The project RAINBOW experiments

J - Alright, this has cleared up quite a bit for me. Can we go back to RAINBOW itself? By mid-'42, RAINBOW seems to be well under way at the NRL, and by early '43, with Einstein formally engaged, it becomes a test of his UFT. Taylor was in charge of the project, and Gebhardt -

W - Yes, Gebhardt supervised several sections for Taylor - and that's where Lorenzen and [Lt. Cmdr. Dr. Lloyd] Berkner came in. Berkner was the radio engineer aboard the first 1928 expedition of Admiral [R.E.] Byrd to Antarctica. Taylor and Hulburt had designed a special high-frequency radio system that was built by the NRL Radio Division for Byrd's 1,500 kilometer flight over the South Pole. Berkner was the chief operator. From '33 to '41, Berkner worked at the Carnegie Institute on both terrestrial magnetism and ionospheric studies, following up on the high-frequency studies of [M.A.] Tuve with the crystal-stabilized transmitters invented by [L.C.] Young and Gebhardt at the Carnegie Institute, and the studies of Taylor and Hulburt.

J - Sounds like a Carnegie-club operation...

W - Yes, [V.] Bush's home-ground. Berkner had joined the Navy Reserve in '26, and was called to active duty in '41. When his rank was revealed after the war, surprisingly, he'd become a Rear Admiral. As of 1940, Berkner became a consultant to Bush's NDRC, the National Defense and Research Committee where Gunn had a seat.

J - What was Berkner's role in RAINBOW?

W - He was the chief engineer in charge of overseeing the technical part of the project for the NDRC, directly in charge of the high-frequency component and radar instrumentation. At the NRL, he interfaced with Gunn, Taylor, and with Hulburt in particular. Between '43 and '45, Berkner was the Director of the Electronics Materials Branch of the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics [NBA].

J - So RAINBOW was not exclusively an NRL project! It really was a joint NDRC/NBO/NRL and NBA project.

W - Right -- that's how it started. Hulburt's Division of Light and Heat was renamed, I think in '41, the Physical Optics Division. Hulburt was a man of great character who joined the NRL in 1924. He was the first to propose a mathematical treatment for the propagation of low and high frequencies that took into account the role of the ionosphere -- this was in a paper co-authored by the 'Wireless Washington'. His later work on rocketry at the NRL led to the discovery of the role of the ozone layer in absorbing ultraviolet below 3,000 angstroms. For these contributions, he was awarded the John Adam Fleming Medal from the American Geophysical Society in '64. Berkner got one in '62. Aside from his many other specialties, Hulburt was also the supreme expert in optical camouflage and mirage. He was the author of the Navy's handbook of ship camouflage patterns and colors. After the 1935 reorganization of the NRL, the Bureau of Aeronautics asked him to look into the possibility of optical camouflages that might make a plane seem closer than it was, or make it invisible until it reached a very short range. The idea of the brass was to employ varied illuminations for these purposes -- but Hulburt thought this was totally impractical. And he was proved right by experiments carried out at the Anacostia Naval Air Station. He immediately began tinkering with the possibility of bending light -- if light could be artificially red-shifted, a plane would appear to be further away than it was. Or it could even be made invisible -- and that's how he, Gunn and Gebhardt began thinking about the implications of a unified field for the general theory.

J - So this problem must have joined the other countermeasures problems that Lorenzen's Section was working on?

W - Yes, Hulburt was the chief scientist in charge of the RAINBOW experiments, data gathering and analysis. He operated largely through Lorenzen's hands-on approach. Ship procurement and project logistics were left to Commander [William S.] Parsons. [T.T.] Brown, now made a Lieutenant Commander, was placed in charge of the electric and magnetic equipment used to generate the fields. Duncan, Bennett and Bitter from the NBO/NOL were in charge of degaussing and the electromagnetic transmitters. The long- term target of the experiment was to produce magnetic, optical and radar invisibility, that's how it was sold in the end. Einstein and Infeld did the preliminary study regarding expected local distortions of space curvature. But afterward, the calculations for the gravitational and nuclear-magnetic effects were made by Einstein, Taylor and Hulburt, correlated by Gebhardt, Bitter and Berkner, and checked by Neumann and Veblen. The required strength of the total field -- if it was to bend light and produce an electromagnetic mirage -- was anticipated by some of the models to be incredibly high.

