Hi guys...
Nice to see some activity around here even if it's just the three of us.
Jan, one of us should post something to the main blog site with a link to this thread. I've been seeing evidence in the Google search results that ttbrown.com is rising in the rankings (though, admittedly, for narrowly focused keywords like "townsend brown"). Unfortunately Google has also changed the way its analytics work this year, and I still can't quite figure out how it works now. It's the usual, "we've changed everything, now read through these dozens of paragraphs to figure it out by yourself.
I grow increasingly weary of life online....
Not much to add to Jan's portrait, but this warrants a nod:
natecull wrote: ↑Sun Dec 03, 2023 11:04 pm
I know I said I'm skeptical about all of the online forum text posts marked as from "Twigsnapper" in the Before Times being actually from him - just due to the amount of sockpuppeting that happened then - but it seems feasible that the person himself existed and was probably more or less what he said to be. Perhaps. Or someone was roleplaying this character for multiple years.
As Jan and I have discussed, I've found (several) reason(s) over the past few months to question the provenance of
all the e-mail I correspondence I started receiving in 2004 - which calls much of the narrative (if indeed you can call it that?) in the book into question. There are some 'tells' that imply that it call came from a single source, regardless of the sender's address or sign-off.
Suffice it to say for now that we're not out of the rabbit hole yet.
At least there was a lot of very specific military-intelligence flavoured inside gossip from Twigsnapper and Morgan that seems like it would have been hard to just make up. But then, military-intelligence people making up highly specific, partially verifiable, and yet misleading stories.... *particularly in the context of talking specifically ABOUT stories that were made up to distract and mislead*..... well, that too is very "on brand" for that job description.
I keep coming back to David O. Russell's opening to "American Hustle"
... which actually rings truer than "Based on a True Story."
Don't mind me, I've been dealing with the psychic whiplash of "is this antigravity stuff true - and if so, government agencies are concealing it from the public to maybe do unspecified things in the future, which is pretty bad. Or is it all made up - in which case maybe another set of government agents are bare-faced lying to the public to whip up unfocused mob rage - which would also be pretty bad. And what's it all about/for, anyway? And how do I hold both extremes of possibility in my head without getting hurt?" since I was a pre-teen. I'd like to say I'm used to that deep sense of complicated ambivalence around the subject, but I'm still not entirely so.
Nice job there, Nate, of summing up all the quandaries.
The sight, forgone and forgotten in her little pink dress, caused Twigsnapper's heart to crack and he wept at the sight. It was at that moment that Townsend invited him to join the inner circle.
The way Twigsnapper and Morgan described "The Caroline Group" is *very* similar to how, eg, Theosophy used to describe its "Mahatmas". In fact several esoteric groups in the last couple hundred years have talked about "inner circles" or "inner lodges" or "hidden masters" who seem to straddle the border between the physical and the immaterial.
I oscillate btw two interpretations of the Caroline Group.
One is it was simply a quasi-clandestine alliance of international business interests. I'm reading
The Rise And Fall of The Their Reich at the moment (a little light, casual reading....) and can see how, given the mid-30s chronology, there could have been just such a consortium to protect allied business interests from the growing Nazi threat.
The other is that, as Nate suggests, it was an organization that "straddled the border" between the physical and the metaphysical. The rational remnants of my brain have a harder time with that.
But, then... Alice in Wonderland....?!?!
In the 1980s, when I first encountered the Townsend Brown mythos as a pre-teen reading strange back-of-Popular-Science-Magazine leaflets - and particularly the *very specific* flavour of the mythos which included details like "the Gravity Cruise" and "tank commanders in WW2" and "Eldridge Johnson" and "William Stephenson" and "Bahamas" and "Ilya Tolstoy in Tibet" - it was also very much within this Theosophical kind of framework.
I like your of of the word 'Theosophical.' Other activities in my life presently are drawing me toward that arena.
At my AA meeting this past Saturday, I said "I think the word 'God' is the most over-used and least understood word in the English language, and the same goes for it's translation into all the other languages in Babel."
That's as far I'm gonna go with that subject for now. I'll let you know when I've come up with the foundations of a new religion (cult). I hear that's a cool/easy way to make a lot of money.
The words "Caroline Group" were not part of this 1980s mythos (I guess because Paul invented that term) but the same general feeling was.
Actually, the words 'Caroline Group' first showed up in the very first snail-mail letter I received from 'Morgan.'
I specify 'snail mail' here because along with the other discoveries referenced above, I've determined that the manner and tone of the first fifty-some pages of hard-copy correspondence I had with 'Morgan' (
whoever-the-hell-he-was) differs from the 'tells' in the emails that started a couple of months later in the spring of 2004.
There has always been a Theosophical contingent who were drawn to the Townsend Brown story - and many of his actual colleagues had that sort of philosophical drift. In my case one of the first connecting points was "The Antigravity Handbook" by David Hatcher Childress: first edition, 1985. (
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2745571 ... y_handbook ).
Isn't that the "Adventures Unlimited Press" guy? He had an interesting racket going there for a while.
Speaking of which, I think AUP published some of Joseph Farrells' books. Farrell is on an interesting thread now, professing that 'plasma' bears 'intelligence.'
Farrell here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t ... 0614524158
The topic is also discussed in a book that was recently commended to me:
https://amz.run/7Sp9
Is that why Morgan told me to "stick with ball lightning" like spit on gum"?
This Theosophical viewpoint behind so many of Townsend's friends and admirers - along with the equally as legitimate US Navy / CIA / defense-contracting links - is another point of view that might explain just what the "black Oppenheimer" might have been about.
Nice to see the notion of the 'black Oppenheimer' getting some traction (even if it's just the three of us...)
I feel like one connecting point is the "Men Who Stare At Goats" community.
Maybe I should watch that one again...
Edit: To be clear, I'm well aware that long before the 1970s populist New Age (and the parallel 1970s US military obsession with "closing the ESP gap" with the Soviets that jump-started the careers of, eg, Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ and Dean Radin), that Theosophy had been a big deal globally, and wasn't even socially obscure but rather enjoyed a blaze of publicity.
Funny how often Puthoff's name comes up (or is it?). And I heard Russell Targ's name in the conversation that steered me to the book linked above (I haven't read it yet, but I read enough of the description and reviews to get the gist: plasma = intelligence).
Townsend's life is like a lightning rod for how all of this stuff actually came together, what it felt like to be at the vortex of the fairly freewheeling defense/research culture which was open to wild and new ideas, at the same time as it was trying to standardise and button-down a new physics.
I just pulled that passage because it deserves to stand on its own.
Nate, you make so many good points here...
The challenge now is to use this book to broaden the discussion... and get more people talking about it.
The Man Who Mastered Gravity has sold almost 3,000 copies on Amazon alone since it was released in March.
Where is everybody?
--PS