I just "happened to run across this which is the acknowledgment page that Paul finally included in his Ebook presentation of the biography of my Dad " The Parallel Universe of T. Townsend Brown."
Now, almost five years later these words have an interesting additional meaning to me. It was just weeks before he wrote this that Paul had a fateful ( it turns out) meeting in Pa with "Mikado". I am sure that name is familiar with you because that same entity has made his negative presence known here. I have to ask..... why would a man who had ALREADY spent six years composing a book quit so suddenly and under what looks like ..... according to his own words here..... such emotional duress. Please read what he wrote here and then ask along with me..... what is really happening here.
And you all also have the four plus years AFTER Pauls " implosion" to watch Mikado in action here and on other Forums. Judge for yourself and then please share your thoughts with me.
This is Pauls " Acknowledgement Page"
"The book you are about to read is a compilation of material originally published in
periodic installments to the World Wide Web between September, 2005 and March,
2008.
It must be stated emphatically here that this is the first draft of a work that, due to the
unusual nature of its underlying material, necessarily remains very much a “work in
progress.” As such, you can expect to see typos, grammatical errors, and all the other
blemishes that you’d expect of a “first draft.” There is good reason for that.
An enormous amount of research has gone into this undertaking since it began in earnest
in the spring of 2003. Still, there remains a great deal about the life and work of Thomas
Townsend Brown which remains hidden apparently concealed by forces and for
reasons unknown and perhaps unknowable. It is not only that much of Brown’s work
was officially “classified;” there is also the bizarre specter that much of his work is truly
“secret,” beyond the reach of even those official institutions that do all the classifying.
Despite all the research, there remains a great deal about the underlying fundamentals of
the life of Townsend Brown that we do not know, making it difficult if not downright
impossible to coherently unify the intriguing details that we do know.
This is, or is at least supposed to be, a book about science, and offer a fair represention of
a man who devoted his life to both the theory and practice of what appears to have been
an unorthodox school of physics. It is first and foremost a biography, and as such should
find its foundation in a steady narrative stream of verifiable facts. But the curious nature
of Townsend Brown’s life is that the substantial record of his existence is, oddly…
nonexistent.
There may also be a metaphysical dimension to such a pursuit how, after all, do we
learn anything new if we do not look askance from all that which we think that we
already “know”? Nevertheless, a grave injustice is committed to the scientific method if
we ignore the principal that some form of empirical evidence must follow any bold new
hypothesis before it can be readily stated even temporarily as a manifestation of
new knowledge or truth.
I labored under the assumption that such evidence exists within the pages of Townsend
Brown’s life, but finding that evidence in a form that can be placed within the pages of a
book has created a challenge that at times has proven insurmountable.
Until such time as some kind of further evidence is revealed, this “first draft” is offered
as marker to establish as much as we do know now. There is no telling where the
necessary information will come from or when.
AcknowledgementsThere is, for example, an archive that interests us from World War II. Its files contain the
records of something called the “Targeted Information Committee” top-secret
missions during the closing weeks of World War II that are destined to remain
classified until 2012, nearly seven decades after the actual events. Brown’s own travels
intersected with those TICOM missions, behind enemy lines in Germany just before the
end of the war. Perhaps there is something in those files that will reveal the unifying
secret of his life. Or, perhaps, those papers will be reclassified indefinitely before their
scheduled release in 2012.
For all we know, there may be some key information buried in the recesses of some
“Raiders of the Lost Ark” warehouse that is scheduled for future declassification at some
time in the future that will shed further light on the real nature of Townsend Brown’s life
and work. But all we know for certain now is that, absent more concrete information,
this “unexpurgated” first draft of the biography of Townsend Brown will have to suffice
for the growing legion of enlightened readers who want to know the basic facts of
Townsend Brown’s life and its impact on the people around him.
Today’s easy access to digital publishing makes it possible to offer this draft to willing
and interested readers. This draft could certainly benefit from some refinement and
proof-reading, but whatever further work is put into it now would be tantamount to
polishing an oyster shell because we simply cannot get to the pearl regardless of how
certain our faith may be that this is the one mollusk in a thousand that indeed contains a
jewel.
In the meantime, there are quite a few people whose contributions to this stage of the
enterprise deserve generous and sincere recognition.
There is probably no way this project could have been undertaken without the Internet,
and easy access to the web’s vast, instantly searchable global library. So I guess I should thank Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Andreesen, Larry Page and Sergey Brin for making it allpossible. But even having the largest library in history at my fingertips is not enough. Itstill takes special sources just the kind of resources that appear almost magically onceyou start offering content online.
