Arthur Young with model helicopter

 

Arthur Young outside of his rural Philadelphia barn with one of his early helicopter models, which led to the development of the Bell Helicopter 47-A - glass bubble and girder - MASH helicoper, the first commercially licensed helicopter.

If Peter Dale Scott's "negative template" thesis is correct, and those given the least amount of attention are the most significant, then Arthur Young is indeed an important character, as I can only find a few references to him in all of the JFK assassination literature.

And that is in Gerald Ford's "Portrait of the Assassin" in which it is noted that the accused assin's wife Marina wrote a letter to Ruth Hyde Paine agreeing to move to Texas with her, a letter addressed in care of Arthur Young/Paoli, Pennsylvania.

So who was Arthur Young of Paoli, Pennsylvania?

It took me years to find out, and a few more years before I finally met him and interviewed him on the record.

Arthur Young is the second husband of Ruth Forbes Paine Young, the mother of Michael Paine, the accused assassin's primary patron and at whose home Oswald spent the night before the assassination.

As the inventor of the original Bell Helicopter, Arthur Young arranged for his son-in-law to work as a designer at the Bell Helicopter plant in Dallas, Texas, where Michael Paine was at the time of the assassination.

ARTHUR YOUNG – A Visit At Home With Arthur Young –
by William E. Kelly, Jr. / bkjfk3@yahoo.com

The name Arthur Young may not mean anything to most people, yet for me, he was one of the most elusive and interesting unquestioned witnesses in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. That however, is a mere footnote to his incredible career that included the invention of the first commercial helicopter, the Bell 47A – MASH helicopter, which is still flying today.

I first came across his name in Gerald Ford’s book Portrait of the Assassin, which included documents, testimony and records not previously released by the Warren Commission because of Ford’s special access as a member of the Commission. It was a brief, and fleeting reference, but one that caught my attention, in quoting a letter Ruth Paine wrote to Oswald’s wife Marina, in which she requested Marina to write a return letter in care of “Art Young, Paoli, Pennsylvania.”

Ruth Paine had asked Marina, in New Orleans, to move in with her in Texas while she had her second child. If she would, Ruth would pick up Marina and the baby on the return leg of her cross country summer trek, which she eventually did.

I looked but didn’t find anything else on him, but didn’t give Art Young much though again until I began my quest, which lasted years.

Beginning in Paoli, a small town on the Main Line suburban train route from downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, it stood out in my mind as being very close to the offices of the CIA front Catherwood Foundation. By the time I caught up with him however, Arthur Young had left his Paoli farm, where he had invented his helicopter, and was living in a similar centuries old farmhouse near the Brandywine creek.

When I got his phone number and called, the person who answered gave me a California phone number where he could be reached at his West Coast Center for the Study of Consciousness. I called and when Young answered the phone I identified myself as a journalist and requested a formal interview. Young said he had no problem with granting an interview, but he doubted that I could find a publisher who would print what he had to say. I asked him about his published work, and he gave me the name and number of his publisher, who sent me two of his books, his personal narrative of his work on the Bell Helicopter, and one of his books on his philosophy of process. After reading them I would call him and visit him at his home near Philadelphia.

Following the directions precisely, I found myself driving up a winding dirt road and past a huge brick barn to the front of an old farmhouse that dated to colonial times. Another visitor was there, a women who was with Arthur Young’s wife, Ruth Forbes Paine Young, who JFK assassination researchers know as Michael Paine’s mother. It was while visiting her husband’s mother and step father when Ruth Paine had asked Marina Oswald to write to her – in care of Art Young.

While the two women chatted together in a veranda off the kitchen, Arthur Young took me into his living room-study, which was literally lined with books, on the wall, on tables, on the floor, everywhere. I felt at home, as he asked me to sit down while he sat back in a nearby chair. I asked him if I could tape our conversation, and he assented, so I put the cassette tape recorder on the table in front of us, and pretty much ignored it. He picked up a notepad and asked me my date and place of birth. He said he was into astrology and wanted to do my chart, which he did while we talked.

As I try to do in all such interviews, I too began at the beginning, asking him where and when he was born and who his parents were. Both were artists, he said, pointing to a painting on the wall which he attributed to his mother. He either was born in Paris or lived there as a child, while his parents studied art. In America they lived near Philadelphia, where he attended school before entering Princeton (circa 1920s). He studied physics and philosophy, and while he was there when Einstein was there, they only passed each other on campus and never talked. Young said he did take a course on relativity, taught by the physics department chairman, to him, the only student, and disagreed with some of Einstein’s principles – particularly, as I understood him, (or misunderstood him) – in regards to the concept of time. Apparently E=MC2 accepts time as a constant, while Young argued that time is a variable and subject to change.

