The Man Who Mastered Gravity: Life and work of Thomas Townsend Brown with Paul Schatzkin

Transcript

[Music] in the 1920s our understanding of the universe was growing due to advances in quantum physics and relativity during this time a high school student with an obsession for electrical phenoma discovered a curious new effect he found that applying a high voltage across a coolage tube produced a force one that could act against gravity convinced that he had discovered a connection between electricity and gravitation he eventually wrote up a paper and built a device called the gravitator Thomas Townson Brown who would describe gravity as a push and not a pull effect would later go on to work with the US Navy take part in the second world war get shot and rescued save lives with his inventions work with a very secretive private organization develop an abiding interest in UFO and take a serious crack at anti-gravity machines all under the shroud of secrecy and highly classified projects sadly this also meant that most of his contributions never made it to history and science books in today's podcast I speak to Paul shatkin biographer of Thomas Townson Brown Paul has painstakingly put together details about the life and work of this obscure genius in his book The man who mastered gravity I hope you enjoy this video and please consider subscribing to the channel if you haven't already thank [Music] you Paul shatkin welcome to stopping the world I hope you're having a great day I've been having a great day of course we're in entirely different time zones so I'm at the end of my day while you're just at the beginning of yours so I can report that I've had a good day thank you for uh being on the channel and Paul of course is the author of this amazing book that I read called the man who mastered gravity it's a biography of this really enigmatic uh scientist called Thomas Townson Brown now I have to say my first brush with Thomas Townson Brown was at least a couple of decades ago when I read this book called The Philadelphia Experiment and it was exactly the kind of book that my physics professors would uh discourage me from taking seriously if I wanted to have a career in science so I guess that's that kind of gives you an idea of the circumstances that that Thomas ston Brown worked under and the kind of work that he did so Paul so I want to start off by asking you in your words who exactly was Thomas dson Brown well it it's not something that is easily put in in a simple declarative sentence but I will I will answer that question the way I have typically answered it when I've had a conversation like I'm having now and the conversation goes like this have you ever heard of the Ionic Breeze Air Purifier well that was a device that was advertised on info commercials and in The Sharper Image catalog in like the late 8 1980s and in the early 1990s it's a it's an air filter that uses an anomalous electrical effect that Townsen Brown discovered as a teenager in the 1920s and when I was first introduced to Brown and and began to go down the rabbit hole what I discovered is that there is a league of people around the world who think that that anomalous electrical effect Which towns and brown discovered in the 1920s when employed in a different manner than the Ionic Breeze Air Purifier and using different materials produces something along the lines of a synthetic gravity or anti-gravity effect and so at that point I went down the rabbit hole of trying to understand who this man was and discovering that he led a very as you say enigmatic life where most of the information that would ordin be available about an accomplished scientist has been stripped from the records so to try to answer your question simply towns and brown is and is was and remains a mystery because the nature of the work that he was doing doesn't lend itself easily to any kind of conventional Orthodox scientific explanation you you ask me who was he I could talk about he was born in Zanesville Ohio he had a he had a fairly affluent background his family had the means to fund his scientific experiments he had a kind of questionable academic career because he was trying to pursue things that his teachers found unorthodox and so he doesn't have the kind of credential history that you would often expect to find with somebody when you're talking about Advanced scientific achievements uh and and he would went into the Navy to try to get some support for his work and in 1942 he left the Navy under very questionable circumstances and after that he becomes a complete Enigma and so the the existing record of towns and brown is very spotty and very suspect and I would actually commend your teachers who's tried to steer you away from The Philadelphia Experiment because the work that's in the Philadelphia Experiment is part of the camouflage that we're beginning to understand suram SS all the work around towns and brown so by putting Something In A Book Like The Philadelphia Experiment that is Highly Questionable to the trained scientific ear we discredit Brown and then steer attention away from whatever it was he may have been due right and and of course you described it as a rabbit hole and I agree so how did you get involved and how did you decide to write a book uh a biography no less of such an Matic person because obviously details are very hard to come by and and I imagine you spent many many years collecting information and sort of gave up and then finally decided to publish the book yeah well it's hard for me to separate this work from the first book that I wrote Because I was preoccupied for a very long time with the story of a man named Philo T Farnsworth his work in the 1920s in roughly the same period that we're talking about with brown is the Genesis of every video screen on the planet and even though this is the most influential invention of the entire 20th century we don't know his name either so I am drawn to these stories of unknown inventors and as I was finishing my work on the pH of Farnsworth biography in roughly 2002 I was thinking that this was work that I wanted to do now and I wondered what my next project would be and it was during that summer of 2002 that I got an email completely out of the blue from a source that I have still not clearly identified nor met introducing me to Townsen Brown and as it says in the book this email said that towns of brown it mentions the Ionic Breeze Air Purifier and that some of his work has has been making millions of dollars for people like The Sharper Image but he never received a dime and other work of his can be seen in blue lights floating over the desert of Nevada so that was my introduction to towns and brown and it like I say it came on the heels of finishing up the the work on my first book about the guy who invented video and because I was looking for an encore project something to do that kind of fit into my wheelhouse and I started reaching out to people that operated a website that had some information about Brown and and I really think to a certain extent that all of this was kind of pre-ordained predestined maybe mystical forces are at work here because once I began to inquire on this subject the path began to clear for me and even though she was kind of hiding or staying out of public the public eye in the desert of Southern California I got a chance to be introduced to Brown's daughter and we formed a partnership and then starting in the spring of 2003 I met her in Las Vegas and we spent a couple of days together going through the family archives and then this became the project that I undertook so your the simple answer to your question is I got interested in this because it seemed like a logical sequel to the project that I had already finished and