21st Century Propulsion Report prepared for Dr. Franklin Meade by Veritay technologies

[Jan Lundquist]

This 1988 report was prepared as part of a Small Business Innovation Research grant for Dr. Franklin Meade of Edwards AFB.

http://www.rexresearch.com/ttbrown/ttbrntly.pdf

Oddly enough, Veritay describes themselves as "Operator of a gun barrel and ammunition ballistics research firm. The company specializes in gun barrel and ammunition ballistics research, development, test and evaluation."

They classify themselves as a technology incubator and accelerator. Is a privately held firm, doing just under 10 million in annual billing with the DoD and the EPA. I have not found the name of the principal researcher nor of any of the company principals.

See https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/ ... 6#overview

[Jan Lundquist]

We know via, Raymond and Michael R..... forgot how to spell it, that there was a period of time when Wackenhut Security Services was doing some ballistics research/testing in the low desert, near the Odlum Ranch. They were operating on a local Indian Reservation, because it was exempt from certain types of control. I don't recall the full details of the work they were doing, but there was something about a "pineapple" bum.* (and PRISM?).

Veritay feels to me like a company that would have, either been in the Wackenhut stable or tethered nearby.

[natecull]

This 1988 report was prepared as part of a Small Business Innovation Research grant for Dr. Franklin Meade of Edwards AFB.

Nice catch! (Though I need to nitpick that it's actually spelled Dr Franklin Mead, no e, in this report. Did he also go by Meade elsewhere?)

I think I've read this report. I've probably read just about every "Biefeld-Brown propulsion" paper ever publically released, at some point in the last 40 years that I've been aware of Townsend's name.

What always gets me is how every time, every one of these documents represents a completely new team from a completely new contractor or military agency, apparently starting afresh from first principles, as if they only just then discovered a Townsend Brown document and went "whoah! what on earth is this! we gotta check this out!"

To me, that pattern of multiple independent restarts does not say "unified, cross-agency, decades-long program to exploit Townsend Brown's work". Perhaps such a program exists, but if so these multiple (even if successful) replication attempts don't seem to be part of it.

I do wonder though, if a coordinated Townsend Brown Technology program does exist, how well that would seems to mesh with the story being pitched by David Grusch, about work siloed off into specific contractors with no top-level governmental oversight. This seems very similar to the overall Five Eyes security architecture (based on the private intelligence networks of the inter-war industrialists like Eldridge Johnson and William Stephenson) that "Morgan" patiently laid out for us. The idea that in the Western capitalist world, the capitalists and their idiosyncratic research whims are at the top of the national-security food chain and even the governments and militaries are a very poor second, if they figure at all. And the universities come a distant third.

Initially this claim seemed shocking, but now it seems plausible to me. After all: preserving industrial capitalism (as opposed to a unified socialist "world government") was the entire point of waging the Cold War, so it would be surprising if the system the industrial capitalists set up to protect industrial capitalism did not give special rights to those same industrial capitalists.

And yet: I'm still not sure how much to believe about whether Townsend's unusual physics ideas worked. Yes, he seems to have been highly respected by Navy submariners. So he did something. That doesn't mean he was respected for his out-of-the-box gravity ideas. It might just have been his extremely mainstream, boring, technical electromagnetics work.

I want to believe, though. But I need to see an actual replication that does something obviously beyond-Standard-Model. I really hoped Lifters back around 2005 would be that something, but they weren't.

Edit: This Veritay replication is a fairly sophisticated one, using a 1m diameter vacuum chamber much the size of the Montgolfier one, and using mercury contacts like Montgolfier. But. The testing protocol seems very weird and they got inconclusive results:

1. They didn't test dielectrics! At all! Only asymmetric metal! How can you test Townsend Brown without dielectrics?

2. Like Montgolfier, they reported multiple conflicting forces. And the one apparently non-ion-wind force they did detect, was in the opposite direction to what Townsend Brown reported. So they didn't think it was Townsend's force.

3. There remains a massive amount of confusion as to whether Townsend Brown reported: a force on symmetric capacitors, from the positive to the negative; a force on asymmetric capacitors, from the small electrode to the big one (or vice versa); or a weird mashup of both forces at once (which makes no sense to me): in an asymmetric capacitor, a force from the positive to the negative (but only if the negative is also on the small end?) The answer is, Townsend reported all three of them, and seems to mix between them on a whim. And let's not even go into the fourth option: a force on an AC (or pulsed DC) capacitor.

Mead is sufficiently interested that he recommends further study. And then, of course, as always for Townsend Brown replications, there is just static and radio silence.

Regards, Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

Bringing this to the top again, as it is also being discussed on Twitter. Nate, in addition to your observations above, Jesse also noted that the Project Veritay tests were performed with much lower voltages. This is, indeed, a flawed report.

