About "The Space Brothers"

[Jan Lundquist]

Someone brought up the question, recently of what Bahnson might have meant when he said it was the "Space Brothers" who told him to find Townsend Brown.

Sorry to harsh your woo, ET folks, but it is more likely that he was referring to the immensely powerful Dulles Brothers, Secretary of State, John Foster, and his brother Allen, Director of the CIA, than to little green men from Mars.

Jan

[natecull]

Someone brought up the question, recently of what Bahnson might have meant when he said it was the "Space Brothers" who told him to find Townsend Brown.

Sorry to harsh your woo, ET folks, but it is more likely that he was referring to the immensely powerful Dulles Brothers, Secretary of State, John Foster, and his brother Allen, Director of the CIA, than to little green men from Mars.

Hmm. Is there any other context that we know of in which the Dulles Brothers were ever called "the Space Brothers"? When we think of say the man that Dulles Airport is named after ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Foster_Dulles ), in all his list of interests and achievements, is it really Space that comes to mind first?

Other the other hand, the term "Space Brothers" is very well established in 1950s Contactee literature (deriving from the older "White Brotherhood", in widespread Theosophical usage since Helena Blavatsky's era, the 1870s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_White_Brotherhood), and was used by multiple groups to describe trance channel entities - or, cult leaders pretending to trance channel. Either way, the kind of people who used the phrase "Space Brothers" in 1950s were almost exclusively of some alternate spiritual orientation.

I would be happy to be proved wrong, if someone could point me to any other documented historical use of this phrase to refer to the Dulles boys and not to mediums, or claimed mediums, associated with Theosophical/Contactee groups.

We know - if we accept Linda's word - that Townsend had an Adamski "scout ship" model, which to me shows a link of some kind between Townsend and Adamski, or Adamski's circle. We don't yet know how (through which social circles) exactly that connection formed, yet it must be there.

Many of Townsend's known friends - or people who became attracted to Townsend's ideas - seem to have alternative spirituality links, of the kind which would be called "New Age" from the 1970s on. Thinking of people like EL Kitselman and his Scientology/Dianetics roots. Linda recalling the "Russian Bank" card game and its fans, who seemed to enjoy the game for training precognitive intuition. And then thinking about how certain factions within the CIA either became or remained interested in Scientology up through the "Star Gate" remote viewing era of the 1970s. And thinking about, for example, the Tolstoy-Tibet connection during WW2. Is it too far to assume that right at the formation of the CIA - in the generation prior to the Baby Boomers, who kept much more quiet about their off-the-books beliefs - there may have been factions within that ex-OSS scene with a strong ESP interest, and connections to organized alternative spiritual groups? Up to the 1930s, the upper-class British and American culture and society scene from which the "Oh So Social" recruited was riddled with magical and Theosophical orgs; it seems it would have been hard to avoid them.

We know, or I thought we knew, that Townsend Brown had some link to Wilbert Smith. Smith had his own "Space Brothers" who he called the "Boys Topside" (I'd need to Google to remember who the specific medium was that channelled Smith's "Boys", but I believe we know her name). I've read Smith's "channelled" essay on physics allegedly from the "Boys", and I can certainly believe that it was produced in some kind of trance state, because it doesn't make any actual physical sense.

The "Borderland Sciences Research Foundation" (Meade Layne and Riley Crabb), who were early movers on quoting Townsend Brown in New Age contexts, had "Space Brothers" of their own (medium Andrew Probert's "Inner Circle"), and Riley Crabb was in a Theosophical and/or Huna group in Hawaii, I think during the time Townsend was there.

Was Agnew Bahnson also a friend of some medium or Contactee who claimed to have or to be "Space Brothers"? The "Brothers" in this case wouldn't even have to be actual metaphysical entities, just a chatty medium who'd heard Townsend's name from somewhere in the esoteric scene (that Townsend seemed to swim in as easily as he did the Navy contracting scene). I don't know if it's documented, but I would find that easy to believe. Particularly because - like Roger Babson - Bahnson was not an academic, and so whatever it was that was drawing him to research "gravity" and to trust Townsend Brown's unusual approach to it was not the mainstream view of physics. People involved with esoteric/metaphysical groups, on the other hand, often found themselves drawn to unusual interpretations of physics that would help explain unusual phenomena. Bahnson fits that profile of a seeker after esoteric knowledge, so I'd be very unsurprised if he was hanging out in esoteric circles of some kind as well as playing with electrical equipment.

Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

Nate, I haven't found any connection from Bahnson to any of the Theosopy/Channeling/Adamski crowd.

In fact, the only UFO in his book, The Stars are too High, was built and piloted entirely by humans. There was not a single NHI in the book, nor any reference to them.

Keeping in mind the facts on the ground at the time, I believe Bahnson was being intentionally misleading with his use of the term, Space Brothers.

Secretary of State, John Foster most certainly wanted to use the fruits of orbital reconnaissance to inform State department actions in dealings with the USSR, but the US would not have had them, had not Allen Dulles' obtained funding for the first secret satellites that were built for the CIA by the NRO.

Jan

[Jan Lundquist]

Delete NRO, substitute NRL.

[David Osielski]

Just started digging...

Amazing what interesting stars fall from the sky when you shake other trees than "The Google" algorithm

https://yandex.com/search/?text=%22Spac ... 2&lr=20993

DuckDuckGo is another goto browser

[natecull]

Hi David. Yes, the quality of Google search results has declined dramatically since about 2019, when there were internal shakeups at Google and the departure of a key search architect. ( https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ )

However, just because you have some full-text hits, doesn't mean that you have a proven answer to our question here.

https://unhypnotize.com/community/threa ... own.93867/

March 22, 2013
Having just finished a careful rereading of George Adamski’s 1961 book "Flying Saucers Farewell", I feel ready to enter the 'Lady of Light Forum', which is dedicated to Linda Brown’s issues, particularly her attempts to understand and evaluate (if not also validate) the work and intentions of her enigmatic father, Thomas Townsend Brown (TTB).

Interesting. I knew Linda was active on multiple other (and more "woo") forums than Cosmic Token et al during the Between Times, but "Lady of Light" is not one I have visited. It's good to see her words here, still preserved.

It appears to me, in reading early editions of Linda Brown’s memoirs, that TTB was in contact with the space brothers as early as 1928

Well. If by "space brothers" we mean "unexplained inner promptings that lead to odd ideas", then sure. I don't think Townsend was in physical contact with either physical interplanetary travellers, or 1950s-era UFO contactees, in 1928.

Oh hey, and scrolling down, Linda herself says exactly this!

Are you asking my impression that Dad was in contact with " the Brothers" as early as in the twenties. I am not sure that he would have called the " Entities " by that name but he very particularly felt that somehow another intelligence was interacting with him through his dreams. Mother even spoke of that when I asked her about some of her first dates with Dad.... that he had told her that he was experiencing dreams and a flow of information that he could not explain.

This sort of thing has happened to a lot of people, in my opinion. Certainly Townsend was "tuned in to an unusual frequency" in his scientific thinking; it's what makes it so difficult to evaluate his ideas. They'll read as perfectly normal and sane and practical and then next sentence, casually, wham, something very, very left-field like "gravitational isotopes".


Moving on to the second hit, the book "A Critical Appraisal of George Adamski", no actual mention here of any direct Contactee link to Bahnson before Townsend Brown.

https://archive.org/stream/ACriticalApp ... s_djvu.txt

13 DECEMBER 1952 AND AFTER...

The account of Adamski's contact published in the Phoenix Gazette started to circulate, sometimes supplemented by the alleged events of December 13. It was used here and there by local newspapers, and then finally rewritten completely by Clara Little John.

Mrs Walton C. John, a widow about 62 years old at the time who was better known to her friends as "Clara," was the editor and publisher of a Washington (D.C.) publication entitled The Little Listening Post, which dealt with a variety of esoteric and strange items including flying saucers.

Around 1955 she came into contact with Thomas Townsend Brown, an American physicist who discovered what is called the Biefeld-Brown effect and who conducted personal research on antigravity. Maybe it was she who gave him the idea to use the Venusian scout ship design as a prototype for the antigravity machine he was working on The Thomas Townsend Brown "saucer." with Agnew Bahnson. Some ill-informed UFO researchers have said the reverse, that Adamski had copied the Townsend-Brown model. Actually, Adamski's pictures are older. [1)

We know about the Clara John connection. This chain of events is certainly the most plausible - the part about Townsend being inspired by Adamski I mean - except that as Linda says in 2013 on Lady of Light, above:

The little model disc that I remember playing with as a child Dad always called the Adamski Scout Ship.... ( you can see pictures of it in the oil bath test unit....I wasn't supposed to play with it... the year was 1953 though and it was neat..... I am not sure when the photo of that same ship was produced and honestly I can not tell you which came first... the chicken or the egg. I have always suspected that when Adamski mentioned meeting those who encouraged him to get a high powered telescope and to study one section of the sky carefully..... that one of those men was Dad... Unable to prove that yet.

