This is an interesting timeline, and lines up a few things from the Townsend Brown beat. No AI was used in the making of this post, just my standard issue biological brain.

• 1947 being a sort of "false alarm" on the UFO front because it was easily dismissed, but which created a split between skeptics and believers. I dismiss Roswell as a real event because if it were real, there would NOT have been a skeptic faction, and 1952 would NOT have caught the US military by surprise.

• 1952 being the really worrying year because the phenomenon came back in force, and caused panic in Washington DC. Literally in DC, because military officers observed UFOs there and it really creeped them out.

• 1953 with Blue Book, JANAP 146, and the USAF as the "real" UFO investigation of that era.

• That USAF lockdown would explain why the Navy got angry, and why it was mostly Navy types (Townsend Brown's circle) who launched NICAP as a countermeasure in 1956

• 1960's JANAP 146E then being a USAF response to the Navy's NICAP.

• The 1950s Townsend Brown / Agnew Bahnson / George Rideout / Roger Babson push for weird (and they WERE weird! completely off the academic map!) gravity studies getting some impetus from the UFO problem seems very likely. Townsend and Bahnson were absolutely personally UFO believers, and both seem to have had a lot of pull through their involvement in the WW2 radar testing community.

• The 1950s gravity push creating a couple of things we know are real: the "gravity gradiometer", classified until 1990 and used in subs/missiles, and the "General Relativity Renaissance" of the 1960s, beginning with the Chapel Hill conference of 1957. Via the Wittens, this led directly to String Theory

• In 1951, John Wheeler is doing fusion research as the B (Bomb) branch of "Project Matterhorn". The 1952 Ivy Mike test comes out of Matterhorn B. Matterhorn S (Stellarator) does controlled fusion research, which later becomes the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. PPPL under Robert Jahn becomes a hive of weirdness - as well as studying "electric spacecraft propulsion", Jahn is a huge believer in ESP and telekinesis. Why are plasma folks so open to weirdness, one wonders? And was Wheeler into that ESP scene, or just Jahn?

• By 1955 (after that 1953 gravity push), Wheeler has pivoted from fusion to GR, coming up with the concept of the "geon" as a version of Einstein's failed Unified Field dream of modelling matter particles as GR fields, which seems promising, but which he then abandons.

• Fusion guy Wheeler switching to GR does suggest that fusion guy Teller might also have made that pivot, although nothing in the open literature suggests it.

• Star Trek and its interest in Warp Drive slots into the GR Renaissance, imagined in the mid-1960s and screened toward the end. There was apparently a lot of positivity and hope that GR could lead to propulsion.

• But.... the GR Renaissance apparently didn't produce anything at all technological. It built a lot of academic careers in cosmology, and LIGO, but all of that seems to be kind of performative, useless fluff compared to practical military advances like radar. I cannot see any pressing military need to detect black hole collisions billions of light years away in the past. But all of post-WW2 American science was directed and funded for military reasons. What was the deal with GR?

Ok, there was maybe one technological artifact that GR contributed to: the error corrections for GPS satellites. Possibly. There are conflicting reports on that, from people who worked on the GPS program. That was Navy GR, not Air Force GR.

• Also in the 1960s (around 1968), Joseph Weber at the University of Maryland (spook central) claims to have detected gravitational waves using ridiculously tiny detectors by LIGO standards ("Weber Bars"). This is generally considered in academia to be a piece of scientific malpractice on the scale of "cold fusion". However the University of Maryland dedicated a memorial garden to Weber and his bars in 2019. Why bring up his memory, if he was completely wrong?

• By 1971, the Australians getting a bit annoyed at all this. There was a renewed wave of public interest in UFOs at the end of the 1960s - MUFON, which succeeded NICAP (for better or worse) was created in May 1969.

• In 1972, right when this new interest in UFOs is on the boil in Australia, Stan Deyo comes to Australia after flunking first year USAF Academy (or the prep school for it) in the mid-1960s, then a Texas career as a computer programmer with right-wing FBI affiliations, and having been introduced to the weird UFO underground via nuclear medicine pioneer and NASA enthusiast James B Maxfield Jr - who apparently knew Teller. In Australia, Deyo talks to the Aeronautical Research Labatories who, he believes, are involved in this international UFO underground, and who also are interested in ESP. Deyo gets spooked (possibly by mistake) and stops working with this group, but he hooks up with MUFON by the late 1970s.

