/LonghornNation Daily Off Topic Free Talk Thread

"In 1971, Terrell had a pretty hefty chunk of the American dream: Married with children, the 35-year-old venture capitalist and CPA had a house in Chevy Chase; he was making nearly $200,000 a year. He owned a farm in West Virginia and half of an oil company, among other holdings. Less than a year later, Terrell had left his family and joined the Finders. “I was looking for a more meaningful life,” he recalls. “I had already made a pretty big pile of money and I couldn’t go on just making more, there wasn’t really much point in that. Pettie offered a more personalized life, more community-oriented, re-establishing the kind of extended family that the human species evolved under. — In the early days, the group resembled an extended family, but the real attraction for Terrell was self-realization. “Pettie used the term ‘pressure cooker,’” he says. “The idea was to explore your own person and discover your own true nature. You can’t do that just sitting at a desk or on a couch in a routine way. You have to have some experiences, so Pettie was good at structuring experiences from which you could learn. He called himself the ‘game caller,’ and what that meant was that he’d call a game for you to do something where you’d gain experience.” For Terrell, game playing ranged from working a temp accounting job in a downtown D.C. law firm to catching a flight to Japan on two hours’ notice to gather information on Japanese companies and report back to Pettie. It was a subculture built on whimsy and intrigue, undergirded by a sense of tribal affiliation. “Early on, we were focused on trying to build a community that was based on old-fashioned principles of loyalty,” he says. When my questions drift into the sexual dynamics of the Finders, Terrell gets angry: “If you want to write a scholarly piece about the group in the historical context of the Shakers and the Oneida communities, fine, but for a newspaper article, I don’t want to get into that—that’s sensationalism.”

In August 1984, two twenty-something young men wearing ties knocked on my door and gave their names: Steve Usdin and Jeff Ubois. A tiny newsletter had mentioned the database I was developing, and they were interested. They began pumping me on my activities and associates, and took notes. Their questions reflected a familiarity with obscure leftist personalities and publications that is found only among seasoned activists, and even more curiously, they expressed no politics of their own. Usdin and Ubois had to be "sent men."
But they wanted to be helpful. My own attempts to interest progressives in my project had been met with quizzical looks, because at the time most leftists were still using typewriters. These two fellows at least knew all about microcomputing. So I rewarded them with the first edition of what today is called NameBase. At the same time I mentioned that I needed the IBM BASIC compiler to get the program transferred from CP/M, and a few weeks later they came by with just what I needed, complete with a photocopied manual in a binder. I probably should have asked them for new computers and an office.
They said their group went by the name of "Information Bank," and they wanted to approach certain organizations in the Washington DC area and volunteer their technical skills. The following June I visited their warehouse headquarters and met Randolph A. Winn and Robert M. Meyer. I asked questions about who or what was behind it all, but their answers were evasive. From their perspective, I was a potential recruit.
In July 1985 I got a call from Kris Jacobs, a DC activist who did research on the right-wing. She said that Ubois was caught looking in her office files, and when she confronted him, he claimed to be from the National Journalism Center. Since NJC is a right-wing group that was then doing research on the left, his answer didn't pacify her. Ubois had been dropping my name to talk his way into certain places, so Ms. Jacobs wasn't happy with my excuses either. I alerted two other organizations who were getting assistance from the Information Bank. The next time Ubois came over in early 1986, I casually brought up the name "National Journalism Center" in a different context, and asked him if he had ever heard of it. "Nope." That's when I opened my own file on the Information Bank.
Louis Wolf helped me check crisscross directories and we visited the recorder of deeds. Several group names were listed under each address, and the two properties we knew about were both in the name of Robert G. Terrell, Jr. While returning from the recorder of deeds office, cross my heart, we spotted Usdin walking with an older man. He didn't see us so we followed them on foot for about two miles like Keystone Kops (they kept stopping at store windows), but eventually lost them. Sometime later Ubois dropped in on Wolf (they never call ahead) and whipped out a business card that read "Hong Kong Business Today." He wanted to know how to get a visa for Vietnam. It was clear by then that most group members were world-class travelers, which included travel to numerous Eastern Bloc countries. It was all a game to them. This was a small group -- perhaps 40 adults -- but they had no visible income to support their far-flung activities.
In February 1987, two young men from the group were arrested in Tallahassee, Florida because the van they were driving contained six children with dirty faces. The term "child abuse" was trumpeted in all of the media, all over the country, for several days. Customs, the FBI, and DC police raided three group properties and made off with their files and computers. The group (it was a "cult" to the media) was called the "Finders" (years earlier they had been known as the "Seekers"), and it was run by Marion David Pettie, then 67 years old. At least now I knew who the older man was and I had another name for the group. No charges were filed and the children were soon returned to their mothers in the group. After realizing that they had been feeding on a nonstory, the media suddenly dropped everything with no apologies. I called the Washington Post city desk at the height of the hysteria and explained that there was another angle, but when their reporter called back he was only being polite.
Three years later I obtained a three-page nongovernment memo of undetermined origin that summarizes Pettie's intelligence links. Most of it seems to check out. According to this memo, Pettie began his career with assorted OSS contacts, served as a chauffeur to General Ira Eaker, became a protege of Charles Marsh (an intimate of FDR and LBJ who ran his own private intelligence network), and was trained in counterintelligence in Baltimore and Frankfurt, Germany. His wife worked for the CIA, and Pettie himself was run by Col. Leonard N. Weigner (whose September 1990 Washington Post obituary confirms that his career was spent in air force intelligence and the CIA). Pettie's case officer was Major George Varga, who relayed Weigner's instructions until Varga died in the 1970s. The memo says that on Weigner's advice Pettie resigned from the military and surrounded himself with "kooks" so that he could infiltrate the "beat," human potential, and now the New Age movements.
Okay, so file this memo under "P" for "Paranoia." Except that in December 1993, first the Washington Times (which was picked up by AP), and then U.S. News and World Report, both carried essentially the same story. It seems that the Finders investigation was stopped cold shortly after it started in 1987, and now the Justice Department has formed a task force to figure out what's going on. Why was it stopped? This is from an internal "Memo to File" written by a Customs agent who participated in the raids, dated 13 April 1987:
CIA made one contact and admitted to owning the Finders organization ...but that it had "gone bad." ... [I was advised] the investigation into the activity of the Finders had become a CIA internal matter. The MPD [DC police] report has been classified Secret and was not available for review. I was advised that the FBI had withdrawn from the investigation several weeks prior and that the FBI Foreign Counterintelligence Division had directed MPD not to advise the FBI Washington Field Office of anything that had transpired. No further information will be available. No further action will be taken.

