The Cosmic Token forum is back online!

[natecull]

http://www.cosmic-token.com/forum/index.php now resolves and can be browsed. So we can access historical conversations between around 2010-2020.

I don't know when the Token came back, but I see that a poster on the Reddit forum two months ago mentioned it.

[Jan Lundquist]

Nate, what I remember about that forum is that someone was deleting huge swaths of messages. It wasn't I, Linda said it wasn't she and I believe her. There was no rhyme or reason that I could see, as to what was deleted and we never knew who was responsible, but that's why I stopped posting there.

[natecull]

Nate, what I remember about that forum is that someone was deleting huge swaths of messages. It wasn't I, Linda said it wasn't she and I believe her. There was no rhyme or reason that I could see, as to what was deleted and we never knew who was responsible, but that's why I stopped posting there.

So that's a thing I didn't know!

I think I may have been the last actual human to post on the Token. It took me quite a while to realise what whatever was posting a "good thought for the day" like clockwork under the name of "Jesse" was almost certainly not a human but just a bot.

Do we know who runs the Token? I never knew that either.

Anyway, deletions or not, there might be some archival value in the site being currently accessible, which is why I mentioned it.

Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

I see the now-deleted Reddit poster, who accumulated too much bad karma for his almost/possibly pathological hatred of women needed a clean start. It is embarrassing to see my old posts, from before "upboating" on account of learning new information. Now I know, if I didn't know then that much of the Time Teachers it is a translation of a Sanskrit text, I want to say from the Upanishads, but maybe not.

Re, the Kitselman math loaned to Mikado may not have been Kitselman Math. IIRC, Mikado seemed to think it was a set of gauge transformation equations.

As for who runs the Token...originally, only Linda and I had administrative rights. The site was reportedly hosted by. someone who was somehow related to somebody, and that's all I recollect.


Jan

[Paul Schatzkin]

So somebody has cobbled the 'Token' back together and brought it back online?

As Rose says, that was Linda's site, so we can only wonder if she's taken enough of an interest to get it restored.

I did have some contact with Linda for the first time in a dozen years back in October, have not heard much from her since, I think, before the holidays.

Having the site restored... it's hard to tell which side of the equation that strengthens: the 'more information' side or the 'more disinformation' side.

That's the curious thing about the TTB story, it seems to thrive on equal parts of both.

I think I may have been the last actual human to post on the Token. It took me quite a while to realise what whatever was posting a "good thought for the day" like clockwork under the name of "Jesse" was almost certainly not a human but just a bot.

To the best of my recollection, those daily quotes were posted by Jess Fritch, a TTB acolyte of long standing.

If you poke around the Interwebs, you can find some videos of Jess demonstrating Lifters and calling them "antigravity" devices.

Again, a nifty blend of information and disinformation.

--PS

[Jan Lundquist]

IIRC, Jess was turned on to TTB stuff by a USAF project he worked on for 6 or 7 years which he is prohibited from speaking about, and he is also a contactee experiencer. His website is up at https://eckerstar.com/

I'm listening to Ross Coulthart, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM3kxeU_oDE and just got to the point where. he talks about the amount of disinfo pervading the field. (~3.05). This discussion arose in response to a question about Philip Cosrso. Linda told me of witnessing a meeting between him and Townsend on a marina dock in Florida. The would have been during her Christmas visit when Morgan joined the family in Homestead, or the next spring/summer before the relocation to Decker, and reunion with Puschek and Spririto.

[natecull]

Jess Fritch, a TTB acolyte of long standing.

Ah! So I'm confusing a Jess with a Jesse! Two different people. Yes, I think it was Jess "Ecker" Fritch I interacted with - or someone claiming to be him, because I'm never sure on the Internet - not Jesse Michels (who I don't think I've encountered).

I see Jess's current "EckerStar" website is entirely new and was created last year, after my interaction with him (which I thought was on good terms) apparently led to him completely erasing both his entire old website and his Reddit identity. If it was something I said, I'd like to know.

If you poke around the Interwebs, you can find some videos of Jess demonstrating Lifters and calling them "antigravity" devices.

Again, a nifty blend of information and disinformation.

Yes.

