A Great Man is Gone

Dr. Robert Duncan-Enzmann

 

Public Obituary

Dr. Robert Duncan-Enzmann was born in Peking, China in 1924 to an American mother and an Austrian father. He passed away on October 19, 2020 and is survived by his wife, six children, and fourteen grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his beloved sister, Jane. He served in the Navy during WW II as a pilot and navigator, receiving a Purple Heart. He was discharged with honor.

Dr. Enzmann came to the USA for the first time at the age of five. He grew up in Massachusetts and Maine. He earned doctorates in medicine and geology and attained three master’s degrees. He conducted geological work all over the world, especially in Southwest Africa. He authored several books; his translations of ice age inscriptions were published in 2013. Dr. Enzmann is best known for his work in the pre-NASA space and military weapons industry, working with Drs. Goddard, Bussard, and von Braun, to lay the foundation for landing men on the Moon. He worked for Beryllium Corp, Avco, and Raytheon, and taught at several Boston universities.

A Great Man Is Gone

Our Memorial to Doc E

On Tuesday, October 19, 2020 the world lost one of the most intelligent minds to have lived in centuries. Dr. Enzmann is now preserved in Suspended Animation, at a cryogenics facility in Detroit. One day, he told us, he will be cloned or even revived, providing that humanity has defeated old age. At least this was his hope in life.

Robert Duncan-Enzmann was born in Peking, China at a time just before the electrification of the city, before the introduction of the motorcar. His father, Ernst von Enzmann, was an officer in Franz Josef’s army. He escaped from prison in Siberia by walking to China; his mother, Florence Goodman was a native of Maine, USA. As a Johns Hopkins graduate she was on the Peking Union Medical College staff. Ernst and Florence met there and married. 

Robert attended British Embassy schools where he was taught reading, writing, composition, arithmetic (emphasizing mental computation), history, astronomy, and navigationally based geography. The school regularly exchanged students with France and Germany beginning with Kindergarten. 

He has achieved degrees in engineering, physics, medicine, and law, and has geological experience on every continent. He is fluent in many languages, including English, Chinese, German, Arabic, and French. He can also read several ancient languages. Dr. Robert Duncan-Enzmann’s extensive travel, education, and knowledge of languages were of great benefit to his life-long effort translating ice age inscriptions, which were published in 2013. His accomplishments in planetology and space mission planning are too numerous to list.

Doc E lived almost one hundred years. He witnessed a century of technological advance, from life without electricity to landing men on the Moon. He saw the invention of the light bulb, the radio, television, cars, computers, missiles, rockets, and space shuttles. He worked with von Braun to develop the most powerful engine ever devised – the Saturn Five.

What is best known in Doc E’s portfolio is perhaps the Enzmann Starship. An interstellar ship based on a design that Dr. Bussard and Dr. Enzmann worked on – the Orion – Dr. Enzmann’s starship advanced the Orion’s capabilities to that of interstellar travel. Yet, what is not as well known about Dr. Enzmann is the vast area of influence his knowledge had on our world. In some circles he was known as the Missile Lord, as his work in weapons and radar has resulted in an unparalleled military capability to defend our nation.

One of the most outstanding achievements was his development of the APChE (Automated Program Checkout Equipment) program for prelaunch. Applied to the Patriot Missile, it is now used to launch everything that leaves the planet. FREA published an article about this in ENDEAVOR (spring 2019 premier issue, page 12).

Another area of knowledge that will continue to enrich humanity is his expertise in history. His magnum opus, which FREA intends to complete for him, is to combine all known history timelines into one. From astronomical events to zoological evolution, Doc E has notes, lists, timelines, images, and documents which will be merged into one manuscript. He explained that this is the only way to correct accounts of history that are contradicted by other accounts, and to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of Earth’s complete history.

The histories of astronomical events, geological events, agriculture, human and animal migrations, sociology, religion, animal life, oceanography, climatology, tools, housing, medicine, pottery, hunting and fishing, weapons, navigation, and much more have all been researched and detailed notes taken. Not only will FREA compile and publish the manuscript, but we have invested in an online timeline which allows entry of events over millions of years, yet in detail of day and time when needed.