"Games" played a central role inside the Finders, and it was often difficult to know when the members were playing out some fantasy and when they were not, ex-associates said. The Finders' tendency to abandon jobs and homes at a moment's notice could complicate law enforcement efforts to find the group's members, who were gone from their Washington bases when police arrived Thursday, sources said. Sometimes they approached businesses -- from a major Washington law firm to a leftist think tank -- and offered their expertise in computer programming and other services, sources said. Other times the group went through the motions of setting up a business, sometimes printing up phony business cards. Some members used up to 20 aliases, ex-associates said.
Terrell called Finders' leader Marion Pettie "my entertainer. He provides me with a model of somebody who is never satisfied with the status quo and he inspires me upward and he keeps me laughing as I go.” Pettie, an Air Force master sergeant who retired in 1956 and bought extensive woodland property in rural Madison County, Va., started the Finders in the late 1960s as a communal experiment characteristic of the period. He sought intelligent, well-educated people who could discuss the latest thought in philosophy, psychology and human development. The Finders eschewed counterculture music and drugs, former associates said. While they maintained an open-door policy at their Washington house and Virginia farms, many of the drifters and hippies who came for free food quickly left because of the emphasis on serious conversation and work.
"It used to be an organization of dropout professionals who didn't know what to do with their lives," said one former associate. "But it took a bad turn.” In the early 1980s, Pettie's close friend and second-in-command, known by the group as Barbara Sylvester, who was in her forties, died at the Finders' W Street house after she did not receive medical help for appendicitis. The death apparently placed Pettie into a gloomy mood and led to a shift in the group's tone. The Finders became increasingly secretive, hostile and arrogant toward nonmembers, former associates said. Members engaged in long self-criticism sessions, exposing painful emotional inadequacies to the group. Members stopped seeing relatives and friends who were not in the group; former associates found themselves shunned or treated brusquely. It was amid this blend of surliness and somber planning for the future that the community began to raise its new generation, children who were shared by numerous parents yet nurtured by no one in particular, ex-associates said."
...Former members of the Finders said that the six children found in Tallahassee are sons and daughters of group members, the result of a deliberate binge of child-bearing among group women in the past few years, after about 10 years of freewheeling relationships in which they deliberately avoided having children, former associates said. A number of the older members of the Finders, people in their forties or fifties, had careers or families before but left them behind to take part in the group. Looking back, most of them regarded their old lives as uninteresting and their children and former spouses as too conventional, according to former group associates and relatives of current members. Pettie and his followers agreed about 1980 that they should start a new generation of children and raise them in an experimental way, the sources said. The biological parents would not raise them; the group would. But in reality the children were largely ignored by the members, with responsibility for their care considered drudgery, former members said. "It was an undesirable job in the group," said a person who quit several years ago. "They were trying to keep the kids out of their hair . . . . The theory was the children should have a lot of abundance . . . . But they were terrible at putting it into practice.” In a telephone interview last night, a man who identified himself as Robert Gardner Terrell, 50, the owner of two Washington buildings used by the Finders, said the group included 20 adults and six children, and tried to provide children with "the richest life they could have."
"Children always come first in our organization," he said. "We're trying to create a model that could be followed by other persons who want to raise free children . . . . “ The commune children were so dirty and full of sores on their bodies that they were not allowed to play with other children on the playground at Stoddert School near the W Street residence, former associates said. Group members had taken the children there to encourage them to play with nongroup youngsters, but the two groups did not mix because the Finders' children could hardly communicate with the others, one ex-associate said. All the commune's former participants who were interviewed agreed that they knew nothing about child abuse in the organization, though members may sometimes have ignored the children or even mistreated them.