I used to hang out on Jean-Louis Naudin's website back in the early 2000s when the Lifters thing was taking off, so to speak. I can certainly see a geometric similarity between the Lifter and the Fan patent of the 1960s. Ie, a wire and a ribbon. I believe Townsend would have been clear that the wire must be the positive pole and the ribbon the negative in order to maximise the Effect, and I can't remember if the Lifter experimenters were doing this or not. (I think Townsend's reasoning around the Effect - in Structure of Space - is that it's primarily due to spatial asymmetry between negative and positive, but that electron clouds vs protons have a sort of built-in spatial asymmetry.)

The general consensus at the end of the 2010s was that Lifters were not doing anything interesting in terms of physics. And then quadcopters came along (physical fans got smaller and better) and demolished the performance of dangerous and flaky tinfoil electrostatic drones and that was that, the hardware hacker community rapidly moved on.

I recall though that the Lifters craze apparently started from one company, "TransDimensional Technologies" of Huntsville, Alabama (Jeffrey and Susan Cameron) - https://web.archive.org/web/20040628032 ... nsion.com/ Their website went offline after 2004, but from their "Projects" page they seem to have been a little involved in the NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics scene. The story I read somewhere was that one of the Camerons got interested in the Biefeld-Brown effect and "asymmetric capacitors" after seeing a high voltage power cable jerk in one of their day jobs. That seems like quite a different physical regime from the matchstick and tinfoil Lifter.

On the TDT website, for example, Jeffrey Cameron had a paper he presented at the 37th AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) Joint Propulsion Conference in 2001, "An Asymmetric Gravitational Wave Propulsion System": https://web.archive.org/web/20040411100 ... script.pdf .

AIAA has a list of the other papers here: https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/book/10.2514/MJPC01 Some other interesting ones:

Gravity modification by high-temperature superconductors
C. Woods, J. Helme, S. Cooke and C. Caldwell
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3363

Exploration of anomalous gravity effects by magnetized high-Tc superconducting oxides
Glen Robertson, Ron Litchford, Bryan Thompson and Randall Peters
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3364

Studies of non-conventional configuration closed electron drift thrusters
Y. Raitses,D. Staack,A. Smirnov,A. Litvak,L. Dorf,T. Graves and N. Fisch
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3776

Induction and amplification of non-Newtonian gravitational fields
M. Tajmar and C. De Matos
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3911

Towards the control of matter with gravity
D. Burton,S. Clark,T. Dereli,J. Gratus,W. Johnson,R. Tucker andC. Wang
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3912

Measurement of repulsive quantum vacuum forces
Jordan Maclay, Jay Hammer, Rod Clark, Michael George, Lelon Sanderson,Rob Ilic and Quinn Leonard
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3359

Geometrodynamics, inertia and the quantum vacuum
Bernard Haisch and Alfonso Rueda
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3360

Research on achieving thrust by EM inertia manipulation
Hector Brito
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3656

Experimental results of Schlicher's thrusting antenna
Gustave Fralick and Janis Niedra
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3657

Specially conditioned EM radiation research with transmitting toroid antennas
H. Froning and George Hathaway
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3658

An experimental investigation of the physical effects in a dynamic magnetic system
Vladimir Roschin and Sergei Godin
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3660

This is like a who's who of the "Antigravity Handbook" / MUFON scene, not quite what I expect from a mainstream aerospace industry conference. Maybe AIAA always has weird/fringy papers but it seems like 2001 (after 1957) was a high point of fringe antigravity research in conventional aerospace venues. NASA had BPP, and BAe had Project Greenglow. The X-Files was still on the air. Nick Cook's "The Hunt for Zero Point" was about to come out. It felt (as some now feel with David Grusch) that we were on the verge of some kind of electrogravitics disclosure moment. Which turned out not to happen.

And "Lifters" came from TransDimensional who came out of that turn-of-the-Millenium milieu. Has anyone heard from the Camerons in the last 20 years? And how often are they even mentioned in the same context as Lifters?

