop is still around, at least in name, though they don't have the collection they used to have and I doubt they would have any records of purchases in the 1980s. From here we had at least "The Antigravity Handbook" and related books by David Hatcher Childress and they probably were also the source of the other extremely small press packages i remember holding.

3) The back pages of Popular Science. (See eg: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_eyPf ... 3/mode/1up ) The main "odd" advertisers there were AMORC, Rex Research, and Information Unlimited. I do remember the first few lessons of an AMORC mail-order course so someone in our house must have written away to at least one of those! Rex and IU are the main survivors from those years.

4) Nexus Magazine, which began distributing in New Zealand in the early 1990s. But sheesh, it is tough for me to even glance at one of those, they are so filled with misinformation it physically hurts. I remember that being the case in the 1990s too.

Sadly the family member of mine threw some of these documents away during a particularly churchy phase, now regretted. (On the other hand, some of them were worth throwing away. But not all of them.)

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Re: Revisiting Revered Elder Mr. Twigsnapper

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He was O'Riley and Boston to Paul, but only Twigsnapper to me and the Before Times Forum members.

I believe that he lived here in the high desert for a while. And I also believe that I received some messages from him, one facilitating my first meeting with Linda, one demonstrating how easily conversations are overheard these days, and a third, relayed to me by Linda, about Shanghai.

But for now, though we have the 1956 photo of him in France with Townsend, he remains one of the mysterious instigating characters in act 2 of Chasing Townsend Brown. He has said that Gamow was Bergier's uncle and he would have been in a position to know


For future readers, this is his profile as I have put it together from Linda, Paul, and hints on the forum.

As the son of an Irish Gypsy (his word) family, Twigsnapper was an absolutely "murderous youth" who "didn't care if [he] lived or died". He enlisted in the Royal Marines as soon as he was able, and volunteered for an assignment to the dangerously unproven, still in development minisub program. He qualified for it because of his slight stature and his willingness to lie about knowing how to swim.

The first operational prototype, described as a submersible canoe, was developed for Navy Lt.Cdr Ian Fleming in Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) group. Fleming headed the Royal Marine [Auxillary Unit} AU 30 which would participate in sabotage missions in Occupied France, and carry out the Joint US/GB TiCom snatch and grab activities at the end of the war. (Fleming ultimately retired to Jamaica, where he often had cocktails at sunset with neighbor William Stephenson, the man he credited with inspiring his James Bond character.)

Twigsnapper first met Doctor Brown, as I am sure he would have called him during Brown's post-war mission to vet a particular scientist. At that time, roads were filled with panicked refugees hoping to reach the American sector before the borders were frozen. In the midst of their desparation, one family had left their child's body lying in the mud where she fell.

The sight, forgone and forgotten in her little pink dress, caused Twigsnapper's heart to crack and he wept at the sight. It was at that moment that Townsend invited him to join the inner circle.

Twigsnapper has told of a wartime adventure where he fled, bareback on a stolen black and white pony . This breed, known as the Gypsy Vanner, was particularly favored by Irish Travelers. I know that Twigsnappler had a lifelong love of horses and, in his later years often attended horse shows and followed the breeding of certain lines. He would have been delighted when this breed came to the attention of the US Equestrian scene in the nineties.

In another encounter, with a "Gypsy" in the backstreets of Paris, she told him he was a "dapper zing!" (As we can see in his photo, he certainly was that!). This sobriquet tickled Linda so much that she named her first Yorkie "Dapperzing"

Twigsnapper also told us of traveling across Russia by train, with Robert Sarbacher to retrieve German Commander Von Luck from a Siberian POW camp, but for now, that is a dead end tale.

I speak of Twigsnapper as if he has passed, but I have no reason to believe that he has. It does seem, though, that this character will not be returning to the larger tale.
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Re: Confusion over Cornillion/Bergier and Twigsnapper/Sarbacher

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I speak of Twigsnapper as if he has passed, but I have no reason to believe that he has. It does seem, though, that this character will not be returning to the larger tale.
Hi again, after too many months away. Been unable to toggle my head back into this mindspace due dealing with other life stuff. Really glad to see that Paul is getting online airplay with people like Nick Cook!

