After my mentioning Tony Collins’ book, Open Verdict: 25 Mysterious Deaths In The Defence Industry, Ron had told me his main uni tutor would say to the class, “Don’t work for Marconi, there’s some real bastards in there!”…..in that imperfect English grammar.
Ron and I being on the same bedsitting level was accidentally useful.
A large number of scientists had died mysteriously, and Tony Collins’ position as editor of Computing Weekly had enabled him to observe these reports in greater detail……he points out, in his book, that the 25 deaths described in the book are merely Tony’s selection……there are quite a lot more.
Open Verdict tells you police seemed to ignore obvious connections: two brilliant scientists are claimed to have tied electric wires to their teeth then switched the power on, both in August 1988 ~ Peter Ferry, assistant marketing director, found dead as described, in a company apartment south of London…..actually later referred to as an MI5 “safe house”, a not-very-safe house is what Gareth Williams was to be found dead in (remember the guy claimed to have stuffed himself in a suitcase?)…..
……and Alistair Beckham, a “software engineer for Plessey Defence Systems”, electrocuted himself, as described, in his garden shed…..Tony points out that when mysterious deaths were of guys working under other defence rubrics, Atomic Energy Authority, Eassams, British Aerospace…..it was as if Marconi had put them there to hide the fact they were actually still working for……….you know who……….Marconi.
So the statement “all working for Marconi” is more accurate than some might think.
Tony Collins told me over the phone 📱 that he wondered if his book had caused the deaths’ information channels to be smothered: another Marconi death had occurred & he was given exceptional difficulty when he enquired about it, still editing for Computing Weekly. Found floating dead in an English canal, with a painter’s palette 🎨 tied round his neck, in late 1991, close to his London home…..Marconi employee, Malcolm Puddy, had been in a Eureka-like state of mind, as if having made an amazing discovery…..but shady Marconi bootboys suddenly appeared at his door looking unhappy. Malcolm was then missing for six days…..the six-day disappearance is one of the frequently occurring correspondences with these mysterious deaths, police ignored everything about them – the scientist was found dead in the canal, as described…..the bootboys returned to Malcolm’s house, removed boxes of files and took away his computer 🖥️. The article best referring to this incident was in a 1993 March issue of BusinessAge magazine, which went out of business in 2002.
So during January 1990, Ron & I were talking about the Marconi deaths, and discussing Jessie Hill thinking her mind was possibly actually being linked onto from London BBC Studios…..
I said to Ron, thoughts being received by a BBC brain-wave decoder, the bounce back to her mind would technically be considered ‘reverse-wave propagation’, which I had read an article about in a Scientific American magazine issue a few years before. Ron answered, “That’s right, we’ll soon be getting reverse-wave propagation, it’s on our syllabus, I’ll photocopy the infosheets for you.”
…..weeks and weeks passed by, without reverse-wave propagation being taught by his tutor, thus perplexing the young student.
“It’s very strange, it’s long overdue according to our syllabus….”
“Has this happened before?”
“No, everything has been on time.”
“Are you going to ask about it?”
“Yes.”
A few evenings ✨ later, Ron came back to his bedsit looking disturbed, I invited him into mine as was becoming usual.
“I just asked about reverse-wave propagation. The lecturer took a massive fright, stuttered and stammered, ‘I’m s-s-sorry I c-c-c-can’t t-t-t-talk about that, I’m afraid!!!!'”
And he never appeared in the university again; the head of department had to take over the lectures for the rest of that student year.
Obviously that resulted in a big realisation Ron and I were definitely now being subjected to surveillance procedures. Our developed image of what had to have happened is…..MI5, Britain’s spy service, had known of our interest…..how?!?
Probably our phone calls 📞.
Then an MI5 operative has contacted……..meaning contacted in terms of in-your-face snarling & growling……..Ron’s lecturer to say, “We’re not ‘appy abaht this cunt Ron!” (Translation: we’re not happy about this cunt Ron!) We could only imagine Special Branch agents (at least two of them) violently grinding @ the lecturer, “We’re under orders to stop that student & his mate finding shit out!”
……and some sort of indication as to what might happen to “that nosey little cunt who’s helping him”, “meaning that fucking pleb that kicks along beside him”, whilst directly threatening the uni lecturer also…….using the news reports of the mysterious deaths to pressure him.