If Linda is correct and Townsend had a model of the Adamski ship in 1953, then Townsend could not have been introduced to Adamski in 1955 through Clara John, but must have had his own connection, maybe as early as 1952.

This is one of those odd "date glitches" as Jan points out with Jacques Cornillon - where it feels like we can't see all of the moving parts in the cup-and-ball show, and that there was a "public performance" versus a "private reality" to some of these connections between both intelligence and UFO-believer factions (which sometimes overlapped) as they scrambled to understand and respond to both the UFO phenomenon, and much more prosaic but even more worrying international science and political and military issues (the Cold War, ICBMs, space reconnaissance, etc).

Remember that even the pioneers of chemical-rocket space exploration were deeply intertwined with some very startlingly "woo" philosophies, eg, Russian Cosmism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism), which mixed materialist "transhumanism" with spiritualist/Theosophical ideas. I believe there was also an American counterpart to this mix of prosaic military space science and "out there" weirdness.

My feeling is that Townsend was really, truly, a believer in the UFO phenomenon, he wasn't just putting that part on for show. He had weird ideas and he deliberately sought out people who also had weird ideas and not just as a "cover". Some of those other people with weird ideas were very highly ranked in the emerging post-WW2 American military-industrial complex. Townsend also had day jobs for these same military-industrial people involving very real, very prosaic, and very classified military electronics technology. He was able to juggle these multiple interests and not let one obscure the other. I think he was smart enough to be able to use the weird stuff as cover for his real secret stuff - but also, he was sincerely weird as well.

The Rense link (2004) comes closest to the actual Bahnson "Space Brothers" date priority question we're asking:

https://rense.com/general48/tm_feb.htm

So, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Bill Hamilton, a well known UFO researcher, contends that Bahnson had extensive correspondence with Adamski, and so modeled his anti-gravity device after Adamski's 'scout ship.'

I presume this Bill Hamilton is William F Hamilton III, author of "Cosmic Top Secret" (2002). I haven't read any of Hamilton's writings (and ugh, he has a foreword by John Lear, so that's enough to make me not want to read him), but "Bahnson had extensive correspondence with Adamski" (before meeting Townsend) is the same guess as I have. However, it wasn't Bahnson that designed the Bahnson discs but Townsend Brown. I suppose I need to (ugh) read Hamilton's book to see what he actually claims, and not what this reviewer thinks he claims.

Here's the core question:

Jan thinks that Bahnson didn't know Adamski (or any other Contactee) before he met Townsend, and instead was given Townsend's name by the Dulles brothers. This would imply that Bahnson was extremely politically connected and perhaps read-in to some extremely secret space projects.

I think that Bahnson probably did know Adamsi or some other Contactee before 1955 (perhaps in the years 1952-1954), and that when he said the "space brothers" pointed him to Townsend Brown (and I forget now which source this quote comes from) he meant this Adamski-shaped connection.

Both ideas are somewhat plausible but we don't (yet) have much documented support for either of them.

Wait, here's Linda herself (on that same Lady of Light page) explaining the source of the quote:

Of course I meant that I do not know if Adamski and my Dad ever met.... I do know that Adamski visited the Bahnson Lab just a few weeks after Dad left in 1958.... that is mentioned in the Bahnson Lab notes that were offered to me a couple of years ago. Agnew Bahnson spends half a page also lamenting the fact that " The Brothers" hadn't been in contact for awhile and he missed them.

He also told J. Frank King.... his brother in law that the " Brothers" had told him to find Townsend Brown.... that he was the man that he needed for his project. I believe that Stan Deyo ( a film maker from Australia has J. Frank King on film saying that exact same thing.... that he had been " missioned" to find Townsend Brown and bring him in to help with the research. I haven't seen it for a very long time but I believe that the film was called " The Cosmic Conspiracy". Now if I press Post will it actually do that? Linda

So it's the Bahnson lab notebook. I'll look around for it, it's around somewhere.