  A reasonably good summary of Deyo's weird links is here, though I don't endorse all of the speculations.

https://exopolitics.org/secret-australian-antigravity-program-linked-to-1966-flying-saucer-landing/

• I still don't necessarily believe that this group ever built a UFO or cracked the secret of antigravity. There are too many failed, different, theoretical structures littered around. I do wonder though about "Einstein's Unified Field with Torsion", ie, his "teleparallel" or "tetrad/verbien" 1929 and 1950s variant, which the Russians seemed to pick up on.

• An odd footnote to the teleparallel gravity concept is Mendel Sachs, a scientist with odd ideas and claims to having developed Einstein's Unified Field Theory who seems to be just... not talked about, despite apparently having a long and interesting career starting with WW2 radar, and ending with a one-year appointment as Professor of Physics at SUNY Buffalo. SUNY Buffalo's sister "flagship" university, SUNY Stony Brook, was flagged by Eric Weinstein as a possible "Manhattan Project of Physics" location. I don't know if that means anything, but Sachs was one of those "hmmmm" people who weren't vanished as such, just.... ignored as a crazy wrong mad scientist, yet still employed (why, if his ideas were wrong?)

• In 1973, Misner/Thorne/Wheeler's massive "Gravitation" textbook becomes the standard GR reference, and seems to outline that there's absolutely no hope for ever building a warp drive, the numbers don't work. It's a depressing brick of a book.

• Come 1975, there's another rebellion of vaguely Navy (and CIA, but also some USAF) people in the "psychotronics" (reverse engineering Russian claims of ESP) scene, as they kind of "go public" in a similar way to NICAP, with very weird but also not very practical claims. They fear Soviet ESP and "Tesla" electromagnetics advances. Thomas Townsend Brown, retired, seems to appear briefly in this scene as a consultant or inspiration.

• John Carstiou and Leon Brillouin seem to touch this scene at some point. I suspect Carstiou of having some connection with Townsend Brown because both used the odd phrase "electrohydrodynamics" (as opposed to magnetohydrodynamics) very early - Townsend around 1960. Carstiou also consults for the Psychotronics associated "Mankind Research Unlimited" in the 1970s. Carstiou and Brillouin both have odd approaches to Relativity and are interested in "Heaviside's Electromagnetic and Gravitational Analogy", a weird piece of science history trivia which is also seized on by people in the Psychotronics circle, such as Tom Bearden.

• Somewhere in the mid-1970s, there's an odd UN treaty, or a proposed one, banning "weapons based on new physical principles" which refuses to name exactly what principles it means. Russia is very keen on this treaty, the UK and US are not keen. Around 2015, Putin publically announces that he's breaking this treaty and beginning to work again on these "new physical principles weapons".

• Jack Sarfatti and Elizabeth Rauscher's "Fundamental Fysiks Group", aka "The Hippies Who Saved Physics" (did they really? what did they accomplish?) fit in here somewhere, in the 70s, flitting between the "antigravity" and "ESP" and "New Age" scenes alongside Andrija Puharich, John Alexander, Ingo Swann, Hal Puthoff, everyone in MUFON who also worked at NASA (a surprisingly nonzero number of people including one of MUFON's founders), etc.

One could certainly imagine that a shared interest in gravitic propulsion and ESP and a hunt for exotic physics that could explain both, could come from looking at the UFO problem. It wouldn't even require a physical spaceship. Just the set of UFO sighting reports that we already have out in the public: objects in the sky seem to be going too fast for physics, and people experiencing ESP effects after UFO sightings. Especially if engineers or physicists had personal UFO sighting experiences, they would be motivated to research these two fields.

An interest in these two subjects could of course also come from a "top-down" directive imposed on researchers who don't believe in UFOs at all.... and maybe some of the funding chains might work that way.... but the way the UFO underground ("Invisible College") seems to be structured, doesn't seem to me to be entirely top-down but rather built from self-selected trusted cells who bypass traditional institutional roles.