…….leaving that lecturer in such a giveaway, jumpy state of mind, he’s totally lost self-control on being approached, in a very ordinary manner, by one of his students……
There is certainly no point in imagining an eloquent elaboration, on the part of those MI5 agents or whatever they were, as to the dangers of me, Ron, or anyone, accumulating further information……as the type of explanation given to those university lecturers by those boot boys.
That is basically The Reverse-wave Propagation Incident, I’m sure The Times, Telegraph and Guardian will be bursting to cover it…..an interesting incident for those in Edinburgh who remember Yulia Solodyankina; a Russian physics student who died mysteriously attending Edinburgh University, during the year 2013………a good re-examination of Yulia’s death is on www.scottishreview.net…..she and I had sat beside each other a number of times in Twitch Internet Games café in the months before she disappeared….I was always typing up stuff like this……& as a volunteer for the Forest Arts Café, had made, then carried to her table, coffees a few times, after she had paid for them, of course.
(If anyone reading 📚 this would like a state-sanctioned image of reverse-wave propagation, the art installation called Earth-Moon-Earth, by Katie Paterson, is quite interesting to experience…..she repeatedly transmitted a single performance of the Moonlight Sonata to the Moon……so each time the performance-beam hit a crater, the bounced back/reverse-wave propagated performance-beam she received on Earth had a missing note….then another note missing, then another note….the bounce back is reverse-wave propagation, though she doesn’t call it that….nevertheless it gives you a good picture of what reverse-wave propagation is about. Also, due to that incident with that lecturer, I had used Edinburgh’s National Library to try to find the Scientific American magazine back issue with the reverse-wave propagation article, but hadn’t found it)
There was to be more mysterious behaviour of the university lecturers.
Ron informed me that there is a magazine published bi-monthly by the Institute of Electrical Engineering, which deals with implants in human bodies and the technology involved in turning transmissions from the implants into useful information. They were £6 a copy, & I gave Ron the money 💰 to buy six back issues, which arrived a couple of weeks later, amazing amount of information about implants inserted into different areas of human bodies, intestines, the heart, the head, very interesting reading.
The latent, secret, chagrin of these university lecturers in Heriot-Watt University soon revealed its horrid self, however.
One of the lecturers walked up to Ron, this must have been while Ron was attending a lecture in March 1990……and informed him, “You know that magazine you bought for £6 a copy? It’s now £38 per copy.” Which would sound ridiculous in the present day, let alone March 1990.
But they didn’t stop there. Ron was approached a second time a few weeks after that, to be availed of the fact that the implants magazine was now £62 a copy – imagine picking up a magazine you noticed at a railway station newsagents in 2020-something , going to the counter and being told, “That’s £62, sir.” But this is Spring 1990, 30+ years ago & counting……a calculator I just used told me £62 in 1990 is the equivalent of £130 in 2021.
So quite a lot of mysteriousness happened, seeming to radiate out from “the Marconi thing”, I hope the reader now sees, how serious a matter is What You Are Not Being Told.
Incidentally, quite an interesting implant story came my way, this one is by way of Aileen Fisher, a daughter of Archie Fisher, a quite well-known folk musician, a brilliant alternative tuning guitarist.
She described to me a Jewish ✡ guy being arrested on the streets of Edinburgh then transported to Fettes Avenue Police Station, I am assuming this is an incident occurring 1990/91……by 🚔 police…..for being drunk, & held in a jail cell for three nights, I can imagine the public – which they like to call the pubic – being so very reassured by such serious sedulous soothing care of our responsible police officers that they gave a drunk man three nights to sober up……”Leonard”, to give this abductee a name…..described an implant being inserted into his body during his tenure in Fettes Avenue accommodation.
Aileen continued, the two of us face to face, each drinking ☕ coffee somewhere in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile,
“Lennie said that they inserted the tiny implant here, at the top of the left arm, and they seemed to rely on the pressure of the flow of the blood to carry it on up through the carotid artery, and it carries on up then lodges in the front of the brain here”, and she indicated where the frontal lobe is with her fingers. “Then they released him on the third day, and ever since then he’s been hearing the police who arrested him shouting into his mind, obscenities & stuff, like yelling ‘Cut your balls off!'”