Jan

[natecull]

Thanks for pinging this, Jan. Looking at the references section of that 1988 Veritay report, I notice this:

6. Office of Naval Research, The Townsend Brown Electrogravity Device: A Comprehensive Evaluation by the Office of Naval Research, with Accompanying Documents, W. M. Moore Publications, Prescott, Az. Sept 15, 1952

It's not the ONR report itself that attracts my eye but Moore. This is William "Philadelphia Experiment / Roswell Incident" Moore, of course, in his 1980s Townsend Brown phase. It would actually have been William L Moore publications, and Moore's republishing of the report must have been before 1988.

I'm interested in Moore's 1980s TTB research, you see, because I'm almost sure that it's one of his samizdat dossiers from that period that I read and which I would dearly love to find again, because it talked about many of the points that "Morgan" covers. It's been lost, apparently, yet I hold out hope that in an age of pervasive digital scanning, almost nothing that's been printed once is ever really lost.

Searching for "Moore Publications" "Prescott Arizona" gets me this 1994 FAQ from the Usenet group alt.alien.visitors, which includes some of Moore's publication names from that liminal period between the 1980s hardcopy 'zine scene and the Web.

https://ufoturk.tripod.com/alienfaq.htm

8.08: Focus
-----------
William L. Moore Publications & Research
See: Fair Witness Project, Inc.
4219 West Olive Avenue Suite #247
Burbank, California 91505
Williarn L. Moore
213-463-0542
Publishing entity for Antares Publishing, The Fair Witness Project, Inc., and "Focus" magazine (which specializes in UFOs, New Age, Metaphysical, and Occult research; offers a substantial listing of books, government document reprints, papers, pamphlets, back issues of George Van Tassel's
"Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom" newsletter, research files, folios, back issues of "Focus" (the Fair Witness Project newsletter), cassette tapes, and video tapes for sale.Discounts on various items are available to booksellers and other qualifie buyers."Focus" subscribers are entitled to a 25% discount on all items

11.15: The Fair Witness Project, Inc.
-------------------------------------
Parent Organization: William L. Moore Publications & Research
4219 West Olive Avenue Suite #247
Burbank, California 91505
213-463-0542
Publication is : Focus
A non-profit corporation whose income is used to fund the research efforts of qualified persons selected by the Directors of the Fair Witness Project.
They accept donations and will send an acknowledgement of that donation for tax purposes.

So there's some names to conjure (Google) by: "Antares Publishing", "The Fair Witness Project", "Focus Magazine", all of which appear to be William L Moore. And if so, they all would have been intertwined with the emerging Townsend Brown New Age Legend as it stood in the 1980s.

Oddly that entry didn't even include Prescott: it was another one that caused the hit. Might have been a friend of Moore's, perhaps.

9.08: JACO Book Publishers
--------------------------
P.O. Box 3135
Prescott, Arizona 86302
John H. Andrews
602-778-0018
JACO Book Publishers provides many UFO and Extraterrestrial-related books.

Regards, Nate

Edit: And here's another set of references which pinged my radar:

Brown, T. T. , 1956, "Electrical Self-Potential in Rocks", The Psychic Observer and Chimes. 37(1), Jan-Mar, pp 34-40
Brown, T. T. , 1956, "Electrokinetic Apparatus", The Psychic Observer and Chimes. 37(1), Jan-Mar, pp 34-40
Brown, T. T. , 1956, "The Fluid Pump", The Psychic Observer and Chimes. 37(1), Jan-Mar, pp 54-59
Brown, T. T. , 1956, "How I Control Gravitation", The Psychic Observer and Chimes. 37(1), Jan-Mar, pp 14-19

And guess what? The Psychic Observer has an archive online! Time for some digging.

https://www.psychicobserverarchive.org/archive/

But even before I start, the question I have: in 1956, why was Townsend Brown either choosing to (re)publish patents in an explicitly Spiritualist publication, or what was it of interest that Spiritualists saw in his work? I mean that's kind of a rhetorical question, because, we do know that he was already hanging with people of a metaphysical inclination by then.... but still, exactly what group affiliations were they that sorted him into that sector? And no, I don't buy "he was deliberately being metaphysical in public to distract the Communists" as the only argument, because we know he was exactly this metaphysical in private too.

Edit2: The answer is: Townsend wasn't hanging out with 1950s Spiritualists. These dates are flat wrong. Psychic Observer only merged with Chimes magazine in 1974, so there could not in 1956 have actually been such a thing as "Psychic Observer and Chimes". So, we're looking for a post-1974 issue "37(1)" of a magazine which had taken upon itself to reprint some old Townsend Brown patents, which are almost certainly NOT dated 1956 (since How I Control Gravitation obviously is not from that year). "Electrical Self-Potential" then is probably one of Townsend's 1970s papers, and that means Townsend didn't write about rock electricity in the 1950s and this is still agitprop from the 1970s Psychotronics circle, NOT Townsend doing Prairie Chicken in the 1950s.