By comparison, the 47th AIAA conference in 2011 ( https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/book/10.2514/MJPC11 ) has only one apparently "weird" paper (my rough metric: searching for "gravity" or "inertia")

Physics of Axial Gravity-Like Fields
Walter Droescher andJochem Hauser
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2011-6042

The 49th AIAA Joint Propulsion conference in 2013 seems like it was the last one, and had one "weird" paper:

Extended Weight Measurements of Uncharged and Charged Spinning Gyroscopes in the Earth's Gravitational Field
Istvan Lorincz,Erik Edlinger,Daniel Hochwarter,Christian Boy andMartin Tajmar
AIAA 2013-3766
Future Flight Propulsion Systems I • Monday, 15 July 2013 • 1700 hrs
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2013-3766

So I guess the AIAA scene is still quietly open to the fringe. Much more than I would expect, because even one "wtf how did that get here" paper is more than is normally allowed in academia! But I still stand by my gut feeling of 2001 as being something else. (Though I really need to pull all the conference paper lists and make a proper comparison to be sure.)

Ok, some more receipts on the Lifters / Jeff Cameron connection. Well one receipt and a half.

http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/story.htm

On October 5, 2000, the Hector Serrano's patent WO 00/58623 " Propulsion device and method employing electric fields for producing thrust " has been granted. This patent is very close to the Aymmetrical Capacitor Thruster ( ACT ) patented by the NASA ( patent US 6,317,310 , granted on Nov 2001 ) . These two devices use the Biefeld-Brown Effect for producing a thrust Vs the surrounding medium ( this effect was discovered by Townsend Brown in 1928 in his Gravitator, see the GB Patent N°300311 filed on Nov 15, 1928 "A method of and an apparatus or machine for producing force or motion" from T.Townsend Brown ).

On June 2001, Transdimensional Technologies has presented the Power3 Lifter1 and Lifter2 devices. The Lifter1 device was built with three capacitors joined so as to form a triangle assembly and the Lifter2 is three time heavier and three time bigger than the Lifter1. These devices are able to lift their own weight and they are a "modern version" of the Townsend Brown Electrokinetic Apparatus. The Lifters are using the Biefeld-Brown Effect to generate the main thrust to self levitate.

On October 2001, I have replicated successfully the Transdimensional Power3 Lifter1 and Lifter2. You will also find the full explanations to build yourself your own Lifter1.

From a private mirror of Naudin's site (this page is not on the Wayback machine or on the current jnaudin site):
http://linas.org/mirrors/jnaudin.free.f ... ifters.htm

The lifters developed by TDT are NOT the same technologies as portrayed by the NASA patents.

The TDT lifters are based on technologies derived from laser weapon systems in the early 1970's, not NASA. The TDT lifters are based upon leaky dielectrics and the resulting momentum transfer from the vector potential of the conduction electrons in the skirt assembly ( as discussed in Goldstein ). The specific lifter shape is directly derived from the preionizer arrays of the early Excimer laser weapon class systems, NOT any type of work with NASA! There was no NASA involvement!

Jeff Cameron
Transdimensional Technologies ( March 27, 2002 )

I wonder who "Goldstein" is?

A third, battered, receipt: A "Bruce Smith" from 2003, summarising the weird propulsion scene, then still at its height. He quotes Tim Ventura and Nick Cook among others. https://www.aulis.com/manned-space-flight.htm

Another Huntsville operation, Trans-dimensional Technologies, is exploring these multi-faceted phenomena, and its extensive website shows it to be a frequent contractor to NASA, conducting research into "asymmetrical capacitive propulsion" and capacitor based devices to test "ion wind" forces. Jeff Cameron, of Trans-dimensional, is said by Ventura to be "the father of the lifter", having developed the device while exploring anomalous torsional effects of high-energy lasers.

The lasers twisted and broke the metal frames of unrelated test material, and at the time this was considered a nuisance. But the unknown forces at work later led Cameron to found Trans-dimensional, develop lifter technology to a commercial level and subsequently patent many pieces of related technology. Unfortunately, I have been unable to reach Jeff Cameron or anyone at Trans-dimensional for any kind of confirmation.

Anyway: Excimer lasers in the 1970s, that would be even pre Star Wars (SDI) wouldn't it? Also note: *early* 1970s. That's just before 1975 (the founding of the US Psychotronics Association) where people like Tom Bearden, Christopher Bird, the MRU circle, hung out.... then Rolf Schaffranke in 1977... and then *finally* Stan Deyo and William Moore circa 1978... started pumping Townsend Brown's reputation.