There is a racist undertone about this anecdote too, the reader might think back to this later on. She averred,
“There was definitely a mark on his arm where he said the implant was inserted, here….”, and she pointed to where, quite high on her upper left arm, she’d seen the mark on Leonard’s arm, he’d shown her.
That’s the gist of the Leonard story, which sounds remarkably like it could be communicating the reason for the mysterious behaviour of the Heriot-Watt University lecturers.
By the way, this informative café conversation was followed by the coincidence of Claudia Schiffer appearing on the front page of a Sunday Times magazine……the following day…….looking absolutely totally 💯 % the same as Aileen……there was no difference whatsoever between what was sitting in front of me in the Edinburgh café and what was on the front page of the Sunday Times magazine the following day, same sunglasses, the lot.
A LITTLE BIT ABOUT OUR PREJUDICED JUDGES
Edinburgh, during the early 1990s, had a case of a fair blonde guy, whose first name was Easton, who was ridiculously violent…..he would wade into Edinburgh University student social events and smash upper cuts into their chins, “to see how far I could get them to jump into the air”, Easton battered a helluva lot of young people, mostly students in those early years. The quote is from him to me, we occasionally conversed. He appeared in court in Edinburgh sixteen times, literally walking in and out and in and out and in and out the courtroom, the judge saying, “You’re acquitted” every time Easton appeared over his violence towards the students.
The 16th time Easton was acquitted, police in the courtroom started shouting and yelling at the judge, “That should surely be two years at least!” “What’s going on?!?” “That’s fuckin’ ridiculous!” After that 16th acquittal, the police dragged Easton down to a cellar, punched him around, then rubbed a cheese-grater into his face. We didn’t hear from Easton again.
Contrast that with, a few years later, my dark-skinned Serbian friend Zoran Maric, hitting someone once, in Edinburgh, and immediately getting six months……while Zoran was in jail, the man he had hit once was found guilty of murder. Zoran asked if that made any difference to the principle of his arrest, but the police refused to alter his punishment. Almost as if a racist, biased, impression was what was intended. Zoran had no previous, he had been a radio broadcast dee-jay in Serbia, he had studied Musicology in Paris, and was studying journalism in Edinburgh University, he hadn’t been long in…….racist Edinburgh.
To think of the high probability, of that judge knowing, as he gives Zoran Maric six months, that the guy he had punched was allegedly a murderer……?!?
I just think it is worth it to convey that impression of a secret fascist infrastructure amongst the judiciary……I will admit the lower paid, on-the-beat police officers in that courtroom were not, apparently, in on the big fascist idea……to make another point in law pro-Zoran, common to all countries’ legislation, is that the accused is declared normally healthy before prosecution……you would think to be in jail over hitting someone once, the “victim” had been absolutely smashed……a former SAS man told me breaking the bone just under the nose is a full three months in HOSPITAL……not simply recovering……but maybe that tells you how much better you were looked after during the 1980s, when he told me.
Let’s regenerate the January 1990 image, I’m working constant nightshift in a railway maintenance depot……I do like the job……and I’d been recently promoted……I got this larger-than-usual bedsitting room, resulting in a random association with a final year Electrical Engineering undergraduate. I was listening to Sonic Youth, Lush, the Throwing Muses, Hole……I occasionally left Edinburgh to see bands I was interested in in London, every band I liked I saw live in London.
And Ron decided, eventually, to ask his father about the Marconi scientists’ mysterious deaths……let’s ask the police force’s big enchilada.
This resulted in yet another day when Ron came into the bedsitting area looking disturbed, again I invited him in, asking “What’s happened now Ron?”
He entered my room, sat on the edge of one of the two 🛏️ beds in it, then told me what his father had just told him,
“British judges do pass top secret death sentences. The judge is usually in a small room, sitting at a table with a sheet of paper in front of him, describing what the putative security leak is supposedly guilty of, a security risk mostly. The unlucky sod is walked into the room by one other person, who is a witness to the passing of the execution order. Nine times out of ten the judge in that sort of scenario is expected to pass a death sentence, occasionally he doesn’t, but usually he does.”