One novel aspect of first publishing this book to the web over an extended period of time
is that the work became somewhat “interactive.” Once the first installments began to
appear on the web in the fall of 2005, a small but dedicated cadre of readers from around the world began to regularly tune in and offer a lot of helpful feedback on each chapter.
For example, it was not long after I started publishing the chapters online that I received
an e-mail message from Lace Lynch, an historian and genealogist in Brown’s hometown
of Zanesville, Ohio. Lace already knew a little bit about Brown from newspaper
accounts she had found from the 1920s and ‘30s. Lace, and another Zanesville local,
Renee Huddleston, became indispensable volunteers on my research team. They escorted me around Zanesville when I visited there in the fall of 2004, and Lace uncovered some surprising and previously unknown information about Townsend Brown’s marriage to another Zanesville native, Josephine Beale.
After the first chapters appeared online, a group of “regulars” began to chime in to an
online forum after the publication of each subsequent chapter. There are well over a
hundred active members of the forums, too many to single out every one, but among
those who stand out now are: Mark Culpepper, who encouraged me to a higher level of
scholarship with every chapter; Trickfox, who amazed members with his incisive insight
into Townsend Brown’s science; Mikado, who always insisted that contributors get to the point; Jim Zimmer, who never wavered from his certainty that there was something at the bottom of the rabbit hole; Radomir, who was often a voice of sanity amid a cacophony of contentious perspectives; Kevin.b, the hobbit navigator; Langley, who had his own intriguing angle on what it’s all about; and Victoria Steele, whose gentle needling was instrumental in making new chapters on Thursdays a nearly regular event.
I am also extremely grateful to Jan Lundquist, who offered invaluable editorial assistance
and did her level best to help find an agent and/or publisher. A nod also to UFO
researcher Ryan Wood, who was the first to show me how to navigate the labyrinthine
corridors of the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.
I don’t think any of this would have been possible without the very generous contribution of Andrew Bolland and his wife Linda, who rightfully deserve to be regarded as the
torch-bearers for the Townsend Brown legacy. Andrew created the website where I first
learned about Townsend Brown in the summer of 2002. Andrew has served as the
“official science advisor” to this project, doing his level best to help me understand the
real gist of Townsend Brown’s work. He is also the person who introduced me to
Townsend Brown’s daughter, which introduction really got the ball rolling on this whole
endeavor.
Much of this story is derived from “covert” sources, without whose input I don’t think I
would have been able to do even as much as I’m offering here. Much of what these
mysterious sources had to offer has found its own life in the pages that follow; for now I
will just offer another heartfelt word of thanks to “Morgan,” “Boston,” and “Bentfeather.”
Finally, I am indebted in ways I will perhaps never fully recognize to the indefatigable
Linda Brown, the daughter of the subject of this volume and herself a principal in its
multiple story lines.
When I first approached Linda with the idea of writing her father’s biography, she
expressed deep-seated reservations about revisiting potentially painful memories of the
struggles she shared with her family. Over the course of a “snail mail” correspondence
that we exchanged over several months, we found enough common ground and trust in
each other that Linda was finally able to cast aside those reservations.
AcknowledgementsLinda Brown and I have been in almost constant daily contact for a period of nearly six years. It seems at times that what started out as a contractual, working arrangement had evolved into something much more akin to a marriage: sometimes constructive and functional, and sometimes maybe not so much.
A substantial portion of the material contained herein comes from the recollections of a
devoted daughter, who had the presence of mind during much of her early life to maintain a voluminous personal journal of her travels and observations. Given the lack of
substantive information from other sources, were it not for the generous and trusting
access Linda provided to the intimate recollections of a young woman coming of age in
the most unusual of circumstances, this book probably would not exist at all.
As stated, this is just “the first draft.” This work is not done. Despite all the effort thus
far, there remains a great deal to learn about Townsend Brown.
The central mysteries of his life persist: Did Townsend Brown discover the key to a
parallel universe, or is all of the speculation that swirls around such possibilities the
result of a deliberate a misinformation campaign designed to conceal other possibly
more prosaic but nonetheless important aspects of Brown’s life and work?
The answers to these questions have yet to emerge in a solid, credible, verifiable form.
The best we can do for now is to assemble what we do know about Townsend Brown’s
life, send it down the river and see who takes note.
Paul Schatzkin
February 23, 2009