Wednesday night – well, actually, Thursday morning – I will be a guest on the Coast to Coast AM radio show with host George Noory.
Coast to Coast “…airs on over 600 affiliates, and has repeatedly been called the most popular overnight show in the country.” The audience is said to reach in millions despite the bizarre hour – I’ll be on from 2-4AM Central!
I first learned of “Coast to Coast AM” back in the early ‘aughts. After I’d first published the Farnsworth bio – and embarked on my new career as the “biographer of obscure 20th century scientists” with the Townsend Brown project – I started hearing about this fringe-topic, all-night radio show, at the time hosted by the legendary Art Bell.
It’s only taken twenty-some years, but I’ve finally been invited to appear on the show.
And, yes, the program has its share of critics who take issue with its coverage of “pseudohistoric and pseudoscientific ideas,” but I’m entirely comfortable with the forum. I know that I’m going in with actual history and a pretty healthy sensibility re: where the science gets to the edge of pseudo. So I’m looking forward to a lively conversation.
If by some strange happenstance you are awake at that ungodly hour, see if you can find a station near you from these listings.
First Darlings – There is a book (or something) in the works with all this material, built around the letters that Harvey and Ellen wrote to each other in 1943. This is how the correspondence started.
Brigadoon – the Broadway musical (and film) about “…two American tourists who stumble upon a mysterious Scottish village that appears for only one day every 100 years.” I remember now why that storyline has stayed with me all these years: the high school in our town did a production of Brigadoon at the end of the semester in the spring of 1962. It was that summer that they “sent me to camp for the summer… and moved while I was away.”
There is finally going to be an audiobook edition!
Once the book was re-released last year, I considered several options for converting it to an audiobook. I auditioned several narrators via the Audible platform at Amazon, but finally opted to do the reading myself after enlisting the production assistance of Robert Lane, the creator of a program called “Your Book, Your Voice.”
I started working with Robert back in January. It has taken the better part of the past four months to get the project done. Each week I would read and record several chapters. I sent the files to Robert, he edited and mastered them and uploaded them to Audible.
I found the experience of reading and recording the text quite gratifying*, to hear how the way I write sounds like the way I talk and vice-versa.
We finished all the uploads this week and have submitted the project to Audible for review. I expect the production to go ‘live’ before the middle of May.
The freeze frame that YouTube delivered with the embed above would not have been my fist choice, but I do think the word ‘plausible’ is incredibly apt.
I know Joe Rogan is a controversial figure for some, but I certainly have no quarrel with the man and would dearly love to spend some time talking with him, so I hope this catches his eye.
I am a long time admirer of Nick Cook and relied heavily on his deeply researched 2001 book The Hunt For Zero Point when I was trying to make sense of the Townsend Brown saga back in the ‘aughts. Nick and I have somewhat different methodologies: he comes at this material as a hardened aviation journalist and I’m more the whimsical story teller. But we agree that there is far more to the #TTBrown narrative than meets the eye.
It is gratifying to see all these clips cut together in a way that lends some credibility to the allegation that the Biefeld-Brown effect is at work in the B2, despite the government’s frequent denials.
This evening, Jesse announced the video on YouTube with this:
I spent six years researching this story between 2003 and 2009, and another dozen-plus years just thinking about it until the book was published last year. But Jesse Michels has been deep-diving into the larger, longer story of unexplained phenomena, unorthodox science and invisible frontiers for a quite a while. I am duly impressed (if not downright in awe) of how he explores the connections between my work and the countless layers of coverup and conspiracy theories that have hovered on the edge of human consciousness and popular culture for decades if not centuries and millennia.
The whole epic production runs almost two hours, but if you’ve got even the slightest interest in “WTF is going on out there?” then by all means, avail yourself to the entire thing:
Also, hats off to Jan Lunquist, who latched on to the Townsend Brown saga near the end of what we call “The Before Times,” the period from 2003-2009 before I set the book aside for more than a dozen years. Jan has kept the bit between her teeth, has doggedly stayed on top of the TTB story and reports on countless connections she has found between Brown and other off-the-books tales. She is featured quite prominently in Jesse’s video and fills a lot of the gaps in my own investigations.
Money shot (well, for my money): “Townsend Brown is Nikola Tesla meets the Dos Equis guy.”
With the release of this video – even more than the book – I think Townsend Brown is about to find a place in the discussion, and I am pleased that it’s about to become more of a ‘crowd’ effort than my solitary, two-decades pilgrimage.