Are you of the opinion British judges pass death sentences, dear reader? Another incident involved Ron…..a judge had been a casual friend of the family for many years, coming round to join in on Sunday dinner every Sunday for years – Ron & that judge met up in the Edinburgh Filmhouse bar for a drink together……halfway thru their drinks & conversation, Ron half-interestedly asked, “What do you think of that Marconi thing then?” The judge thumped his drink down, walked out the bar, & was never seen by Ron & his family ever again……that was goodbye to the Sunday dinners. Other stories came Ron’s way……a Ferranti employee in Edinburgh was told he was being sacked, & that he would never have anything to do with the electronics industry ever again…..for opening the wrong drawer, he’d been sent to get a file by one of the bosses……got confused as to what drawer to open….so he was booted out. This corresponded in its overtones…….with a story from Chelmsford’s Marconi zone, a Chelmsford local told me Chelmsford is often called Marconi Town……this guy didn’t get sacked, I must admit, but a janitor-type bloke swept out a room full of files he shouldn’t have – obviously as confused as the poor fucker in Edinburgh – he then had heavy overcoated powerfully muscled men all of a sudden following him everywhere, he went for a pint in a nearby pub & the atmosphere generated by these MI5 (presumably) nutters stupidly trying to act like they weren’t really following him, in the pub, was like a Carry On film, or something Monty Python might have kooked up…..another informant, Ed, a long-time amateur scuba diver, was, like Ron, studying Electrical Engineering, had friends already employed in Marconi-related industries, & Marconi itself…..Ed contributed,
“I can’t say I’ve known someone that’s died, but I can say people have told me there’s a bit of a thing working for Marconi, of people just suddenly not being there any more, nothing said, no prior indication, no gettogether in the pub for a last drink with your newly ex-workmates…..they just disappear.” Ed had been planning on the underwater/submarine/torpedo area of research…….for his future Marconi employment: quite a high proportion of the mysterious deaths described in Open Verdict: 25 Mysterious Deaths In The Defence Industry are in precisely Ed’s projected area for his future career. I have never seen Ed (a more posh-accented fellow) again, though if he is in Marconi via Chelmsford, for instance…….well, I want to be as far away from them as I can possibly achieve, so it isn’t very likely we’ll bump into each other……
In tthe early months of 1990 I mentioned Marconi around, especially in London & a couple called Dan & Vicki had a story, met them in Camden – Dan had always wondered about his grandfather who had been a Marconi employee in Chelmsford……in 1941, eighty – plus years ago – Dan’s family had been informed his grandfather had been killed in a plane crash – but Dan’s family learned, later on, that Marconi “hadn’t wanted to tell us that he had actually jumped out of a window & committed suicide, they told us a story they thought would be less upsetting…..”
That suggests to me something had happened, the grand’mother’ (wife) possibly randomly visiting…..causing a quick, embarrassed, improvised story……..and neither of the two stories are going to be true……there is a question of walking in this disturbing circumambient atmosphere of queasy marconiness, it was pervading every aspect of some people’s lives. How many deaths are there to find out about?!? Linda Howe (for instance), in 1974, later in life to be associated with researching cattle mutilations (winning an Emmy award in 1980 for her film on this, A Strange Harvest)……before that period, somehow found herself inside BBC TV Studios in London…..& frequently in the newspapers in those days, had been The Brain Drain, the reports giving the impression the most brilliant minds of Great Britain were jumping ship to work in other countries. Making innocent conversation, Linda asked where all the brilliant minds are going, what are they ending up doing? That conversation went something like this: –
“We don’t know.”
“Whaaaat?”
“We don’t know.”
“What d’you mean you don’t know?!?”
“We don’t know.”
“You mean no-one’s got back to you saying ‘Hi guys, how’s everything, I’m doing brilliant running my own restaurant in Tassie?”
“No.” Linda left the BBC Studios, a little disturbed. And if you think about it, in sounding so similar to Ed, to me, aren’t those respondents to Linda Howe in 1974, unwittingly conveying the BBC as fully equally gripped by the same syndrome as Marconi in Chelmsford, there is indeed a “BBC/Marconi complex in Suffolk”……& the person who mentions that in her book says next “….and the locals are used to seeing bodies floating in the water just off-shore with nothing ever getting into the papers”…..there is a lot of suspicion in the biographies of Alan Blumlein regarding odd aspects to the plane crash that killed him, in 1941, same year as Dan’s grandfather…..one engine malfunctioned, the plane crashed roundabout the region of Hay on Wye, killing Blumlein…..who had been big in exploring TV technology, developing it……I just wonder am I right to think of the plane crash that almost killed Muse, the rock band? It sounds incredibly similar…..the Blumlein crash is mysterious, the Muse crash isn’t.
