In such circumstances, I could conceive of reasons why the Navy might want to plant misleading stories about the Eldridge—the more so, since it involved stealth.
It remains highly sensitive technology, but the use of electromagnetic fields in generating radar stealth is a technique well known to military science today.
But during World War Two — if Brown had discovered a means of shielding U.S. Navy ships from enemy radar (or even for marginally reducing their radar signature) — it would have rung right off the classification scale.
The last thing the Navy would have wanted was sailors running around complaining of headaches and revealing how they had come by them.
The next experiment supposedly went even further. In October 1943, after the Navy had replaced the first crew, a second test on the Eldridge was carried out.
This time, soon after the generators were switched on, the ship shimmered for a few seconds, remaining visible in outline only. Then there was a blinding flash and it vanished altogether. The legend states that it was transported briefly to a berth in Norfolk, Virginia, before making its way back to the yard at Philadelphia.
When investigators went on board, they found that some of the crew had been swallowed by the ether that had momentarily consumed the Eldridge. These men were never seen again.
Those that did make it back were either made dangerously ill by their adventure, experiencing intense nausea and headaches for years, or were driven mad by it.
Weirdest of all, five of the crew were found fused into the metallic structure of the ship, which had materially transmuted to accommodate them.
These were the broad "facts" as presented to Berlitz and Moore, who were first alerted to the mystery by a man who claimed to have been on the Eldridge. They were supported by an eccentric source identified variously as Carlos Allende and Carl Allen, who claimed to have witnessed the whole thing from the deck of the S S Andrew Furuseth, a merchant marine ship berthed close to the Eldridge in the Philadelphia navy yard.
This was in the mid-1970s, more than 30 years after the purported events. When the book came to be written, Brown became an inextricable part of the myth.
The only other thing I knew about disinformation, certainly as it had been practiced by the Soviets, was that it worked best when mixed in with a little truth.
Intuitively, therefore, I felt Brown must have been somewhere in the vicinity of the "experiment" when it was supposed to have happened. Beyond that, I could draw no other conclusions, so I returned to the documented facts of his career.
In 1942, he was appointed head of the Atlantic Fleet Radar Materiel School and Gyrocompass School in Norfolk, Virginia, a position that would have made him privy to some of the most highly classified technical secrets of the day. Whatever work he was engaged on there, it appears to have taken its toll, since the following year he suffered a nervous breakdown and was discharged from the Navy.
There is something neatly synergistic in this unfortunate devel opment, which appears to have been real enough, with the mystery surrounding the USS Eldridge. One suggestion is that whatever work Brown was engaged in at the time, be it in the radar or minesweeping field, it caused him temporary memory loss.
While it stretched credulity to believe in stories of optical invisibility, tele-transportation and parallel dimensions, I did find it possible to envisage a scenario in which the legend of the Eldridge had grown out of the secrecy of Brown's legitimate work in the radar field; in much the same way that the supposed ability of RAF night fighter pilots to see in the dark by eating carrots stemmed from a childishly simple British ruse to protect its radar secrets at around the same time.
Despite Brown's illness — and whatever really happened in the Philadelphia and Norfolk shipyards — it appears to have had no longterm detrimental effect on his standing in the eyes of the Navy. In 1944, he went back to work as a radar consultant in Burbank, California, at Lockheed's Vega Division, which was responsible for development of the Navy's PV-2 Harpoon and P-2V Neptune antisubmarine patrol bombers.
At war's end, Brown moved to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where he once again resumed the antigravity work that had driven his research efforts as a young man.
It seemed to me from this period — long before the story of the Philadephia Experiment emerged to complicate the picture — as if two portraits of Brown had been painted and were now in circulation: one portraying him as a mildly eccentric inventor with some harebrained ideas about negating the forces of gravity; the other showing him to be a man responsible for some of the most highly classified research of the war.
Seen through this ambivalent prism, the story of the Philadelphia Experiment has helped to perform a very important function.
By 1980, it had managed to tip Brown over the edge; make him a wholly discredited figure in the eyes of science.
That left me with the uncomfortable feeling that the story had been carefully stage-managed. If so, why? And why so long after the supposed events had taken place?
The next occasion Brown is reputed to have demonstrated his Gravi tor and tethered flying discs was to Admiral Arthur W. Radford, Commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, in Hawaii in 1945. Brown had by now left California and was resident in Hawaii, where he worked temporarily as a consultant at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard.
His demonstrations supposedly failed to impress the Navy, but there is no known official record of its reaction. One account is that it "refused funding for further research because of the negative opinion of other scientists." Another relates the story of his room being broken into after the Pearl Harbor demonstration and the theft of his notebooks. According to this variant, which was related by a close friend of Brown's, Josh Reynolds, the Navy returned the books days later, adding that it remained uninterested. The reason given was that the "effect" was not due to electrogravitation, but to "ionic wind" — this, despite Brown's view that he had conclusively proven otherwise with experiments under oil back in the 1920s.
From 1945 until 1952, little is known about Brown's activities, but based on what happened next, it is clear that along the way he returned from Hawaii to Los Angeles, where he established the Townsend Brown Foundation.
In 1952, the Foundation received an unannounced visit by Major General Victor E. Bertrandias of the U.S. Air Force. I learned of this thanks to a recovered transcript of a phone conversation between Bertrandias and another USAF general called Craig, whose job description was not immediately clear.
The transcript had been forwarded to me by Tom Valone at the In tegrity Research Institute. It made clear that Bertrandias was astounded by what he witnessed.
"It sounds terribly screwy, but Friday I went down with Lehr, a man named Lehr, to a place called the Townsend Brown Foundation, and believe it or not, I saw a model of a flying saucer," Bertrandias reported. "No," Craig replied, apparently without irony. "I thought I should report it," Bertrandias told him. "There was a lot of objection to my getting in there by the party that took me and the thing frightened me — frightened me for the fact that it is being held or conducted by a private group. I was in there from about one-thirty until about five in the afternoon and I saw these two models that fly and the thing has such a terrific impact that I thought we ought to find out something about it — who these people are and whether the thing is legitimate. If it ever gets away I say it is in the stage in which the atomic development was in the early days."