Young said it was the death of a brother that led him to this concept, which he also applied to develop his philosophy of process, a revolutionary way of thinking that is still generating followers today.
[see: http://www.arthuryoung.com/isc/index.html ]

From Princeton, in the 1920s, Young said that he knew he wanted to be an inventor and invent something new that would change society for the better, and went to Washington DC to review the lists of patents and patents pending, especially checking out high fidelity and stereophonic sound, fm radio, television, three dimensional film and vertical flight – all of which were envisioned, but had yet to be successfully developed. Of all the items on his list, Young said he thought vertical flight, the helicopter, would be the easiest, as it was only a matter of mastering the physics of flight.

Instead of working with full scale products however, Young decided to use models, and began experimenting with small, motor powered and tethered scale models, which could be tested without endangering a pilot. For years, which became decades, Young worked on his model helicopters in his colonial brick barn in suburban Philadelphia. Young wasn’t the only inventor working on the helicopter, and one of the radical concepts Young adapted from Sokorsky’s design was the rear rotation blade, which he perfected with a unique stabilizing bar that was the basis for his patent.

Once he got the rear blade and stabilizing bar in place, he was able to control and direct the maneuver of his model, which brought him up to 1939, when the world was on the verge of war. So he put his model helicopter into a little black box and took up to Bell Aircraft in upstate New York. There he made an appointment with Larry Bell, the owner of the factory that was busy making fighter aircraft that were sold to Russia. The secretary told him that Mr. Bell would only be able to see him for 15 minutes, Young walked out of the executive office and into the main factory and took his model out of the box, set it up and began flying it around the huge room, to the amazement of the factory workers and engineers on hand. When Larry Bell came out of his office to see what all the commotion was about, Young landed the model helicopter at Bell’s feet.

They went into the office, and in fifteen minutes Bell Helicopter was in business, though Young explained that it would take a few years to develop his scale model into a full sized flying machine. Actually it took more than a few years, and like Jacque Cousteu’s aqua lung, the Bell 47A didn’t become the first helicopter approved by the Federal Aviation Administration until the war was over.
[See: http://helis.com/timeline/bell.php ]

Once the full scale model Bell helicopter finally got off the ground and was totally operational, Young said his job was over and he wanted to move on to other things. That’s when he began to take an interest in esoteric studies like ESP and astrology, what he called his “gee wiz” years.

Since his quest to invent a practical helicopter was over, his first wife thought he would settle down, but instead, he went on to study even more esoteric ideas, like Extra Sensory Perception (ESP), remote viewing and healing, yoga and mind over matter. While his wife failed to appreciate these new experiments, he met Ruth Forbes Paine, who was a bit of an excentric herself. Eventually Young divorced his first wife and married Ruth Forbes Paine.

In Philadelphia Young set up the Foundation for the Study of Consciousness (FSC), which he later folded because of institutional problems and funding sources, then establishing the Center for the Study of Consciousness (CSC) in California, which is still in existence [ See: CSC ] .

From what I gathered, he had funding sources that were giving him trouble, and he wanted to be independent, which made me think that the CIA or some federal agencies had bankrolled him in the beginning, but he didn’t like where they were going.

I asked him if he had ever experimented with psychedelic, mind-expanding drugs, and he said he tried peyote once, but he said he could achieve the same experience doing yoga.

As I discussed these new experiments with Young, he stopped and asked me a question. Having figured out my astrological chart while we were talking, he said that I am at the stage in my career where he was in the late 1940s, and getting the helicopter off the ground. I am on the verge of a great discovery, he said.

Then he asked me, “Are you an alien?”
Taken aback, I asked if he meant like an illegal Irish alien, without a green card?

And he said, no, was a I from the Pleadies?

“Where are the Pleadies?” I asked.

When he said some two hundred thousand light years away in the Tarus constalation, I said, no I wasn’t. I really was from across the river in Camden, New Jersey. I think he was disappointed I wasn’t.

He explained that my astrological chart indicated that I might have been from the Pleadies. And when I asked more questions, he said that there were already a number of different alien – meaning people from other planets, galaxies, among us, including the Pleadieans, who resemble humans in form and mingle among us to study us. Then there are the “Grays,” who have the big eyes and look like ET and the Roswell crash victims. The Grays and the Pleadians don’t like each other and are often at war, he explained, which puts us in the middle of their intergallatic battle.

When I asked if there was any documentation for all this he went into the other room, which was also lined with books from floor to ceiling, and knew right were a particular book was and took it off the shelf. I wrote down the name of the book and it’s author, a retired Air Force officer, whose book was self published in New Mexico.

