Jess Fritch, a TTB acolyte of long standing.
Ah! So I'm confusing a Jess with a Jesse! Two different people. Yes, I think it was Jess "Ecker" Fritch I interacted with - or someone claiming to be him, because I'm never sure on the Internet - not Jesse Michels (who I don't think I've encountered).
I see Jess's current "EckerStar" website is entirely new and was created last year, after my interaction with him (which I thought was on good terms) apparently led to him completely erasing both his entire old website and his Reddit identity. If it was something I said, I'd like to know.
If you poke around the Interwebs, you can find some videos of Jess demonstrating Lifters and calling them "antigravity" devices.
Again, a nifty blend of information and disinformation.
Yes.
I used to hang out on Jean-Louis Naudin's website back in the early 2000s when the Lifters thing was taking off, so to speak. I can certainly see a geometric similarity between the Lifter and the Fan patent of the 1960s. Ie, a wire and a ribbon. I believe Townsend would have been clear that the wire must be the positive pole and the ribbon the negative in order to maximise the Effect, and I can't remember if the Lifter experimenters were doing this or not. (I think Townsend's reasoning around the Effect - in Structure of Space - is that it's primarily due to spatial asymmetry between negative and positive, but that electron clouds vs protons have a sort of built-in spatial asymmetry.)
The general consensus at the end of the 2010s was that Lifters were not doing anything interesting in terms of physics. And then quadcopters came along (physical fans got smaller and better) and demolished the performance of dangerous and flaky tinfoil electrostatic drones and that was that, the hardware hacker community rapidly moved on.
I recall though that the Lifters craze apparently started from one company, "TransDimensional Technologies" of Huntsville, Alabama (Jeffrey and Susan Cameron) -
https://web.archive.org/web/20040628032 ... nsion.com/ Their website went offline after 2004, but from their "Projects" page they seem to have been a little involved in the NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics scene. The story I read somewhere was that one of the Camerons got interested in the Biefeld-Brown effect and "asymmetric capacitors" after seeing a high voltage power cable jerk in one of their day jobs. That seems like quite a different physical regime from the matchstick and tinfoil Lifter.
On the TDT website, for example, Jeffrey Cameron had a paper he presented at the 37th AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) Joint Propulsion Conference in 2001, "An Asymmetric Gravitational Wave Propulsion System":
https://web.archive.org/web/20040411100 ... script.pdf .
AIAA has a list of the other papers here:
https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/book/10.2514/MJPC01 Some other interesting ones:
Gravity modification by high-temperature superconductors
C. Woods, J. Helme, S. Cooke and C. Caldwell
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3363
Exploration of anomalous gravity effects by magnetized high-Tc superconducting oxides
Glen Robertson, Ron Litchford, Bryan Thompson and Randall Peters
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3364
Studies of non-conventional configuration closed electron drift thrusters
Y. Raitses,D. Staack,A. Smirnov,A. Litvak,L. Dorf,T. Graves and N. Fisch
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3776
Induction and amplification of non-Newtonian gravitational fields
M. Tajmar and C. De Matos
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3911
Towards the control of matter with gravity
D. Burton,S. Clark,T. Dereli,J. Gratus,W. Johnson,R. Tucker andC. Wang
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3912
Measurement of repulsive quantum vacuum forces
Jordan Maclay, Jay Hammer, Rod Clark, Michael George, Lelon Sanderson,Rob Ilic and Quinn Leonard
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3359
Geometrodynamics, inertia and the quantum vacuum
Bernard Haisch and Alfonso Rueda
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3360
Research on achieving thrust by EM inertia manipulation
Hector Brito
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3656
Experimental results of Schlicher's thrusting antenna
Gustave Fralick and Janis Niedra
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3657
Specially conditioned EM radiation research with transmitting toroid antennas
H. Froning and George Hathaway
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3658
An experimental investigation of the physical effects in a dynamic magnetic system
Vladimir Roschin and Sergei Godin
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2001-3660
This is like a who's who of the "Antigravity Handbook" / MUFON scene, not quite what I expect from a mainstream aerospace industry conference. Maybe AIAA always has weird/fringy papers but it seems like 2001 (after 1957) was a high point of fringe antigravity research in conventional aerospace venues. NASA had BPP, and BAe had Project Greenglow. The X-Files was still on the air. Nick Cook's "The Hunt for Zero Point" was about to come out. It felt (as some now feel with David Grusch) that we were on the verge of some kind of electrogravitics disclosure moment. Which turned out not to happen.
