Thomas Townsend Brown is a man whose true importance may be inversely proportional to the degree to which he is widely known by the general public.
-Joseph P. Farrell, Covert Wars and the Clash of Civilizations: UFOS, Oligarchs and Space Secrecy
Somehow, the pervasive mysteries of the past century—nuclear physics, relativity, quantum mechanics, UFOs and alien contact cover-up conspiracies, the clandestine operations of the military-industrial complex—all converge in the life of this one extraordinary man. I have come to the inescapable conclusion that Townsend Brown’s singular knowledge, unique insights and clandestine connections may have opened the door to a universe very different from what the rest of us mere mortals can comprehend. And after staring into this rabbit hole for all these years, the only thing that I can safely say is that I have yet to find the bottom.
-Paul Schatzkin, Defying Gravity: The Parallel Universe of T. Townsend Brown
Long before the story of the Philadelphia Experiment emerged to complicate the picture, [it seemed] as if two portraits of Brown had been painted and were now in circulation: one portraying him as a mildly eccentric inventor with some hare-brained ideas about negating the forces of gravity; the other showing him to be a man responsible for some of the most highly classified research of the war. Seen through this ambivalent prism, the story of the Philadelphia Experiment has helped to perform a very important function. By 1980, it had managed to tip Brown over the edge; make him a wholly discredited figure in the eyes of science. That left me with the uncomfortable feeling that the story had been carefully stage-managed. If so, why? And why so long after the supposed events had taken place?
-Nick Cook, The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology
The Wikipedia page for Thomas Townsend Brown leaves much to be desired. While his name will forever be associated with the Biefeld-Brown effect, he also was the founder of the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena and the (uncredited) inventor of the “ionic air purifier”...and possibly much, much more.
Born in Zanesville, Ohio in 1905, by the time he was 10 he was electrifying the soil outside his house to collect earthworms for fishing. The only male heir to a wealthy family, Brown's parents spared no expense for his experiments throughout his early life.
At 12, his achievements reached the local papers when he demonstrated his first home-made wireless set for his class, when radio was used for transmitting little more than Morse code. A newspaper story at the time read:
Townsend Brown is the possessor of what is probably the only complete wireless plant in Zanesville. Zanesville’s Second Edison [has] a wireless telephone. When he is at play away from home, he wears a wireless telephone over his ear. Members of the family are able to call him wherever they want to merely speaking into the wireless transmitter in the house, and he can hear them perfectly.
His inventions were well known around town, and during World War I it was rumored he could pick up radio signals from Germany, and was visited by a government officer to dismantle the antenna on his roof.
By 1923, only 18, Brown made some sort of discovery. While we don't know precisely what moment it occurred to him, his daughter Linda confirmed that her father would later claim that he knew it “all at once.” According to his own memoir:
I began to cultivate the thesis that a radiation (other than light) prevailed in the Universe, independent of our Solar system. I felt this radiation could be gravitation. That it exerted a pressure (however small) on all forms of matter.
This gave rise, in my view, to what could be considered as a new theory of gravitation. Such a theory called for gravitation being a “push” and not a “pull.” This seemed logical in that Nature abhors a vacuum. A mechanism for the transmission of gravitation theoretically was needed.
This view would inspire him to investigate the relationship of electromagnetic phenomena and gravitation. Brown referred to “sidereal radiation,” claiming that the strengths of the radiation were related to the positions of the planets at any given time. These claims, as he continued to experiment throughout his life, seem to have been verified.
According to mathematician A.L. “Beau” Kitselman, a friend of Brown and his wife Josephine, Brown believed conventional rockets to be completely impractical, and he began to consider electric propulsion at a very young age. In his version of events, during a high school experiment with an X-ray tube, Brown applied high voltage to the tube and saw the electrical cables “jump.” This planted the seed in his mind that began rapidly developing.
The young Brown designed dielectrics—basically square bricks of dielectric material—which he would suspend vertically from the ceilings of his laboratories, and then suddenly charge with high voltage. As a result, the dielectric would swing up against gravity, and then gradually settle back into its zero state in steps, rather than descend gradually and continuously. This strongly suggests that, whatever the phenomenon was, it was not continuous but quantized.
The high voltages Brown was using in these experiments suggested to him something absolutely radical, and nowhere encountered in the standard science of the period—outside of the unified field theory papers.
These papers were but scientific curiosities until Hungarian electrical genius Gabriel Kron, taking Einstein's tensor calculus, demonstrated that the higher-dimensional unified field theories could be used to explain electrical anomalies electrical engineers encountered on an everyday basis! With his observations, Brown had entered that little-known conceptual world where high voltages were demonstrably having an effect on the mass of the apparatus producing it.