I did another podcast interview that was released this week.
A lot of this will be familiar to you if you tuned into the first one.
But this time the Greg Carlwood went a little deeper into ‘The Caroline Group’ and some of the, umm… more… ah… conspiratorial? … aspects of the Townsend Brown story.
And I got to expound a little further on the place where the Philo Farnsworth and Townsend Brown stories dovetail together…
Listen on Apple Podcasts:
Today’s Guest: Paul Schatzkin is a biographer of obscure 20th century scientists. He has written “The Boy Who Invented Television” about Philo T. Farnsworth and “The Man Who Mastered Gravity” about T. Townsend Brown. Together, the two stories hint at – as science fiction pioneer Eden Philpotts predicted – a “Universe of magical things, patiently waiting for your wits to grow sharper.”
After Apple canned me in January ’22 and I had nothing but time on my hands, I started to wonder two things: 1) what to do with the time and 2) how to restore that little bit of income, which for five years had made the difference between living on ‘portfolio income’ and running out of capital before I run out of breath.
A couple of months after I’d hung up my Apple T-shirts I got a check from the self-publishing service called ‘Lulu.com‘ – which I’d used to publish the unfinished Townsend Brown biography after I abandoned the project back in 2009.The check was not very much, maybe $60 or $80 for a quarter.
Necessity being the mother of invention stories, that was enough to get me wondering: if I dusted off the manuscript, could that trickle be turnedinto an actual stream?
By then I’d had Mike Williams’ rewrite for several years.I tried to do something with it when Mike first presented it to me in 2018, but I didn’t have the patience then for the very granular work of restoring my ‘voice’ to the expedited narrative Mike had distilled.
It’s not like I’d ever stoped thinking about what-the-hell had happened back in 2009 – when my collaboration with Brown’s daugther went off the rails, when the only interested agent rejected the proposal, saying “there’s no meat on the bones” – when I closed the book and put it away. I did expect I might return to it some day. I just didn’t think it would be another twelve years.
Still, over the ensuing years I found myself returning to certain themes I could dwell on and some story points I could focus on.
The Room Where It Happened.
With nothing but time on my hands (and, more importantly, no co-habitant telling me not to) I re-visited the files in the spring of 2022.
I opened three windows on my 27″ display: my 2009 manuscript, Mike’s 2018 rewrite, and a new window where I cobbled the pieces back together.It took about six months to reconcile my original manuscript with the Mike’s scaled down version.
Fast forward to this recent spring.With the help of designers in Pakistan and Bangladesh I found through Fiverr.com, I had a book ready to upload to Amazon’s Kindle Direct platform.
I didn’t stop there.
Not only had I thought a lot about the themes running through the Townsend Brown story, I also thought a lot about what that story had in common with the Philo Farnsworth story that was published back in 2002.1 And it occurred to me that so much has happened since that book was first published that it was time for an update – and a new introduction to explore what ties the two books together.
These two stories – Farnsworth and Brown – are like swamp creatures crawling out of the priordial soup of 20th century cosmology – that bubbling cauldron of novel thinking from the likes of Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Schroedinger and all the others that gave us Relativty and Quantum Mechanics.
For example: You might be surprised to learn that Albert Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize in 1921 for either his Theories of Relativey or E=mc2.No, Einstein won his Nobel for the first paper he published in 1905 on the Photoelectric Effect.
You’ll be hearing a lot about the bomb and E=mc2 in a few weeks when the big feature film Oppenheimer is released.In the meantime, think about this:
E=mc2 gave us the atomic bomb, but the Photoelectric Effect gave us television and every video screen on the planet (including the one you are looking at now).
Now I have two books in circulation.They both draw from that well.
And now, this: Last month Amazon put more money in my bank account than I have ever earned from something I created and put into the world.2
At the ripe age of 72, I am actually earning a living (well, subsidizing my retirement) as an author.I’m not certain yet that the model is sustainable, but I’ve been learning how to run ads on Amazon and the results are quite encouraging.
Who’da thunk3?
In addition to the targeted advertising I’ve been doing on Amazon (thanks again, Holly Butler), I have also been interviewed for a couple of podcasts in the past few weeks, and each conversation has given me an opportunity to articulate some of the not-yet-fully-formed things I’ve been thinking about since I went back down the rabbit hole last year.
CYA at the bijou… and bring plenty of popcorn, it’s long one!
