ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

28 The Hunt for Zero Point
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The only other thing I knew about disinformation, certainly as it had
been practiced by the Soviets, was that it worked best when mixed in with
a little truth.
Intuitively, therefore, I felt Brown must have been somewhere in the
vicinity of the "experiment" when it was supposed to have happened.
Beyond that, I could draw no other conclusions, so I returned to the
documented facts of his career.
In 1942, he was appointed head of the Atlantic Fleet Radar Materiel
School and Gyrocompass School in Norfolk, Virginia, a position that
would have made him privy to some of the most highly classified
technical secrets of the day. Whatever work he was engaged on there, it
appears to have taken its toll, since the following year he suffered a
nervous breakdown and was discharged from the Navy.
There is something neatly synergistic in this unfortunate development,
which appears to have been real enough, with the mystery
surrounding the USS Eldridge. One suggestion is that whatever work
Brown was engaged in at the time, be it in the radar or minesweeping
field, it caused him temporary memory loss.
While it stretched credulity to believe in stories of optical invisibility,
tele-transportation and parallel dimensions, I did find it possible to
envisage a scenario in which the legend of the Eldridge had grown out of
the secrecy of Brown's legitimate work in the radar field; in much the
same way that the supposed ability of RAF night fighter pilots to see in
the dark by eating carrots stemmed from a childishly simple British ruse
to protect its radar secrets at around the same time.
Despite Brown's illness—and whatever really happened in the
Philadelphia and Norfolk shipyards—it appears to have had no longterm
detrimental effect on his standing in the eyes of the Navy. In 1944,
he went back to work as a radar consultant in Burbank, California, at
Lockheed's Vega Division, which was responsible for development of
the Navy's PV-2 Harpoon and P-2V Neptune antisubmarine patrol
bombers.
At war's end, Brown moved to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where he once
again resumed the antigravity work that had driven his research efforts as
a young man.
It seemed to me from this period—long before the story of the
Philadephia Experiment emerged to complicate the picture—as if two
portraits of Brown had been painted and were now in circulation: one
portraying him as a mildly eccentric inventor with some harebrained
ideas about negating the forces of gravity; the other showing him to be a