then as it unfolded it it turned out to be not so much a sequel in the same of it's not a similar story but the two stories at times seem to me to be of a piece that they kind of belong together and tie into each other somehow that's interesting also interesting is the fact that your introduction is as enigmatic as a character himself and I I spoke to Nick cook in my previous uh podcast and he sort of mentions that somebody pushed a like there somebody left a an article or a paper on his desk and he doesn't know who and that sort of started his uh um you know path down this this thing so it's really enigmatic like who's doing all this it's like there's this secret organization overlooking who who wants this information come out or your I don't think that you can discount that there are larger forces at work here and something being slowly unveiled and and uh the the experience I I finally had a chance to speak with Nick cook myself and I used him as a source I think that he has done some of the most credible research on towns and brown that anybody he's done in the last 25 years uh and he does get into the Philadelphia Experiment and you can almost see how effective the Philadelphia Experiment was because when he gets close to Brown and he begins to read about the Philadelphia experiment he begins to Discount Brown he doesn't go a whole lot further he does a lot of very credible research about Brown I don't want to Discount that but you can almost see how the forces that were trying to be careful about how Brown's story is revealed were at work there and that Philadelphia Experiment book is I think very much part of that but I do think it is curious that um uh Nick Brown Nick cook and I had kind of consonant experiences very Conger was very similar and that this just kind of came over our transom and something about it struck a nerve with us and we both followed it up right and you mentioned uh talking to his daughter I mean uh Townson Brown's daughter Linda and your book of course um has it's basically put together it's pieced together based on the information that you received from multiple sources of course there's Linda and there's this unnamed character called well pseudonymous character called Morgan and there's O'Reilly yeah Linda was Linda was the primary source and what Linda and I discovered as we were beginning to try to reconstruct her father's life and remember Linda spent long periods in her father's absence so she doesn't know what she was doing she also spent as much time as anybody in her father's presence working with him in various Laboratories around the country on the stuff that I think he was doing on the surface and not the stuff the important stuff that he was doing behind the scenes so Linda became the primary source and early on in the process we kind of arrived at the conclusion that what we were trying to do was like spilling all the pieces of a c a jigsaw puzzle out on the table and then realizing that we had no cover image on the box top to guide us in assembling the picture the the jigsaw puzzle and and it just it just became a almost intractable process over a period of time and then after about a year we began to get messages from the mysterious source that I have codenamed Morgan in the book who began to provide some of the more behind the scenes information but in a very guarded way because whoever the source was and and the The Source uh inferred that he was somebody that Linda had gone to high school with and was then drawn into whatever clandestine Network towns and brown was part of after his high school experience um who whoever that Source was was not at complete Liberty to tell me to answer a lot of my questions directly so I had to try to read between the lines and where this book differs so greatly from the first book Is that the first book was relatively easy to do as an objective third person biography a conventional kind of biography this one became as much about what my experience was trying to get to the story and then the relationships that I formed with my clandestine covert sources with whom I had extensive email correspondence right and and to this day uh you don't know who that was who was sending you that email right so like who Morgan was actually um I have at best a couple of ideas of who Morgan was um but I can't say with certainty that I know exactly who he was and he may he may be as as Nick cook infers in his book uh he he used a lot of quote Blended characters and he had a character that he relied on called Daniel I it was Daniel Marcus Dr Daniel Marcus now Nick told me that he actually met Marcus on several occasions and I don't doubt that I never had the opportunity to actually meet these sources that I was corresponding with so if if you want to take everything that the stories that I'm telling with some kind of grain of salt I think that's entirely reasonable that's why I have couched the story in the way that I have this is my experience of trying to research and tell this story and how much I can state with factual certainty is kind of unknowable at this point but it still makes for a really interesting story and we know that towns and brown was a real person and a real mystery a real Enigma right and of course uh where the stories of Morgan and and Linda also intersect at many points and I guess Linda was able to provide some points of corroboration as to like the existence of this person called Morgan absolutely and and she had her own personal contact with this individual and um and then Morgan introduced me to another individual who who in the book is Coden named O'Reilly and I think uh the character who was O'Reilly was also a presence in Linda's life and he had experience with Townsen Brown During the period of his life that is of the most most interest starting with when he left the Navy in 1942 so I was really working with these three sources one of which was very real and material and tangible to me and two of which were of less absolute certainty right so their stories do kind of corroborate they do they they run together there is some consistency to them I think right so so in a way in trying to build a picture like a complete picture of towns and brown uh like who he was as a person as a family man as a father you know that information came from his daughter and information related to his work and you know all the classified stuff that he was doing came from these other two mysterious sources yeah correct right and and then I did I did a lot of independent research of my own and and some of that experience is included in the book as well it became very difficult even even trying to use the typical objective sources like going to the National Archives there's that great story in the book about trying to find the FBI files and running all over Washington DC because one source told me it was at this place and that place told me it was at the first place and when I got back to the first place then they told me that the FBI files that I was trying to find had been destroyed years earlier and that's just so typical of what this experience was like the expression that Morgan used when he was describing to me how towns and Brown's life was camouflaged and concealed the expression that Morgan used was sheep dipped and that's a reference to a farming process when you want to delouse a farm animal you dip it in some vat of of some chemical and that removes all the uh the Vermin the bacteria or whatever from the sheep and that's kind of what the story is like with towns and brown his records have been sheep dipped and when you go to find the records you find they're not there right so they've been sanitized in some way they've been sanitized in some way and and that of course raises all kinds of questions