Years ago I did something which was uncharacteristic of me actually. I asked my Mother about the story of the "Philadelphia Experiment" and if what William Moore was saying was true about Dads participation in it. She replied that" Moore had his own reasons for including your father in his book" .... OK .... that was a pretty much closed door I figured. So I asked again what it was that Dad did during the war. I knew that he was a Lt. Commander in the Navy but he had never mentioned any wartime experiences. The only thing that my Mother said .... with kind of a twinkle in her voice was " You Dad was involved in " Deep Camouflage"
I can remember laughing and making the joke " Well, making a destroyer disappear sure sounds like " deep camouflage to me!" and I went off to do something else and dismissed what she had said. I often wonder if she would have said more if I had just been smart enough at the time to ask the right questions.
And getting back to what I was trying to point out.... I may be very angry right now at Paul Schatzkin but there are moments when I do appreciate how very hard he worked on " Defying Gravity" and some of the things that he did manage to write were masterful. If you all haven't read the Chapter 63 " The Mole, The Bug, and the Prairie Chicken" please do. Of course I see the influences from Mr. Twigsnapper and even myself and especially Morgan, but Paul did manage to pull all of those elements together nicely and he made this important revelation.
Page373. Defying Gravity: The Parallel Universe of Townsend Brown
" What Morgan is describing..... we can now look back and see.... was the pivotal event not only in the life of Townsend Brown but also his wife, their adolescent son and toddler daughter. Everything that happened in all their lives from that moment forward was colored by whatever happened in that hangar at the Barbers Point Naval Air Station in Hawaii. And everything we think we know about Townsend Brown today, every story that has been told, every myth that has been perpetrated is colored by his own effort to discredit himself that started in the wake of the security break at Pearl Harbor.
If resigning from the Navy in 1942 was the moment when Townsend Brown went black , if thats when he truly disappeared behind the curtain of classified military research then his re-emergence in Los Angeles beginning in 1951 marks his coming out from behind the curtain. Only he emerges in costume with a mask on and in full camouflage. You thought it was hard to see behind the curtain? Now try seeing behind the mask."
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And I have realized with sort of a start that he describes perfectly what was happening in my early life. The entire world around us was seeing my Dad .( and us too really!)... with a camouflaged mask .... but I still simply saw .... Daddy. Perhaps that will be the eventual key to the problem of seeing past the mask.
Linda