Included in the History Archive are the extensive documents generated by his work translating ice age inscriptions. Like the Rosetta Stone, these translations have opened our ability to read the pictorial language of 12,500 BC, and of those older and more recent. The same style of language was used in 16,000 BC at Altamira and is the foundation of much more recent languages. Ice Age Language, translations, vocabulary, and grammar was published in 2013.

Doc E earned a Doctorate in geology from Upsala University. He did field work on every continent, especially southwest Africa. This foundation made him valuable to the military and space tech industries, and he spent many years researching and creating beryllium, a substance with specific uses in both areas. FREA’s Museum Archive has many samples of his efforts to create this substance. Doc E understood that if we were to explore planets and asteroids, geology was an essential area of knowledge to have. So why did the USA wait until the last Moon landing to send a geologist?

In the Rhodes Fairbridge Encyclopedia of Geomorphology, Doc E published his Expanded Order Theory. It is a fundamental area of study for those interested in Cosmology.

Dr. Enzmann’s medical doctorate benefitted from his geological knowledge, especially that which pertained to the natural formation of hexagrams and pentagrams, which he said were valuable in diagnostic observation. This was the basis of his thesis, which FREA hopes to publish.

Doc E started writing at age five and has done so ever since. Educated in RAJ schools in China and Germany, he had many unusual interests for a young boy, one of which was rocket fuel. Taught math calculations done mentally, languages, and history, he gained an education taught by teachers who were in their 80s, who were also taught by teachers in their 80s – providing an education which covered two centuries of his teachers’ personal experience as well as the academic subjects. He learned King’s English in the RAJ schools and Chinese on the streets of Peking. By adulthood Doc E could read and or write over a dozen languages.

Doc E also told stories. Many stories. Some were about history, told as verisimilitudes, some were technological sci-fi. Some were about his life. Without these stories the Enzmann Universe would not exist.

His stories grew from the reality of his knowledge, his work, and his futurist vision. RealScience Fiction is based on hard, workable, feasible science. Doc E wants readers to immerse themselves in a possible world of starships, and his stories tell us what kind of life that would be. We offer these stories here, in the Enzmann Chronicles, for your enjoyment and inspiration. Starships could have been reality in our current century, had the powers that be allowed the Grand Design to manifest. Alas, they did not.

In story and in real life, Dr. Robert Duncan-Enzmann and Joanna Enzmann changed the face of our country – changed the face of the world. Their work in space engineering, missile defense, radar, and computer programming is the foundation of every rocket and missile that leaves the ground, and every defense against airborne attack. It is the foundation on which the USA sent men to the Moon.

Here is a brief list of his educational and professional accomplishments: 

British Embassy School, Peking, China; WW II USNAC; AB Harvard; ScB Hon., London; Standard, MSc, Witwatersrand; Nat Sci Scholar; MIT course work; Royal Inst. Uppsala Swed.; PhD/MD Cuidad Juarez, Mex.; Pacific Radar: Greenland Gap-filler, Canada DEW-line; SAGE; Pacific PRESS; California ATLAS, BMEWS; ICBM; Kwajalein Atoll ICBM intercept; TRADEX; Mars Voyager; Cryptography.

At FREA our mission is to publish the vast amount of writing and imagery Doc E produced in his more than nine decades of life. The Archive contains not just his stories, but sciences and history as well – translations of ice age inscriptions, timelines, cosmology, astronomy, medicine, geology, radar, physics, mathematics, planetology, engineering, archaeology, and more.

The Archive also includes hundreds of objects from his life, his travels, and his work on every continent. FREA is founding a museum and gallery as part of the Enzmann Legacy.

His widow asks that in lieu of flowers, memorial donations be sent to the nonprofit that publishes Dr. Enzmann’s work: Foundation for Research of the Enzmann Archive, Inc.

Donations can be sent online via freafoundation.space or by PayPal to freafoundation@gmail.com. Checks can be mailed to 70 North Street, Grafton, MA 01519.

Rare Appearance of Doc E in the Media

A rare media appearance by Doc E in the Lowell Sun. No year on the date, but his first conference was 1965.  The article is like a who's who in the academic and technical world of space sciences. 

