TTBrown

Townsend Brown Notebooks Now Online

Back in the 1970s and 1980s a researcher and author  named Willam Moore  -- best known as the co-author of such folk-lore as "The Roswell Incident" and "The Philadelphia Experiment" (there, I said it...), wrote a couple of articles about Townsend Brown.  Moore was also the last journalist to interview and photograph  Brown shortly before his death in 1985. 

Somehow, during that period, Moore obtained access to Brown's personal laboratory notebooks, and, presumably, obtained permission to "published" three volumes of those journals.  Photo-copies of those journals have been in circulation ever since.

Now those those three notebooks -- Voumes 1, 2, and 4 -- are available in their entirety online.  They were transcribed and encoded by Rex Research, one of the web's largest collections of " information about unconventional", suppressed, dormant, or emerging sciences, technologies, inventions, theories, therapies, and miscellaneous alternatives that offer real hope of liberating humanity" -- a noble pursuit if ever there was one.

For reasons that are not clear, Rex Research is no longer hosting this valuable resource, but their pages have been transferred to the Qaulight Systems, LLC, which offers the most comprehensive collection of documents relating to Townsend Brown's research on the Internet. 

Click here to access Volumes 1, 2, and 4 of Townsend Brown's notebooks from Qualight LLC.

Visit the "Science" section our forums to discuss the contents of these notebooks.

A Personal Note From The Rabbit Hole

I’m sorry there is no new “chapterette” (as one reader called them - OK, so I'm not Tolstoy...) to post to the website this week. After the last two installments, after going a little deeper into Townsend Brown’s work and some of its cosmological underpinnings, I’m really not sure which direction to turn next. I’ve been working with a couple of possibilities, but in the vacuum of a clear direction, I have — I am chastened to admit — allowed my focus to be diffused by a wide range of distractions that have come over my digital transom over the past week or so. 

Consequently, I found myself inexplicably, frustratingly, unable to continue the main story. It’s not just that I’m stuck. It’s more that I’m totally overwhelmed. I need a break and yet I know that taking a break isn’t going to solve anything either. So instead of a “chapter” I’ve just decided to step out of the flow altogether and share with you a little bit of what my week has been like.

The amount of input that is now being directed to my attention from myriad different angles is just staggering, and yes, at times I am staggered. The experience brings to mind something they teach you when you’re learning how to scuba dive. It’s called “breathing from a free-flowing regulator.” Let me describe the procedure and I think you’ll understand the morass I've been dealing with....

First Patent Drawings Discovered

Andrew Bolland has just sent us some photographs that he took back in 1988 of what appear to be the very earliest hand-drawn renderings of the illustrations that found their way into the 1927/28 patent discussed in Chapter 20.  There are two sets of images here.  The first drawings depict the gravitator as it was eventually rendered in the 1928 patent. 

The second set discloses Brown's concept for a "Gravitator Space Car." These drawings are completely new to us, and are the first concrete evidence we've seen that indeed, Brown may have been thinking in terms of space travel from the outset.  Or, at least, gravity-field powered flight.

It's probably just due to the graphic styles of the period, but we also couldn't help but notice a resemblance between what Brown has drawn here and the image of a "G-Engine" vessel that appears on page 3 of Nick Cook's breakthrough epic, The Hunt For Zero Point - Inside The Classified World of Antigravity Technology."  Just our wild imaginations, I'm sure.

Click here to see all these images.

Another "Missing Persons" APB

Posting these "missing persons" alerts seems to be working.  I've posted a couple of messages here that mention people who might be able to help us unravel some of the many mysteries of Townsend Brown's life, and so far the power of this Internet thingie has proven to be quite useful in that regard.  Most recently we heard from a daughter of Beau Kitselman, who was Brown's "partner" in various aspects of his work.

Now we're looking for an individual named Joe Currey.  Joe was an employee of Martin Decker's companies when Brown was working with Decker in the 1960s, and worked directly with Brown  on the projects that he was working on during that period.  Ostensibly, this is the period when Brown was developing the first prototypes of the fan/loudspeaker (that eventually became the Ionic Breeze), but our hunch is that there was something else much more interesting going on behind the scenes, and we're hoping Joe Currey is alive and can help shed some light on just what that might have been.