like who's doing the sanitizing and what are they actually trying to cover up and and then we're asking questions that are even harder to answer about how much could actually be going on in some completely secret Realm with Advanced Technologies that the public is kept unaware of right so before we dive into some of the details of his work what is your having spent so much time looking into this and so much research having done so much research what is your well speculation or gut feeling was there something really secretive and high high tech going on that's they trying to cover up or is it like like like a decoy to cover up some other black operation or or something that's more Earthly and mundane I have been re-engaged in this for about a year now or a year and a half or so because as you mentioned at the start I worked on this project initially from 2003 to 2009 and then because I couldn't make the kind of sense of material that I was inclined to work toward I kind of ran screaming out of the room with my hair on fire in 2009 but I never stopped thinking about and it took me almost 13 years to reach the point where I could come back to the material and make another run at trying to make sense of it and so now that the material is out there and I'm engaging in conversations like this and other things are happening around it like the the the hearing that we had in Congress last summer where the fellow named David grush tried to tell as much as he could about what he knew from his experience I'm I'm getting closer to being able to accept the proposition that yes there is something very real and viable in the work that towns and brown did and that continues to be developed in a realm so dark that like a black hole light can't even escape from it right right and so do you think think in I know it's very difficult to answer in plain and simple terms do you think Townson Brown mastered gravity which is sort of the title of your book I actually do yeah and I come to that conclusion somewhat belatedly because some other conversations I've had have have compelled me to take a closer look at Brown's disclosures from the 1920s that's when he was talking about the gravitator and that that's when he was building devices using what's known as a solid dialectric there are are you familiar with the lifters have you seen any of Jean Lou Nan's work on the internet the lifters are based on the same discovery that brown made in the 1920s the beld brown effect and in a way the lifters seem to be part of the subterfuge because they can be proven to not be an anti-gravity effect because they employ what's called a fluid dialectric so in in the lifters you have the triangle of a band of aluminum foil which is the positive electrode and then suspended above that on balsawood posts are a wire that that traces the same outline as the triangle and that's the negative post and or I'm sorry it's U the negative chases the positive so the aluminum foil is the negative and the wire is the positive and when it's charged a lifter will instantly lift off the ground and it looks like it's Defying Gravity but it has been pretty well proven that there is an electrical wind happening that there's an ion exchange between the wire and the aluminum plate at the at the base so that's the result of being in a fluid dialectric where ions can be generated so so we discredit the idea that this is an anti- gravity effect or I I prefer to say a synthetic or artificial gravity effect and I'm not really sure why I've settled on that Tech that terminology but I just like it better than anti-gravity because that brings so many elements of like Science Fiction and Fantasy to it what we're talking about really is producing an artificial gravitational field that can work against the gravitational field of the earth so the lifters provide counter evidence for an artificial gravity effect because they are reli lying on ionic wind but what towns and brown disclosed in the 1920s was based on a solid dialectric so what you have is a is a metal plate and a very high K or high capacitance material on top of that then another metal plate then another layer of the high dialectric and you stack that up and that's what the gravitator was disclosed in the 1920s and even as recently as around 20 9 or 2010 somebody who was a contributor to my early towns and brown forums built one of those devices and it weighed three pounds but when he applied a high voltage direct current to it and placed it on a scale the weight went from three lbs to one pound how do you account for that weight what you measure on a scale is a function of the effect of a gravit field on the mass of an object so if something is causing the weight to change then arguably you have produced a synthetic gravitational field that is working in opposition to the Earth's gravitational field and then producing an element of lift and changing the weight so that is how I have recently come to the conclusion that yes I do believe the towns and Brown's approach to producing artificial Gravity by means of electri currents is a viable Force right when you mentioned fluid um dialectric in the case of the lifter you are referring to air right because air acts as the dialectric in between yeah air is a fluid effectively yeah right and it's interesting that you you know this is mentioned in your book that Townson Brown himself seemed to sort of um sabotage and you know I think there was this Pearl Harbor incident and he himself self wanted to actually create a doubt about the nature of the um the phenomena and he had these demonstrations to people where it was clearly ionic wind and he seemed to want people to believe that that is part of what appears to be the subterfuge of the 1950s and in the book it's referred to as towns and Brown's wounded prairie chicken routine and that's just a reference to the behavior of of a certain animal when it's being prayed upon it pretends to be wounded and the Predator will no longer pursue it or pretends to be dead I guess so what you're talking about is I think this is a critical turning point in the clandestine black story where after working at Pearl Harbor at Barber's Point actually uh in in the the late 1940s to early 1950s there was a point at which he demonstrated I I believe the solid dialectric device to the Navy to the military at Pearl Harbor and the story is that there was a mole there was a whole chain of uh Espionage agents working within the the Allied American English intelligence establishment most notably a man the the filby network Kim filby uh who was providing information out of American and English sources to the Soviet Union and the story that I tell in the book is that there was an agent for Kim filby present at Pearl Harbor who witnessed this event and and then I guess passed it on to philby and then to the Russians so the decision was made to try to camouflage the work by as you say turning from the solid dialect to the fluid dialectric and then demonstrating that and there are several instances in the story where it was demonstrated and the people who observed it kind of snickered under their breath well obviously whoever is doing this has not studied their their elementary school or High School physics because anybody knows this is ionic wind but what we were demonstrating was not the real thing that towns and brown was working on right and and he of course at some point visited Paris to do the test in vacuum yeah which is also mentioned in your book I think which proves that it is not ionic wind that's right yeah were the reports conclusive because I I think it wasn't like maybe it wasn't published or do you do you know it was like conclusively proven at that point well I I can send you a link to um something called