Here’s a welcome addition to the Townsend Brown canon: With this post, we introduce Jan Lunquist.
Jan has been onboard the Townsend Brown Train almost as long as I have. The archive of material she has gathered lends further credence to Brown as the mysterious-but-super-savant ‘Forrest Gump’ of 20th century science, possessed of a curious ability to show up just when things get interesting – and then disappearing again, back in to the veiled realm.
Jan posted some of the material she gathered on a website of her own, the banner to which appears atop this post. More recently, Jan has been posting in the forums that accompany this site, and honestly a lot of what she’s been sharing is a surprise to me. I think it will be of considerable interest to visitors who don’t quite make it to the forums, so we are going to bring some that material here to the front of the site.
(In the introduction that follows, Jan refers to ‘The Before Times’ – that is the period from 2003-2009 when I was working on the first draft of what eventually became The Man Who Mastered Gravity; She maintained her interest even through the decade-plus when the project was abandoned.)
–PS
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It was Defying Gravity: The Parallel Universe of T. Townsend Brown, Paul’s seminal book about the Man Whose Story Cannot Be Told (TMWSCBT) that drew me into this never-ending investigation. In looking up electroculture for home gardening, in 2010 I found a lonesome mention of someone named Thomas Townsend Brown who had used it in the cane fields of Hawaii in 1949. Happily, jubusly, joyfully, that slight clue brought us (husband/astrologer/editor-in-chief, Johnny, and myself) to Paul’s website as he finished his walloping 600 page tale, delivered chapter by chapter, to a forum audience on the Parallel Universe of T. Townsend Brown, eager to discuss each new episode. We were particularly charmed by the Linda/Morgan love story told in first person bytes from Townsend’s daughter’s diary and her recollections as reported in the biography.
Clues in the narrative told us that the real live, present day, Linda Brown was a near-neighbor of ours in one of the rural communities scattered across the high desert of Southern California. I reached out to her, we arranged to meet, and we clicked immediately, bonding over our certainty that magic is a real and active force in the world, combined with our shared belief that all magic is just science that isn’t understood yet.
After the apocalyptic ending to the Before Times, I encouraged Linda to see that she had the makings of a wonderful memoir if she chose to write it. She was a fluid writer with an interesting story to tell and I helped her edit the narrative into a 60,000 word story that was (briefly) published under the title of The Good Bye Man.
During that time I had the opportunity to quiz her closely about her memories. I met then husband George and grilled him as well and I had access to all of the family archives. The deeper I delved, the more certain I became that Thomas Townsend Brown played a vital, as yet unrecognized, role in some of the events that shaped World War II, the Cold War, and the Race to Space.
I have a couple of unique qualifications for making such a claim. My undergraduate degree is in History, but my boss on my first “real job” during graduate school was a Luddite from the Naval Metrology group, who swore that computers were a fad and a waste of his time. He sent me, in his stead, to Navy research labs and aerospace vendors working on a then top secret project. When I asked the scientists how long it would be before their workbecome public knowledge, they said 50 years. (This is the maximum length of time documents can be classified without a mandatory re-review.)
As if on the strike of the clock, documents from that time period, and earlier, are now being declassified and released often. Information is available that Paul could only have dreamed of at the long ago start of his endeavor. Fellow Fascinated-by-Townsend fan, New Zealander, Nate Cull, from the Before Times posts some of it on his Reddit Forum, In Memory of Thomas Townsend Brown (1905-1985) I have been publishing bits of it as I come across them, in posts to the Parallel Universe forum.
Paul has kindly set me up with a blog account so that I can bring some of those items over here. But, before I begin, it only seems appropriate that I acknowledge and thank Linda, for the memories she shared that enabled me to see Townsend in his proper perspective against the background of the some of the most important events of the Twentieth Century:
Linda Brown, I hope you are living your best life, wherever you are. Have faith that the harvest is nigh and your father will not pass through history without receiving his just recognition.
