Joe Rogan doesn’t know it yet, but he’s been introduced to T. Townsend Brown– with a little help from a chap named Eric Weinstein.
My Internet wanderings have taken me to some interesting places of late. Several weeks ago I happened on this video from the American Alchemy YouTube channel where host Jesse Michels spends nearly an hour in the company of Eric Weinstein and Hal Puthoff. If you are not familiar:
Eric Weinstein is a Managing Director at Thiel Capital and the creator of geometric unity, a unified theory in physics, and the intellectual dark web, a loose coalition of intellectuals dedicated to free thought. Hal Puthoff is former CIA, NSA and AATIP (the government’s official UFO investigation program). In the 70’s, he oversaw Stargate: the government’s psychic spy program at Stanford Research Institute. In this conversation, we discuss the physics of UFO’s, private aerospace as the keepers of fundamental science and Hal’s experience with parapsychology
As you might imagine from such descriptions, this is quite a conversation. Eric Weinstein is entirely new to me, but Puthoff I’ve been aware of for as long as I’ve been falling into this rabbit hole. He is featured in several passages of Nick Cook’s Hunt for Zero Point, where he has some interesting things to say about the energy lurking in the quantum void. And Townsend Brown was in the Stanford, CA area during the period when the ‘remote viewing’ psychic spy program was developed. But I digress…
What caught my eye and ear in this particular video starts at roughly ten minutes in, when Hal Puthoff says:
There’s a famous series that came out in the Miami Herald and other newspapers in the 50s… The author was (Ansel E.) Talbert, and he did a series where he found out that a number of aerospace engineering companies were suddenly interested in antigravity and that people like DeWitt on up and down, really top-level physicists were suddenly getting grants to look at the idea of antigravity.
The video inserts a couple of newspaper headlines from the period:
Eric Weinstein then picks up the thread:
And so it looks like there’s gonna be a big explosion…then it all sort of quieted down. I take two implications from that: Either it quieted down because nobody ever got anywhere or it quieted down because it did get somewhere and it went ‘black.’
Well now, isn’t that the whole point to this entire exercise? Which is it?? Nowhere? Or somewhere… “black”???
And how curious is it that this is where things get ‘Townsend Brown adjacent’ – as they weirdly – and often – do.
The ‘Dewitt’ that Puthoff mentions almost in passing here is Dr. Bryce Dewitt – who visited Agnew Bahnson’s laboratory in North Carolina – while Townsend Brown was working there! From Chapter 83 – First We Build A Fire:
At Bahnson’s lab, Brown intended to continue the work that was interrupted after his departure from France in 1956 to the point of filing patents. Some experiments were conducted with solid aluminum disks; others utilized ‘canopy’ models that resembled a silk-and-aluminum-foil umbrella, with electrodes running down the curved ribs. 16mm film footage from the lab shows variations with two and three concentric canopies. Weights were added to a rod suspended vertically through the canopies, which provided a means for measuring the experiments’ progress.
Another segment of the film footage shows a visit from two highly-accredited professors from UNC, physicists Bryce DeWitt and his wife, Cecile DeWitt-Morette. Townsend described their visit to Josephine:
On Monday we had a meeting here with Dr. and Mrs. Bryce DeWitt. We had been working day and night, Saturdays and Sundays, for the past two weeks preparing for it. I had worked until 3 a.m. the night before, so I was afraid that I might not be awake when they got there. But everything went along all right and I believe the meeting served the purpose – although, like all of the other meetings of that type in the past, the ice and reserve was almost impossible to break through. Frankly, I got the distinct impression that neither one of them really grasped what it was all about.
Agnew is quite enthusiastic and spends more time in the lab than in his own office. He has just finished a letter of five pages to the DeWitts and the people at Princeton and the patent attorney, outlining his ideas as to how to proceed from this point.
After the DeWitt’s visit, Agnew Bahnson expressed some frustration with the the rigors of orthodoxy in his personal notes:
Until the DeWitt’s visit, we were working exclusively with condensers of a conventional type to prove the basic effect.1 I realized that even if it were proven to our satisfaction there would be little interest in high scientific circles that it was new and useable because it would probably depend on the acceptance of an ether theory – which would call for a 180° turn from presently accepted concepts. It is easier to say “We can’t explain it from known knowledge but we are sure some ‘specialist’ could,” and therefore discount its importance. So I decided to strive for an irrefutable demonstration of value.2 This we would like to do before disturbing the scientists or the governments of the world3.
