Paul,
I am new to the group and I just starting reading T. Townsend Brown's (TTB's) story just a short time ago. But I am fascinated by the story and this forum. I have many thoughts after I read Ch. 71.
"Our boy" was very much into what you have called "skip radar". In fact that is one of the reasons that he was in Florida in 1957. You may also find references to "cesium cloud" that was loosed in that and other areas.
"Skip radar" is actually called "tropospheric scatter" or "troposcatter" and was used in radar to for early detection of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Radar uses microwave frequencies which travel in straight lines but by bouncing the signal off the troposphere of the earth, radar can peer over the horizon. Wikipedia has a good article on it here :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_scatter
I was first made aware of this technique in the late 1980s when we did an environmental survey at a former Air Force base in Niagara Falls. It was also a Nike missile base but the Rome Air Defense System (RADS) was using the facility for a troposcatter radar system to detect missiles coming over from Canada. I thinks RADS is now the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS), which is a component of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) located at what used to be Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York. Once satellites became more common, the troposcatter radar was not as useful.
Now the cesium subject. Paul, you mentioned cesium in Farnsworth's story about the television. Farnsworth used it in his picture tubes. Now the plasma display could be used as an artificial cloud to bounce radar or radio signals off of it, much as astronomers bounce signals off meteor showers.
But maybe the tests with cesium was for another purpose. Project Bluebeam comes to mind:
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/projectb ... ul05.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Beam
If this is true, the sky could act as a big television screen and an image could possibly be projected into the sky.
Now how would the cesium be introduced into the air? Simple - via airplanes! And this brings us into the talk of "chemtrails" which are foreign substances introduced into the air via airplanes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrails
http://www.santacruzhousing.net/observer/20001112.htm
http://herballure.com/ubbthreads/showfl ... o=&fpart=1
http://www.carnicom.com/contrails.htm
http://www.carnicom.com/FibersNov2005.htm
Now isn't it interesting to note that barium titanate is in the chemtrails. Barium titanate was also mentioned previously in your story tied to improving the effects in a vacuum. I'm sure this is the similar effect that the thruster exhaust with the ionized gas did in the NASA tether experiment, and produced a plasma for which the charge could migrate.
The picture of TTB in Ch. 70 standing next to the GCHQ at Cheltenham, England reminded me of an early version of High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP).
http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/
Who knows the real reason for HAARP but they also talk about "skip" on their "official" site:
http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/prpEis.html
Now it could be entirely feasible that Dr. Brown's earlier research paved the way for HAARP to be built. But a transmitter capable of delivering up to 3.6 million Watts would make a helluva auroral borealis or for a projected image as described in Project Bluebeam that could be seen by all on the earth!
Now, as for the shortwave radio, I once read about an amateur radio operator that could predict earthquakes by listening to the 'ringing' of the sound on a shortwave radio.
http://www.eham.net/articles/887?ehamsi ... 392d7f27bb
Although TTB may have been the shortwave radio to listen to nuclear tests as well if he was familiar with them.
Carrying this even further, electrical signals travel throughout the earth much faster than sound. There was a group of amateur scientists I was connected with in the past that actually monitored earthquakes by detecting these faint electrical signals as they pass through the earth. They could detect earthquakes faster than the seismologists and have been looking for patterns of building electrical signals prior to an actual quake. The detectors are a series of ground rods in the earth with a detector/amplifier system connected to the computer to detect faint variances in the earth's resistivity, thereby measuring the earth's conductance.
The Bible says there is "no new thing under the sun" and the earth's conductivity was studied by Nathan Stubblefield
http://www.nathanstubblefield.com/ who communicated through the earth with a wireless telephone even before Nikola Tesla. Tesla is even in one of the photos of Stubblefield's demonstrations. Stubblefield also developed "earth batteries" but he probably wasn't the first to do so. Sand is made of quartz and is piezoelectric and this may be the reason why TTB was collecting different sands.
Well, I know this is a LOT to digest so I will leave for now.
I have to finish reading "the rest of the story". I will probably post some more, hopefully not as long!
Take care, and I hope this information is useful to someone out there...
MagicBill