By 1924 Brown was enrolled at Caltech in Southern California, and he quickly grew tired of the stifling rules and procedures in the laboratory there run by Dr. Robert Millikan. Although Millikan is well known today as being the first to measure the precise electrical charge of an electron, according to Schatzkin: “There was no sudden, inward, intuitive sense of something that needed to be revealed. Rather, Millikan was visited by a manifestation of his ego, and set about to make a name for himself.”
Although the world was in the midst of being torn asunder by the work of Einstein and others, and the firmly held dogmas that had lasted centuries had been turned on their heads, Millikan was completely uninterested in Brown and his experiments. Brown even sent out invitations to fellow students and Millikan himself to a private viewing of the phenomena he was observing, but no one showed up, which must have been disheartening, to say the least.
Even after approaching Millikan himself about his belief in “electro-gravitics,” the coupling between electromagnetism and gravity that was locally engineerable, Millikan dismissed the notion as utterly impossible. These rejections seem to have affected Brown deeply, and he left Caltech soon after.
However, he would soon find a sympathetic ear in Paul Alfred Biefeld, a professor at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Before their encounter, Brown was encouraged when one of his invitations prompted a reporter for the Los Angeles Evening Express to run a story called “Claims Gravity is a Push, not a Pull.”
Although Millikan said Brown's claim were impossible, his story began to be picked up by national wire services and eventually was carried in the New York Times. He was on the map.
Contrary to the close-minded and ego-driven Millikan, Paul Biefeld was constantly on the look-out for something that might represent an “electrodynamic-gravitational coupling.” When the young Brown asked the professor what physical instrumentality might it resemble if such a coupling existed, Biefeld replied confidently, “the capacitor”.
Brown had already discovered this to be the case with his Coolidge tube experiments. Biefeld had confirmed he was on the right track and that they were of like mind.
To summarize what would eventually be known as the Biefeld-Brown effect, Brown himself observed in 1977:
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 (dipole) in the negative-to-positive direction.
How did Biefeld's name get attached to Brown's discovery?
This is just the first occurrence of a pattern that will repeat itself through the rest of Brown's life. Considering the relative obscurity that his reputation struggles with today, you might say that the “Biefeld-Brown Effect” was really the earliest manifestation of Townsend Brown taking extraordinary measures to “hide in plain sight”–by diverting credit for his own discoveries toward others in what we can see now was a carefully calculated effort to obscure his achievements behind a veil of anonymity that would follow him the rest of his days.
By 1928 Brown was awarded his first patent, in Great Britain, for his “gravitators” or “gravitors,” simply dielectric devices charged with high voltage that lift and return to their ground state in step-wise quantized fashion.
The importance of this point cannot be overlooked, for in the same year, 1928, that Einstein was writing yet another unified field theory paper coupling gravitation and electromagnetism, Brown had filed for, and received, a patent for a technology that demonstrated, and therefore, locally-engineered the coupling!
From a Cincinnati Enquirer article from 1929 titled Zanesville Inventor 'Applies' Einstein in new Electrostatic Pendulum Motor: “[It consists] simply of surrounding or impregnating mass of any non-conducting material with an electro-static condition. This is accomplished by applying high-voltage but low-amperage current to opposite ends of material that does not transmit electric force.”
In other words, Brown has sandwiched a layer of a material that does not conduct electricity between two layers of a material that does conduct electricity. The material that does not conduct electricity is called a “dielectric” and the material that does conduct electricity is called an electrode.
Because the dielectric layer interrupts the flow of electrical energy in the apparatus, the circuit is not completed, and this is one reason why Brown and scientists called in by him to test his results unite in saying the electrical energy present is not the cause of the force liberated.
Why was Brown convinced there was an electro-gravitic coupling being demonstrated by his device?
While conducting experiments with it, Brown noticed varying results depending upon planetary and stellar positioning relative to the galactic center. When the Sun and Moon were aligned in the direction of the positive thrust of his gravitator, the displacement of the apparatus was greater. In other words, the apparatus responded to conditions of local celestial space. This in turn affected the quantized release of energy as the gravitator returned to its ground state.
This quantization phenomenon is quite important, and Brown began to write of this concept himself, calling it “gravitational atoms,” and with it, Brown is suggesting, contra Einstein, that space-time is not a continuum, but rather, like the implications of quantum mechanics itself suggested, is a quantized phenomenon.
Brown was saying that space itself was a dielectric and the material universe an asymmetrical dipole in a state of non-equilibrium. His gravitators were not just an idle curiosity, they were the “only way to go” if mankind ever hoped to venture to the stars.