the G the it was called The Mont golfier project now the Mont golfier brothers were the the Frenchmen who developed the first um lighter than air balloons in the 18th century and and so this was a call back to that the project where in this Aviation company in Paris or or France brought towns and brown over and built him vacuum chamers so that he could test his devices they did it under the guise of what's called The Mont golfier project and there is a report on the Mont golfier project on the web and I can send you the link to that if you want to see it I had an opportunity to interview 2008 a man named jacqu cornean who was actually the man who met Townsen Brown in 1956 and arranged this whole process in France and I spoke with him just months before he died I think at age 98 he was living in Pennsylvania at the time and so he has written these reports and with the help of his daughter provided all that material on the internet now and it's it's a it's a process that seems very consistent with this whole strange phenomenon of hiding things that we're talking about where once they began to get some results that at the very least demonstrated clearly in a vacuum that there was some unaccounted for anomalous electrical effect happening in this vacuum well then suddenly the company is acquired by another company and the funding is cut short and the project is shut down and the report is inconclusive right you suspicious yeah yeah yeah yeah and okay so this leads me to the question so if this now it's been of course many many decades since uh this information about you know the the uh the force generated between two asymmetric electrodes is is available on the internet why haven't I mean the world I would imagine is full of brilliant physicists and scientists why hasn't someone else privately or secretly or publicly or some University taken it up as a challenge and put a solid dialectric and proved that yes it is possible to do this in vacum and it is an anti-gravity effect like why aren't other people doing it well I I agree with you that it needs to be done again but what I just cited for you was the most recent incident that I know of where this fellow who had been a contributor to our forums did build a solid dialectric gravitator stack and was able produce what he attested to was a reduction in the object's weight on a scale now this is not a peer reviewed report it is not done under the guise of Orthodox scientific study so I agree with you it needs to be done again and if uh if the results um prove it would be good to have a result one way or another from a credible scientific source and there may be an effort with somebody else that I've been talking to recently to mount just such a challenge but I think you're right the time has come to do that but do you think the the composition of this dialectric itself is is critical is that like proprietary and secret is that why maybe other people may not have the same extent of effect like you need to be very specific about what you put how you layer what is a composition and so on is that the thing that is secret I think we're getting into advanced a advanced applications of what we're talking about and and then to to to carry to a more logical conclusion we're wondering how something that can simply demonstrate a reduction in weight could actually be converted into some kind of propulsion device that could lift a whole vessel out of the Earth's atmosphere or even off the ground and and I don't have a good answer for you for that but I also recently saw a video um was a talk given by man named Hal POF now that may that name may be familiar to Hal POF is a guy who's got his fingers in a lot of pies and and he is a source for Nick cook as well but this video that I recently saw he just says very quickly he makes a reference to um layers of um I think he says bismuth but he me layers of some very Sub sub some layers of some substance that are less than a the width of a a a strand of hair and that got me to wondering if there was a way to engineer a material that had the dialectric built into it into such a way that a surface could have those artificial gravity properties when the surface is charged in a certain way you know I I I've learned enough from the research of that I've done to know that the very first iteration of any new technology is going to be crude Beyond Comprehension when you go back for example and look at the very first drawings that Philo Farnsworth did for what became the network of video that dominates our world today it's hard to see the connection but it's clear and it's direct so add a hundred years to What towns and brown was doing and is no telling what is there is literally no telling what might be possible and that's that's a true statement whether it's viable or not there's no telling um and then it raises all kinds of questions about how could something so profound be kept a secret who's keeping it a secret and why and right th those are the questions that I keep running up against that I keep bouncing off of and why I went screaming out of the room with my hair on fire in 2009 it's like okay I'm trying to be rational here but this story just keeps not being rational right actually when you mentioned this material with bismi it kind of rings a bell now I don't remember the source but many years ago I remember reading that when somebody did this material analysis on some well quote unquote recovered uh otherw worldly craft they found that it was layered between with with nanometer thickness of bisou and magnesium uh composite that was that's an interesting combination yep because there you have the Magnesium serving as the electrode and the business serving as the dialectric and that is kind of what Hal pudol was describing that little video snippet it was in one of Jesse Michaels American Alchemy uh videos I think it was the one he did where he actually he interviewed uh both Hal POF and um is is it Hal Weinstein um another scientist of some Fringe note and and I think that I think that clip was in the middle of that one right yeah um just to just to temporarily change Focus from his work onto his onto his family because his family plays a very very critical role from what I read in your book and his wife for example who he completely relied on who was very supportive and who could keep secrets like you mentioned in the book also played a critical role in him being you know allowed to just do his research freely right because they were traveling all the time and and uh what was happening there with his family well the critical ingredient in that aspect of the story is how much they moved over the course of their lives together uh Townsen met Josephine Beal in I think 1928 they were married in 1928 and discovered that in in Josephine he had somebody that he could conf finded his deepest secrets and uh and I think that they both had the expectation going in that they would follow a kind of a conventional path to the realization of those dreams and the manifestation of their lives together not realizing that they were going to run up against some forces of opposition or doubt or dispute that threw obstacles in their path but she did stay with him through periods of tremendous hardship particularly during that period in the 1950s when he had to appear to the world as some kind of failed scientist and inventor and so they were living for a while under very uh um well meager means and um and and it was a very difficult time in their life uh their son he had a he had a very estranged relationship with their son who was born in oh n mid 1930s I think uh Joseph and Joseph thought he was going to be the heir to the brown the towns and and Brown family fortune but that fortune got dissipated in the 1930s a