In fact, the whole "Martin Decker" thing is pretty much an ongoing mystery.  Decker at one point was a fairly prominent industrialist in the Philadelphia area, but his company went bankrupt in the later 1960s and now there is practically no evidence of the enterprises ever having existed.  A Google search on "Martin Decker" reveals practically nothing, and the site his operations occcupied on a hillside in Bala Cynwyd, PA is now mostly office buildings and condominiums.   There is no evidence of Decker ever having been there.

So, if anybody within the sound of this post can help us find Joe Currey, or has any info on the Martin Decker operations near Philadelphia in the early-to-mid 1960s, by all means, give us a holler.

The Paternity of the Ionic Breeze, Part 2:

The case of the Shut-Down Project, Ion Propulsion, and Credit Where It is Due.

In fairness to the inventors, developers, manufacturers and marketers of the Ionic Breeze air purifiers, I thought it would be appropriate to speak to Jim Lee, the man whose is credited for the patent (U.S. Patent No. 4,789,801) cited on The Sharper Image website, before publishing the results of our little fact-finding expedition regarding the true origins of these products. It took a couple of weeks to finally get through, but on Monday December 5, I spoke with Mr. Lee by phone for about thirty minutes. Nothing he said contradicts the assertion that my mysterious correspondent made in the first e-mail that started me off on this quest: Townsend Brown is indeed the originator of the “electrokinetic” air purifiers, even though it was improvements developed and patented by Mr. Lee that made the product a practical consumer item.  Much to my surprise, it turns out that Mr. Lee learned of “the fan” first hand from Townsend Brown himself.

PS: So you did work with Townsend Brown?

Jim Lee: I not only worked for him, but he worked for me for a while. I had a company called Zatek Industries in Concord, CA.  I was interested in his ion wind technologies, trying to make something of it. It was kind of crude, what he had, but it was interesting. He was having a lot of financial problems. So we put him on as a consultant of sorts, gave him some space in the back. He was working on what he called “petro-voltaics,” measuring the voltage across rock samples. There seemed to be an interesting phenomenon there which he seemed excited about, so we put him a corner and provided him with some material and time and money and he played with that for six months or a year, and he was available to consult with us on the ion wind technologies.

The conversation then drifted around to Jim’s recollections of Townsend Brown’s career history:

JL: He’d been burned pretty bad by people licensing his stuff and not paying him.

PS: What are you referring to ?

The Paternity of the Ionic Breeze - Part 1

Readers who have been following faithfully along with the draft online publication of Defying Gravity: The Parallel Universe of T. Townsend Brown will hopefully recall how this project began:  In the summer of 2002, I received an anonymous e-mail which first brought Brown to my attention.  That e-mail also said "...smarter image is selling an air purifier on cable for 60+. He never collected the royalties for that either."

The writer of this message was obviously referring to The Sharper Image, and the "Ionic Breeze" air purifier which has been relentlessly marketed via TeeVee infomercials for quite some time now.  Readers of the chapter entitled "How Many Generals Does It Take?" will recognize the Sharper Image product as undeniably similar to the device that Townsend Brown was demonstrating in the mid 1960s. 

So I have had it in the back of my mind for quite some time that at some point, I would approach The Sharper Image and ask them what they know about the "paternity" of their product. 

I finally got off my duff a few weeks ago and contacted the Public Relations Department at The Sharper Image corporate headquarters in
San Francisco. Of course, the “public relations” office doesn’t really want to have any contact with “the public,” so my call was answered by a machine. I told the machine why I was calling and what I hoped to learn regarding the origins of the technology behind their very successful product. I left my phone number and my e-mail address.

The next morning I received an e-mail from Suzie Stephens in the Sharper Image Public Relations office that sounded like it was a copy-paste job from her folder of “boiler-plate responses to impertinent questions:”

Thank you for taking the time to contact The Sharper Image Public Relations.  We appreciate your interest in our Best Selling Ionic Breeze Air Purifier. This is a Sharper Image Design product that was developed in house.  For more information on the Ionic Breeze and how it works, please feel free to visit our website at http://www.sharperimage.com for thorough information on the product and its technology or contact me if you have additional questions.