J - I'm not clear on this. On one hand, the idea of completely degaussing at sea was to use methods similar to NMR to achieve a more balanced distribution of atomic dipoles. But this wouldn't interfere with light - how could it, since you would be countering any expression of a magnetic field? Then you raised the question of spin polarization of most nuclei either in parallel or antiparallel direction with respect to both the gravitational and geomagnetic fields. But this polarization requires an effect opposite to balancing the dipole orientations -- it calls, instead, for a preferred orientation...?

W - Yes, these were two different experiments - how to create what you could call an antiferromagnetic state and erase all residual magnetism, and how to bend light by inducing a greater curvature of spacetime with high power magnetic or 'antimagnetic' spin polarizations --

J - You mean with parallel or --

W - ...preferably, antiparallel spin orientations with respect to the applied magnetic field. Correct. If I remember, Hulburt had questioned the notion that a steady optical light displacement would be possible if one succeeded in inducing a substantial antiparallel spin polarization. Expected resonance states would suggest sudden shifts. The result could also be a fuzzy pattern of light, a colorless fog of electromagnetic waves caused by random destructive and constructive interference.

J - Why so?

W - Keep in mind that nuclear magnetic resonance was known to exist but resonance levels were unknown. Many models had to be considered, and the values were widely different for such guiding parameters as magnetic field frequency, Larmor frequency, field strength, and so on, not to mention optical shifts. Hulburt, Gunn and Abelson were all of the opinion that the field would interact with the protons in the surrounding air and water and produce all manner of possible mischief.

J - Yes, no one knew what the NMR thresholds would be for air or water...

W - Nor were the calculations accurate for the amount of heating that the ship would have to endure, or the amount of ozone and hydrogen gas that would be released from air and water. Worse still, for heterogeneous materials where magnetic domains have different sizes -- it's more difficult to orient large magnetic domains than smaller ones in a non-uniform field, and an alternating magnetic field will involve all manner of hysteresis lags in magnetization and relaxation, as I've said. If the timing of the superposed fields was not appropriate, the result could be quite disorderly - like dissociation of molecular structures and magnetic domains.

J - How were they going to try to generate a secondary gravitational field - one seated on the target ship, that is? Would it be done by increasing the strength of the permanent magnetic field when the ship's dipoles were deshielded, and then varying the RF field -- in frequency and intensity? Surely the ship was not going to be set spinning...?

W - The target of the experiment was not antigravity, or even weightlessness. Demagnetization of residuals was the objective of the first experimental runs. Redshift of electromagnetic radiation was the next step -- but the equipment required for the second step was going to be tested from the start. All the equipment was to be installed under the cover of degaussing the ship at the end of its construction period. When the ship was launched, it was pretty much ready to go.

J - So, the work really began in '42.

W - Yes, the construction of the gigantic permanent electromagnets, the homopolar generators, the coils to be wrapped around the magnets and the ship, the transformers, the motorized current interruptors, radar transmitters and receivers in various radio and microwave bands, the optical detectors, the magnetic resonance detectors, the gaussmeters. It was a major ordeal. Most of the effort took place at the NRL and at the Philadelphia Naval Yard. By June '43, the DE 173 USS Eldridge was fully fitted with the gargantuan coils, transformers, generators and magnets, and the USS Furuseth with all the monitoring and test equipment. Several short experiments were conducted throughout the early Summer of '43, in the hope of hitting the most likely resonances. There were some observations of possible resonant spikes, but they turned out to be nothing more than instrumentation glitches. The final experiment of this first phase -- on or about August 12, 1943 -- appears to have been performed at some resonant condition, but the result was catastrophic. A cloud of green fog enveloped the ship -- and it appeared opaque to radiation. Water and air boiled off all around its periphery, surfaces became charged, it was a hell of a freakish thing and plenty of equipment broke down and ignited. A terrific electrostatic field developed alright, but it bathed the entire ship. Outside the foggy envelope, the ship became surrounded by an envelope of shimmering light due to 'zeemanizing' and constructive interference. The men had been issued rubber shoes, suits and gloves, as well as gas masks. Even still, virtually the entire crew ended up at the Bethesda Naval Hospital with severe psychosomatic ailments, toxicity and burns. Brown himself, who had been aboard the USS Eldrige, suffered a nervous collapse. Confronted with the dismal and unexpected result, the experiment in its original form was discontinued. Over the years, physicists like Einstein, Infeld, Gunn, Hulburt, Gebhardt, Bitter, etc, poured over the data, to figure out what had happened, where it went wrong. For Einstein, the problem was tremendous -- there was little chance now that he would ever succeed in completing his Unified Field Theory, since the properties of the total field clearly were not understood.

