Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion (5 page)

Electromagnetic wave experiments conducted by the independent researcher John Hutchison lend some credibility to the report that sailors had been found fused with the vessel’s metal structure.
Beginning in 1979, Hutchison experimented with high-voltage, high-frequency longitudinal wave emissions similar to those Tesla was producing.
Employing a Van de Graaff generator and two or more Tesla coils, he was able to create wave interference zones in which a number of strange phenomena were observed.
These included the fusion of dissimilar materials such as wood and metal, cold liquefaction or fragmentation of metal, invisibility, and levitation.
Examples of metal splitting and fusion of dissimilar materials are shown in figures 1.14 and 1.15.
In the fusion phenomenon, the substances do not dissociate; they retain their individual compositions.
A piece of wood, for example, could sink into a metal bar with neither the wood nor the bar coming apart.

Interestingly, Brown’s work on magnetic minesweeping would have made him a prime candidate for work on this version of the Philadelphia Experiment.
In his autobiography, he describes how he had developed a new technique for blowing up magnetic mines—submerged explosive devices that are triggered when a steel-hulled vessel passes over them.
A detector in a mine senses the temporary alteration in the Earth’s magnetic field intensity produced by the steel hull and detonates the mine’s explosive.
Brown had devised a method of exploding these mines by floating a loop of degaussing cable on the water’s surface and passing 300 amperes of current through it, producing a magnetic field that triggered the mines to explode.
The cable, which typically measured 3.5 inches in diameter, could easily carry a current of several hundred thousand amperes or more.
Such a cable would have been ideal to generate an extremely high-intensity magnetic field around a ship.
If so, Brown’s work in Washington at the Bureau of Ships and later at the Philadelphia Navy Yard may have involved more than just research on magnetic minesweeping.
The $50 million research project he was heading, which involved a team of fifteen Ph.D.’s and reportedly had occasional input from Einstein himself, was most likely directly connected with the fabled Philadelphia Experiment.

Figure 1.14.
Professor Panos Pappas (left) holding a 2-inch-wide brass
bar that was split by the Hutchison Effect.
John Hutchison is shown
standing to the right.
(Photo courtesy of P.
Pappas)

Figure 1.15.
A stainless-steel butter knife incorporated into a block of aluminum by the Hutchison Effect.
(Photo courtesy of J.
Hutchison)

Another, very different, account of the story, presented by Gerry Vassilatos in his book
Lost Science,
claims that the cloaking effect was instead brought about by enveloping the ship in a very intense pulsing electrostatic field and makes no mention of magnetic fields.
³³
Vassilatos’s account is not as documented as Moore’s, as he gives no indication of what sources he used for the rather detailed information he gives.
One is left with the impression that portions of his story have been improvised.
Vassilatos writes that the invisibility effect was first serendipitously noticed at a classified military arc-welding facility that had developed a new spot-welding technique for fabricating very durable armor-plated vessel hulls.
The process employed a very intense, high-amperage discharge supplied from an immense bank of high-voltage capacitors.
When the titanic, lightning-like discharge was applied to the hull, the resulting shock wave reportedly rocked the entire welding facility.
Vassilatos writes that during the discharge, an optical blackout region was seen around the arc, and tools left in the vicinity of the discharge were displaced or found to have vanished.
Scientists from the Naval Research Laboratory who were called in to investigate determined that the blackout was not a neural retinal bleaching phenomenon and that the tool disappearance was not due to thermal vaporization.
Something far more exotic was going on.
They eventually concluded that the momentary buildup of high electric field potentials in the vicinity of the arc in some unexplained manner induced a state of invisibility and even caused local dematerialization of objects.
The project was code-named Project Rainbow, and Vassilatos says that at one point Brown was brought in to consult on the project.

Vassilatos writes that after conducting a series of further experiments, researchers devised an experiment that attempted to render an armored tank invisible.
Capacitors of very large capacitance were arranged in a ring, and the tank was placed at the ring’s center.
The capacitors were oriented so that their plates were parallel to the circle’s circumference, that is, with their polarization axes directed toward the circle’s center.
They were synchronously energized with high-voltage, high-amperage pulses conducted in phase along a spokelike array of cables extending from the center of the ring out to each capacitor.
In this way, the capacitors acting together were able to build up a very high electric field potential, presumably with a negative potential in the ring’s interior.
Tesla had done years of research with high-voltage shock discharges, which could explain why he was allegedly called in to consult on the project.

According to Vassilatos, as a next step they scaled up the cloaking experiment to attempt to make an entire ship invisible.
He says that they sought to control the effect by adjusting the electric field’s intensity to a moderate level so that a state of invisibility might be produced without inducing complete dematerialization.
He claims that Brown bowed out of the project prior to the test on the
Eldridge
, which reportedly ended in tragedy.

