This explained why the Pentagon's archives had contained a de classified copy of Winterhaven.
Despite the view of LaViolette, Valone and many others that this was the moment Project Winterhaven went super-classified, forming the basis of a number of "black programs" in the antigravity field from the mid-1950s onward, I found this hard to believe. Although LaViolette's theory dovetailed neatly with the ringing silence that followed the zealous rhetoric of George Trimble and his colleagues in the U.S. aerospace industry on the subject of antigravity in 1956, there was no evidence at all to support it.
Nor, crucially, did LaViolette's thesis explain Brown's behavior from this period onward. For although it was obvious that he knew how to keep a secret — his wartime work would have instilled in him the need for the rigors of secrecy — if the ONR report was merely a blind, his subsequent actions went way beyond attempts to lead investigators away from a buried program within the U.S. Navy or Air Force or both. The energy with which he now set out to prove his electrogravitational theory seemed, in fact, to stem specifically from the comprehensive rejection of his experiments by the U.S. military. For the rest of his life, Brown, who was universally described as quiet, unassuming, honest and likable, behaved like a man driven to prove his point.
In 1955, he went to work for the French aerospace company SNCASO — Société Nationale de Constructions Aéronautiques du SudOuest.
During this one-year research period, he ran his discs in a vacuum. If anything, they worked better in a vacuum, something that prompted SNCASO, which was interested in exploiting Brown's work for possible space applications, to offer him an extension of his contract. But in 1956, SNCASO merged with its counterpart Sud-Est and its new bosses saw little future in the space business. They wanted to build aeroplanes; real ones, with wings and jet engines.
His contract terminated, Brown returned to America, where he helped found the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), an unofficial study group set up to analyze the growing body of UFO sightings across the American continent and elsewhere. It was Brown's belief that the study of UFOs, many of which exhibited characteristics similar to his discs, could shed light on their propulsion methodology and this, in turn, could be exploited for science and space travel. The trouble was, of course, that this alienated him even more from the mainstream.
It also further alienated him from me. As I'd immersed myself in Brown's life and work, I'd wondered more and more if his "discovery" of electrogravitics had had something to do with the emergence of the whole UFO phenomenon in the '40s, if these "alien" craft had in fact been top secret aerospace vehicles propelled by a power source that science even today refused to recognize. This, however, did not gel with a man who went on to found a UFO study group.
In 1957, Brown was hired as a consultant to continue his antigravity work for the Bahnson Company of North Carolina and in 1959 he found himself consulting for the aerospace propulsion giant General Electric.
I found little corroborating evidence for Brown's activities during these years.
When he went into semiretirement in the mid-1960s, Valone and LaViolette saw this as a signal that, in effect, he had been been bought off by the military, especially as he hardly touched electrogravitics again. His last great interest involved a series of ultimately successful attempts to draw stored electrical energy — albeit in minute quantities — from common or garden rocks …
Unquestionably a highly gifted and unusual man, Brown died in relative obscurity in 1983.
In trying to draw lessons from his story, lessons that might perhaps help explain the sudden outpouring of interest in antigravity by America's leading aerospace designers in the late 1950s, I found myself trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. The problem was, however I went about it, they wouldn't form into any recognizable picture.
If the Navy had developed Brown's experiments into a fully fledged antigravity program, why had its premier research arm, the ONR, gone out of its way to dismiss them? And if this was an elaborate ruse to throw others off the scent — including its old rival the U.S. Air Force — why did Brown continue in his work, eventually taking it to another country? If electrogravitics was classified, this would have handed it on a plate to another nation, which was madness.
There was, conceivably, a chance that Brown's work had been hijacked by the U.S. military without his knowledge at the end of World War Two, but this too seemed unlikely. Given Brown's wartime clearances, it would have been simpler to have sworn him to secrecy after the Hawaii experiments, had the Navy been that impressed with them.
There was another, remote possibility — that Brown's work had been rejected by the military, not because it was hokey or crazy, but because its principles were already known to them — and, perhaps, therefore already the subject of advanced development activity. Had this been the case, it might well have explained why, a few years later, Bell, Convair, Martin and so many other companies — equally ignorant of this activity — aired their views on antigravity unchecked for a number of months, as recorded in the Interavia article, until someone, somewhere ordered them to silence.
As I kicked this notion around, I found sympathy for it from an unlikely source.
In the appendix section of a compendium of UFO sightings, I found a secret memorandum dated September 23,1947, from Lieutenant General Nathan Twining, head of the U.S. Army Air Forces' Air Materiel Command (AMC), to Brigadier General George Schulgen, a senior USAAF staff officer in Washington.
The memorandum had been declassified and released into the public domain only in the late 1970s. I'd found it during another late-night trawl of my burgeoning archive, a cup of strong coffee in my hand to keep me awake.
In the memo, Twining states in his "considered opinion" that the rash of UFO sightings in America during the summer of 1947—the first real wave, as it turned out — had been "something real and not visionary or fictitious."
He continued: "There are objects … approximating the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as a man-made aircraft." These discs exhibited a number of common characteristics, amongst them a metallic or light-reflecting surface, an absence of any jet trail and no propulsion sound.
In addition, they were capable of "extreme rates of climb, maneu verability (particularly in roll), and action which must be considered evasive when sighted."
For an Air Force officer — a senior one, even — to admit to the reality of UFOs was quite an admission, but it was not unique. Other thenclassified memos from other USAAF officers of the day show them to have been similarly perplexed by the disc sightings phenomenon across America from mid-1947 onward.
UFO researchers had seized on these documents as evidence that the USAAF (and from 1947 its successor, the USAF) recognized the reality of UFOs while officially pooh-poohing them — a blanket denial that remains policy to this day. My attention, however, had been drawn to something quite else. As an aerospace analyst, and in light of the Brown research, I found the key part of Twining's memo in what followed. UFO researchers had concentrated entirely on the main thrust of the memo: Twining's acknowledgment of the reality of UFOs.
The part that interested me, the postscript, added almost as an afterthought, had been totally overlooked. It so absorbed me that I never noticed the pencil on which I set down my cup of lukewarm coffee. It tipped over and the drink spilled, spreading across the open pages like ink on a blotter. I swore, mopped it up as best I could and returned to the text. The stain, as poor luck would have it, had covered the paragraph I was interested in, making the task of rereading it a painfully slow affair. I uttered the words aloud, enunciating them slowly so I knew I had read it right.