After the crash of 1929, the Great Depression prevented Brown's father from providing further funding for his son's experiments, and Brown was thrust into the world of corporations and covert operations
Brown joined the Navy in 1930, and within a few months was promoted and ordered to report to the Naval Research Laboratory in DC. Here one begins to encounter the signs of deliberate obfuscation in his history and record.
What could possibly be so classified? According to Brown himself, he had his own private office at the Naval Research Laboratory, unheard of for someone who wasn't an officer or credentialed academic, and he was continuing to conduct experiments that “seemed to prove the concept of Gravitation which I had hypothesized at Caltech in 1923.”
Why would the US Navy be interested in just a purely theoretical concept? In 1932 Brown wrote the following to the director of the Naval Research Laboratory:
Increased voltages, leading to increased electrical field pinch and increased fluid flow, had now caught Brown's attention.
Someone was beginning to take Brown seriously, because when he was ordered to the sea for duty in 1932, the orders were countermanded by the Chief of the Bureau of Engineering.
Given all of this information, it should come as a surprise that Brown was suddenly discharged from the Navy in 1942.
In the person of Thomas Townsend Brown, we may have the perfect example of something who has bumped into the phenomenon referred to by Richard Dolan and others as the Breakaway Civilization.
Brown, who was thinking in terms of the relationship of localized gravitational effects and geological formations, was offered and accepted a place on a Navy-Princeton Gravity expedition to the West Indies in 1932. He was to be the assistant of Felix Andries Vening Meinesz, who today is known for his invention of a precise method for measuring gravity. It's obvious why Brown was chosen, for as Schatzkin observes:
Brown prepared the journal of the expedition, and apparently did well enough to warrant an increase in salary, a promotion to an officer, and a commendation as being “indispensable” to the Naval Research Laboratory.
Because of his connections to the enigmatic Dr. Vening-Meinesz, Brown earned a place on board the private yacht Caroline on an expedition in 1933 as the sonar and radio operator. The yacht was owned by magnate Eldridge Reeves Johnson, owner of the Victor Talking Machines Company.
On this expedition, Brown likely met James Bond, quite literally. When the Caroline docked in Nassau in 1933, it is alleged that William Samuel Stephenson boarded the ship. Stephenson, again, literally was the inspiration for Ian Fleming's creation.
In the period between the two world wars the intelligence operations of various nations were curtailed. Businessmen filled the void by their networks of contacts in finance, science and academics, and it's possible that the “Caroline Group” was one such private intelligence network.
Having been just promoted to a lieutenant, junior grade, Brown wrote to the Naval Research Laboratory, summarizing his experiments and requesting custody of all of the experimental apparatus he was using!
Photographs from the 1930's of Brown and his equipment raise the question: where did the now financially-strapped Brown get the money for the equipment? Was it the equipment that he had requested access to in 1933? If so, then how did it get there? Who authorized the transfer if indeed it was his equipment from the Naval Research Laboratory? Even Schatzkin's sources raised considerable doubt about the year and location of these photos, one even claiming that they were taken somewhere in Bermuda in the spring of 1934.
The strangeness continues when Brown apparently took what remained of his family's fortune to begin a non-profit corporation called “The Townsend Brown Foundation.” In 1938, Brown wrote to Denison University to ask if they could store expensive equipment in his home laboratory, some of which he used at the Naval Research Laboratory.
Schatzkin concluded “that not all the money in the 'Townsend Brown Foundation' was coming strictly from the remaining assets of the Townsend and Brown families.”
By 1938 Brown was promoted to full lieutenant, and surprisingly, again, he requested sea duty without pay. After being assigned to the USS Nashville in August of 1938, Brown recalled the following after docking at Portsmouth, England:
Schatzkin and Farrell expand upon this bizarre event:
There is further corroboration that Brown was conducting experiments for the Navy that embodied his novel approach to gravity, for there exists an Annual Fitness Report from 1939 for Brown in which he wrote that he had been building equipment for measuring sidereal radiation in the Physics Department of the University of Pennsylvania, and he was “computing the records for 1937 and 1938.”
The mysteries continue with Brown's sudden resignation from the Navy in 1942.
A quick note about the infamous Philadelphia Experiment. I'm going to avoid discussing this event in detail as to not distract from Brown's story, but for better or for worse, Brown's name “is inextricably tied up with the Experiment.”
Now, as for Brown leaving the Navy, more information can be found in his FBI file:
This may be a clue to another mystery, the “error” Ben Rich may have been referring to when, at a speech in 1993 at UCLA, he made the following extraordinarily provocative statements: “There is an error in the equations, and we have figured it out, and now know how to travel to the stars, and it won't take a lifetime to do it.”