That’s all pretty interesting in of itself. First, there is an almost casual mention of the ‘antigravity’ research that surfaced in the mid 1950s and then disappeared (and provided the genesis for Nick Cook’s research). And then, there in the shadows, lurking beyond the veil is none other than Townsend Brown – slow-dancing with Agnew Bahnson’s frustrations.
But… that’s not what I am here to tell you about.
Once I’d started watching YouTube videos featuring Eric Weinstein, the algorithm presented me with another one – a video podcast with Weinstein talking to (popular? controversial? notorious?) podcaster Joe Rogan.
The whole video is worth watching for context, but it is this snippet, starting ~3:20, that got my attention:
If you have two masses in general, they always attract each other gravitationally. But what if somehow you had a different kind of mass that was negative, just like you could have negative and positive charges. Oddly, the negative mass is still attracted just the same way to the positive mass as if there was no difference – but the positive mass is always repelled. So you get this weird solution where the negative mass chases the positive mass. And they go off to unbounded acceleration.
Wait? What? “The negative mass chases the positive mass”? Where have we heard that before???
Well, for starters, it’s right there in The Man Who Mastered Gravity, starting in Chapter 9 – A Push Not A Pull, where Brown’s colleague Beau Kitselman writes:1
Brown mounted the Coolidge tube in a careful balance, as if it were an astronomical telescope. His idea was to point the tube in different directions and somehow find a variation in the power used by the tube, the strength of the X-rays generated, or something. He didn’t find what he was looking for, no matter where he aimed his apparatus, no tell-tale differences appeared. But he did find something he wasn’t looking for; he found that the X-ray tube generated a thrust, as if it wanted to move.
He soon learned that the new force was not produced by the X-rays, but by the high voltages which they required. Many experiments were necessary to make certain that the force was not one of the known effects of high voltage, and that it is a mass force, like gravity, rather than an area force, like most known electrical forces.
Continuing in Chapter 10: The Biefeld Brown Effect:
In 1977 Townsend Brown wrote in his brief memoir,
The basic Biefeld-Brown effect is quite simple. It is manifested as a departure from the Coulomb Law of electrostatic attraction, in that the opposite forces are not equal. The negative electrode appears to chase the positive electrode so that there is a net force of the system… in the negative-to-positive direction.
Now, I get that in the clip I’ve excerpted, Weinstein predicates his prediction with a big ‘if’ regarding the charge of the negative mass. I’m not really sure what he’s getting at there. What I do know is that as soon as you starting talking about a ‘negative mass’ chasing a ‘positive mass’, then you are describing precisely what Townsend Brown observed in his Coolidge Tubes back in 1923.
Google ‘Biefeld-Brown Effect’ and you begin to get some sense of what might be at stake here.
Contrary to the popular scientific opinion, the Biefeld-Brown effect has been experimentally confirmed many times, also in high vacuum.
Which kinda brings us back to the question that Eric Weinstein asks in the first video cited above, the one with Jesse Michels and Hal Puthoff:
Either it quieted down because nobody ever got anywhere or it quieted down because it did get somewhere and it went ‘black.’
I know it’s impossible to prove, but I’m still going with Door Number Two: it went black.
And I can’t help but wonder if Joe Rogan has ever heard of T. Townsend Brown, or has any idea how close he just came to having Brown’s whole Parallel Universe dumped in his lap.
Hey, Joe… wanna talk?
1 Kitselman, A. L. Hello Stupid
1 Re-reading this passage in September, 2022, I was struck with fresh insight re: what is really going on here: Brown is ‘seeding the ground.’ He is showing Bahnson what will work and they are getting deliberately minimal results.Brown is showing Bahnson the least he possibly can of technologies that he knows work in a far more impressive manner – maybe sometime in the future, or on another planet, in another galaxy or another dimension.
2 Agnew Bahnson personal notes January 5, 1958
3 This idea of “disturbing the government” – and the impact of revolutionary technologies on ‘world security’ – provided the theme of a novel that Agnew Bahnson wrote and published in 1960, The Stars are Too High, in which a secret, privately funded group constructs a revolutionary, saucer-shaped flying craft with gravity-defying capabilities. See footnotes and bibliography for links. Agnew Bahnson died in 1964 when the plane he was flying crashed on take-off; conspiracy theories abound, suggesting that Bahnson’s death was not purely accidental, but the way his family tells the story, there is little doubts that despite Bahnson’s skill and experience, his death was caused by “pilot error.”