Twigsnapper still alive? Could be, I suppose! How old would be he? I've forgotten his stated birth year, but didn't he claim to be underage in WW2? Someone born in say 1930 would be 15 in 1945, 70 in 2000, 93 today. That's perhaps the outer edge of feasibility, right?

One of the things I've been thinking about recently is how many "older" friends I have - in their 80s and sometimes even 90s - some born in the 1920s - and how much this has changed my perspective on how long people live.

Henry Kissinger just died and he was 100 and active and globetrotting right up to the end. So yeah. Others of his generation being around, certainly *possible*.

I know I said I'm skeptical about all of the online forum text posts marked as from "Twigsnapper" in the Before Times being actually from him - just due to the amount of sockpuppeting that happened then - but it seems feasible that the person himself existed and was probably more or less what he said to be. Perhaps. Or someone was roleplaying this character for multiple years.

At least there was a lot of very specific military-intelligence flavoured inside gossip from Twigsnapper and Morgan that seems like it would have been hard to just make up. But then, military-intelligence people making up highly specific, partially verifiable, and yet misleading stories.... *particularly in the context of talking specifically ABOUT stories that were made up to distract and mislead*..... well, that too is very "on brand" for that job description.

Don't mind me, I've been dealing with the psychic whiplash of "is this antigravity stuff true - and if so, government agencies are concealing it from the public to maybe do unspecified things in the future, which is pretty bad. Or is it all made up - in which case maybe another set of government agents are bare-faced lying to the public to whip up unfocused mob rage - which would also be pretty bad. And what's it all about/for, anyway? And how do I hold both extremes of possibility in my head without getting hurt?" since I was a pre-teen. I'd like to say I'm used to that deep sense of complicated ambivalence around the subject, but I'm still not entirely so.
The sight, forgone and forgotten in her little pink dress, caused Twigsnapper's heart to crack and he wept at the sight. It was at that moment that Townsend invited him to join the inner circle.
The way Twigsnapper and Morgan described "The Caroline Group" is *very* similar to how, eg, Theosophy used to describe its "Mahatmas". In fact several esoteric groups in the last couple hundred years have talked about "inner circles" or "inner lodges" or "hidden masters" who seem to straddle the border between the physical and the immaterial.

In the 1980s, when I first encountered the Townsend Brown mythos as a pre-teen reading strange back-of-Popular-Science-Magazine leaflets - and particularly the *very specific* flavour of the mythos which included details like "the Gravity Cruise" and "tank commanders in WW2" and "Eldridge Johnson" and "William Stephenson" and "Bahamas" and "Ilya Tolstoy in Tibet" - it was also very much within this Theosophical kind of framework. The words "Caroline Group" were not part of this 1980s mythos (I guess because Paul invented that term) but the same general feeling was.

There has always been a Theosophical contingent who were drawn to the Townsend Brown story - and many of his actual colleagues had that sort of philosophical drift. In my case one of the first connecting points was "The Antigravity Handbook" by David Hatcher Childress: first edition, 1985. ( https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2745571 ... y_handbook ).

When he wrote that book, Childress was a member of the Stelle community, whose beliefs certainly must have shaped his thought. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/us/07cncstelle.html and https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/en ... elle-group . Stelle was founded in 1963 by Richard Kieninger as an offshoot of "The Lemurian Fellowship" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemurian_Fellowship) , founded 1936 by Robert Stelle.

This Theosophical viewpoint behind so many of Townsend's friends and admirers - along with the equally as legitimate US Navy / CIA / defense-contracting links - is another point of view that might explain just what the "black Oppenheimer" might have been about. I feel like one connecting point is the "Men Who Stare At Goats" community. People in, around, and outside the US military - sometimes with tacit support from their superiors, and sometimes very much without that support - who felt that there was more to the universe than physical science of the 20th century was comfortable exploring. Some of those perhaps tried to weaponise their discoveries. Some of those maybe weren't comfortable with that. There were many conflicts between these groups, I think.

But what intrigues me is that Townsend was near the centre of what in the 1970s was called the "New Age" beat. But he was doing this in the 1930s to 1960s.

