"I see," General Craig replied. The man's urbane delivery earmarked him, to me at least, as someone big in Air Force intelligence.
"I was told that I was not to say anything about it," Bertrandias burbled on, "but I'm afraid that all that I heard made me believe in it and these were not schoolboys. It was conducted in rather an elaborate office in Los Angeles. I thought I should report it to you."
"Yes, well I'll look into it and see what I can find out," Craig told him, shortly before hanging up.
It seems that what Bertrandias had stumbled upon, a little before the Townsend Brown Foundation was ready to pitch it formally to the military, was Project Winterhaven — the distillation of all Brown's ideas into a blueprint for a manned antigravity fighter, built in the shape of a disc and capable of Mach 3, twice the speed of the leading jet-powered interceptor of the day.
Years later, LaViolette had found extensive references to Winterhaven in the sole remaining copy of the Electrogravitics Systems report the Congressional librarian had tracked down to the technical library at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. I was rapidly coming full circle. I needed to see the report on Project Winterhaven, but remembering the difficulty LaViolette had had in tracking down the one remaining copy of Electrogravitics Systems, I couldn't begin to think how or where I would lay my hands on one. I imagined, given the Air Force's evident excitement about Brown's work, that if there were any copies of Winterhaven left, they were buried somewhere deep.
I rang Valone in Washington — my third call in as many weeks — and this time got the question I'd been dreading. Was Jane's running some kind of investigation into antigravity?
I told him it wasn't; that my interest in Brown's work was born of personal curiosity, nothing more, and that I'd appreciate it if he'd keep the matter to himself. Valone seemed quite unfazed by this request. In the murky world of antigravity research, I realized it was probably par for the course. The conversation drifted inevitably toward Townsend Brown and Winterhaven. It was then that I mentioned how I'd give my eyeteeth to know what was in it.
A week later, to my absolute astonishment, a copy of Winterhaven (registered copy No. 36) landed on my desk. Attached to the front page was a note from Valone. Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, there was no need for me and my teeth to part company, he said. I smiled. The man was a one-stop shop.
He assured me, too, that no one else bar him and LaViolette would ever know that I was interested in the subject matter.
Nagged by the ease with which the military had relinquished its grip on Winterhaven, I started reading.
In his pitch to the military, on page six, Brown had written: "The technical development of the electrogravitic reaction would usher in a new age of speed and power and of revolutionary new methods of transportation and communication.
"Theoretical considerations would predict that, because of the sustained acceleration, top limits of speed may be raised far beyond those of jet propulsion or rocket drive, with possibilities of eventually approaching the speed of light in 'free space.' The motor which may be forthcoming will be essentially soundless, vibrationless and heatless."
I made notes. This was language that was similar in tone to that expressed by George S. Trimble and his quoted contemporaries in the 1956 Gladych article. Trimble, who 40 years later had canceled my interview with him, because he appeared — to Abelman's mind, at least— to be too afraid to talk.
The attributes of the technology were also right in line with the characteristics exhibited by the flying triangles observed over Belgium.
The little model discs that had so impressed General Bertrandias "contain no moving parts and do not necessarily rotate while in flight," the Winterhaven report stated. "In atmospheric air they emit a bluishred electric coronal glow and a faint hissing sound."
Project Winterhaven, then, offered a systematic approach for the establishment of a U.S. antigravity program — echoing the origins of the U.S. atomic bomb project a decade earlier and the path that Trimble had advocated in 1956.
In the report, Brown recommended starting modestly with 2-foot discs charged at 50 kilovolts, then proceeding to 4-foot discs at 150 kV and finally to a 10-foot disc at 500 kV, with careful measurements being made along the way of the thrust generated.
This was a sensible, structured approach. It showed that Winterhaven was ready to transition from the drawing board to the technology demonstration phase. Full-blown development wouldn't be far behind. Brown had also formulated a method for generating the required high voltages for a free-flying disc — the problem that had earlier stymied its practical development into a manned aircraft — by means of a "flame-jet generator." This was a jet engine modified to act as an electrostatic generator capable of providing up to 15 million volts to the skin of the craft. The Interavia article, I remembered, had talked of trials involving 3-foot discs run in a 50-foot diameter air course under a charge of 150 kV "with results so impressive as to be highly classified." Brown's flying saucer now had a power source. In one way and another things seemed to be gaining momentum. But it was short-lived. Days after General Bertrandias' conversation with his spook colleague General Craig, the documents trail showed that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, AFOSI, was well and truly onto the Brown case. AFOSI was the Air Force equivalent of the FBI — an indication that Craig had taken Bertrandias' interpretation of his visit to the Brown Foundation seriously. Once again, it was Valone who furnished me with the relevant papers.
They showed that AFOSI uncovered a copy of a report prepared by one Willoughby M. Cady of the Office of Naval Research, the ONR, in Pasadena, California, entitled: "An Investigation Relative to the Townsend Brown Foundation."
The report, which was forwarded by AFOSI to Major General Joseph F. Carroll, Deputy Inspector General of the USAF, made disappointing reading all around.
"Mr. Brown claims that a gravitational anomaly exists in the neighbor hood of a charged condenser," Cady wrote in his conclusions, adding: "This effect has not been well documented by Mr. Brown."
Cady went on to say that there was no electrogravitational link, merely a disturbance of the air around the model saucers stimulated by the electrical charge and it was this that was causing them to be propelled upward and forward.
Any hope that this technology might be of use in aerospace propulsion was damned by Cady. "If the efficiency of conversion of fuel energy into electrical energy is 21 percent, the overall efficiency of propulsion of the model flying saucers by the electric wind is 0.3 percent. This compares with about 25 percent for a propeller-driven airplane and 15 percent for a jet airplane."
If Cady's conclusions were clear to me, they would have been crystal clear to the Navy and the Air Force. Brown's flying saucer would have had trouble getting off the ground, let alone cruising at Mach 3. The whole "science" of electrogravitics, Cady was telling his superiors, was a waste of time, effort and money.
The Navy and its old foe the Air Force would have concluded that they were both far better off sticking with jets.
Even under the auspices of a deeply classified program, an arrangement by which one branch of the armed forces might be unaware of projects taking place in another, it was hard to see Brown's work surviving such an appraisal.
On September 22, 1952, six months after General Bertrandias' telephone call to General Craig, documents showed that the Air Force downgraded its interest in the work of the Townsend Brown Foundation from "confidential" to "unclassified."