And "Lifters" came from TransDimensional who came out of that turn-of-the-Millenium milieu. Has anyone heard from the Camerons in the last 20 years? And how often are they even mentioned in the same context as Lifters?
By comparison, the 47th AIAA conference in 2011 (
https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/book/10.2514/MJPC11 ) has only one apparently "weird" paper (my rough metric: searching for "gravity" or "inertia")
Physics of Axial Gravity-Like Fields
Walter Droescher andJochem Hauser
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2011-6042
The 49th AIAA Joint Propulsion conference in 2013 seems like it was the last one, and had one "weird" paper:
Extended Weight Measurements of Uncharged and Charged Spinning Gyroscopes in the Earth's Gravitational Field
Istvan Lorincz,Erik Edlinger,Daniel Hochwarter,Christian Boy andMartin Tajmar
AIAA 2013-3766
Future Flight Propulsion Systems I • Monday, 15 July 2013 • 1700 hrs
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2013-3766
So I guess the AIAA scene is still quietly open to the fringe. Much more than I would expect, because even one "wtf how did that get here" paper is more than is normally allowed in academia! But I still stand by my gut feeling of 2001 as being something else. (Though I really need to pull all the conference paper lists and make a proper comparison to be sure.)
Ok, some more receipts on the Lifters / Jeff Cameron connection. Well one receipt and a half.
http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/story.htm
On October 5, 2000, the Hector Serrano's patent WO 00/58623 " Propulsion device and method employing electric fields for producing thrust " has been granted. This patent is very close to the Aymmetrical Capacitor Thruster ( ACT ) patented by the NASA ( patent US 6,317,310 , granted on Nov 2001 ) . These two devices use the Biefeld-Brown Effect for producing a thrust Vs the surrounding medium ( this effect was discovered by Townsend Brown in 1928 in his Gravitator, see the GB Patent N°300311 filed on Nov 15, 1928 "A method of and an apparatus or machine for producing force or motion" from T.Townsend Brown ).
On June 2001, Transdimensional Technologies has presented the Power3 Lifter1 and Lifter2 devices. The Lifter1 device was built with three capacitors joined so as to form a triangle assembly and the Lifter2 is three time heavier and three time bigger than the Lifter1. These devices are able to lift their own weight and they are a "modern version" of the Townsend Brown Electrokinetic Apparatus. The Lifters are using the Biefeld-Brown Effect to generate the main thrust to self levitate.
On October 2001, I have replicated successfully the Transdimensional Power3 Lifter1 and Lifter2. You will also find the full explanations to build yourself your own Lifter1.
From a private mirror of Naudin's site (this page is not on the Wayback machine or on the current jnaudin site):
http://linas.org/mirrors/jnaudin.free.f ... ifters.htm
The lifters developed by TDT are NOT the same technologies as portrayed by the NASA patents.
The TDT lifters are based on technologies derived from laser weapon systems in the early 1970's, not NASA. The TDT lifters are based upon leaky dielectrics and the resulting momentum transfer from the vector potential of the conduction electrons in the skirt assembly ( as discussed in Goldstein ). The specific lifter shape is directly derived from the preionizer arrays of the early Excimer laser weapon class systems, NOT any type of work with NASA! There was no NASA involvement!
Jeff Cameron
Transdimensional Technologies ( March 27, 2002 )
I wonder who "Goldstein" is?