Edit: To be clear, I'm well aware that long before the 1970s populist New Age (and the parallel 1970s US military obsession with "closing the ESP gap" with the Soviets that jump-started the careers of, eg, Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ and Dean Radin), that Theosophy had been a big deal globally, and wasn't even socially obscure but rather enjoyed a blaze of publicity. In the 1920s, for example, practically everyone in high society and the arts was involved in some kind of spiritual org or secret society or other. And English and American high society, of course, also crossed over with the "Oh So Social" and other spy orgs. So it's not *that much* surprising that Townsend seemed to know his way around this "cultic milieu" just as much as he did high society, cutting edge physics, and strategic military concerns. These social worlds all really did overlap.

It's just that it *seems* surprising to us, now, looking back from the 2020s at the 1920s and later decades, because.... all the colour and strangeness that absolutely drenched the first half of the 20th century has been a bit airbrushed out of later retellings of history, which likes to pretend High Modernism was all sober people doing serious science and serious war... and that the only people playing spooky dress-up games were the Nazis. That was *definitely* not the case. So Townsend's life is like a lightning rod for how all of this stuff actually came together, what it felt like to be at the vortex of the fairly freewheeling defense/research culture which was open to wild and new ideas, at the same time as it was trying to standardise and button-down a new physics.

As an example of just how linked some of these worlds are, here's a random blogger talking about the lasting influence of Theosophy on pop culture, including Lovecraft, Tolkien and Robert Howard. I'd add almost the entire modern horror and superhero genres to this list, which spun out of the "weird tales" scene. https://www.ecosophia.net/theosophy-the-golden-age/

Another thread I'd like to mention is the 1940s-1960s ARPA scene that created the Internet and the Personal Computer. Alan Kay is particular interesting on this. The ARPA way of working , going back to the Radar scene that Townsend seemed to be a part of, was to give smart (and weird) people lots of room and funding and just let them create stuff, or fail, but failure was seen as just an overhead cost. And also, to have multiple approaches running at a time, so there'd be a broad (and very ambitious) general vision, but a very loose rein on ideology. So multiple conflicting ideas - even multiple conflicting *basic principles* - were fine. That seems to explain how a person like Townsend who had such unusual physics ideas could exist in the military contracting world of his time, as long as he delivered (some kind of) results. It was just such a *different* way of thinking and working, back then, that it's hardly imaginable today. But being able to imagine the now-unimaginable is why history is cool.

Nate
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Jan Lundquist
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Re: The Morning of the Magicians

Post by Jan Lundquist »

It is good to see you, as always, Nate. I hope the tide of your life will be in the quiescent stage for a while now.

I found a copy of The Morning of the Magicians on line yesterday, and skimmed it again.
https://ia902907.us.archive.org/12/ite ... icians.pdf

Madame Blavatsk, founder of Theosophy, is portrayed in the cover montage, and cross referenced in the index. Though she is not mentioned by name in the text, it seems likely that it was she who popularized the Legend of the Nine Unknown Men, the group entity that Puharishc's group later sought to contact via channeled messages.

9781594772313-us.jpg

Louis Pauvels, a one time student of Gurdjieff's, was the primary author, but Bergier, aka Verne, hero of the French Resistance, provided the inspiration and content.
As I have said, this book owes much in its general theory and its documentation to Jacques Bergier. Everyone who has met him and experienced his extraordinary memory, his insatiable curiosity, his (a rare quality this) invariable presence of mind, will at once believe me when I say that five years with Bergier have saved me perhaps twenty years of private reading. His brain includes a formidable library: selection, classification, complex cross-references take place with an electronic rapidity. Watching him thinking out a problem never failed to produce in me an excitation ofmy own faculties without which I would have found the conceiving and preparation of this book impossible.
Because Jacques Bergier was a student of alchemy who understood its methods and practices at the atomic particle level, he was asked,in 1937 to meet with an unidentified gentleman whom he believed to be Fulcanelli*, the greatest living alchemist. The purpose of the meeting was revealed in the warning "Fulcanelli" gave about the power soon to be unleashed on the planet.
"M. Andre Helbronner, whose assistant I believe you are, is carrying out research on nuclear energy. M. Helbronner has been good enough to keep me informed as to the results of some of his experiments, notably the appearance of radioactivity corresponding to plutonium when a bismuth rod is volatilized by an electric discharge in deuterium at high pressure. You are on the brink of success, as indeed are several other of our scientists today. May I be allowed to warn you to be careful? The research in which you and your colleagues are engaged is fraught with terrible dangers, not only for yourselves, but for the whole human race. The liberation of atomic energy is easier than you think, and the radioactivity artificially produced can poison the atmosphere of our planet in the space of a few years. Moreover, atomic explosives can be produced from a few grams of metal powerful enough to destroy whole cities. I am telling you this as a fact: the alchemists have known it for a very long time."
.pdf p. 121