People, get your bibliographical references correct! Grrr! And also: never, ever, ever, trust a secondary source to cite correctly. Especially on anomalous subjects. They just don't.

Frustratingly, IAPSOP still does not have 37(1) of "Psychic Observer and Chimes". It does have the issue just before it: 36(5), which is 1975.
http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/chi ... c_1975.pdf

37(1) therefore is Jan-Feb *1976*, which is extremely unsurprising.

I can even locate the cover image of this issue, which was dedicated to Townsend Brown. But not a scanned text of it. Yet.

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDe ... 1_26-_-bdp

Nate

[natecull]

Okay but here's another reference which I'm not sure if we've tracked yet.

Coll. Univ. Wisdom 1966, "The Biefield-Brown Effect", "Proceedings" College of Universal Wisdom, Yucca Valley, Calif., Volume 8, Aug-Oct pp 1-4, 4-6, 36-51, 87.

College of Universal Wisdom was George Van Tassel's outfit. If 1966 is in fact correct, then what drew *him* to Townsend Brown? Just the existence of NICAP, or something else?

Woohoo! The magic of Google site search reveals that the Integratron site holds scans of the Proceedings. You have to poke a bit but you can find them. Here it is!

https://integratron.com/wp-content/uplo ... T-1966.pdf

AUG_SEPT_OCT-1966.pdf

(549.22 KiB) Downloaded 204 times

And yes, NICAP was the link. There's no suggestion that Townsend reached out to Van Tassel, rather the other way around:

I visited Townsend Brown in his office in Washington in late 1956 while I was on a lecture tour. In discussing his research and flying saucers with him, I explained the purpose of the 120 deg control. In a few weeks he resigned as the head of NICAP and Major Donald Keyhoe became its Director.

It's quite interesting to see almost the whole 1970s New Age mythology of Townsend Brown (with all the usual misinterpretations and associations with other unrelated "antigravity" ideas) appearing here in 1966. A lot of it copied I think straight from Mason Rose, but other remarks maybe just interpolated by Van Tassel himself. And they've stuck to the mythology since.

In 1926 Townsend Brown described a "space car" using this new principle. By 1928 he had built working models of a boat propelled in this manner. By 1938 Townsend Brown had shown how his condensers not only moved but had interesting effects on plants and animals. Townsend Brown made a condenser shaped like a saucer that flew around a maypole long before flying saucers became a newspaper topic in 1947.

The saucers made by Brown had no propellers, no moving parts at all. They created a modification of the gravitational field around themselves, which is analogous to putting them on the incline of a "hill". They acted like a surfboard on a wave. The electro-gravitational saucer creates its own "hill", which is a local orientation of the field around it. Then it takes its own "hill" with it in any direction and at unlimited acceleration. There are no inertial forces as such inside the field. No thrust, or centrifugal force results on the load or occupants with directional changes.

That "no inertial forces" idea has a long persistence in the New Age literature after this. Obviously it could be true *of an artificial gravitational field, and then only if we can shape it very carefully to exclude tidal forces and be locally flat, which is a huge if*, but some later writers - like Stan Deyo in 1978 - get confused by this, jump straight from speculative electrogravity and/or General Relativity with negative energy, to ordinary electricity, and take it to mean that this would be true even just of an electrical field, by virtue of it being an electrical field. Which is not at all the case. Faraday cages can probably help, and Tesla did some fun stuff with them, but I'm still fairly sure that several million volts of electricity are going to have some intensely differential effects on the different molecules in your body. I mean, just look at what static does to hair, right?

Did Townsend really fly saucers around a maypole before 1950, or is this something Van Tassel muddled up? Weren't the saucers a post-WW2 development?

Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

Nate, what I believe, based on what Townsend has said, is that his first demonstration of the BB effect was with the boat model used in Hawaii. As far as I can tell the saucers were a follow-on development, so no, there is no record of them before 1950.

But speaking of Van Tassel, and digging deep into my store of interesting, but not directly related to Townsend, AFAICS, anecdotes. The details have escaped me, but here's the gist of it:

Van Tassel's son-in-law, for a time, has written of his own ET encounter with the Tall Whites. Norm Paulsen hung with Yogananda for a while, but went on to become a Guru type with his own commune near Ventura, CA, which became one of the earliest large and successful organic fruit companies in the US. His autobiography is called Christ Consciousness

https://www.amazon.com/Christ-Conscious ... omerReviews

jan

[Paul Schatzkin]

I thought first of starting a new thread, "Where Have We Heard This Before" but I guess it can go here, though this one has already gotten kind winded...

