Free Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion by Ph.D. Paul A. LaViolette

about this in chapter 4.
    The ONR researcher’s skeptical reaction was typical of individuals who were used to thinking in conventional scientific terms. In one of his articles on Brown, the journalist Gaston Burridge wrote that many scientists and engineers had watched the discs fly and most of them concluded that the discs were propelled by the well-known “electric wind” phenomenon and not by some new principle of physics. One engineer blurted out to him, “The whole thing is so screwball I don’t want to even talk about it!” Other engineers reportedly objected to the lack of mathematical substantiation. Burridge explained, “To engineers and scientists one equation is worth a thousand words!” But even an equation is of little use unless it has values assigned to at least some of its main parts. When these were not forthcoming, from a technical point of view, it appeared Brown was walking on straw legs. 11
    2.2 • THE SECOND PEARL HARBOR DISC DEMONSTRATION
    Some years later, around 1953 or 1954, in the hope of renewing the Navy’s interest, Brown again staged a demonstration at Pearl Harbor for a number of admirals. This time his demonstration was on a much larger scale. From a gymnasium ceiling, at a height of 50 feet, he suspended a revolving horizontal beam that tethered a pair of 3-foot-diameter discs (see figure 2.5). Powered by a potential of 150 kilovolts, the discs flew around a 50-foot-diameter course at such an impressive speed that the subject became highly classified. The speed may have been in excess of 100 miles per hour, because the May 1956 issue of the Swiss aeronautics magazine Interavia stated that the discs were capable of attaining speeds of several hundred miles per hour when charged with several hundred kilovolts! 12 Such high velocities are not surprising considering that the ONR test data show that the speed of the discs increased exponentially with voltage.

    Figure 2.5. Sketch made by Thomas Townsend Brown showing the test setup used for demonstrating his 3-foot-diameter flying discs. (From Brown’s November 1, 1971, letter to T. Turman; see appendix A )
    Brown used a different disc design for this later demonstration. During a telephone conversation he had in the early 1970s with electrical engineer Tom Turman, Brown disclosed that the airfoil disc design depicted in his 1960 patent (no. 2,949,550) was an inferior one. The cross-sectional view presented in that patent shows the spun aluminum discs having a knife-thin edge at their periphery (as shown in figure 2.3). The discs used in the 1952 ONR test were of a similar design. On the other hand, the discs that Brown flew in his gymnasium demonstration had a blunt profile, as shown in figures 2.6 and 2.7. This design consisted of two spun aluminum discs cupped on either side of a Plexiglas sheet, but the upper disc had a “triarcuate” cross-sectional profile—a convex central bulge that turned concave farther out and that finally terminated in a convexly curved rim with a radius of curvature of ½ inch or more. The outer rim of the lower half of the disc had a flat profile, but its outer edge was curved to make a smooth transition to the edge of the upper disc.
    Also, the leading-edge electrode used in the disc flown in Brown’s gymnasium demonstration was of much smaller diameter. In a letter he wrote to Turman in 1971, Brown noted in a sketch that he used an electrode that had a diameter of only 1 mil (0.001 inch). This is five times smaller in diameter than the wire he used on the discs flown in his ONR test in Los Angeles. Moreover, it is far smaller than the diameter he had specified in his 1960 patent. His patent states that saucers designed to be energized at voltages greater than 125 kilovolts would preferably have leading-edge electrodes of large cross-section made of rods or hollow pipes having diameters measuring from ¼ to ½ inch (e.g., 250 to 500 mils) to ensure that their surface potential gradient was below the