A third, battered, receipt: A "Bruce Smith" from 2003, summarising the weird propulsion scene, then still at its height. He quotes Tim Ventura and Nick Cook among others.
https://www.aulis.com/manned-space-flight.htm
Another Huntsville operation, Trans-dimensional Technologies, is exploring these multi-faceted phenomena, and its extensive website shows it to be a frequent contractor to NASA, conducting research into "asymmetrical capacitive propulsion" and capacitor based devices to test "ion wind" forces. Jeff Cameron, of Trans-dimensional, is said by Ventura to be "the father of the lifter", having developed the device while exploring anomalous torsional effects of high-energy lasers.
The lasers twisted and broke the metal frames of unrelated test material, and at the time this was considered a nuisance. But the unknown forces at work later led Cameron to found Trans-dimensional, develop lifter technology to a commercial level and subsequently patent many pieces of related technology. Unfortunately, I have been unable to reach Jeff Cameron or anyone at Trans-dimensional for any kind of confirmation.
Anyway: Excimer lasers in the 1970s, that would be even pre Star Wars (SDI) wouldn't it? Also note: *early* 1970s. That's just before 1975 (the founding of the US Psychotronics Association) where people like Tom Bearden, Christopher Bird, the MRU circle, hung out.... then Rolf Schaffranke in 1977... and then *finally* Stan Deyo and William Moore circa 1978... started pumping Townsend Brown's reputation.
So is the series of events something like: someone in the pre-Star-Wars missile defense world noticed "hey weird stuff is going on in those laser cables" and that led them to ping semi-retired Townsend? And then some development maybe finally started to happen, or is it still a series of disconnected strangers each stumbling on anomalous high voltage phenomena and going "hey!" before either losing interest or having a quiet chat and maybe a hiring interview from the Area 51 crew?
I like the idea of ballistic missile defense in the early 1970 being one of the venues where the Biefield-Brown effect was finally replicated, because that would provide enough secrecy (and a high-profile enough and yet unusable enough mission - literal nuclear apocalypse engineering) for it to have been immediately hushed up. And that hushing up might have been part of what caused some of the paranoia that started spinning out from the military contractor scene in the later 1970s.
Because the sequence of events as I see it is:
* Early 1950s: Townsend is making a fuss about saucers, possibly deliberately making himself look ridiculous
* Late 1950s: Townsend and his friends are making a fuss about gravity and the need to engineer it, but this time he's not being ridiculous at all, he seems deadly serious, and he's trying to do replications, but his ideas are just so hard to understand and communicate
* 1960s: A few of Townsend's friends like Kitselman make some frustrated remarks about the bigwigs not understanding his stuff
* Late 1960s: Big security fights, Townsend seems to finally get some recognition at RAND with the Fan and someone there takes it.
* "Early 1970s": something something missile defense laser cables omg what is this new physical force?
* Mid-to-late 1970s: suddenly out of nowhere, a new generation of CIA/Navy/Airforce linked Baby Boomers with esoteric connections are exploding with excitement about this Townsend Brown fellow and/or about some weird conspiracy to either conceal or exploit - or both - his work, and from there his story (slowly) goes viral - but with massive gaps and misinformation.
* 1980s-2000s: Townsend Brown's legend slowly builds, as does multiple deliberate drops of disinformation (Roswell, Majestic 12 etc). But details also slowly emerge.
* 2001-ish: a quiet peak of interest in weird propulsion, but it seems to all go nowhere, lots of moving cups and balls
* 2000s-2010s: an entire Global War on Terror and several other bushfire wars, in which exotic US weapon platforms are very prominently not featured at all
* late 2010s: omg Space Force! Space Foooooorrrce! but why? what are the new toys the USAF wants to deploy, why does it need an entire reorg, and why now?
* 2020s: a sudden new surge of interest in UAPs and exotic propulsion and a new sense of panic in Congress as if they've just discovered that some kind of new toy is real and they're not read into it
Nate