He continues in this vein and then Bergier asks . Now can you, sir, tell me what is the nature of your researches?"
"
"....The secret of alchemy is this: there is a way of manipulating matter and energy so as to produce what modern scientists call 'a field of force.' This field acts on the observer and puts him in a privileged position vis-a-vis the Universe. From this position he has access to the realities, which are ordinarily hidden from us by time and space, matter and energy. This is what we call 'The Great Work.'"
The unstated purpose of this books is to encourage individuals to do the Great Work to help evolve humanity toward greater enlightenment.

*The pseudonym by which he was known. Reportedly, the Nazis scoured Paris in search of his manuscripts, and the Allies offered large sums for them after the war. Whether they were found by either is not known.




But being able to imagine the now-unimaginable is why history is cool.
Ajo to that, Bruddah!

The first half of the book castigates those who ignore the rich and informative history in old books and manuscripts. The authors tell of many once unimaginable discoveries that were reported in old texts, but had to wait to be born until they were "invented" again in the 20rh century.
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Paul Schatzkin
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Re: Confusion over Cornillion/Bergier and Twigsnapper/Sarbacher

Post by Paul Schatzkin »

Hi guys...

Nice to see some activity around here even if it's just the three of us.

Jan, one of us should post something to the main blog site with a link to this thread. I've been seeing evidence in the Google search results that ttbrown.com is rising in the rankings (though, admittedly, for narrowly focused keywords like "townsend brown"). Unfortunately Google has also changed the way its analytics work this year, and I still can't quite figure out how it works now. It's the usual, "we've changed everything, now read through these dozens of paragraphs to figure it out by yourself.

I grow increasingly weary of life online....

Not much to add to Jan's portrait, but this warrants a nod:
natecull wrote: Sun Dec 03, 2023 11:04 pm I know I said I'm skeptical about all of the online forum text posts marked as from "Twigsnapper" in the Before Times being actually from him - just due to the amount of sockpuppeting that happened then - but it seems feasible that the person himself existed and was probably more or less what he said to be. Perhaps. Or someone was roleplaying this character for multiple years.
As Jan and I have discussed, I've found (several) reason(s) over the past few months to question the provenance of all the e-mail I correspondence I started receiving in 2004 - which calls much of the narrative (if indeed you can call it that?) in the book into question. There are some 'tells' that imply that it call came from a single source, regardless of the sender's address or sign-off.

Suffice it to say for now that we're not out of the rabbit hole yet.

At least there was a lot of very specific military-intelligence flavoured inside gossip from Twigsnapper and Morgan that seems like it would have been hard to just make up. But then, military-intelligence people making up highly specific, partially verifiable, and yet misleading stories.... *particularly in the context of talking specifically ABOUT stories that were made up to distract and mislead*..... well, that too is very "on brand" for that job description.
I keep coming back to David O. Russell's opening to "American Hustle"
IMG_0025.jpeg
... which actually rings truer than "Based on a True Story."
Don't mind me, I've been dealing with the psychic whiplash of "is this antigravity stuff true - and if so, government agencies are concealing it from the public to maybe do unspecified things in the future, which is pretty bad. Or is it all made up - in which case maybe another set of government agents are bare-faced lying to the public to whip up unfocused mob rage - which would also be pretty bad. And what's it all about/for, anyway? And how do I hold both extremes of possibility in my head without getting hurt?" since I was a pre-teen. I'd like to say I'm used to that deep sense of complicated ambivalence around the subject, but I'm still not entirely so.
Nice job there, Nate, of summing up all the quandaries.
The sight, forgone and forgotten in her little pink dress, caused Twigsnapper's heart to crack and he wept at the sight. It was at that moment that Townsend invited him to join the inner circle.
The way Twigsnapper and Morgan described "The Caroline Group" is *very* similar to how, eg, Theosophy used to describe its "Mahatmas". In fact several esoteric groups in the last couple hundred years have talked about "inner circles" or "inner lodges" or "hidden masters" who seem to straddle the border between the physical and the immaterial.
I oscillate btw two interpretations of the Caroline Group.

