Jan wrote:Also, re: the Ball Lightening monograph, written by James Dale Barry, I think your response indicated that you attributed it to "Morgan"...perhaps because Linda had settled on James Dave Barrett as her pseudonym for the Morgan character. The publication date of 1980 certainly makes it possible that the document was written at the behest of, or with the assistance of Townsend, toward the end of his life, but from what i know of "Morgan", he did not/does not have the type of science background that would have stirred an interest in the subject.
Thanks for this note Jan. No, I wasn't attributing the Ball Lightning monograph to Morgan because I haven't come across the name "James Dale Barry" before, and I'd even forgotten the name "James David Barrett" (I have another name in my head entirely that I thought Linda used for "Morgan" in "The Good-Bye Man".)
What I said was:
I find the Cutlass 1974 claim from Morgan et al interesting
and by "the Cutlass 1974 claim" I didn't mean a reference to ball lightning. Rather, I meant a claim that I believe I read on one of the Townsend forums from one of our mystery informants (someone claiming to be either "Morgan" or "Twigsnapper", and I'm not even sure that those Internet identities are two separate people).
The specific claim I was referring to, that I can't remember precisely right now, was to the effect that "the REAL TPX happened not in the 1940s on the Eldridge, but in the 1970s on the Cutlass". Or perhaps not even the Cutlass but another submarine.
I am sure that the claim made by our mystery men certainly wasn't just the sighting of a bit of ball lightning but something entirely more spooky. (Like "time travel / teleportation" level of spooky.) So much so that I didn't personally give it much credence, because I am always suspicious of anonymous Intelligence sources hinting at beyond-miraculous technology, and wonder what game they are playing.
Sorry I can't be more specific about that claim right now - I can try to search my archive for the exact reference but it will take some time.
On James Dale Barry:
JD Barry appears to be another of those one and done authors who left no discernable traces and who has, apparently, never published any thing else, scholarly or otherwise.
He appears in a NYT article from 1981 responding to his monograph:
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/26/scie ... ction.html
James Dale Barry, senior scientist at Hughes Aircraft Co. in Los Angeles, has studied ball lightning for the past two decades. After subjecting to scientific scrutiny some 1,800 reports and photographs of ball lightning collected from many places over the past 300 years, Mr. Barry has concluded that ball lightning probably exists.
If JDB was a senior scientist then he certainly wasn't Morgan.
Hughes is a vector of weirdness in itself which seems to have some Townsend flavour to it. They were doing gravimetrics research in the 1960s, weren't they? Submarine stuff of the kind that went public in "The Hunt For Red October" (the 1990 movie).
''One of the main problems,'' Mr. Barry said in a telephone interview, ''is that trained scientists are rarely the ones who report having witnessed ball lightning. I've never seen it myself, at least outside the laboratory. I believe its existence has been fairly well established, but it must be exceedingly rare - perhaps 10,000 times rarer than ordinary lightning.'' Mr. Barry's exhaustive survey on which he bases his conclusions is presented in a new book, Ball Lightning and Bead Lightning -Extreme Forms of Atmospheric Electricity (published by Plenum Press, New York).
But with the advent of new kinds of electric generators and batteries, the general scientific skepticism about ball lightning began to soften. For instance, luminous green balls sometimes formed and persisted for a second or so after accidental short circuits involving the high-current storage batteries and generators of diesel-electric submarines.
Emphasis mine. That bit sounds familiar.
Some investigators, including the Soviet scientist Pyotr Kapitsa, winner of the 1978 Nobel prize for physics, have hypothesized that ball lightning is actually a light-emitting plasma. Plasma is a gas whose atoms have been partly stripped of electrons, and which readily conducts electricity.
But Mr. Barry, himself a plasma physicist, believes that ball lightning is actually a term covering several very different phenomena.
''Some events described as ball lightning,'' he said, ''almost certainly were will-o'-the-wisps - burning hydrocarbons.'' Will-o'-the-wisps themselves have never been explained to the complete satisfaction of science. Usually described as vague, luminous shapes that flicker, move about the countryside and disappear abruptly, will-o'-the-wisps are thought to be pockets of burning methane gas generated by rotting vegetation.
In many other cases, Mr. Barry believes, putative ball lightning is not lightning at all. True lightning is an electrical discharge that carries a large current from an electron-rich object to an electron-poor object. Such a discharge requires a charged terminal at one end and an oppositely charged or grounded terminal at the other. Typically, the electrically charged base of a cloud and an oppositely charged tree serve as the terminals for a lightning discharge.
But a ball of ''lightning'' floating in space is not usually fixed between any identifiable terminals, and is therefore unlikely to be a true lightning discharge.
Some luminous objects mistaken for floating balls may actually be electrical ''brush'' discharges of the kind that sometimes appears on the branches of trees and inside airplanes in flight. This flickering high-voltage discharge, which is usually harmless despite its alarming appearance, is known as ''St. Elmo's fire.''
Another kind of discharge much rarer than St. Elmo's fire is bead lightning - strokes of lightning that look like strings of dazzling beads rather than the usual bright lines. The wave patterns believed responsible for such lightning may also cause ball lightning, which has sometimes materialized near bead lightning.
Some ''lightning balls,'' Mr. Barry said, may really consist of low-density, luminous plasma created when ordinary lightning passed through air under unusual conditions.
