Post #648321 by Cammo on Tue, Aug 14, 2012 11:12 PM

PART 8
Real Life Spies

The most famous man you’ve never heard of, Alfred Loomis is the central subject of Jennet Conant’s other Sci-Fi Spy book with the extremely long name, **Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed The Course of WW2. **

Loomis decided to seriously investigate way-out concepts like time bending, x-ray vision, telepathy, parallel universes, ultrasonography, artificial intelligence, encephalography, atom smashing, brain waves and quantum molecular theory.

Instead of hiring cheap college kids, he did the exactly right thing and hired the top men in every field, raiding universities for physicists from every field, then throwing bizarre projects at them in totally unrelated fields, while having them live for free in a beautiful park setting, playing tennis and fishing most of the time.

It worked.

Suddenly, against everyones expectations but Alfred’s, they got results.

After Pearl Harbor hit the fan, Jennet Conant’s book suggests that at the very highest levels every war and life lost on the American side was planned as a delaying action, a top-secret misdirection to buy time in the feverishly serious secret war to invent the atomic bomb before the Germans did.

Guess where the physicists met to discuss their work?

The original Trader Vic’s.

And Tuxedo Park became the genesis of every high tech park to come, eventually expanding into MIT and UC Berkeley and inventing every spy tool you can think of, from Radar to automatic tracking of incoming missiles to GPS to the atom bomb itself.

It’s absurdly ironic that anti-war vegan friendly happie hippie Berkeley was basically the highest technology arms manufacturer of WW2; ground zero for enriched uranium and plutonium production. But apparently Berkeley’s always been a bit strange...