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Technol Rep Tohoku Univ: GENERATION OF ANTI-GRAVITY ...

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NICK COOK 33<br />

model flying saucers by the electric wind is 0.3 percent. This compares<br />

with about 25 percent for a propeller-driven airplane and 15 percent for<br />

a jet airplane."<br />

If Cady's conclusions were clear to me, they would have been crystal<br />

clear to the Navy and the Air Force. Brown's flying saucer would have<br />

had trouble getting off the ground, let alone cruising at Mach 3. The<br />

whole "science" of electrogravitics, Cady was telling his superiors, was a<br />

waste of time, effort and money.<br />

The Navy and its old foe the Air Force would have concluded that<br />

they were both far better off sticking with jets.<br />

Even under the auspices of a deeply classified program, an arrangement<br />

by which one branch of the armed forces might be unaware of projects<br />

taking place in another, it was hard to see Brown's work surviving such<br />

an appraisal.<br />

On September 22, 1952, six months after General Bertrandias'<br />

telephone call to General Craig, documents showed that the Air Force<br />

downgraded its interest in the work of the Townsend Brown Foundation<br />

from "confidential" to "unclassified."<br />

This explained why the Pentagon's archives had contained a declassified<br />

copy of Winterhaven.<br />

Despite the view of LaViolette, Valone and many others that this was<br />

the moment Project Winterhaven went super-classified, forming the<br />

basis of a number of "black programs" in the antigravity field from the<br />

mid-1950s onward, I found this hard to believe. Although LaViolette's<br />

theory dovetailed neatly with the ringing silence that followed the zealous<br />

rhetoric of George Trimble and his colleagues in the U.S. aerospace<br />

industry on the subject of antigravity in 1956, there was no evidence at all<br />

to support it.<br />

Nor, crucially, did LaViolette's thesis explain Brown's behavior from<br />

this period onward. For although it was obvious that he knew how to<br />

keep a secret—his wartime work would have instilled in him the need for<br />

the rigors of secrecy—if the ONR report was merely a blind, his<br />

subsequent actions went way beyond attempts to lead investigators away<br />

from a buried program within the U.S. Navy or Air Force or both. The<br />

energy with which he now set out to prove his electrogravitational theory<br />

seemed, in fact, to stem specifically from the comprehensive rejection of<br />

his experiments by the U.S. military. For the rest of his life, Brown, who<br />

was universally described as quiet, unassuming, honest and likable,<br />

behaved like a man driven to prove his point.<br />

In 1955, he went to work for the French aerospace company

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