lot of it was actually lost during the Depression and and so he felt like he was the victim of his father's Flying Saucer pipe dreams and they had a very strange relationship but just the fact that Josephine stayed with them as they moved back and forth across the country and there are many tales in the book about how when they first got married uh Josephine received as a wedding gift this little green ceramic teapot and they stayed at a at a lodge on the family property the lodge was called elnido and she named the teapot ELO and every time they got ready to move that was the first thing that she packed and when they reached their new destination that was the first thing she unpacked right do you do you think they divorced or separated briefly so Townson Brown could protect her for something I believe that that is the case now here is one of the solid things that we were very surprised to find during the course of our on the ground research I had a kind of a a research assistant a a uh historian and genealogist from Zanesville Ohio lace Lynch who has been instrumental in providing a lot of things that Linda and I were not able to get our hands on and she discovered in the Zanesville newspapers two Snippets of information the first from um I think 1938 and you'll forgive me for not remembering all the dates as well as I should at this point but I think it was 1938 that that announced the divorce of townzen and Josephine Brown and then there are numerous articles where Josephine Brown is part of rather yeah Josephine Brown um and I think she started using her maiden name again Beal but she is part she is part of the Zanesville Social Circle as a divor and the the suspicion the best suspicion we can is that brown was involved in some kind of very clandestine intelligence work and that for her protection he separated from her and then they were remarried in early 1940 right and right um one of the reasons that I tell so much of the Morgan and Linda story is because to me that was a parallel construction that kind of demonstrated in a more contemporary framework what brown and Josephine's life must have been like with him operating being under the umbrella of some unknowable intelligence or industrial Espionage organization and and the strains that that put on their relationship because when Linda's boyfriend that I code named Morgan got drawn into that same network when he demonstrated his capabilities to towns and brown then their relationship became very strained and they actually had to split right and that was that was something that Josephine said to to if you're going that way if you're going to the root of this intelligence work then you must let Linda go yeah right right and and Josephine was also uh there was this incident there's this uh incident that you talk of where she actually inspired him or rather her hip bones inspired him to come up with the design for a mind sweeping invention yeah I'll see if I can do justice to that story um so this is is uh when Brown is working openly for the Navy between 1940 and 42 and the war has started and the the Allies are losing a lot of ships to um to German um mines around harbors and stuff so they were trying to come up with some kind of um mind sweeping anti anti-mine device and um I'm really not going to be able to do justice to the story off the top of my head I guess I'll have to reread this one so I can do if anybody asks me about this one I can do it better the next time but um I think it may have been during the course of what we're calling their second honeymoon when they were remarried and they're at a I think a hotel in Washington DC and he's working on these this mind sweeping technology and and he he as you say he caressed her hip and and had a moment of Revelation where it suddenly dawned on him that the way to float the anti- Mind devices was by putting putting the air pockets inside like a sausage and floating them that way and how he made the connection between Josephine's hip and a mind destroying device I don't know but that is the story that Josephine's hip inspired a a m an anti-mine device and anti- seagoing mind device that had an impact on the outcome of World War II right speak speaking of World War II of course he's he was heavily involved there and there's this really like a spy James Bond movement where he jumps out of a plane and gets shot at and gets saved and there is interestingly you mentioned there is a James Bond connection because there is Sir Ian Fleming who was part of uh operations uh there as well so that's that's an interesting connection yeah there's there's an oblique indirect a reference to Ian Fleming who was um an officer at the uh intelligence station where the character that I codenamed O'Reilly is working so Ian Fleming is at the same station I don't know if their paths ever crossed but it was this kind of oblique connection but I think what you're what you're interested in there is that towns and Brown went into Germany in the closing weeks of World War II and he was probably on a number of Missions at least one of which was to see if he could gain any insight into the aerial phenomenon that were being reported in the last months of World War II that have come to be known as the Foo Fighters now most people nowadays when they hear the expression Foo Fighters what do they think of the band the band well ask Dave Gro the band is named for the aerial phenomenon that were observed after world War I and the Skies over Germany right and and um do you there there's a more direct connection for you I can make a direct connection between Townsen Brown and David Gro I wish he'd call me and and uh do you think ton Brown was also a spy did he spy for the Allies I don't think that he was a spy for the allies in in the direct sense that um he was behind the scenes sending reports uh on enemy movements or the kinds of things that you would ordinarily associate with spy work on the ground but I do think that he was part of the upper level spy networks that were working on things like encryption codes and part of his mission when he went to Germany involved recovering some of the devices the advanced devices that the Germans were using to decipher uh to to encode and decipher their own messages within within their troops because they didn't want that technology to fall into the hands of the Russians so there was a big scramble in Germany in in the closing months and in in the months right after uh VE Day in May of 1945 where all these forces and and squadrons are scrambling around Germany trying to recover as much of this equipment as they could to keep it out of the hands of what they expected would be the next opposition the next adversary in in the wars to come so great I do believe that he was involved in in Espionage work but I wouldn't say that he was a conventional spy who's like looking around the corner and then reporting troop movements or something like that right and and you of course refer to this uh what they call Tech plunder which happened at the end of World War II and uh like I I I I really enjoy reading this this picturization where where all parties interested like whe it's the Allies whether it's the Soviets the Americans the British even even people like a team from South Africa and and mercenary Renegade uh groups everybody it was like a free for all and everybody wanted their hands on secret German Nazi technology by then right yeah the word that you can use to describe Germany uh in in at least the the the months of of 194 5 after the outcome of the war is pretty clear and it's just a matter of getting there Germany was a state of Anarchy and and there were all kinds of of clandestine forces scrambling all over the German Countryside uh particularly uh in the month or