But an even likelier possibility, he believes, is that on very rare occasions, lightning discharges may create radio-frequency standing waves, which are capable of carrying, focusing and depositing energy in some confined region of space.
That's quite interesting, because I don't think I've seen the idea of "radio frequency standing waves" appear
outside of the highly non-mainstream physics scene before (where standing waves of all sorts, particular as a model of matter, remain an extremely popular idea). It seems to almost have some aspect of John Wheeler's "geon" to it. But I'm not a radio head, so maybe RF standing waves really are oldschool and plausible?
Such standing waves may excite trace components of the air, especially carbon dioxide. When this happens, the energy levels of carbon dioxide molecules are pumped up to abnormal levels, from which they gradually dump their excess energy in the form of fluorescent light. Once excited, the carbon dioxide in a sphere of gas would continue to fluoresce for a second or so - long enough to account for many of the reports of ball lightning.
Folk stories likening ball lightning to the destructive Poltergeist - which unlike most other ghosts can move material objects - must be discounted as fantasy, Mr. Barry feels. Calculations made from observations of the luminous balls show that they must contain far less energy than the amount needed to smash furniture or boil buckets of water.
Most of the purported photographs of ball lightning made during the past century, Mr. Barry believes, are merely the accidental images of such ordinary objects as street lamps. In common with purported photographs of ''unidentified flying objects,'' such pictures result from camera movement and other misleading effects.
But a few pictures of ball lightning, notably those recorded by movie or television cameras, seem to Mr. Barry to be convincing. ''There may always be some argument as to the exact nature of ball lightning,'' he said, ''but science has taken a useful step just by determining that it is dealing with something real. And future research in the subject may have practical uses in the search for new sources of energy.''
A version of this article appears in print on May 26, 1981, Section C, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: BALL LIGHTNING NOW SEEMS MORE FACT THAN FICTION
Another couple of references to James Dale Barry are on page 1197 of DTIC AD0680977: SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS, VOLUME 3, which seems to be from the Condon Report, in the Ball Lightning section. He did a master's thesis on the subject.
https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0680 ... 7/mode/1up
3. Ball Lightning, James Dale Barry: Master's Thesis, California State College, 1966
4. Ball Lightning, J. Dale Barry, Journal of Atmospheric and Terrestrial Physics, vol. 29, p. 1095, 1967
So one reason this ball lightning specialist is hard to find online is that he apparently went by "Dale" or "J. Dale" or sometime "J D" rather than "James". Searching for "Dale Barry" gets us:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp ... er=1449058
PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE, JUNE 1969
J. Dale Barry (S’66) was born in Washington, D.C., on February 8, 1942. He received the B.S. degree in nuclear physics from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1964, and the M.S. degree in physics from California State College, Los Angeles, in 1966. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in space physics at UCLA. Since 1963, he has been involved in space oriented research at the UCLA Space Center. He is associated with the Department of Planetary and Space Science and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. Dr. Barry is a member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
A few years on, June 1974, someone by the name of Dale Barry appears in this General Dynamics / Convair report. This Dale Barry is associated with Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/197 ... 004129.pdf
The Future Payload Technology Requirements Study was conducted from June 1974 to January 1975 by Convair Division of General Dynamics with support from Rockwell International Space Division and General Electric Space Division
10. PLANNED PROGRAMS OR UNPERTURBED TECHNOLOGY ADVANCEMENT:
The WPAFB is building laser communications terminals and will use the Nd:YAG laser. No information is available as to whether they are considering laser diode pumping. The AF program is non classified. Contact at WPAFB is Dr. Dale Barry, Technical Director.
And yes it's definitely our J. Dale Barry on that laser project. Here he is two years later, in 1976:
https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.co ... .tb41619.x
First published: January 1976
LASER COMMUNICATIONS IN SPACE: Nd:YAG TECHNOLOGY STATUS
J. Dale Barry
Space Laser Communications, Program 405B
Air Force Avionics Laboratory (AFAL/405B)
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
He appears to have been doing space and plasma science as late as 1997, writing with his old colleague R C Snare:
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... _Satellite
A Fluxgate Magnetometer for the Application Technology Satellite
January 1997 IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science 13(6):326 - 332
Authors:
J. Dale Barry
R. C. Snare University of California, Los Angeles
A satellite-borne magnetometer used to detect magnetohydrodynamic wave propagation within the magnetosphere is introduced. The instrument is a biaxial, closed-loop, fluxgate magnetometer. The unit consists of the basic magnetometer plus additional sections, including a data processor, a field nulling section, and sensitivity selection logic. The basic magnetometer is discussed briefly, the additional sections in greater detail. It is shown that the use of sum and difference amplifiers in the data processor enable the derivation of magnetic field vectors transverse and parallel to the spacecraft spin axis. The field nulling section involves the use of an offset-field-generator to apply discrete current steps to the sensor offset winding in order to null the ambient sensor field. The use of three sensitivity levels is shown to maintain the analog output within the dynamic range of the instrument. An in-flight calibration section is discussed and referenced to instrument stability and sensitivity. A brief discussion of the ATS satellite mentions the advantages of its orbit, which is favorable for the study of long-term magnetic field variations and for correlation with plasma and particle experiments also onboard.
Regards, Nate