Havana Syndrome has always sounded like Russian tech to me, yes, fitting the profile of the legendary 1970s/80s "scalar weapons". Hoping that one day we find out more about it.Your comments on the possible Russian experiments with electromagnetic effects on human physiology reminds me of the Havanah Syndrome that American diplomats etc suffered when in certain overseas postings. Apparently new technology has enabled scientists to determine it is definitely artificially generated electromagnetic in nature and can be aimed in beam format towards target(s).
Jan:
I believe that would have been Townsend talking about his concept of "gravitational isotopes", which is not quite the same idea as "isotope" in nuclear physics (as in, a nucleus with the same number of protons but more or fewer neutrons). Rather, it would be an atom that's chemically identical to others, but has a differing response to a gravitational field compared to inertia. That's what his patents about "beneficiation" of the alleged stuff were generally about (using various centrifugal techniques, similar to how normal isotopes are sorted, to detect anomalous gravitational vs inertial response).Back to Witten’s oral history, he also said something like a man named Brown from Indiana or some midwestern state claimed that an isotope of Bismuth would have antigravity properties.
I keep forgetting which elements Townsend pegged as potentials for gravitational isotopes, if we ever had an exhaustive list, though I know that silicon compounds (ie, in quartz, in beach sand, in "Sandusky clay", in loess, and in lunar dust) were mentioned in writing. Bismuth compounds may well have also been in that list.
The idea of a gravitational isotope has two very large red flags against it, when viewed from a mainstream physics perspective:
One, Townsend did not have a mechanism to describe what might cause a gravitational isotope (as opposed to how to detect them). The mechanism couldn't just be a change of the neutron count in the nucleus. In the 1950s, "something to do with mesons" could have been accepted as an answer, because the "mesonic forces" were still mysterious. But after the Standard Model was complete in the 1970s, that answer no longer can be used.
Two, the existence of even one gravitational isotope completely destroys the theoretical structure of General Relativity, because it breaks the Equivalence Principle. That is, unless he was also considering such an isotope to have a lowered response to inertial forces as well.
Both of these are serious stumbling blocks to mainstream physics even beginning to imagine that gravitational isotopes could exist.
That would certainly be very interesting if that tale is true. The actual existence of some physical material with those properties might explain why Townsend went down the very strange and otherwise very unmotivated Gravitational Isotope rabbit hole. (Unmotivated, that is, apart from the 1920s experiments and writings of fellow Ohian, Charles Brush, during Townsend's teens and twenties).The report on the material, once in USN hands, was that it had a peculiar ability to induce temporary weight loss in nearby materials.
Townsend's ideas of "passive counterbary", as described in the 1950s, appear to center on Gravitational Isotopes and on the idea of "energising them" with static electrical charge to cause a loss of gravitational response (and perhaps inertial response) such that it would be a little like putting hot air into a balloon. He seemed to still be thinking about this in the 1970s with his sand shaker experiment and his musing about lunar dust fountains (a real, observed effect) being caused by ultraviolet light in sunlight inducing a static charge on lunar dust causing it to lose weight and "loft".
It's his mention of loess (a fine silty clay, always very light) that intrigues me, because the hills in Canterbury in New Zealand are just filled with the stuff. Of course, if something were lighter than it should be but it always was that way, how would we know if it was anomalously light?
I remember writing a time travel short story in high school in the 1980s, based on one I'd read combined with the Townsend Brown / Tesla fanclub stuff I'd been reading, with my justification being that if the gravitational isotope conjecture plus "gravity equals time" stuff from GR was true then maybe lightning striking a sufficiently weird rock could displace you in time. It scared my teacher (it was a religious school and the story sounded too much like ghosts for his liking).
Regards, Nate