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NICK COOK 35
trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. The problem was,
however I went about it, they wouldn't form into any recognizable
picture.
If the Navy had developed Brown's experiments into a fully fledged
antigravity program, why had its premier research arm, the ONR, gone
out of its way to dismiss them? And if this was an elaborate ruse to throw
others off the scent—including its old rival the U.S. Air Force—why did
Brown continue in his work, eventually taking it to another country? If
electrogravitics was classified, this would have handed it on a plate to
another nation, which was madness.
There was, conceivably, a chance that Brown's work had been hijacked
by the U.S. military without his knowledge at the end of World War
Two, but this too seemed unlikely. Given Brown's wartime clearances, it
would have been simpler to have sworn him to secrecy after the Hawaii
experiments, had the Navy been that impressed with them.
There was another, remote possibility—that Brown's work had been
rejected by the military, not because it was hokey or crazy, but because its
principles were already known to them—and, perhaps, therefore already
the subject of advanced development activity. Had this been the case, it
might well have explained why, a few years later, Bell, Convair, Martin
and so many other companies—equally ignorant of this activity—aired
their views on antigravity unchecked for a number of months, as
recorded in the Interavia article, until someone, somewhere ordered
them to silence.
As I kicked this notion around, I found sympathy for it from an
unlikely source.
In the appendix section of a compendium of UFO sightings, I found a
secret memorandum dated September 23,1947, from Lieutenant General
Nathan Twining, head of the U.S. Army Air Forces' Air Materiel Command
(AMC), to Brigadier General George Schulgen, a senior USAAF
staff officer in Washington.
The memorandum had been declassified and released into the public
domain only in the late 1970s. I'd found it during another late-night trawl
of my burgeoning archive, a cup of strong coffee in my hand to keep me
awake.
In the memo, Twining states in his "considered opinion" that the rash
of UFO sightings in America during the summer of 1947—the first real
wave, as it turned out—had been "something real and not visionary or
fictitious."
He continued: "There are objects . . . approximating the shape of a
disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as a man-made