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1 Isn’t it curious that the Farnsworth book was published the last time I got fired from a job – when Gaylord took songs.com out to the woodshed and put it out of their misery?
2 songs.com not withstanding – that was mostly an aid to others putting their creativework into the world.
I contacted the host/producers of Mysterious Universe, and we spent more than two hours talking about the Townsend Brown biography and my earlier (recently re-released) bio of Philo T. Farnsworth, The Boy Who Invented Television. This was really the first opportunity I’ve had to talk about how the two stories dovetail to suggest a single story of forbidden science (fusion and gravity control) and the veil of mysteries surrounding both men.
Here are links if you listen via Apple Podcasts:
Paul Schatzkin joins us in this episode to explore his remarkable research on the obscure historical figures of Philo T. Farnsworth and Thomas Townsend Brown. We delve deeply into the narratives of these men, who pioneered technologies that revolutionized the world, while also contemplating some of the unrevealed technological advancements. Did Farnsworth unlock the enigma of fusion energy? Was Brown connected to a clandestine, highly advanced group?
..or here if you listen to podcasts on Spotify:
I am rather surprised and delighted that both books are starting to sell. It’s not huge numbers by any stretch, but I’ve been learning how to run ads on Amazon and get them to show up when users are searching related titles. I’m also working on tying my books into the release of the expected-to-be-a-blockbuster feature Oppenheimer when it comes out this summer:
*
I have been thinking a lot about what ties all these stories together: that all the science involved begins with Einstein in 1905.
Townsend Brown was born in 1905, Philo Farnsworth in 1906. So both men were “relativity natives.” Like kids today who grew up with computers and smartphones and are considered ‘digital natives’ – these men who were born in the first decade of the 20th century never knew a world where relativity and its related discoveries didn’t exist.
At the very least, the breakthrough theories that led to the atomic bomb also led to electronic video – yes, the the screen you’re looking at now. Even though video is by far the more common and useful technology (lemme check… nope, no a-bomb in my pocket), that connection is largely lost to history. That is mostly because corporate greed and public relations swept Philo Farnsworth under the rug of history after the 1940s.
And Townsend Brown? Who the hell knows what happened there. I’ve been on that story for twenty years now and still have more questions than answers.
You can get a better idea what I’m driving at here:
*And in case you don’t recognize the song, Hey Mister, That’s Me Up On The Jukebox, listen to James Taylor from the album Mud Slide Slim (from 1971 –back when he, like me, still had hair:
I’m not exactly sure how this came to pass, but I learned this week that The Man Who Mastered Gravity has been discussed at considerable length on the Mysterious Universe podcast.
Discussion of the Townsend Brown story begins about 38:20 in – after some discussion of something called “The Ghost Moose.’ I guess that’s one thing I can cross off the bucket list: playing second-fiddle to a ‘ghost moose.’
Mysterious Universe is a very popular and long-standing podcast, ranking #5 in Apple’s listings of social science podcasts. From the listing:
Always interesting and often hilarious, join hosts Aaron Wright and Benjamin Grundy as they investigate the latest in futurology, weird science, consciousness research, alternative history, cryptozoology, UFOs, and new-age absurdity.
Just a quick scroll through the Mysterious Universehome page displays the depth and breadth of this podcast and its affiliated enterprises. These guys cover a lot of territory, some of it within the wheelhouse of my work (i.e. ‘lost science’ outside the realm of orthodoxy) and some of it, let’s be charitable and just say, ummm…. not so much.
Most of the discussion that is freely available is a recap of the early chapters of the book. There is a further discussion that gets into The Caroline Group and the rest of the story, but that’s behind a prescription paywall.
Gratitude
I have reached out to the producers of Mysterious Universe to see if I can get access to the subscriber-only edition. And (perish the thought!) offering myself up for an interview.
As I said, I don’t know how this came about, or how the book fell into their hands. I’m just glad that it did.
Yesterday, I listened to the episode in my – and had something of a moment. I listen to dozens of podcasts. I rarely listen to radio any more, just podcasts. And too often I’m listening with a twinge of envy, like “hey, I’ve written books… I’m interesting… why doesn’t anybody want to talk to me?”
So yesterday… finally! Hearing my own name and work mentioned in a credible manner was the most ‘external validation’ I’ve had for about twenty years. I know, we’re not supposed to rely on ‘external validation,’ we’re always just supposed to believe in our own work and purpose and just forge on in obscurity.
Well, fuck that. It’s nice to know that somebody else finds merit in the work.
