After more than twenty years of referencing his book, I have finally ‘met’ Nick Cook, the author of The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology.
The ‘meeting’ was virtual: I was at home in Tennesee and Nick was at home in the U.K. We were introduced by Jesse Michels, the host of the American Alchemy YouTube channel.
Nick is an important reference because he is one of the few reporters who has scratched the surface of the Townsend Brown story. I did exchange some emails with Nick back in the what is now affectionately referred to as ‘The Before Times’ – the period between 2003 and 2009, before I abandoned the first attempt to publish a biography of Brown. So this was the first time we spoke in real time – if not exactly ‘in person.’
I have an abiding respect for Nick, who earned his stripes as a reporter for the highly respected Janes Defense Weekly (whereas I am merely a self-annointed ‘biographer of obscure 20th century scientists’). I was really looking forward to comparing notes with Nick, because nearly a dozen times over the course of my correspondence with the covert source I called ‘Morgan,’ I was instructed to revisit certain passages in The Hunt for Zero Point.
Morgan’s inference was that Nick had come within spitting distance of some valuable revelations about Townsend Brown, but was steered off by precisely the diversions that Brown himself had instigated decades earlier.
Something Truly Innovative
For example on July 27 2004, in a message bearing the subject header “Something truly innovative,” Morgan wrote:
I am beating you over the head with Cook, but bear with me. I hope that you will see what he was missing.
He then directed me page 137, in the midst of a section where Cook writes about Northrop’s contract…
…to build the B-2A Stealth Bomber, based on its use of electrostatics to make it ultra-stealthy. The technique, first developed by [Townsend] Brown… represented a phenomenal breakthrough… that would give the U.S. a ten-year lead.. over the Soviet Union.
But herein lay a problem.
The whole science of stealth would have to be protected like no strand of weapons science before – the lesson of the bomb1 being uppermost in the minds of those charged with securing the Air Force’s new secret.
A novel protection strategy, one that overcame the flawed security model established to protect the bomb 40 years earlier… needed to be set into place.
Eradication and disinformation, coupled with the secure compartmentalization of the program, formed the basis of that strategy.
From that point on, pointers to stealth would have slowly and carefully been excised from officialdom.
But then, in the archive trawl, somebody would have come across T. T. Brown’s stealth work for the Navy in the early 1940s, coupled with his… electrogravitic work… that needed to be handled with great care. The man’s work was a dangerous liability. Something needed to be done – something truly innovative.
At which point Cook dives into the provenance of… wait for it… The Philadelphia Experiment!
And Morgan commented,
DR. BROWNS FINGERPRINT RIGHT THERE, IN CASE YOU MISSED IT.
Anyone who can live for nearly 10 years as a “wounded prairie chicken”2 to draw away interest in a secret situation could handle doing it again. Hello two Air Force officers who “claimed to have knowledge of a fantastic secret” (quoting Cook again).
Connective Tissue?
This is where I have to stop and look up from my screen-and-keyboard. From the west-facing glassed-in porch behind my house I call “The Treehouse,” I pause and admire the mid-autumn sun setting above the bare limbs and branches that fill my horizon.
I need this moment to wrap my head around Two Things.
1. The First Thing is an idea that has been crystaling in the weeks since I saw the film Oppenheimer – not once, not twice, but four times.
In the film, J. Robert Oppenheimer is portrayed as the one indvidual with the both the knowledge and the organizational skill required to pull together the most complex – and, yes, compartmentalized – scientific endeavor of the mid-20th century. And it all had to be done under the cloak of complete secrecy (except for that part where the Russians knew about it all along).
Thinking about Oppenheimer that way has (finally?) got me to wondering:
To what extent was T. Townsend Brown at the center of an a equally vast but even more secretive array of scientific investigations?
Is it possible that Brown was the ‘connective tissue’ between all the mysteries of the era, from UFOs and alien visitations to the ‘antigravity’ research that momentarily blinked on-and-off the radar in the mid 1950s? 3
I’m just asking:
Was Townsend Brown the ‘Oppenheimer’ of a world even darker than The Manhattan Project?
Was he gathering all the information, coordinating it, farming it out to further investigators, and above all, sacrificing his own credibility to keep it all behind the curtain of common knowledge?
Looking back on all of his directives, that certainly seems like what Morgan was trying to tell me.
2. Which brings me to The Second Thing: I can’t entertain the First Thing for very long before I also have to ask:
Is any of what I just speculated truly possible?
Is it possible that somewhere in the desert, humans really are experimenting with gravity control and bending the spacetime continuum?
Such a thought really stretches the imagination – to the point that Thing One and Thing Two nearly cancel each other out.
Unless we’re all under the influence of some collective, planetary Jedi mind trick:
More Hunt-ing
Now follow me back into my correspondence with Morgan, and look again at another passage in Nick Cook’s Hunt for Zero Point4.
On May 28, 2005, Morgan directed to Cook’s page 138:
In the 1980s, the decade when stealth came to be fielded operationally, the technology had acquired its own tailor-made cloak of disinformation…
When the B-2 and its antigravity propulsion system appeared in print, Brown – whose work was at the heart of this technology – was already a highly discredited figure. Whichever way you approached the story of his life and work, sooner or later you hit the Philadelphia myth. It blew all hope of dispassionate reporting on the man out of the water.
After citing that passage, in an oblique reference to Brown’s ‘wounded prairie chicken’ routine Morgan wondered…
…how difficult was it for him to do that? How many could place themselves intentionally in that situation? …. so that all true record of their contribution would be invisible?
In another missive, Morgan had steered me to a passage on page 144, where Cook is diving into what else may have emerged from Lockheed’s ’Skunkworks’ aviation research facility, and notes that…
Forty years earlier, T. T. Brown had proposed specifically that Project Winterhaven should be built outside the aerospace industry. Maybe Brown knew intuitively what it had taken me months to grasp. The aerospace industry had more to lose from antigravity than it could ever gain….
Antigravity threatened to wipe the entire aerospace industry off the map. Was this the reason for the crushing silence that had followed the industry’s initial burst of enthusiasm for antigravity in 1956?
To which Morgan added:
Pretty obviously, the old “Caroline Group” is still in existence …. as secret as they were in the 1930s – and as connected – which will account for the fact that – of the things that we have been talking about – the military only has a part of the action and not the whole deal.
See it yet?
I have to admit, I didn’t see it at the time.
But now that I’ve seen Oppenheimer four times... maybe I’m getting some sense of the pattern and… the connective tissue.
For what else might be lurking behind the curtain, continue with Part 2: Blended Characters.
1 That lesson being that even though the Manhattan Project was the most secretive military research project ever undertaken, Josef Stalin knew about it before Harry Truman
2 TMWMG Chatper 65 – Mortally Wounded
3 One publishe account of which mysteriously appeared on Nick Cook’s desk and set him off on his quest, much as an anonymous email showed up in my inbox some years later and set me off on mine.
4 I also asked Nick what “ZPE” has to do with “antigravity” and he couldn’t really say, either.