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

NICK COOK 33
model flying saucers by the electric wind is 0.3 percent. This compares
with about 25 percent for a propeller-driven airplane and 15 percent for
a jet airplane."
If Cady's conclusions were clear to me, they would have been crystal
clear to the Navy and the Air Force. Brown's flying saucer would have
had trouble getting off the ground, let alone cruising at Mach 3. The
whole "science" of electrogravitics, Cady was telling his superiors, was a
waste of time, effort and money.
The Navy and its old foe the Air Force would have concluded that
they were both far better off sticking with jets.
Even under the auspices of a deeply classified program, an arrangement
by which one branch of the armed forces might be unaware of projects
taking place in another, it was hard to see Brown's work surviving such
an appraisal.
On September 22, 1952, six months after General Bertrandias'
telephone call to General Craig, documents showed that the Air Force
downgraded its interest in the work of the Townsend Brown Foundation
from "confidential" to "unclassified."
This explained why the Pentagon's archives had contained a declassified
copy of Winterhaven.
Despite the view of LaViolette, Valone and many others that this was
the moment Project Winterhaven went super-classified, forming the
basis of a number of "black programs" in the antigravity field from the
mid-1950s onward, I found this hard to believe. Although LaViolette's
theory dovetailed neatly with the ringing silence that followed the zealous
rhetoric of George Trimble and his colleagues in the U.S. aerospace
industry on the subject of antigravity in 1956, there was no evidence at all
to support it.
Nor, crucially, did LaViolette's thesis explain Brown's behavior from
this period onward. For although it was obvious that he knew how to
keep a secret—his wartime work would have instilled in him the need for
the rigors of secrecy—if the ONR report was merely a blind, his
subsequent actions went way beyond attempts to lead investigators away
from a buried program within the U.S. Navy or Air Force or both. The
energy with which he now set out to prove his electrogravitational theory
seemed, in fact, to stem specifically from the comprehensive rejection of
his experiments by the U.S. military. For the rest of his life, Brown, who
was universally described as quiet, unassuming, honest and likable,
behaved like a man driven to prove his point.
In 1955, he went to work for the French aerospace company