Edward Bailey claimed ghost sightings happen thru the 300hz phenomena range……there is a booklet or diary recording Borley Rectory incidents…..with a padlock clamping it shut, held in an American CIA headquarters in America……if the reader types the Borley Rectory incidents into a search engine, they’ll find out about it…..the ghostly experiences arising from Flight 401, which starts with the crashing of a Tristar in December 1972……the crew members’ experiences are also padlocked…….so there does seem to be some secret thing about this – the Americans have displayed this oddly severe attitude regarding these padlocked diaries of literally living with ghosts…..& they have built this totally astounding antenna length. The disparate little factoids seem to all fit together.
All this mysteriousness darkened our minds and our lives, it was difficult to stop thinking about it. Ron began racking his brains, striving to dredge up memories of the psychiatrists’ conversations, because he felt sure they had talked about a technical ability to overhear people’s thoughts, yet another justification of the “mad” Jessie Hill.
Ron’s eventual conclusions can’t possibly be rendered here as they developed over the months, with me going back and forward between London, this has to be concertina’d, squashed into the small space of the next paragraph.
The doctors and psychiatrists seemed to have had an incident where a psychiatric patient appeared to be upsetting 📺 TV sets. In psychiatric wards they always have a relaxation room, always with a TV in it, hardly ever switched off. Let’s invent a name for this eventful psychiatric patient, let’s call him Nick. Nick was in this common room, and the TV went funny, say ❄️ snowy. A psychiatrist was in the room, going round the patients, kindly talking 👄 to them, asking them about their personal interests, future plans, were they trained for any jobs…….Nick went out the room to buy sweets and a can of coke, the TV returned to normal, Nick came back with his refreshments, the TV screen went snowy again. The psychiatrist observed that, and watched for Nick leaving the room again, for the toilet possibly, but while Nick was in the room, no-one could watch the television…..however, the doctor kept the patients entertained in other ways, trying to make things fun for them, keeping their attention drawn away from the TV. Nick eventually needed to go to the 🚻 🚾 loo, caffeine in the Coca-Cola being just one factor accelerating peristalsis, & while he was out, the television returned to normal, and went snowy when he returned. The bemused psychiatrist asked Nick if he would walk in and out the room with him, the two of them did this……so the psychiatrist observed the television screen behaving oddly with Nick in the room, and returning to normal with Nick out the room. Nick did this a number of times with the psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist eventually brought other doctors and nurses in to see what was happening, but generally…….something about the broken brain waves of this mental patient was doing something strange to the TV set, objectively, repeatably.
Ron eventually said about this,
“If I had the background in electronics I have now, it wouldn’t be difficult to think of what to do next……I would need to take the signal modulator out of the TV and it would be relatively simple to redesign it for low frequencies, to redesign it to decode along the low frequencies that former BBC TV cameraman told us about. I’d need to also experiment with pulse modulation, beating different frequencies through the basic frequency of .3khz, that’s what Edward Bailey didn’t tell us about, the pulse modulation frequencies.”
So basically, Ron put into my head an image of one or two electronics experts mucking about……based on the lead they’ve been given that something really weird was happening with the psychiatric patient & that TV….they’ve tinkered around…..experimented with different pulse modulation frequencies……& at some point they’ve stumbled on something totally incredible, perhaps suddenly Nick became like a transmitting television studio……everything he’s seeing is materialising on that altered TV screen.
……so possibly, if they happened upon this incredible phenomenon in this random way, they hardly even understand it themselves, the BBC personnel are as puzzled as the brain screen victims are, hundreds, even thousands of miles away from them.
So that’s the Ron story, unfortunately we had a bad argument about surveillance: he believed, and I didn’t…..that a Special Branch operative had moved into one of the bedsitting rooms. I spoke to that operative accidentally over the phone, and he was then very unpleasant towards Ron. We haven’t spoken since.