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

34 The Hunt for Zero Point
SNCASO—Société Nationale de Constructions Aéronautiques du Sud-
Ouest.
During this one-year research period, he ran his discs in a vacuum. If
anything, they worked better in a vacuum, something that prompted
SNCASO, which was interested in exploiting Brown's work for possible
space applications, to offer him an extension of his contract. But in 1956,
SNCASO merged with its counterpart Sud-Est and its new bosses saw
little future in the space business. They wanted to build aeroplanes; real
ones, with wings and jet engines.
His contract terminated, Brown returned to America, where he helped
found the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena
(NICAP), an unofficial study group set up to analyze the growing body
of UFO sightings across the American continent and elsewhere. It was
Brown's belief that the study of UFOs, many of which exhibited characteristics
similar to his discs, could shed light on their propulsion
methodology and this, in turn, could be exploited for science and space
travel. The trouble was, of course, that this alienated him even more from
the mainstream.
It also further alienated him from me. As I'd immersed myself in
Brown's life and work, I'd wondered more and more if his "discovery" of
electrogravitics had had something to do with the emergence of the whole
UFO phenomenon in the '40s, if these "alien" craft had in fact been top
secret aerospace vehicles propelled by a power source that science even
today refused to recognize. This, however, did not gel with a man who
went on to found a UFO study group.
In 1957, Brown was hired as a consultant to continue his antigravity
work for the Bahnson Company of North Carolina and in 1959 he found
himself consulting for the aerospace propulsion giant General Electric.
I found little corroborating evidence for Brown's activities during
these years.
When he went into semiretirement in the mid-1960s, Valone and
LaViolette saw this as a signal that, in effect, he had been been bought off
by the military, especially as he hardly touched electrogravitics again. His
last great interest involved a series of ultimately successful attempts to
draw stored electrical energy—albeit in minute quantities—from common
or garden rocks . . .
Unquestionably a highly gifted and unusual man, Brown died in
relative obscurity in 1983.
In trying to draw lessons from his story, lessons that might perhaps
help explain the sudden outpouring of interest in antigravity by
America's leading aerospace designers in the late 1950s, I found myself