So is the series of events something like: someone in the pre-Star-Wars missile defense world noticed "hey weird stuff is going on in those laser cables" and that led them to ping semi-retired Townsend? And then some development maybe finally started to happen, or is it still a series of disconnected strangers each stumbling on anomalous high voltage phenomena and going "hey!" before either losing interest or having a quiet chat and maybe a hiring interview from the Area 51 crew?

I like the idea of ballistic missile defense in the early 1970 being one of the venues where the Biefield-Brown effect was finally replicated, because that would provide enough secrecy (and a high-profile enough and yet unusable enough mission - literal nuclear apocalypse engineering) for it to have been immediately hushed up. And that hushing up might have been part of what caused some of the paranoia that started spinning out from the military contractor scene in the later 1970s.

Because the sequence of events as I see it is:

* Early 1950s: Townsend is making a fuss about saucers, possibly deliberately making himself look ridiculous
* Late 1950s: Townsend and his friends are making a fuss about gravity and the need to engineer it, but this time he's not being ridiculous at all, he seems deadly serious, and he's trying to do replications, but his ideas are just so hard to understand and communicate
* 1960s: A few of Townsend's friends like Kitselman make some frustrated remarks about the bigwigs not understanding his stuff
* Late 1960s: Big security fights, Townsend seems to finally get some recognition at RAND with the Fan and someone there takes it.
* "Early 1970s": something something missile defense laser cables omg what is this new physical force?
* Mid-to-late 1970s: suddenly out of nowhere, a new generation of CIA/Navy/Airforce linked Baby Boomers with esoteric connections are exploding with excitement about this Townsend Brown fellow and/or about some weird conspiracy to either conceal or exploit - or both - his work, and from there his story (slowly) goes viral - but with massive gaps and misinformation.
* 1980s-2000s: Townsend Brown's legend slowly builds, as does multiple deliberate drops of disinformation (Roswell, Majestic 12 etc). But details also slowly emerge.
* 2001-ish: a quiet peak of interest in weird propulsion, but it seems to all go nowhere, lots of moving cups and balls
* 2000s-2010s: an entire Global War on Terror and several other bushfire wars, in which exotic US weapon platforms are very prominently not featured at all
* late 2010s: omg Space Force! Space Foooooorrrce! but why? what are the new toys the USAF wants to deploy, why does it need an entire reorg, and why now?
* 2020s: a sudden new surge of interest in UAPs and exotic propulsion and a new sense of panic in Congress as if they've just discovered that some kind of new toy is real and they're not read into it

Nate

[David Osielski]

Nate, you should have been an archivist or at least a research librarian...a man after my own heart who quotes, clips, cites for all history to record. Bravo!

From Paperman to Researchman

I'm working on something biggish in the hopper...but it may just fizzle like some of the threads I'm back-reading from the "Before Days." Stay tuned...

OK, coffee break is over...back to work.

[Jan Lundquist]

David, Nate has been digging at this longer than any of us. He was part of the first wave of researchers, getting information fresh from the factory, so to speak.

Nate, a couple of things. I love that you hold the historical arc of antigravity research in your head.

2001 (after 1957) was a high point of fringe antigravity research in conventional aerospace venues. NASA had BPP, and BAe had Project Greenglow. The X-Files was still on the air. Nick Cook's "The Hunt for Zero Point" was about to come out. It felt (as some now feel with David Grusch) that we were on the verge of some kind of electrogravitics disclosure moment. Which turned out not to happen.

Instead, we got quantum gravity and loop quantum gravity. Were those even in the hopper in 2001?

And "Lifters" came from TransDimensional who came out of that turn-of-the-Millenium milieu. Has anyone heard from the Camerons in the last 20 years? And how often are they even mentioned in the same context as Lifters?

. Probably not relevant, but noting for the record that I seem to remember learning that Rose Hackett's second husband was a Duncan Cameron, who (I think) played a role in promoting the PEX story.

Ok, some more receipts on the Lifters / Jeff Cameron connection. Well one receipt and a half.

http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/story.htm

On October 5, 2000, the Hector Serrano's patent WO 00/58623 " Propulsion device and method employing electric fields for producing thrust " has been granted. This patent is very close to the Aymmetrical Capacitor Thruster ( ACT ) patented by the NASA ( patent US 6,317,310 , granted on Nov 2001 ) . These two devices use the Biefeld-Brown Effect for producing a thrust Vs the surrounding medium ( this effect was discovered by Townsend Brown in 1928 in his Gravitator, see the GB Patent N°300311 filed on Nov 15, 1928 "A method of and an apparatus or machine for producing force or motion" from T.Townsend Brown ).