J - So the ship did not disappear and leave an indentation symmetric to its hull on the surface of the sea?

W - No, that's sailors' lore. The ship 'disappeared' in the sense that it became enshrouded in fog. It was described as grayish green fog traversed by constant shimmering -- as though it was surrounded by a swirl of thick, silvery heat waves that appeared to spin.

J - And no gravitational redshift was observed?

W - When it came to the radar bounce, it was more like a jamming effect that dispersed the reflected beam in every direction. At first they thought this was good news - some form of invisibility had been reached with a new kind of jamming to boot. But then, to their horror, they realized it was sheer havoc down there.

J - Was there an optical mirage?

W - No, not like that. The optical ranging of the fog was still in the same location, so no bending of light had occurred.

J - So what caused the fog?

W - It took me many years to understand the answer to that question. The observation that put me on to it was that Reich had seen a similar green fog during some of his Oranur experiments. He attributed it to a very high concentration of orgone energy that was exposed to ionizing radiation, particularly to neutron radiation.

J - I thought that Reich claimed this green fog was caused by DOR, deadly orgone he called it --

W - Yes, orgone concentrated by an inrush would turn into deadly orgone, that was his interpretation. That could well be the case -- without going there, my point was that the green fog could also be due to the secondary release of protons...

J - I still don't understand -- was the fog due to DOR radiation, or protons -- or like [J.] Corum claimed in '94 (21), due to chlorine gas released from the water, you know, the yellow-green color of chlorine gas...

W - No, Corum is mistaken. The green fog that was observed was the green line characteristic of the formation of hydrogen gas from atomic hydrogen, from the free-radical state -- something that was totally unknown back in '43, but not today. Whenever you have free protons, say because of ionization or electric polarization, and they are subjected to some cycle of recombination with an electron plasma, you will generate hydrogen free radicals. The hydrogen radical may convert to hydrogen gas and release that green light, or instead absorb more energy and re-ionize. Reich, in fact, was generating protons and hydrogen radicals with nuclear sources inside his orgone room, and RAINBOW with its tremendous magnetic and RF fields was doing exactly the same thing in a much grander scale, and at much greater intensities. These combined fields ionized the water and released protons, polarized and recombined them, generating hydrogen gas and ozone, and produced an electron plasma that was pushed out all around the ship.

J - Was this the cause of the shimmering?

W - Right you are! The energies imparted to the electrons were split by a permanent magnetic field, so the photon frequencies radiated by all possible orbital transitions were greatly multiplied by the Zeeman effect. Some interpreted what they had seen as proof that some distortion of spacetime had occurred due to employing electromagnetic fields resonant with the nuclear structure of matter. So it appeared for a time to have validated the general hunch of unified field theorists - except for the fact that it's all bunk. In my view, you know, to think that any of Einstein's unified field theories were on the right track or met with success is a bit like imagining that a Roman charioteer with all his precise knowledge of chariots might have been able to engineer a modern automobile, if he happened to stumble across one. What would his description be like? -- "it's not drawn by horses, but seems to have a legless metal horse permanently imprisoned inside its bowels; wood is absent and the horse is not fed with grass but rather with a slightly colored alcohol; the wheels have soft shoes made of solid tar," and so on. You see my drift -- the charioteer's description may actually be accurate in terms of what he knows and the language he has at his disposal. But he would never be able to reverse engineer, let alone design or build a modern automobile from his own description, nor understand how an automobile works, or how the internal combustion engine functions as 'a horse'. Likewise with Einstein's theories of the unified field. They simply don't give the tools one needs to be able to understand gravity, let alone antigravity. Everything that happened in RAINBOW can be understood today with tools that require no invocation of a unified field. The events can be entirely explained by what we now know about nuclear magnetic resonance, the chemistry of water, free radicals, and so on -- all contributions made by quantum physics, not relativity or the unified field. This is not to say, of course, that there are no gravitational anomalies, including antigravitational ones associated with truly incomprehensible observations. But our physicists and our physical knowledge are just as impotent to understand them today as they were back in '43. We grasp them, but only like the Roman charioteer would have grasped a modern automobile - totally inadequately with respect to understanding how gravitational fields form and how they can be counteracted.

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