Provided by Foundation for Research of the Enzmann Archive, Inc.

Information from the ice age to the space age. 

Why Wait?

Excerpt from Wagon Train to the Stars
 by Dr. Robert Duncan-Enzmann

Prologue: Let the Wagons Roll

Jewel Box Star Cluster

Wagon Train: Out of the Night, Into the Light

The Infinite Ocean of interstellar space, an infinite sea,  

is without knowable boundaries.  

Stupidity of President Grey along with other national leaders results in the “Great Boondoggle.” More Government make-work projects. Oh sure, Yes, and Yes, it was done by private industry - but who financed the Hungry Horse aerospace venture? The taxpayers of course. A big fanfare send off; interesting to begin with,  tapering through less-and-less communication into a nothingness - silence from one, two, then all of the ships.

What happened?

Who knows.

All too soon
not much of anyone cares.

Over thirty years
most everyone forgets.

Lagoons of Light
That was then. This is now. Thirty years passed in silence, and then? News! From one, two, then the three ships that sailed together!

Success, a song of success in aces,

We landed, here's where!

Just look at these places.

Sweet success, we refueled - here's how!

Watch the videos.

We're coming home!

Yes, we were cut off,

here's what happened.

Return takes another twenty years. That’s a generation on Earth. It’s another two decades ago, added to thirty years already passed by; a bit over a half a century has passed on Earth. For the explorers, only a few years have passed. Starship voyagers are, in ways, blessed; in other ways cursed when cruising at full speed between the stars where, for them, time dilation slows, actually almost stops the passage of time. Their communication continues:

This is what happened to cut us off. 

It will happen again. 

But once through that region 

you will hear us loud and clear! 

And, yes, before you ask, 

we talk with each other, 

Except there.

Landfalls 

Twenty years out then several years of communication before the mid-course black-out. What Earth hears fires imaginations. An effort that slowed-down, but never really stopped, accelerates into a planetary boom.

Here we must digress for moments to repeat what every generation seems to relearn:

IT’S NOT WHAT YOU SAY. IT’S HOW YOU SAY IT.

How easily the utterly obvious is overlooked. One politician after another bemoans the fact that the 90% support the 10%. Then with industrialization, 40% support 60%. Automation begins, develops, and expands until 5% can easily support 95%.  Why bemoan and worry the World?

Not politicians but visionaries electrify and fire imaginations, galvanizing the potential work force, which then “mobilizes itself.” Earth’s industries roar as never before. Four words by an astute politician mark a watershed:

LET THE WAGONS ROLL!!!

The pioneer ships are home. Only five, mankind’s first interstellar explorers, had casted off a long half century ago. Two ships that sailed, each to a different destination stellar landfall, now at last are back home.

At the same time three Echolances that sailed together now exit the timeless seas of no-when, where time for them slows so much it almost stops. In no-when, decades, even centuries may pass for us on Earth, but aboard the starships? At most only months for the voyagers. The Echolances that sailed alone, each to explore a potential New Earth, have now returned.  All three modestly successful; they return with gold. All three are docked, being repaired and refurbished. Their relatively small crews trade with and their officers negotiate with Earth's people.

The fleet is Rainbow, Glory, and Aurora. Their explorations about the Jewel Box Star Cluster are a resounding success.  Even as they approach Earth, their officers negotiate with a huge Wagon Train of colonists' ships that they will guide to and about the Jewel Box - a place of many-colored stars and a number of habitable planets. One is especially so - in fact it seems nicer than Earth itself.

This is just the beginning. Humankind, at the very edge of the interstellar sea, knows only a little about what lies out there.  So far we have succeeded only in finding some promising landfall. Are there others out there? To date we know only of us. Ships Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and the Rainbow, Glory, Aurora have found occasion vegetation, but no intelligences, no signals, nor any animals; only some algae, lichen,  moss, and fungus-like vegetations. And fortunately have found no dreadful virii, bacteria, or other pathogens.  It’s sort of sterile out there.

And so I ask:  What  do we really know about much of anything out there? A great adventure of discovery is waiting. Let the Wagons Roll!! What are we waiting for?

Provided by Foundation for Research of the Enzmann Archive, Inc.