The book was about a German alps farmer whose land is used by the Pleadeans as a staging area to come and go in their flying saucers. There’s pictures of the German, the farm, flying saucers in the air, and one of the Pleadians, a knockout blonde, who Art Young said, allowed her picture to be taken because her research project on earth was complete and she was heading home. The flying saucers take them to a “Beam Ship,” which is parked at the edge of the solar system so as not to affect the pull of the planets or for some scientific reason. The Beam Ship then delivers them back to the Pleadies, a group of some seven planets that are visible to astronomers, but very far away.

[Later that night, driving home across the Somers Point – Ocean City causeway over the bay, I saw a double – two parallel shooting stars streak across the sky, far out to sea, and knew that it was a special night. The next day I called information in New Mexico and got the phone number of the retired AF officer who wrote the UFO book. He answered the phone, and when I asked where I could buy his book, he said I couldn’t. It was out of print and he wasn’t printing anymore. When he asked where I saw a copy, he opened up a bit when I said Arthur Young. He was pals with Art Young. I asked him where he was stationed in the Air Force, and he said for the most part, at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio. I told him I went to the University of Dayton. I asked him if he was part of Project Blue Book, and he said yes. And when I asked who his commander was, he said, Gen. Charles Cabal, the brother of the Mayor of Dallas, Texas.]

While I was talking to Young, we were interrupted by his wife, Mrs. Ruth Forbes Paine Young, who seemed like a nice, little old lady. Arthur Young had explained earlier that she was in the beginning stages of altimizers, but was still okay, though a bit slow. She sat down with us for awhile, and while I wanted her to talk about her good friend Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles’ WWII OSS mistress, instead I asked her about her work with the World Federalists.

Founded by Cord Meyer, Jr., a USMC veteran who later became a top deputy to Alan Dulles at the CIA, the World Federalists were an early attempt to support the United Nations and work towards the establishment of a world government. In its fledgling years, Ruth Forbes Paine Young held a number of charity balls to raise money for the organization, and helped it get established. Other World Federalists of note are Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Lee Harvey Oswald’s biographer, and Walter Cronkite, an official spokesman.

Arthur Young said that one of his wife’s most significant achievements was the establishment of the International Peace Academy (IPA) at the United Nations, which she did with the assistance of Gen. Rickie, of the Indian Army. The IPA gets young, up and coming UN officials to play role games in which they try to resolve conflicts without going to war. There’s a photo of Rikhye and Ruth F.P. Young together on their web site
[ See: http://www.ipacademy.org/ ]

In turn, Mrs. Young said that her husband was most proud of the humanatarian uses of the helicopter, in fighting forest fires and in Korea, in the MASH evacuations, but didn’t like the idea of it being converted into an attack weapon, as it was used in Vietnam.

Arthur Young said he was also proud of the fact that the Bell 47A model, with the glass bubble and girders, was on display as a work of art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, a fact that his artist parents would have thought amusing.

While Young was secure from his Bell Helicopter holdings, Ruth Forbes was also well established from her side of the family.

Ruth Forbes Paine Young had been married twice before. One husband had passed away, while the other Lyman Paine, was a radical co-founder of the Trotskyite movement in the United States. The Forbes however, were well healed capitalists, and her relatives were old blue bloods, one was on the board of United Fruit Company during the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954. The Forbes own an island off the coast of Massachusetts, near Woods Hole, where the family has annual retreats, and allows yachtsmen like Walter Cronkite to drop anchor while sailing around.

Ruth Forbes Paine’s son Michael would become the more famous of them all as the chief benefactor to Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President Kennedy.

Michael attended Harvard, but dropped out and enrolled at Swarthmore College near Philadelphia, a Quaker school located near the Young farmstead. While in Philadelphia Michael Paine met Ruth Hyde, an Ohio Quaker teaching at a Friends School. Michael Paine and Ruth Hyde were mentors of Arthur and Ruth F.P.Young, and lived with them for awhile, said to have stayed in the barn where Art invented his helicopter.

Eventually Michael took a job with Bell Helicopter, as an “inventor” and designer, and with Ruth, moved to Texas to work at the Bell Helicopter plant there.

It was while living in Irving, a suburb of Dallas-Fort Worth, where it was arranged, through a mutual friend, George DeMohrenschildt, for Michael Paine to meet Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald, who had recently returned from Soviet Russia with a Russian wife and child, liked to talk about idealogy, Communism and different forms of political societies. DeMohrenschildt thought that Oswald should meet Michael Paine, and through a friend in the oil business, Volkmar Schmidt, arranged for them to meet at a party in February, 1963. The party was held at Schmidt’s house, which he share with two other men, one whose father was a director of Radio Free Europe, and the other, like Schmidt, worked for Magnolia Oil. The odd thing about this party was that neither Schmidt nor Michael Paine showed up.

