I think it was because [Nikola] Tesla and [Leon] Theremin were part of what made up the movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Klaatu was actually a European among the Americans. And so the person who wrote the story said that Klaatu came from Europa, the fourth moon of Jupiter, which is now being investigated for life. There's water and ice on it and that kind of stuff.
Paul LaffoleyI met a guy who had the same theory and wrote a book about it. His name is Walter C. Wright Jr. His book is called Gravity Is a Push. I wrote to him and told him about my father, and he said he wished he'd met him. My father died quite a while ago.
Paul LaffoleyEventually, to get through school, I would make good meaningless blobs if I had to. And so they thought I was falling in with them and stuff like that. But on the playground, kids would come up to me and say, "I need three Supermans and a Captain Midnight by four o'clock because I'm going to sell them to somebody else." So I'd take all their lunch money and whip these things out, and they'd have to stick them in their underwear to get the pictures home, because if the teacher ever found out about that.
Paul LaffoleyThe Babson Institute, which is now an actual university, was started by this guy [my father] who also had a problem with believing in gravity. And so he started the Babson Institute in New Boston, New Hampshire, which then moved to Gloucester. Each year they have a competition of one thousand dollars for one thousand words of an essay on gravity. That's the way they do it.
Paul LaffoleyI began to research the concept of dimensionality from the point of view of quality, and not just quantity, as a mathematician might do. Taking my clues from the theosophical use made of the Vedantic levels of reality, I identified the western notion of Energy (as someting which is effecatious by means of motion), with the idea of Time. The more comprehensive dimension 'eternity' I defined as a form of energy which is efficacious without motion. In this manner I began to establish the qualities of dimensions and open out the seemingly monolithic concept of energy.
Paul Laffoley[H.P.Lovecraft] is thrust into some kind of outer space realm, like here [pointing toward the painting in progress]. In other words, he's recognized he's gone through R'lyeh, the Sunken City of R'lyeh, and then Cthulhu, the extraterrestrial, calls his band of worshippers home to recognize him as the anti-christ. This is all in The Necronomicon, something Lovecraft actually did make up.
Paul LaffoleyI would say [to my father], "Why don't you actually take some courses in physics instead of saying [you are not believing in gravity]?" But he would never do it. Businessmen for some reason or other, think, because they're successful in a single direction, that they know everything. You know what I mean? You ever meet people like that?
Paul Laffoley