One is it was simply a quasi-clandestine alliance of international business interests. I'm reading The Rise And Fall of The Their Reich at the moment (a little light, casual reading....) and can see how, given the mid-30s chronology, there could have been just such a consortium to protect allied business interests from the growing Nazi threat.

The other is that, as Nate suggests, it was an organization that "straddled the border" between the physical and the metaphysical. The rational remnants of my brain have a harder time with that.

But, then... Alice in Wonderland....?!?!
In the 1980s, when I first encountered the Townsend Brown mythos as a pre-teen reading strange back-of-Popular-Science-Magazine leaflets - and particularly the *very specific* flavour of the mythos which included details like "the Gravity Cruise" and "tank commanders in WW2" and "Eldridge Johnson" and "William Stephenson" and "Bahamas" and "Ilya Tolstoy in Tibet" - it was also very much within this Theosophical kind of framework.
I like your of of the word 'Theosophical.' Other activities in my life presently are drawing me toward that arena.

At my AA meeting this past Saturday, I said "I think the word 'God' is the most over-used and least understood word in the English language, and the same goes for it's translation into all the other languages in Babel."

That's as far I'm gonna go with that subject for now. I'll let you know when I've come up with the foundations of a new religion (cult). I hear that's a cool/easy way to make a lot of money.
The words "Caroline Group" were not part of this 1980s mythos (I guess because Paul invented that term) but the same general feeling was.
Actually, the words 'Caroline Group' first showed up in the very first snail-mail letter I received from 'Morgan.'

I specify 'snail mail' here because along with the other discoveries referenced above, I've determined that the manner and tone of the first fifty-some pages of hard-copy correspondence I had with 'Morgan' (whoever-the-hell-he-was) differs from the 'tells' in the emails that started a couple of months later in the spring of 2004.
There has always been a Theosophical contingent who were drawn to the Townsend Brown story - and many of his actual colleagues had that sort of philosophical drift. In my case one of the first connecting points was "The Antigravity Handbook" by David Hatcher Childress: first edition, 1985. ( https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2745571 ... y_handbook ).
Isn't that the "Adventures Unlimited Press" guy? He had an interesting racket going there for a while.

Speaking of which, I think AUP published some of Joseph Farrells' books. Farrell is on an interesting thread now, professing that 'plasma' bears 'intelligence.'

Farrell here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t ... 0614524158

The topic is also discussed in a book that was recently commended to me:

https://amz.run/7Sp9

Is that why Morgan told me to "stick with ball lightning" like spit on gum"?
This Theosophical viewpoint behind so many of Townsend's friends and admirers - along with the equally as legitimate US Navy / CIA / defense-contracting links - is another point of view that might explain just what the "black Oppenheimer" might have been about.
Nice to see the notion of the 'black Oppenheimer' getting some traction (even if it's just the three of us...)
I feel like one connecting point is the "Men Who Stare At Goats" community.
Maybe I should watch that one again...
Edit: To be clear, I'm well aware that long before the 1970s populist New Age (and the parallel 1970s US military obsession with "closing the ESP gap" with the Soviets that jump-started the careers of, eg, Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ and Dean Radin), that Theosophy had been a big deal globally, and wasn't even socially obscure but rather enjoyed a blaze of publicity.
Funny how often Puthoff's name comes up (or is it?). And I heard Russell Targ's name in the conversation that steered me to the book linked above (I haven't read it yet, but I read enough of the description and reviews to get the gist: plasma = intelligence).
Townsend's life is like a lightning rod for how all of this stuff actually came together, what it felt like to be at the vortex of the fairly freewheeling defense/research culture which was open to wild and new ideas, at the same time as it was trying to standardise and button-down a new physics.
I just pulled that passage because it deserves to stand on its own.

Nate, you make so many good points here...

The challenge now is to use this book to broaden the discussion... and get more people talking about it.

The Man Who Mastered Gravity has sold almost 3,000 copies on Amazon alone since it was released in March.

Where is everybody?

--PS
Paul Schatzkin, author of 'The Man Who Mastered Gravity' https://amz.run/6afz
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It's "a multigenerational project." What's your hurry?
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"We will just sail away from the Earth, as easily as this boat pushed away from the dock" - TTB
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