Oswald and his wife Marina met Ruth Paine however, and Ruth, who was studying Russian at the time, enjoyed talking in Russian with Marina, and they became fast friends. Later on, another party was held for Oswald to meet Michael Paine, and they finally met. One day, when Michael Paine picked Oswald up at his apartment in Oak Cliff to drive him to his home in Irving, Michael Paine saw the photo of Oswald brandishing a rifle, pistol and copies of Communist publications, one of which was the official publication of the Trotskyite Party in the Untied States. I’ve always wondered how Oswald could have talked about those things without Michael Paine telling Oswald that his father was a co-founder of the Trotskyite Party.

Ruth Paine took Russian language lessons from Marina and gave driving lessons to Oswald, while Michael Paine explained to Oswald how cheap it would be to buy a car.

Shortly after Oswald is alleged to have taken a pot shot at Gen. Walker in Dallas on April 10, 1963, it was decided that the Oswalds would relocate to New Orleans, Oswald’s hometown. Ruth drove Oswald to the bus station and took Marina and the daughter home with her to Irving until Oswald got settled with a job and apartment in New Orleans. When that happened, Ruth drove Marina there in early May, where they lived for the summer.

It was during the summer of 1963 when Ruth Paine and her two children drove their Chevy station wagon on a roundabout vacation to the Forbes family island off Massachusetts, then to the Young’s home in Paoli, Pa., near Philly, and then to Ohio to see her family. It was then Ruth H. Paine wrote to the expecting Marina at her Magazine street apartment in New Orleans, asking her if she wanted to move to Irving, Texas with her while she had her baby. If so, Ruth said she would drive through New Orleans on the return trip and pick her up, and for Marina to respond by writing to her : c/o Arthur Young, Paoli, Pennsylvania.

And that’s what happened, and that’s the only reference I can find to Art Young in the official JFK assassination records, which sparked my interest in the man.

So Ruth Paine picked up Marina and the baby, and ostensibly the alleged assassination rifle, and delivered them to her home in Irving, Texas, while Oswald took off for Mexico City, where he tried to get a visa to Cuba. When he failed, he returned to Dallas, stayed at the YMCA for a few days, and then visited his family and the Paines in Irving. Since Michael Paine was separated from his wife, and had his own apartment, Oswald occasionally stayed overnight at the Paine home. On another night, he went with Michael Paine to a American Civil Liberties Union meeting.

On the evening before the assassination, Oswald stayed overnight at the Paine home, and ostensibly took his rifle from the Paine garage and used it to kill the President. At the same time the president was being shot, Michael Paine was sitting in the Bell Helicopter cafeteria having lunch with a co-worker, discussing the subject of political assassination. It was a moment of ESP that only Arthur Young could appreciate.

Before I had left Young he took me on a short tour of his barn, where there was a model helicopter. Young said he was looking to be a mentor to some young students who wanted to take up the idea of using models to advance aviation design, but few were interested. There was a black and white photo of Young as a young man working with a model, which he gave me. He warned however, that his ideas are so radical that he didn’t think I would be able to convince a mainstream editor from publishing a story about him.

In that regard, so far he has been right.

When I left him however, he had invited me back, and I thought I would be able to continue the interview on another day. But as Young said, Time intervenes, and you never know what surprises time brings.

Bill Kelly
Browns Mills, N.J.
February 16, 2004
Bkjfk3@yahoo.com



















From:
JFK – The Documented Screenplay (Applause Books, 1992, p. 111-112)

“X (Voice-over)….don’t underestimate the budget cuts Kennedy called for in March of ’63 either – close to 52 military installations in 25 states, 21 overseas bases, you’re talking big money. You know how many helicopters have been lost in Vietnam? About three thousand so far. Who makes them? Bell helicopter. Who owns Bell? Bell was near bankruptcy when the First National Bank of Boston approached the CIA about developing a the helicopter for Indochina usage. How ‘bout the F-111 fighters? General Dynamics in Fort Worth. Who owns that? Find out the defense budget since the war began. $75 going on a hundred billion….$200 billion’ll be spent there before it ends. In 1950 it was $13 billion. No war, no money. Sometimes I think the organizing principle resides in its war powers. Even Eisenhower – military hero of WWII – warned us about it: ‘beware the military-industrial complex,’ he said. Kennedy wanted to end the cold war in his second term. He wanted to call off the moon race in favor of cooperation with the Soviets. He signed a treaty with the Soviets to ban nuclear testing, he refused to invade Cuba in ’62, and he set out to withdraw from Vietnam. But that all ended on November 22, 1963.”

Footnote: - Bell Helicopter: In the early 1960’s, 1st National Bank of Boston had the Textron company as a major client. The bank advised Textron to take over a near-bankrupt company, recommending Bell because the helicopter market was bound to benefit from the developments in Southeast Asia [ Prouty, ‘Visions of a Kennedy Dynasty,’ Freedom, April-May, 1987]