Ok, here's the copy I have. 55 handwritten pages of Notebooks 1, 2 and 3, from 1957 to 1959. Many pages appear to be missing so I'm not sure if this is the full known version and if it contains the quote that Linda is referencing. But here it is:

https://archive.org/details/townsend-br ... -notebooks

Yes, Deyo had at least one video (a VHS, back in the day) called The Cosmic Conspiracy as well as his late 1970s book of the same name. It is very likely that that video contains a J Frank King clip also. But I'd have to subject myself to multiple minutes of Deyo's conspiracy preaching to find it.

Edit: Okay, I've found one hit. Page 1 of notebook 2.

LABORATORY NOTEBOOK No. 2
MAY 1 1958

Tonight 9:58 p.m. I have been meditating the A.C. or R.F. exploitation, possibly with the help of the Brothers. I have missed them for several weeks.

The latest concept as written to Willis [Varg?] today, cc to T.T.B. with a request that he prepare a historical sequence and after experimental investigating for Dave [Grigge?] who will look at our work as a layman Sunday, deals with the expanded field gradient producing a thrust of the entire rig because of differential space charges akin to the Coulomb force between two oppositely charged objects (conductive preferably)....

While Bahnson *might* have used the term in various ways, in this particular instance, it seems fairly clear to me that by "the Brothers", Bahnson is not referring to any human beings but to his personal subjective sense of mental entities interacting creatively with his mind during meditation. It also seems that this is an experience he had had before on a regular basis, and that he could sometimes feel such a presence and sometimes not. This seems to me to be the same sense that Theosophical and UFO Contactee believers would also use the term "Brothers" with a capital B.

Of course Linda in 2013 perhaps has more ambiguity about this than I do:

While I am on this particular thread I wanted to note that I have some of the Bahnson labnotes ( written by Agnew himself) and there are MANY instances where he mentions meetings with " The Brothers".

I wish I had access to those missing pages, because I can only find the one reference.

Now of course we all know that he knew George Adamski well and when George mentioned " the Brothers" he was pushing the idea of fellows from Venus and beyond but it is not so clear to me that Bahnson had the same meaning attached to his words.

He uses the phrase also " The boys Topside" which I think is a decidedly Naval Term and oddly is the same phrase that the Canadian Wibert Smith used when he began his project investigating UFO propulsion systems in the fifties. I need to also note that the little dots that I have here put my Dad and Dr. Sarbacher meeting on the same day that Smith died..(I have his daybook with the meeting in his own writing)..

I have not been able to prove it yet but I believe that they were honoring their old friend and associate......The note about there being a project in existance in the fifties that was "more secret than the bomb" was never meant to see the light of day.....but somehow was leaked. It makes an interesting study of what was going on both " Topside" and below during the fifties. And Agnew Bahnson was right in the middle of things.

For those of you who are new to this story just google Sarbacher Wibert Smith and take your pick of things that will come up regarding flying saucers and secret projects.

It's possible that Linda here is sharing Jan's idea that Bahnson's "Brothers" might have been humans.

However, I believe it's been documented elsewhere (I don't have the source on me a the moment) that Wilbert Smith's "Boys Topside" were trance-channelled (and/or planchette or automatic-writing) entities. (The metaphor in the name is very clear and obvious to me: The "boys" are spiritual or extradimensional entities, they are "above" our physical world as we are "under" theirs. They live in a completely different physical condition: "air" to our "water". Perhaps Linda thinks of "Topside" as implying "the top-ranked members of human society giving orders to the workers below", but that is not at all how I can read that phrase. The people using it were, after all, already in the human social elite.)

And in the notebook entry of 1958 that I quoted, I believe it is very clear that Bahnson's "Brothers" to him in that moment were not human beings, and were not physical spacemen from Venus either, but mental entities, perhaps imaginary.

Still, that 1950s historical moment is confusing because there were highly-ranked military and civilian leaders who were also consulting with trance entities via mediums. So we can't cleanly distinguish "top secret military/diplomatic projects" from "esoteric/imaginary beliefs". They're all intertwined. It's not "either-or" but "also-and".

Could the Dulles Brothers have acquired, in some contexts and as a very complicated in-joke understandable only to people walking in both Contactee and secret military worlds, the nickname of "the Space Brothers"? It's possible. If evidence of such a joke existing can be surfaced (for example, in more of the Bahnson lab notebook pages, or more statements by Bahnson), I'd love to see it.

Nate