Well, I did contact Suzie via e-mail that same day. And, rather than be circumspect about what I was after, I explained precisely what I was interested in: finding if indeed there is a trail of patents and developments that would lead from today’s ubiquitous Ionic Breeze products back to the work that Townsend Brown demonstrated back in the 1960s.

That was nearly a month ago and Suzie still hasn’t responded. I don’t guess she’s got “boiler plate” response for actual questions -- especially when they challenge The Sharper Image's frequent boast that their products were "invented here."

However, my research assistant, Elizabeth Helen Drake -- who is not known to let go of any subject once she gets the bit in her teeth -- seized the opportunity and  delivered all the info I could possibly require on the subject. It was easy, thanks to Google and a couple of well-chosen keywords.

New Links Section: This Week's Reading

Today I'm launching a new section to this site, "This Week's Reading."

I've scanned, skimmed, and read a ton of material in the course of researching and writing this book over the past three years.  I have an enormous range of sources to consider, everything from the "Origins of Quantum Mechanics" to the "Nazi-UFO Connection."    Besides all the books that have been piling up in my office, I visit dozens -- maybe hundreds -- of websites every week.

I've only been able to handle the input thanks to a couple of organizer programs like Onfolio, which make it very easy to bookmark and search through my rapidly growing database of sources.  Onfolio also makes it very easy for me to relay links from the material I've assembled to this website, so that's what I'm going to start doing.

In the course of my travels, as I find sources that might be interesting for others to see, I will use Onfolio to post the links under "This Week's Reading."

The Electric Sun

The word "plasma" comes up a lot in The Parallel Universe of T. Townsend Brown, though the word can seem to have myriad uses. 

Here's an article that postulates that the sun and stars are not deep-space nuclear fusion reactors (the commonly held view), but are instead "an electrical mechanism." 

The Electric Sun... is a logical extrapolation of the Electric/Plasma Universe theory which came into being through the work of Hannes Alfven etal. ...There is no longer any doubt that electrical effects in plasmas play an important role in the phenomena we observe on the Sun.

Indeed, those "electrical effects" may have an important role in the story we are telling here, too. And Hannes Alfven is somebody I've been told I need to learn a thing or three from...

Another "Missing Person"

I was just thumbing through some of Townsend Brown's correspondence from the last year of his life, and  found a letter he wrote to somebody named Josh Reynolds on April 4, 1984.  I'm familiar with the name, as I've seen it before in correspondence I've found among Dr. Brown's papers.  I believe he and Mr. Reynolds had a mutually beneficial relationship in the final years of Dr. Brown's life, with Mr. Reynolds offering both moral support and the offer of some material support for Dr. Brown's final endeavors. 

I have not really made any effort to find Mr. Reynolds, not having the slightest idea where to start.  20+ years ago, he worked for a company in Los Angeles called "Molecular Electronics Corp." on Century Blvd.  Suite 700, to be precise.  Needless to say, that company is not there any more.
So, Josh Reynolds, if you're out there somewhere, please get in touch.  You are one of the few people who had close contact with Townsend Brown during the final years of his life, and we'd like to hear whatever you can recollect about that relationship. 

Anybody Seen This Unit ?

Chapter 2: No Moving Parts introduces Townsend Brown's electrostatic fan/loudspeaker, which eventually became the Sharper Image Ionic Breeze Air Purifier (that reminds me, I need to clean mine...).

The unit described in this paragraph was taken to California, and reappears in Chapter 4.  The actual unit in question can be seen in this picture and this picture. 

We're posting these pictures of what we call "The Big Unit" (apologies to Randy Johnson) because... well, we're wondering what happened to it.  The last it was seen was when it was left at the offices of the RAND Corporation in 1967, as described in Chapter 4.  But it has not been seen since. 

We have no way of knowing for sure, but we're fairly certain that "The Big Unit" is still out there, and maybe, just maybe... somebody reading this knows somebody, or knows somebody who knows somebody... who knows where it is.

Can we please have it back?

Thanks,

--PS