two around it's it's interesting because during the change of administration when Roosevelt died and then things are changing in America as well uh there were all kinds of um scrambles for for power and control right and speaking of Foo Fighters of course Brown himself had a very enduring interest in UFOs and that's right I don't know I don't know whether he himself had any like direct uh experiences with the osce but do you think that kind of really influenced his research into electrogravitics and his his obsession with pursuing anti-gravity I think the relationship there is is that he was curious about what was being observed in the skies that was unexplained thinking and hoping that he could learn more about the technology that he had discovered by learning more about what was being observed and so he did in fact in 1956 or so he formed one of the very first citizen UFO research groups and that's naikap and you might be interested to read I will commend to you a book by an author named Laura Powell and the book is called against the odds it's the biography of a man named Donald kho who was instrumental in the formation and operation of naikap but towns and brown was there at the Inception of naikap if you're familiar with with muon the mutual UFO network naikap was an early iteration of muon it was one of the very first networks of individual citizens trying to gather Knowledge from their experience and sightings and make sense of it all and I think Brown's interest stemmed from two sources one was that he was genuinely interested to see if there was anything he could learn about how possible extraterrestrial Technologies might work and he also gained in a sideways kind of way from being associated with this Fringe element in the course of trying to keep a a Mystique or a discrediting of his own involvement in these things and and of course his involvement with naikap was very shortlived I believe that after just a year or under a year he was remed yeah and and it's another one of those stories where his separation from naikap is cast in a rather dim light which further serves to discredit his reputation right and who was the the kolene group because this is this enigmatic entity that keeps coming up throughout the you know the book and throughout his life I guess who I guess funded him and gave him missions and so on do we know more about the Catalan group well um this is this is where you have to like suspend another dimension of disbel belief and accept the possibility that there are in fact networks of vested interests that work both within and without the um the organizations of the the military industrial and intelligence complexes and so uh I knew early on that brown had spent uh several months on an expedition in the Caribbean in 1933 aboard a yacht called the Caroline and and there's for me there's a very interesting connection there because the Caroline was owned by a man that I had not heard of named um Eldridge Reeves Johnson and please note that the name Eldridge is the name that's given to the Destroyer Escort that supposedly disappeared in the Philadelphia Experiment yeah but um Johnson was one of the pro genitors of the recording industry and I worked in the recording industry for a while when I first came to Nashville so it was Fascinate fascinating to me to learn about Elder Johnson but we'll set that aside for the moment so Brown traveled he sailed on Johnson's yacht called the Caroline named for Johnson's deceased mother on this um um Marine research expedition in 1933 they were dredging flora and fauna from the bottom of the ocean and trying to learn about the the bottom of the ocean in the Caribbean area but in my earliest correspondence with the source that I codenamed Morgan he refers to the an intelligence network of which ELD Reeves Johnson and his colleagues were part of based on two things first of all that the the military intelligence networks became phow in the period between World War I and World War II the intelligence Network built up like the the naval intelligence and so forth they they were not as aggressively maintained during the 1920s and thir and early 1930s as as one Secretary of State said gentlemen don't read other gentleman's mail and and so those intelligence networks were allowed to Fall by the wayside but private business interests formed their own intelligence networks and that is what I first understood the Caroline group be so in his earliest message to me Morgan refers to the Caroline group and so it is this reference to a network of probably mostly business but you can't really get into business without having some kind of governmental interest as well and that would infer a military interest so some of those responsibilities were taken over by some of these private interests to maintain their standing in world World Commerce and brown was recruited one way or another into that Network while he was on that Voyage in the Caribbean with Eldred reev Johnson on the yach Carolina in 1933 and then as you say that became kind of the the underpinning the very secret underpinning of much of the rest of his life and became the group that Morgan was recruited to when Morgan comes along in the early 60s do you think no no we know for a fact that Townson Brown came off from a really came from a really well-off family and his his his grandfather and his dad were definitely Rich do you think the fact that he started sort of a in an affluent background sort of gave him connection to these people at you know at the higher levels of society these businessmen and the rich people who could invite him to your yacht and things like that did to some extent yeah I certainly think it did to some extent because early on in the story when he's trying to find uh material support for the ideas that he's developed he's introduced a people like the founders of General Motors um and and and other people of High industrial standing although mostly in the Ohio area so he had some exposure to that so I I don't think you can discount that he was in fact uh able to Avail himself to the kinds of connections that the rest of us don't really have at our osal yeah I do think so and then certainly once he becomes part of what we're calling the Caroline group then he became probably deeply IM mesed in that Network and and it's it's probably important to note also that one of the other principles one of the international factors in what we're calling the Caroline group was a man named William S Stevenson and I give him a little bit of coverage in the book as well if you've ever heard there's an expression from World War II a man called Intrepid and I referenced that in the book so if you hadn't heard it before you heard it then Intrepid was the Cod name that Winston Churchill gave to a man named William S Stevenson who organized the intelligence networks that was absolutely instrumental in the Allies winning World War II and Stephenson appears a couple of times in the towns and Brown story during the time when he is recruiting Morgan to join that Network and kind of slowly easing off from uh from this work into some of the more bizarre uh nature of This research uh there are a few uh occasions where you speak of Dreams where uh flying sources land and then sort of shared dreams between Townson Brown and his daughter yeah and something about reference to a set what is okay so when you mention the set now we're off into an entirely different Realm of the subject matter that we're discussing because along with what we're calling the synthetic or art artificial gravitational effects of the bifel brown effect Brown was also very keen on developing a Communications aspect to that technology and in the book I I talk about the difference between an analog radio