Somebody who saw Jesse's video sent me this:

Charles Buchler's research confirms Thomas Townsend Brown's research.

System and method for generating forces using asymmetrical electrostatic pressure
https://patents.google.com/patent/US11511891B2/en

Charles Buhler - Propellantless Propulsion Device
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhsKMWOYuYo

I am about 2/3rds through the video, and I hear a lot of familiar terminology (i.e. "asymmetric capacitors" and "high voltage" but I can't tell if either of these guys is confirming B-B effect or... insisting it's something.... "else."

Can I buy a vowel?

[natecull]

Hmm. Looking at the patent text (2019, so at least somewhat recent), it seems to be focusing on something called "Electrostatic Pressure" and "Electrostatic Pressure Force". The reasoning seems somewhat similar to Townsend's:

Equation (11) is remarkable because it shows that a system (or object) can experience a net resulting electrostatic pressure force F if there are asymmetries in the electrostatic pressure experienced by (i.e. acting on) the surfaces of the object, for instance, such that the vector sum of the electrostatic pressure force acting on the surfaces of the system (or object) is non-zero. The determination of the electric field strength at any point along the surfaces of the system (or object), the resulting electrostatic pressure and electrostatic pressure force acting on the surfaces of the objected, and the net resulting electrostatic pressure force acting on the system (or object) as a function of the geometric arrangement of the surfaces of the object and the applied voltage or voltage differential giving rise to the electric field may be accomplished by computational methods.

It is important to note that electrostatic pressure force is not the force or pressure due to Coulomb attraction on a surface.... Although the electric field is well defined in the region between the two surfaces and consists of a known direction, the direction of the electrostatic pressure force is not dependent upon the direction of the electric field; rather, it is a function of the square of the electric field. Thus, in the example in which the invention comprises a first electrode and a second opposing electrode, the two electrode surfaces will have a strong force of attraction due to the Coulomb coupling constant, but the electrostatic pressure between the two surfaces will push the two surfaces away from each other, albeit a much weaker force than the Coulomb force due to the electrostatic pressure force being linearly dependent on the free space permittivity constant while Coulomb's constant is inversely proportional to that same constant. Thus, in embodiments of the invention that comprise opposing electrodes, the electrodes comprising electrically conductive surfaces of the invention may be attached by a non-electrically conductive structure for in order to prevent them from collapsing together due to the Coulomb force. In embodiments, the structure for securing the electrodes may be non-conductive. In embodiments, the reactive force provided by the structure exactly equals the attractive Coulomb force tending cause the electrodes to come together, allowing the novel net electrostatic pressure force described below, which results from an asymmetry of electrostatic pressure forces acting on the electrodes, to be observed and to be utilized in an net electrostatic pressure force apparatus of the invention.

The prior art search is very good, but I feel like any physicist reading this will stop at the words "Electrostatic Pressure Force" and say "Nope, that's not a thing. Tell me why you even think this is a thing." And I don't feel like the authors have sold their case for why an entirely new concept needs to be introduced into electrostatics.

Wikipedia, the bastion of physics conservatism, does have an entry for Electrostatic Pressure (without the Force), so these two words at least do have a meaning:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrost ... c_pressure

On a conductor, a surface charge will experience a force in the presence of an electric field. This force is the average of the discontinuous electric field at the surface charge. This average in terms of the field just outside the surface amounts to:

P = ε 0 2 E 2 , {\displaystyle P={\frac {\varepsilon _{0}}{2}}E^{2},}

This pressure tends to draw the conductor into the field, regardless of the sign of the surface charge.

No other explanation of the background or meaning of this concept. Acting regardless of the sign of the charge and being weaker than the Coloumb force makes it feel a little like dielectrophoresis, but the derivation appears to be very different.

Physics Stack Exchange offers a little more clarity, though this particular answer was downvoted:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/quest ... re-concept

When charge is given to a conductor body then due to mutual repulsion between two charges on the two parts of the given conductor, a net force at a point on the surface of a charge conductor whose direction is normally outward. This mechanical force developed per unit area on the surface of charge conductor is also called electrostatic pressure/electrostatic stress.

Nate

[natecull]

A ping on this one, and after watching the Tim Ventura interview, yes I agree it deserves its own thread. That's my excuse, anyway: I accidentally created one in the lonely forum "Tech Talk (23)" a few days ago, before I realised Paul had already mentioned it here and my memory had blanked it.

Yes, I think it's definitely the B-B effect, at least the "static" mode that Townsend wrote to Ed Hull about in 1955, rather than the "dynamic" mode which involves electric current. The "electrostatic pressure" equations thing doesn't seem so weird now that I realise that Buhler is literally a NASA subject matter expert for electrostatics.

The Tech Talk thread:

viewtopic.php?p=22404#p22404