The Man Who Mastered Gravity has sold almost 3,000 copies on Amazon alone since it was released in March.
Yay! That's really great news!
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.
I guess I'm not surprised to hear that, because this story has always had a strong "Trickster" factor around it.
Actually, the words 'Caroline Group' first showed up in the very first snail-mail letter I received from 'Morgan.'
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.
That's interesting! As I've said before, Morgan's story resonates with me strongly because I read the rough outlines of it back in either the late 1980s or early 1990s. From a set of notes being sold on the weird 'zine scene through either occult bookstores, or "back of Popular Science classified ads" mail order. One set of notes *might* have been by William Moore himself (I have the feeling in my memory that he was advertising those notes somewhere...), or they might have been by another researcher. I think there were several sets of such notes and researchers, honestly. A researcher - or group of them - attached to, say, the MUFON scene deeply going down the Townsend Brown rabbit hole circa 1990 might well have been still active in the mid 2000s.
The problem with personal memory (and me being a teenager at the time) is that things that really happened years apart get all smushed together. I know that I had the feeling reading some of the late 1980s Townsend Brown material that there was some kind of secret group behind Townsend and the (very lightly sketched and not by that name) "Morgan" character, and that William Stephenson and Eldridge Johnson and Ilya Tolstoy were key to that group somehow. But I feel that *why* those three should be important characters in Townsend's life, was never spelled out directly as such.
I was on BBS systems from about 1987 to 1997, yet oddly enough I don't recall any Townsend Brown material ever making its way to ASCII text BBS text files - it must have been a different crowd. It was all books and paper 'zines, and then from 1996 (my first Internet access) it was HTML pages and then, finally and slowly, PDFs.
Isn't that the "Adventures Unlimited Press" guy? He had an interesting racket going there for a while.
Yep, that's the one. A one-man vortex of weirdness in print. And I guess he was a backpacker way back when it was cool. Maybe started the genre of "New Age tourism"? An early mover in the genre, if nothing else.
Is that why Morgan told me to "stick with ball lightning" like spit on gum"?
I've heard variants of that phrase over the years from various UFO groups, and never really understood *why*, but yeah, ball lightning and plasma (plasmoids, particularly?) seems to be a thing that "insiders" keep hinting at. They might know something, or they might just be all reading the same books.
But I believe the person who coined the term "plasma" did so because he felt the stuff looked alive.
I've also wondered whether the exotic glowy, wispy stuff called "ectoplasm" by the Spiritualists back in the 1850s might not have been some kind of cold plasma, since they seemed to need darkness to make it visible. A St Elmo's Fire sort of thing. Except that it's also described in old books as being produced by the body, somehow, and we don't know of any mechanism by which that could happen. But still. It feels a little in the same ballpark.
I like your of of the word 'Theosophical.' Other activities in my life presently are drawing me toward that arena.
I wish you very safe and happy explorations of that arena! The Theosophical Society itself is... well, reading about it, it seems to have been a big and complicated group of people with many different viewpoints, which broke apart into many spinoff groups. I find myself a little attracted to some of the ideas in the big hall called "Esotericism", and repelled by others. Still sorting out which are which. But the idea of a big mostly-invisible living universe that we can interact with somewhat weakly (and through our minds more than our bodies, but sometimes through both)... that resonates with me. It seems to explain quite a lot of things in human history and religion and philosophy, with only a few hypotheses.
Now I need to go catch up on all the conversations I've missed. Cheers!
Nate