wave where it takes time time for the signal to get from one place to another and a gravitational wave where you're essentially tugging on the fabric of space and the signal gets there instantly because it's like you're tugging on a rope rather than waving the Rope you're tugging on the rope and the other end of the Rope responds it instantly so that's kind of the theory behind what he was developing in the way of a Communications Network and one of the things that he demonstrated at Pearl Heart Harbor in 1950 was this application of a Communications device based on this gravitational approach or spatial SpaceTime Continuum and and that technology was immediately taken into some kind of hiding after the demonstration at Pearl Harbor when that demonstration was compromise as we talked about earlier and it was described to me as something that resent a radio set and in the book we talk about how the structure of space applies itself to this possibility and kind of antenna that would Ed so again it's an electrical electromagnetic kind of phenomenon that produces this gravitational effect and the story that you're alluding so the the set was taken away and and not available and The Story You're alluding to uh is a story that Linda who was about 9 years old at the time and they're living in uh outside of leeburg Virginia and Linda tells a story to a friend who is visiting about a strange dream that she had the night before where three saucer type craft descended in a field behind the farm that they were staying at and she has a conversation with the the Personnel that off the craft and they bring with them some manifestation of this technology that we're calling the set because after this occasion whether it was a dream or not now town and brown always has at his disposal and never goes anywhere without something that looks like a shortwave radio it may have been just a shortwave radio but he's never very far without it and the story is that the following evening um Linda and her friend chip are having dinner with Townsen and Josephine and Chip's parents at the farm in in um in outside of leeburg and Townsen starts telling the story of the dream that he had the night before and it's the same dream that Linda had had and when I started talking about all of this with Morgan all Morgan would say was it was not a dream wow wow it just gets more and more you know I know what you mean by the rabbit hole right now you know yeah it's just like it's it's difficult to say where I mean real where like solid physics ends and where all this sort of fluid strange Concepts begin and where like how they overlap with real life you know well I'll be a little philosophical with you here uh because we've been talking for a while um I was greatly influenced in ways that I'm still learning by seeing the movie Oppenheimer last summer now have you seen the movie not yet it's on my list well it it it's very interesting because first of all it demonstrates that it is possible to have a big project going on and nobody really knowing about it or knowing what's going on but um the thing that that struck me about Oppenheimer was it it made makes it more possible to suspend a lot of the disbelief that I come to a storyline like this about uh I think I said at the start it's it is it is difficult for my rational rational leaning mind to accept the idea that all this stuff could be going on behind a curtain somewhere where even when you peel the curtain back it's still black and you can't see anything and and then I think well they did manage to conceal the Manhattan Project from the public for a long time now that isn't to say that other sources other people didn't know what was going on but it was kept from the public for a very long time so that makes it a little easier for me to entertain the possibility or as I said earlier suspend the disbelief that it's possible for all this stuff to be some kind of real that there may have been an occasion in 1956 where three craft came from somewhere and descended in towns and Brown's backyard and brought him a piece of equipment that he used to communicate with forces unknown to us yes it requires a certain level of what they call the suspension of disbelief right just how much disbelief do you want to suspend to continue this conversation when you when you mentioned this instantaneous communication what I'm reminded of is this uh concept called spooky action at a distance or nonlocality nonlocality that's that's that's quantum entanglement and quantum entanglement is a now there is an accepted scientific theory that is absolutely analogous to what I'm describing as towns and Browns communication device right I remember watching this really fascinating tedex talk by Russell tar where he was talking about non-locality and how like on the face of it it seems impossible because information cannot travel faster than the speed of light and yet it's possible for you know for almost near instantaneous communication to happen it's almost like it's sort of blipping out of one dimension and blipping back in another location and so there's definitely something seriously wrong with our model of reality it's completely inadequate uh which is why all these things appear miraculous and and I think once you expand your model of reality everything will just make sense I guess I want to share with you a quote that I just picked up from a most unexpected source so there there's a movie in America right now called poor things which is one of the movies that's in contention for the best picture Oscar next month and it's it's the the quotation is totally unrelated to the story but it's perfectly pertinent to what we're talking about and so that's when the lead character played by Emma Stone says and I've almost got this memorized now she says well that's the way it is until we discover the new way that it is and that's the way it is until we discover the new way that it is and so it goes until the Earth is no longer flat and electricity lights the night and we no longer tie our shoes with ribbons and that's exactly what you're saying there's everything gets so baked in because we have we reach a certain level of knowledge and understanding and on some level we have to be be able to accept that that's just the way it is and then somebody comes along like Albert Einstein in 1905 and says no that's not the way it is and then suddenly we're off on a whole new way that it is while we're waiting for the discovery of the next new way that it is do you think we are on the threshold of something like that again that's what I'm wondering now because there seems to be so much activity percolating in this realm where we're talking we're having disclosure and conversations and Congressional hearings and we're talking about well are these things that are appearing in our skies are they from someplace else in the Galaxy are they something that have been developed secretly here on Earth are they visiting us from another time that is all becoming part of the conversation now in a way that I think that it has not been in the past fostered I would say because of the mlist in me partly because of the internet because now we have all these ways to discuss these unorthodox and out-of the- mainstream theories they're getting much more traction they than they ever did before so maybe yeah maybe we are on the threshold of discovering the new way that it is I'd like to think so I do have one quick point to sort of squeeze in before we start winding down this fan that he seems to be constantly working on this fan without moving parts now was that uh so when I when I looked up fan without moving Parts I come up some with something called the Dyson fan which seems to be coming from a completely different person so