While asserting in a telephone interview Saturday night that he had no connection with the Finders, Wyker described them favorably and confirmed that group members had been in Berea last month. The children, he added, "were healthy, very well fed, and loved like they were in a family.” The memo named a man and woman from Spring Grove, Pa., who it said helped with child care on the trip to Berea. The woman, who identified herself as True Marks, said after being reached at a telephone number supplied by Terrell that members of the group "took very good care" of the children and "never hit them or abused them in any way.” According to Terrell's memo, "it was thought" that the children would be enrolled in a Montessori school in Berea for the duration of the project. He said the children's mothers "are now in San Francisco working in business offices, earning money to help pay for 'New Hope.’ "After finding that preparations for Kentucky groundbreaking were incomplete, Terrell said, the men took the children to Florida on a vacation and camping trip "with the full applause and approval of the children's mothers.”

"First, I must ask if you and/or Hal would be interesting in meeting Mr Bob Beckwith in Tallahassee, FL the evening of May 30th. Bob has been invited to meet with the head of the Florida Academy of Sciences and the Director of the High Magnetic Field Laboratory for a roundtable discussion of his (Mr. Beckwith's) Force Model of the Universe, and his planned experiments in LTT (levitation, teleportation, and time travel), among other subjects."

Ok here it goes ..
http://www.beckwithelectric.com/news/news-102509-1.html
Bob worked for General Electric Power Line Carrier Section in Schenectady, NY. From 1955 to 1961, he was Manager of Computers and Communications at General Electric Company Electronics Research Laboratory in Syracuse, New York. From 1961 to 1967, he was Manager of Utility Systems at Gulton Industries. In 1967, he founded Beckwith Electric Company in Largo, Florida. In 2000, Mr. Beckwith founded Beckwith Electric Research (BER), a division of Beckwith Electric Co. that conducted research at the forefront of present-day engineering and physics.
Mr Beckwith lives ultimately a couple miles from McDill where Titor said he was doing stuff. Mr Beckwith worked for GE which Titor said had stuff going on with time travel.
OH YEAH http://www.beckwithelectric.com/bedownloads/Ltt.pdf He wrote a paper about Time Travel too.
If the formula for Frequency is 1 divided by a time period. F=1/T We can solve that for time in terms of frequency T=1/F. Electromagnetic fields have frequencies. I'm pretty sure the two items in Titors machine created EM fields that vibrated controlled how fast time went by (and in what direction) outside the fields.
It would make sense that this electrical engineer who worked at GE for Darpa projects and lived by Ft McDill and wrote books on time travel fits somewhere in this Titor tale.

• Please click here for details on this week’s movies at All Saints Cinema.
  
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• All of the Student Life Cinema offerings are listed on their web site.
  
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• Burrito Boarder: Bar Trivia With Hank. $30 food & bar tab for first place. Specials on shots and $2 margaritas. 7:30pm
  
• The Warehouse: Lost Mondays with Belmont & Jones & Dick Kraft. 8pm
  
• Waterworks: Patio Theater presents Velvet Goldmine. “Monday night at 8:35. What better film than this to lead up to one of our biggest parties of the year, Glam Slam! Directed by Todd Haynes and starring Christian Bale and Ewan McGregor, this movie visits the days of the early 70s Glam Rock scene. The costume design and music will inspire you to get that Glam outfit ready for Saturday night! Velvet Goldmine under the stars on The Patio at Waterworks!” 8:30pm/21+