December 20, 1982

Dear Mr. P,

   Your letters to Drs. R. and M. requesting information regarding the work of Mr. T. Townsend Brown have been forwarded to me for reply. Please accept my apologies for taking so long to answer.

   The information you cited from the UFO Annual referring to the Biefeld-Brown effect, petroelectricity and other matters is not totally correct, I'm sorry to say. (I hope the editors are more careful about their UFO reports!) SRI International has never sponsored the work of Mr. Brown. Neither has SRI conducted work in the above-named areas for him, under his own sponsorship. He has approached SRI more than once to try to elicit interest in his claims of anomalous phenomena in dielectrics, but those he talked with here have found too little credibility to justify SRI undertaking an independent validating or exploratory study.

   SRI did perform a small job in another area for Mr. Brown many years earlier - evaluation of one of his "inventions." (I seem to recall that it was an air purifier, but I'm not sure.) However, this work had no direct connection with his more notorious investigations.

   I pursued the contact with Mr. Brown privately for about three years, became very familiar with his current work, and actually worked with him to repeat some of his petroelectrical experiments under well-controlled conditions. This work indicated to me that he had encountered an effect not readily explainable by contemporary physics. I undertook to prepare a proposal to obtain public funding for a fundamental, scientific validation of this part of his work. For various reasons, this proposal was never submitted. I stress that it was only the petroelectric effect that I checked; I have no first-hand knowledge, and many doubts, about the other supposed effects reported directly to me by Mr. Brown and in a number of lay publications.

   Unfortunately, I found it difficult to work with Mr. Brown outside of the laboratory, and eventually imposed conditions on our working relationship that he apparently found too confining. He left this area two or three years ago to seek support elsewhere, and I have not spoken with him since.

   If you would like to discuss this matter further, please call me. I can be reached privately at ____.

Sincerely,

W.K.