what happened to this fan that Townson Brown was working on was it ever commercialized into a product or was it a cover for something else because at some point you do refer to the fan as a act it's actually a propulsion device um do I refer to the fan as a propulsion device I guess I do um Let me let me the the the direct answer to your question is that when I started the conversation with the reference to the Ionic Breeze Air Purifier that's the fan right yeah okay um and if it if it does have a prop a propulsion effect then that's going to be based on ionic wind because that's the fluid di electric model but the answer to your question what became of the fan the fan I think was part of the subu it was used to demonstrate the bifel brown effect to military industrial interests in the mid to late 1960s and the the story is that the military application of that technology is demonstrated in the wings of the B2 bomber that the B2 bomber generates an elect a positive electric a negative electrical field behind it and a positive electrical field in front of it and at high altitudes where the air is thin it it it applies additional lift by surfing that electrostatic wave so there are two applications of what was demonstrated as the fan and that's the Ionic Breeze Air Purifier which was developed for commercial use by somebody that brown worked with in on Catalina Island in I guess the 70s or early 80s and the military effect was taken undercover by the Rand Corporation handed over to uh Grumman Northrup developed under their ages Shifting the focus away from towns and brown as we sort of wind down what is what is your background because to to research somebody like Townson Brown and all this all these Concepts like do you have like an engineering degree or like do you have I mean you need to be you need to have some kind of familiarity with physics or science right I'm I am what you would call an autodidact okay I am self-taught um I I have learned enough of these rarified Concepts to be fairly good at reducing them to lay terms that an average reader can understand nobody is ever going to confuse me with being a nuclear physicist or as I like to say I'm not a Quantum scientist but I play one on the internet right but I'll just I'll just share with you on a personal note because I was telling this story to somebody else the other night regardless of the credential the Genesis of this for me goes back to when I was in the third grade and my mother took me to a library in Rumson New Jersey and said pick a book she was concerned I wasn't reading enough so she took me to the library and forced me to buy a book and I I where is it here I'll show it to you because I got I got a copy of it I picked up the signature edition of the story of Thomas Alva Edison so I've been into inventor stories since the third grade this is and I have studied enough science to be conversent if not credential expert just to play a little devil's advocate here would you know or would you suspect if you were being played like for example this character Morgan who maybe the information that he was feeding in maybe there is some information that they want to want to come in know it wants to come into the mainstream uh maybe they put maybe there's disinformation at some level would can can that also is that possible do you want my honest answer to that question yes I absolutely think it's possible I've been played I I don't I don't I cannot discount any possibility in the course of telling these stories and I I don't want to be one of these people that uh presents an absurd hypothesis and then insists that it has to be true I do have the ability to be somewhat objective about the things that I'm saying and understand where they skate up against the limits of of of known information known knowledge and be able to say well it's possible that somebody's handing me a line there so right um I I came into this to tell a story and I got material that lent it itself to the creation of some kind of narrative now is the narrative that I then created part of some larger still unknown narrative I do not discount the possibility are you are you still in touch with some of these uh people like uh is Morgan still writing to you or um I have been in touch with Linda she and I were AR stranged for a long time after I abandoned the project uh in 2009 um she and I met for the first time in 13 years last fall so I will I will say for the record that Linda and I are in communication again though it's very sporadic but I don't want to say any more about any of the other contacts than that got it and and you mentioned that um Townson Brown wrote this book called the structure of space uh book or an article I'm not I don't really recall yeah it was a it was a a white paper was is that in the public domain or are you planning to publish it it is essentially in the public domain um it was I found a digital copy of it where somebody had somebody put it on the I was I was planning to make it available but I discovered that it was already available and I don't have the link off the top of my head but I have placed a pdf version of that document on my website and if you go to the website tbr.edu the website for structure of space or even just the word structure the the the article with that link will come up okay and uh as as we close this conversation are you what what are you currently working on is it are you work doing further research coming up with another book on the subject or doing something else what are your I'm I'm doing something else uh I don't think I have another obscure 20th century inventor story in me so I mean I start Ed on the Farnsworth I met the Farnsworth family in 1975 and I didn't publish a book about pho Farnsworth until 2002 then I started on the towns and brown book and I didn't publish that from 2003 until 2023 and I'm now 73 years old so do the math but I am starting to work on a book that I think both of these books in their own way has been steering ing me toward even though the subject material on the surface would seem to be completely different and I think that I will keep that one kind of close to the vest for now but I have started working on on another project and I think I have enough time left to finish it hey maybe there's a Netflix movie in there on the I mean the enigmatic scientist's Life Sounds like a perfect Netflix movie recipe you know oh yeah well it it I don't want to spend too much somebody criticized me on on a a review on Amazon for saying too much in the towns and brown book about the pho forworth book but one wouldn't exist without the other right and I would say to your comment about some kind of movie for television Netflix or something it still astounds me that more than 50 years after I got involved in the towns and in the pho fors were story that nobody has really done a movie for television about the boy who invented it and it is one of the great stories of the 20th century and and so I'll come back to what we were talking about earlier is there is there something yet to be discovered that becomes the new the new thing the new way that it is until the next new thing discover is there something embodied in both of these stories together that expresses some knowledge that mankind is not yet ready for and I get a sense of that in the tail end of the pH of fsw story where he was working on a nuclear fusion device and don't want to go too deeply into that because we we'll spend another 90 minutes and I'll tell you all about F far well Paul shatkin thank you so much for this really entertaining and um you know information fill talk really enjoyed having a chat on this subject and I appreciate the interest from the other side of the world I really do thanks thank you so much [Music]