While the Navy claims that the story of the Philadelphia Experiment is entirely myth, Brown’s hesitation to speak about the subject suggests that something very important and highly classified was going on in Philadelphia during his wartime service.
One’s suspicions are piqued about the significance of the whole affair because of the tremendous amount of disinformation that has apparently been circulated to purposefully cause confusion.
Conflicts emerge even in Brown’s own biographical records spanning this period.
It is as if these years of Brown’s life are shroudeded in a blurry haze.
Conflicting accounts give the impression of there being two Townsend Browns, one account placing him at the naval base in Norfolk, Virginia, during 1942 and 1943, the other account having him working at Lockheed Vega Aircraft in Burbank, California, during this same period.
This duplicity leaves us asking whether it had been Brown and not the
Eldridge
that had been teleported in space and time during that mysterious 1943 experiment.

According to the version that Moore published in 1978, Brown retired from the Navy in December 1943 after having suffered a nervous collapse.
³⁴
He says that Brown subsequently took six months off to recover at his home following the recommendation of a team of naval physicians.

He began employment in June 1944 at the Advanced Projects Unit of Lockheed Vega Aircraft in Burbank.
This was the forerunner of Lockheed’s modern Skunk Works.
We are led to believe that Moore’s account should be accurate, because prior to its publication he gave Brown the opportunity to check over the draft of his article to make any necessary corrections.
The Lockheed Vega employment date that Moore gives is consistent with that listed in the
Who’s
Who
biography published after Brown’s death, which states that Brown was employed at Lockheed Vega as a radar consultant from 1944 to 1945.
³⁵

A.
L.
Kitselman, a mathematician who worked at this Lockheed facility, met Brown there and became his longtime friend.
In an essay he wrote in 1962, Kitselman describes Brown as “a quiet, modest, retiring man—exactly the sort one expects to find in important research installations.
He was a brilliant solver of engineering problems, and I soon found that he was more familiar with fundamental physical laws than anyone I had met.
So many of us are strictly textbook scientists that it is stimulating to find someone who has first-hand knowledge.”
³⁶

In this essay, Kitselman comments that Brown had previously suffered a collapse after working too long and too hard at the Norfolk radar school, was subsequently retired from the Navy, and then, after a six-month rest at home, came to work at Lockheed Vega.
Hence Kitselman’s account corroborates portions of Moore’s story.

According to this timeline, Brown would have been working for the Navy during the critical period when the Philadelphia Experiment was conducted and would have had his nervous collapse around the time of the disastrous failure of this invisibility experiment.
In fact, in their book
The Philadelphia Experiment
, Moore and Berlitz quote Riley Crabb, founder of Borderland Sciences Research Foundation, as saying that the cause of Brown’s breakdown was directly related to the Philadelphia Experiment.
Crabb noted that if such a disaster had happened to the crew of the ship, it is not too difficult to imagine the mental pressures that those in charge would have experienced.

Schatzkin has come to entirely different conclusions about Brown’s whereabouts during this key period.
At Morgan’s suggestion, he obtained from the Navy a copy of Brown’s resignation letter, which is dated September 30, 1942, and which states, “I herewith submit my resignation from the Navy for the good of the naval service in order to escape trial by General Court Martial.”
³⁷
If we are to believe this date, this was to have occurred just two months after Brown had shipped his equipment from the University of Pennsylvania to Norfolk.

Schatzkin also obtained an official copy of Brown’s Navy fitness report dated October 5, 1942.
Describing this report, he wrote:

The final fitness report is almost completely blank.
Instead of the usual details, the page is struck through with a single pen-stroke, above which is hand-written “See remarks.”
And on the second page, in the “remarks” section that in previous reports had displayed so many glowing assessments of Lieutenant Brown’s character and service, Captain Hinkamp writes, “In view of the circumstances under which this officer was detached, I desire to make no comment.”
³⁸

We know something is amiss in the Navy’s records because they contain no reference to Brown’s assignment in 1942 to the Atlantic Fleet radar schools in Norfolk.
However, trusting that the naval records or Brown’s discharge papers had not been altered by covert operatives in the interest of protecting any top-secret naval research projects from exposure, Schatzkin accepted October 5, 1942, as the date of Brown’s detachment.
He then suggested that within two weeks of the date Brown left the Navy, he began working at Lockheed Vega.
Schatzkin proposed that Brown had neither a nervous collapse following his discharge nor a subsequent six-month recuperation period.
Schatzkin’s version of Brown’s history then conflicts with both that given by Moore and that given by Kitselman, both of whose accounts he maintains are seriously flawed.
The suggestion that Kitselman’s account might be flawed, however, comes as somewhat of a surprise, seeing as he was one of Brown’s close friends.
In writing his essay, he should have had easy access to input from Brown as well as an interest to ensure that he got his facts straight about Brown’s departure from the Navy.
Also, Brown himself had checked over Moore’s story prior to its publication, so if there was such a major error as the date and circumstances of his departure from the Navy, why did Brown not catch it?
Considering that there is no record of Brown having expressed any doubts about the accuracy of Moore’s or Kitselman’s account, one is surprised by the allegation that they were in error.