Project Winterhaven
Brown's 1952 proposal for a joint-services research contract to develop electrogravitic disc craft for 'military applications of recognized priority', with disc speeds it put at 1,150 mph and 'in excess of 1800 miles per hour'; it drew little military interest.
1952 CE · 41.50, -81.69 · status: official
The account
Its chart is dated 20 October 1952 and a Franklin Institute appendix 10 December 1952. The proposal itself mentions Pearl Harbor only for a 1950 communication project witnessed by the Navy Yard's electronics officer and chief electronics engineer; the disc demonstrations at Pearl Harbor and Waikiki between 1947 and 1950 rest on family accounts. An FBI report on 'Project Winterhaven' is dated 10 January 1953. The text survives in copies kept by the Brown family and UFO archives. The proposal came from the Townsend Brown Foundation at 416 Bowen Building, Washington, D.C.; its organisation chart is dated 20 October 1952. It asked for a Defense Department prime contract shared by four companies and four academic institutions. It reports 2-foot captive disc airfoils at 50 kV reaching about 17 ft/s, and extrapolates to 1,150 mph for large discs at 5,000 kV. It also describes a 'gravitational wave' communication project begun at Pearl Harbor in 1950, and a two-room transmission test in Los Angeles in 1952. An appendix from the Franklin Institute (10 December 1952) offers experiments but calls the question 'rather of the long-range type'.
The sceptical view
The proposal promised far more than any device had shown; the military did not fund it.
Connections in the atlas
- Thomas Townsend Brown
- The Coolidge tube that seemed to change weight
- The 'gravitator' patent and the Biefeld–Brown effect
- Naval Research Laboratory and the S-48 gravity expedition
- Tests in Paris for SNCASO
- The 'gravitics' boom and the Electrogravitics Systems report
- Brown founds NICAP
- The Bahnson laboratory (Whitehall-Rand)
- The electrokinetic patents
- Rock electricity on Catalina Island
- The lifter tests: ARL, NASA and Tajmar
- MIT's ion-wind aeroplane