In 1952, during the same period of time that the Cady Report was being written, it was the home to the USAF organization that contracted with Venning Mienescz for the report entitled The Gravity Problem of the Mapping and Charting Research Laboratory at Columbus and Related Problems. The other was Battelle Labs, which I had previously confused with the Bartol Labs of the Franklin Foundation in Philadelphia. Battelle is credited with development of the fuel used for the first nuclear submarines.
Battelle seems to keep cropping up in gravity-research related contexts, and I can't quite remember what those contexts were now. Was it named in Winterhaven perhaps? But I know that it's been a thing in the Townsend Brown lore for a while.
The Mapping and Charting Research Laboratory that you've found in that 1952 report, though, is a player that's new to me.
My general feeling is that Townsend was a person who had many personal contacts with scientists and CEOs at high-end Navy-linked defense labs, and that he had solid and boring "paying jobs" in that defense sector that were mostly NOT about his personal electrogravitic / electrohydrodynamic white whale. (I mean "boring" in the sense of not overturning mainstream fundamental physics: nuclear submarines and satellites and SIGINT were certainly not boring fields in themselves!) But every now and then he would be able to convince some of those individual scientists or CEOs to investigate his extremely off-the-charts ideas. And that the results of those investigations were usually borderline, but would attract enough interest, temporarily, to invoke commercial secrecy and/or classification, until the experimental results failed or some other physicist came in and looked at the "rig" and went "that's ridiculous, it's completely against known physical theory" and tossed it out. And that this pattern happened over and over again.
I like this pattern because it's very similar to what happened with ESP/psychotronics, which seems a bit better documented than Townsend Brown. Many things that didn't work, some things that did work but didn't scale, many cycles of hype and disbelief, all backed by generally private funding because the official stance was always "this is not possible".
It's possible that one of those iterations around the hype/disbelief cycle "caught on" and something resulted that was finally understood and actually classified. My feeling would be that if that happened, it would have been in the 1970s, following Rand taking delivery of the Fan, but again... who knows. If the usual pattern held, it might have just been one person at Rand who liked Townsend and it might have gone no further.
I keep thinking about Raymond's hint about "electrostatic cooling" (InterProbe, wasn't it?) and how that was used in the F117. Which is interesting, though of course we have no actual knowledge that electrostatic cooling came from Townsend's work and wasn't an independent invention. It does feel similar, though.
Nate