Hector Serranno was an occasional poster on one of the old forums. Today he is a co-founder of Gravitec, planning to put a low cost consellation of satellites into space, for superior earth imaging. https://www.gravitecinc.com/general-6

Anyway: Excimer lasers in the 1970s, that would be even pre Star Wars (SDI) wouldn't it? Also note: *early* 1970s. That's just before 1975 (the founding of the US Psychotronics Association) where people like Tom Bearden, Christopher Bird, the MRU circle, hung out.... then Rolf Schaffranke in 1977... and then *finally* Stan Deyo and William Moore circa 1978... started pumping Townsend Brown's reputation.

"What's the frequency, Kenneth?" Vibrational science was suddenly a thing.

Because the sequence of events as I see it is:

The history that infills this narrative is quite enlightening, particularly if you believe, as I do that Townsend demonstrated something for Truman and the future Secretary of the Navy at Barber's Point (documents in the Truman library lend credence to this story, in the sense that A. The sole uncleared civilian was pulled out of Truman's tour group and B. The group's final stop on the Tour was at Barber's point.

Even at that point in his life, Townsend was no "civilian scientist," as in the sense of being a member of the ordinary citizenry. Civilian scientists don't get to set up hobby labs on military bases. Whatever we know about his life as a civilian, for the rest of his life, it was only a front for the more meaningful work he was doing for his three letter employers.

I also know, that twice during the 40's the Navy tried to get a joint program going for a "world circling space ship" and LeMay wasn't having it. He was equally resistant to the idea of missile defense. I don't know if we would have gotten to space in spite of him, if it hadn't been for the UFO flaps of that era. I think, around 1953, enough people gor frightened enough to override him.

Jan

[natecull]

Nate, you should have been an archivist or at least a research librarian...a man after my own heart who quotes, clips, cites for all history to record. Bravo!

Thank you for your kind words! Calling me a librarian is a great compliment, although I'm not one as a day job. For me I think it's a self-defense habit because I grew up with a bunch of UFO conspiracy literature in the 1980s. What we'd call "influencers" today. These sources were often pushing dark, fearful ideas - and I got heartily tired of the habits of this fringe to never source or attribute all the things they quoted, and often to misquote and take out of context. But I was fascinated by the irreducible core of weirdness at the heart of the UFO story, and the Townsend Brown story was one of the most interesting.

UFO and "antigravity" - a little like religion and esoteric philosophy, which it crosses over with - sits in a very odd corner of the information spectrum. Most trained academics shy away from these subjects because most primary source material is seen as "not professionally published" and they generally like to only read things written by other academics. Meanwhile there's a cottage industry of writers/speakers who make money by hyping up mass emotions (often negative ones) and whose power and reach worries me. There's a deep need for "civilian researchers" to try to document fringe material and seriously trace the real history and real science, and the origin and spread, of unusual ideas, while remaining open-minded to the reality of the claims. I wish we all had much better tools to do this than Google and social media! But a web forum like this is a start.

The more I've looked at this subject, the more I've found fascinating stories of very interesting people in the US 20th century defense/science scene. And usually, the reality is much less scary than the conspiracy theories make it out to be! But also, quietly just as strange.

Regards, Nate

[natecull]

Hi Rose!

Instead, we got quantum gravity and loop quantum gravity. Were those even in the hopper in 2001?

Very much so, yes.

Quantum gravity has been in the hopper since quantum mechanics was invented in the 1920s, but it was probably the crop of mathematical physicists coming out of the 1957 Chapel Hill gravity conference that really started the topic. So it's not new! What is very surprising to me though (as a physics layman) is how very little progress the mathematical physicists seemed to make. The problems are way above my head to understand, but it seems there's a very deep and very subtle incompatibility between General Relativity and any possible quantization strategy of it, and there have probably been hundreds attempted now. Certainly dozens. Very, very smart people throwing their heads at the problem and just failing utterly.

