But although Brown's principles seemed to have been confirmed by observation — something, after all, was causing his condenser plates to move, however much the naysayers denigrated the possibility that it was due to an electrogravitic reaction — he had no way of generating and maintaining an electrical charge that would keep a small model craft in the air, let alone to maneuver it. This force was calculated to be in the region of 50 kilovolts, 200 times more than the charge that came from my wall socket.
Yet these were early days. What was astounding was that Brown had developed a concept for an air vehicle, shaped in the form of a disc, years before anyone had coined the term "flying saucer."
This, I thought, had to be more than happenstance, especially as the military were showing signs that they considered Brown to be not just a visionary, but a practical man of invention; someone they could turn to to develop nuts-and-bolts hardware.
In September 1930, Brown joined the U.S. Navy Reserve, but instead of going to sea was given orders to report to the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C. In due course, he transferred to the NRL's "Heat and Light Division" and here he carried on the experiments that he started in Ohio.
Experiments were conducted which seemed to prove the concept of gravitation which he had first postulated at Cal Tech in 1923.
In 1932, Brown served as staff physicist on the Navy's Gravity Expedition to the West Indies. But by 1933, the effects of the Great Depression were forcing cutbacks within the Navy and Brown, suddenly finding himself out of a job at the NRL, was driven to seek work in industry, which he interleaved with his duties as a reserve naval officer.
With war clouds gathering in Europe, Brown was drafted full-time into the Navy and assigned to acoustic and magnetic minesweeping research, a field for which he seemed to have a great natural aptitude. He developed a method for maintaining the buoyancy of minesweeping cables, designed to trigger magnetic mines with a strong electrical force field, while simultaneously shielding them from blast effects. Brown took out a patent on the idea, which was immediately classified.
By 1940, he was appointed head of the Navy Bureau of Ships' mine sweeping research and development activity and it was during this period that he experimented with "degaussing" — a method for canceling a ship's magnetic field. This was a critical breakthrough as it was a ship's magnetic field that triggered a new breed of German mines, weapons that the Nazis had developed in quantity.
There was no question that Brown was by now well plugged into the military's research and development community, and that his opinions were given great credit.
It is ironic, then, that it is at this point that his credibility is most open to question, thanks to his supposed association with the so-called "Philadelphia Experiment." In this, according to legend, the U.S. Navy spirited one of its warships, complete with its crew complement, into another dimension. The Philadelphia Experiment was made famous in a book of the same name by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, writers who have forged names for themselves with tales of paranormal mysteries. Even they confessed that it was "questionable whether Brown was really ever very heavily involved in the Philadelphia Experiment project" — a comment that assumes this incident took place at all.
But the association is ingrained. Run a check with a search engine and Brown is up there, his name highlighted, nine times out of ten, right alongside it.
I tried to maneuver around this obstacle, this blip in Brown's otherwise blemishless wartime record, but whichever way I turned, it wouldn't go away.
Its effect was powerful and immediate. Up until this moment, I'd trawled cyberspace and decades-old documents in the growing conviction that this unusually gifted engineer was an important, longoverlooked link in the antigravity mystery highlighted by the Gladych and Interavia articles.
But the instant the Philadelphia Experiment started to be men tioned in the same breath as Brown, it made me want to drop him like a stone.
It was just as Cross had said it would be. I could feel the association, with its whiff of paranoia and conspiracy, threatening to act like a contaminant on my thinking. Better to avoid it altogether. Everything had been going so well. Brown was university-educated, he'd worked in the aviation industry, he'd been embraced by the military and he'd done classified work. And then, the Philadelphia Experiment had come along. Shit. The substance of the story is that while experimenting with techniques in 1943 to make navy ships invisible to radar through the use of intense electromagnetic fields, a destroyer, the USS Eldridge, disappeared from its berth in Philadelphia and reappeared moments later at a Navy yard in Norfolk, Virginia, 250 miles away. During this time-lapsed interval, the crew were supposedly transported into a "parallel dimension," an experience that drove many of them insane.
Brown's credentials at the time, coupled with his refusal in the years since altogether to dismiss the Philadelphia Experiment as hokum, have helped to stoke the myth. And so it has stuck to him like glue. In the silence of the basement, confronted by this dead end, I began to wonder about that. If the original authorities on the story, Berlitz and Moore, had had their own doubts about Brown's involvement in the Philadelphia Experiment, how had he come to be linked so inextricably to it?
And then I thought of something else; something Cross had said. That this whole field was riven with disinformation, some of it, in his opinion, deliberately managed. The Soviets had even coined a term for it: disinformatsiya.
During World War Two and the long decades of the Cold War the Russian military had used disinformatsiya to achieve key tactical and strategic objectives.
Far from avoiding the Philadelphia Experiment, which was what my every professional instinct yelled I should be doing, I came to the uncomfortable conclusion that I ought to do precisely the opposite.
Tentatively, I began to surf the Net for obscure websites that told the story.
There are two versions of what the Philadelphia Experiment was trying to achieve. One holds that the Navy was testing a method that would make ships invisible to radar, the other was that it was attempting to develop some kind of optical cloaking device as well; that by generating an intense electromagnetic field around the Eldridge, it would distort both light and radar waves in its vicinity, rendering the ship invisible to both sensor systems and the human eye.
To do this, the legend stated, the Eldridge was equipped with tons of electronic equipment. These, the story had it, included massive electrical generators, several powerful radio frequency transmitters, thousands of power amplifier tubes, cabling to distribute the energy around the ship and special circuitry to tune and modulate the fields.
During the first test, which is supposed to have taken place in July 1943, the Eldridge is said to have become invisible at its berth, the only sign that it was there being a trough of displaced water beneath the hull. Though classified a success, the ship remaining invisible for around 15 minutes, the crew experienced side effects, including nausea, disorientation and memory loss.
If we can for the moment assume that there's some truth in the story this would have been quite unsurprising to those in charge of the science, since the nerve impulses by which the brain operates are signaled electrically. In effect, just as earlier iterations of the equipment had demonstrated on enemy mines, the field generators would have "degaussed" the brains of anyone within the area of influence, causing them temporary and, in some cases, permanent damage.