Case file · Disclosure & CE-5

Thomas Townsend Brown

American inventor (1905–1985) who believed from his teens that high-voltage capacitors produce a force linking electricity and gravity, the 'Biefeld–Brown effect', and who founded the UFO research group NICAP.

1928 CE · 39.94, -82.01 · status: disputed

The account

Born in Zanesville, Ohio, on 18 March 1905 to a well-off family, Brown built a home laboratory as a boy. He called his charged devices 'gravitators' and later spoke of 'electrogravitics'. He held British and US patents on electrostatic and 'electrokinetic' thrust; worked for the Naval Research Laboratory, the Navy in the Second World War and the aircraft industry; demonstrated flying discs to officers and engineers in Hawaii and France; and for decades tried, with little success, to win military funding for electrogravitic craft. In 1956 he founded the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), soon led by Donald Keyhoe. From 1970 he studied natural electric currents in rocks on Catalina Island. He died in California in October 1985. Since then he has become a central figure of antigravity lore, linked by later writers to the Philadelphia Experiment and to the B-2 bomber.

The sceptical view

The thrust his devices produce is real, but physicists and every controlled test since (ARL 2003, NASA 2004, Tajmar 2004) attribute it to ionic wind: charged air pushed from one electrode to the other. No independent test has shown thrust in a good vacuum, and none has shown any change in gravity.

How the account grew

A teenage experimenter's observation became a patent, a military proposal, a 1950s press sensation, a UFO-propulsion theory, part of the Philadelphia Experiment legend and a B-2 conspiracy theory, while laboratory tests steadily explained the force as ionic wind.

Year	Who	Added
1921	Thomas Townsend Brown	An X-ray tube on a balance seems to change weight when switched on; Brown concludes electricity and gravity are linked.
1928	British patent GB300311	The 'gravitator': charged masses that produce force or motion. The name Biefeld–Brown effect follows, after the Denison astronomer Paul Biefeld.
1952	Brown, Project Winterhaven	Electrogravitic disc craft for the military, at speeds put 'in excess of 1800 miles per hour'.
1955	Ansel Talbert, New York Herald Tribune	'Conquest of Gravity': US aircraft firms said to be researching gravity control.
1956	Aviation Studies (International), Electrogravitics Systems	A confidential industry report summarises Brown's work as a possible new propulsion.
1956	Brown founds NICAP	The link between his propulsion ideas and flying saucers enters the UFO movement.
1965	US patent 3,187,206	Thrust 'by the direct operation of electrical fields'. (dropped: Gravity is not mentioned.)
1979	William Moore and Charles Berlitz, The Philadelphia Experiment	Brown is tied to the alleged 1943 invisibility test, in a chapter on his 'force fields'.
2004	NASA contractor report; Martin Tajmar, AIAA Journal	The force fits ionic wind; no thrust in vacuum. (dropped: A gravity effect.)
2008	Paul LaViolette, Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion; Paul Schatzkin, Defying Gravity	The B-2 bomber said to use electrogravitics; a sympathetic full biography from the family archive.
2018	Steven Barrett's team, MIT (Nature)	An aeroplane flies on ionic wind: Brown's force put to work, as electrohydrodynamics.

Connections in the atlas

Sources

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