So that's very interesting! And not expected by anyone in the 1950s, as far as I can tell from reading histories. My guess is that there are some major mistakes in the core structure of either Relativity or quantum mechanics, or both. Quantum Field Theory was hacked together in the 1930s/40s and worked well enough to get atomic bombs built, but almost everything since then has been a dead end. Big accelerators, the particle zoo, quark theory unifying them, but then...... nothing more on the basic level. There's no "transistor for quarks", for example, not even an "electromagnet for quarks". All the developments since have been engineering and materials, and mostly we have a deep sense of fear and cynicism and limits when we look at the future. Lasers were unexpected by the quantum crowd, but that's been whitewashed over. GPS possibly doesn't even use Relativity as much as its advocates claim. Electron spintronics might be new-ish (I'm sure that's used in military radio stuff). Condensed matter physics is perhaps the most interesting, but not (yet) breaking any rules: I mean just the name Bose-Einstein condensates dates the theory as not later than the 1950s. There's a lot of work going into quantum computing, but it's entirely possible that that's a dead-end field too: there are fundamental physical limits on how much noise can be removed from a practical machine. We'll have to see what happens there.

Even Roy Kerr, bless him (boy from my hometown), who proved that rotating black holes could exist, doesn't believe that "singularities" as such exist! https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang ... -roy-kerr/

And Loop Quantum Gravity, that's much newer than quantum gravity itself, but it goes back to 1986. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_gravity ) String Theory sucked all the air out of the 1980s and left ideas like LQG without funding. Now ST is starting to lose steam and so maybe ideas like LQG might make progress again.

Personally I think the flaws are much deeper than even LQG can fix. But that's because I've read too much fringe physics material, including Townsend Brown. I have a stubborn romantic attachment to the idea of an "ether" because I literally cannot visualise how relativity is supposed to work without any place to put its objects or any medium to carry signals; surely things really do have a real location, surely the vacuum really is a real entity? How can we banish ether from physics on the one hand and still talk about "virtual particles" and such on the other? Isn't it most plausible that all "matter" is really just states of vibration/oscillation of the medium? And in some respects physics does in fact believe this, yet the textbooks seem to just equivocate on it. I know visualisation and intuition is not how we are supposed to do physics, we are supposed to "shut up and calculate", but most of the actual scientists who wrote the textbooks - and certainly the engineers - did in fact use their intuition a lot.

Anyway, my intuition makes me very hard to teach on the subject of either relativity. or QM. Not so much the equations themselves as the philosophical underpinnings - the pale ghost of a medium which is not allowed to actually be a medium. And the same with QM's probability fields. Which is why I suspect there must be some a major problem buried in both of those. But it will take another Einstein to give us the conceptual key to unlock the simplicity buried in our current mess of epicycles.

Hector Serranno was an occasional poster on one of the old forums. Today he is a co-founder of Gravitec, planning to put a low cost consellation of satellites into space, for superior earth imaging

Interesting! And very cool. I feel like there are a group of Townsend Brown admirers in aerospace, of which Serrano would be one, but they may or may not be doing Townsend Brown things as their day job.

I'd love it if Seranno, the Camerons, Podkletnov, Ning Li etc were all part of a powerfully funded secret Townsend Brown mafia run by let's say the descendants of William Stephenson, who have their own fleet of starships! The breakaway civilization hypothesis that Linda seemed very fond of. I'm not sure that that's the case though. What I keep seeing is just random people having a go at Townsend replications, and sometimes posting ambiguous or vaguely successful results, and then going on with their lives.

(But I'd love to know what connection Stephenson actually does have with Townsend's legacy. I mean we know they hung out and Townsend "joined his organization", but... well. Stephenson's org might just have been people who hunted for Russian spies in the US intelligence services. Which is cool, but not fleet-of-starships cool.)

Vibrational science was suddenly a thing.

Yep, there was a whole lot of interest in ESP in the 1970s. I really admire a lot of the people who fought to make it happen, and I'm sad that the expected mass breakthroughs to bring ESP into the status of a full science/technology didn't - at that time - occur. Yet the data remains, even though on the fringes of awareness, and where there's data, there can still be a science.

I also know, that twice during the 40's the Navy tried to get a joint program going for a "world circling space ship" and LeMay wasn't having it. He was equally resistant to the idea of missile defense. I don't know if we would have gotten to space in spite of him, if it hadn't been for the UFO flaps of that era. I think, around 1953, enough people gor frightened enough to override him.

That could well be! I do believe there's strong documentary evidence that the UFO sighting wave of 1952, in particular, really shook up a lot of people in Washington. Obviously the ICBM project was a big if not the main driver for space; surveillance and communication satellites were another; but at the back of the mind, I'm sure, was that nagging fear: "What if there are other civilizations out there? What if the Soviets aren't our only threat?" So there probably was a sense of multiple purposes for the Space Race.

And on the other side: Russian Cosmism, from which the big Russian push for space came, sure was a lot more mystical than one would expect to be tolerated under Stalin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism Something that I think Diana Pasulka is aware of (though I haven't yet read American Cosmic).

Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

My goodness, how far afield we do wander! It's great fun, actually, to see where these discussions go, but to return to this topic.

Yes, the Token is down again, though the front page is up. The only active link is to Linda's author page on Smashwords, with a picture of us that sill makes me smile. We were feeling mischievious that day and our hats were a nod to a movie we had seen. Did it begin with an A? All I recall is that there was a central group of good-guy operatives with spooky gifts.

Linda's is hers, mine was borrowed from my husband, who took the photo.

Reading Linda's biography reminds me that she spoke of the significance of "the place where the four points meet." I have forgotten if it was something that was told to her or came to her, but it seems to me, in reaching back to those days, that it felt to her like a place on their ranch in Flamingo Heights.

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/4Points


jan

[Jan Lundquist]

Of all the things that stick in my head, movies are the least sticky.

The only scene i recall from The Adjustment Bureau, was a quick flash of a street sign that said "Whitehall", which is the heart of the British government in London, and, as all Brown Hounds know, the name given to Townsend's consulting firm in the fifties and sixties. (Of all the things that stick in my head, movies are the least sticky.) But those who know the story of Linda and "Morgan" can see why this plot tugged at her heart:

Do we control our destiny, or do unseen forces manipulate us? Matt Damon stars in the thriller "The Adjustment Bureau" as a man who glimpses the future Fate has planned for him and realizes he wants something else. To get it, he must pursue the only woman he's ever loved across, under and through the streets of modern-day New York.

On the brink of winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, ambitious politician David Norris (Damon) meets beautiful contemporary ballet dancer Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt)—a woman like none he's ever known. But just as he realizes he's falling for her, mysterious men conspire to keep the two apart.

David learns he is up against the agents of Fate itself—the men of The Adjustment Bureau—who will do everything in their considerable power to prevent David and Elise from being together. In the face of overwhelming odds, he must either let her go and accept a predetermined path...or risk everything to defy Fate and be with her.

https://www.movieinsider.com/m5855/the- ... ent-bureau

Jan

[Paul Schatzkin]

I might have a better memory for movies (I can recite most of 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail' from memory), and I did see The Adjustment Bureau some time ago but don't remember it much.

But now that you remind me that Emily Blunt (aka 'Kitty Oppenheimer') is in it, I'm tempted to watch it again. I've been kinda fixated on her (among others) lately...

--P

[natecull]

I watched The Adjustment Bureau maybe a year ago. It is one of many movies adapted from a Philip K Dick story ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjustment_Team ) but it was quite a slow watch for me. I love romances, action, and surreal stories, and this was all three, and yet...

I think the best way of understanding this film is that it is by an architect, and so it is mostly a movie about cool weird New York architecture that feels slightly "off" and could easily pass as magical/interdimensional, and so the people aren't really important except that the buildings need someone to run though them.

The big question of Love vs Fate on which the movie hangs doesn't have any emotional pull for me, sadly. The question is "should a woman sacrifice her artistic career - which if she continues with, would transform the world - in order to have a happy family with a man she genuinely loves?" which is gripping enough... except that Emily Blunt's transformative artistic career in this movie is ballet, and I am of a generation for which ballet is slightly less interesting than watching paint dry. (If she was a singer or actor, her crisis would make more sense to me). Also the man she loves is a politician, and the audience is meant to also believe in him as a genuinely real person whose profession is noble and important.. which again, for my generation, is a very hard thing to believe.

But it's a reasonably fun, if slow, movie if you love New York architecture and/or you're a Philip K Dick completist.

Nate