Schatzkin speculates that there may be more to the “homosexuality charge” than meets the eye:
Schatzkin's own sources, for what it's worth, confirmed that Brown was involved with the intelligence community. This involvement began during the interwar period, a component of the private network of businessmen, financiers, and scientists that may have connected to something like the hypothetical “Caroline Group.”
If the connection between Brown and Ben Rich seems unlikely:
His ideas continued to mature when Brown wrote an essay in the 60's in his private notebooks entitled “The Structure of Space.” The essay can only be described as a meditation on the electrical properties of space (the Electric Universe, anyone?), and “an exploration into the manner by which those electrical properties might explain the still-mysterious forces of gravitation.”
Brown saw his invention as been applied towards propulsion and a source of energy generation. “Free” energy and a field propulsion technology aren't the only possibilities, as Brown must have been aware, as the possibilities of weaponizing this technology are quite apparent (shades of Tesla!).
Also, those who have extensively researched the subject of UFOs are aware of the sheer amount of sightings that occurred in the 40's and 50's, especially at many nuclear test sites (for more information on this topic, it doesn't get better than UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites by Robert Hastings).
Brown's conceptions gave the “breakaway group” a scientific means—howsoever far out of the mainstream box they may have been—to rationalize the UFO phenomenon, and its apparent increase and tie to human nuclear weapons detonations.
In 1955, Brown wrote a proposal called “Project Winterhaven” in which he reviewed his work on gravitation and proposes some experiments to “confirm or deny” the relationship between electromagnetism and gravity (electro-gravitics). These experiments were to be conducted “with emphasis on military applications of recognized priority.”
The Winterhaven proposal also ties directly to nuclear weapons:
These effects also vary as a result of local celestial mechanics, for in Brown's own words: “there are tidal effects apparently cause by the Sun and Moon which influence to a small extent the power developed.” These effects were also due to “the passage of the Earth through diffuse clouds of cosmic dust or electrified particles ejected from the Sun.”
Again in Brown's own words: “it is already becoming apparent that the rocket must be superseded and speeds even further increased.” Is there a hidden context to these words? Is that context the UFO?
Brown spells it out in his Winterhaven proposal: “Due to the tremendous momentarily displacement of air and the gravitational disturbance resulting therefrom, there is reason to believe that the electrogravitational receiver may be one of the few devices capable of instant long-distance detection and ranging of atomic bomb explosions.
Another fascinating piece of information uncovered by Schatzkin from his sources, although entirely uncorroborated, is Brown's alleged secret mission to Germany at the end of the war. In this account, Brown rendezvoused with the famous German panzer commander Hans von Luck to smuggle a German scientist out of the country. The scientist was none other than Dr. Richard Miethe, well known in the UFO research community as one of the alleged early developers of some sort of exotic propulsion technology. Regardless of what happened, Brown apparently lost a finger during the mission, and had to recover in England before returning home.
After the war, Brown moved his family to Hawaii and established a lab at Pearl Harbor, relatively isolated and behind the security of a military base. He had his equipment moved from the University of Pennsylvania and soon gave a demonstration of his devices to high Navy brass, including Admiral Arthur Radford, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet. Brown demonstrated his emerging ideas about using his conceptions for communications, which would later be incorporated into his Project Winterhaven proposals, and another for propulsion. He also showed his “magneto-hydrodynamic drive” which he had been working with since 1929.
It should be noted that during this stint in Hawaii, Brown still was investigating “sidereal radiation” as well as how it might affect the stock market!
In 1952 Brown moved his family back to California, and soon demonstrated one of his “gravitator disks” to Air Force Major General Victor Bertrandis. As a result of this demonstration, a few skeptically claimed that the effect was merely the result of “ionic wind.”
Brown writes:
Electromagnetic and electrostatic systems are open systems, interacting with the local space-time geometry. Nuclear bombs would do so as well.
By 1958, Brown began continuing his work privately in North Carolina at the behest of yet another corporate mentor, Agnew Bahnson. From Bahnson's own notes, their goal was “a self-propelled, self-lifting and controlled, self-powered 'battery' model at least.”
So what of Brown and his founding of a UFO study group, NICAP?
However, Brown's interest in the UFO phenomenon obvious was genuine, and indeed one of the more mysterious things he told his daughter Linda, after handing her several “UFO” reports to sift through, was that she should separate out the ones that “wobble” because those were “ours.” This statement is obviously open to many different interpretations.
It was one of the first practical applications of the Biefeld-Brown effect he had ever developed.
His inventions attracted attention in some interesting circles.
Something, however, happened at the RAND demonstration:
What can we conclude with this overview?
I'll conclude with a quote from an anonymous email Paul Schatzkin received in 2002, which set him on the adventure that he ultimately abandoned: