Monday, February 4, 2019

"Multiple scientists"... oh yeah?

James Concannon writes...

        Robert Morningstar, as I've remarked previously, gets up in the morning and scratches around his favorite internet sources to see what's shocking today. He then re-posts a selection without ever checking to see if what he's laying before his followers is actually... you know, TRUE.

        Today's hilarious result was an article titled "Multiple Scientists Publish Papers Suggesting The Moon Is Hollow & Artificially Made," by Arjun Walia of Exonews. Walia has no qualifications related to astronomy, and none in journalism either. An article he wrote in 2013 linking vaccines to autism was demolished by the I Speak of Dreams blog.

        So who are these "multiple scientists" of which Walia writes? In order as written, they are the following:

1. USAF Colonel Ross Dedrickson (d. 2007). He had some crackpot ideas about aliens on the Moon, but he was not a scientist and he never said or wrote that the Moon is hollow and artificially made.

2. Dr. Horace Crater, a physicist from the University of Tennessee Space Institute, who, according to Walia's Exonews article,  "recently published a paper in the Journal of Space Exploration that identified certain features that appear inside the [satellite] crater Paracelsus C on the far side of the Moon."

        A paper of that nature was indeed published by J. Space Exploration, on 30 September 2016. Its exact title was Image Analysis of Unusual Structures on the Far Side of the Moon in the Crater Paracelsus C. The problem is, Horace Crater, who retired in June 2015, didn't write it. The authors were Mark J Carlotto, Francis L Ridge and Ananda L Sirisena of the Lunascan Project and Society for Planetary SETI Research, Tennessee, USA. Mark Carlotto is one of the foremost proponents of the artificiality of the so-called Face on Mars. He's a satellite imaging specialist, not a scientist [but see comment by Dee, #10 below]. The Lunascan Project is or was a project specifically looking for lunar anomalies. These are the "unusual structures":


        That does not quite amount to a claim that the entire Moon is artificial, now does it?

3. The Deputy Manager for the Clementine Mission to the Moon. That would presumably be Lt. Col. Pedro Rustan of the US Naval Research Laboratory. As fas as I know Rustan never said or wrote that the Moon is hollow and artificially made.

4. Ingo Swann. Swann (d. 2013) was a self-described psychic and remote viewer, not a scientist. Arjun Walia writes that he "reported viewing strange structures and humanoid creatures on the Moon." That's "viewing" as in "seeing in his imagination" not as in "actually seeing." Swann never said or wrote that the Moon is hollow and artificially made.

5. Sean C. Solomon, the director of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Solomon said that the core of the Moon is a mystery, not that it's a hollow space.

6. Jim Marrs. Marrs (d. 2017) was a journalist and author, not a scientist. His reliablility on matters lunar may be judged from the fact that he said, at the Conscious Life Expo in February 2015, "NASA offers us no better resolution of images of the Moon and Mars than 100 yards, and at that, they all have "blurred out areas." " Marrs said plenty of whacko things, but that the Moon is hollow and artificially made is not two of them.

7. Isaac Asimov. Asimov (d. 1992) was a renowned science fiction author. He had some interesting insights about the Moon but he also never said or wrote that the Moon is hollow and artificially made.

        So the Exonews article contains not one single example of what its headline promises in plurality. Perhaps a writer cannot be held accountable for a headline, but Robert Morningstar, who describes himself as a scholar and a "civilian intelligence analyst," can be and should be castigated for irresponsible re-posting.

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

To be fair, Asimov DID have a degree in Chemistry....But when you mentioned Carlotto, that's when the red flags started going up. I kept thinking, "Carlotto...Why does that name sound so familiar? And why does it come with a bad vibe?" Then you spelled it out: he's one of the Hoaxland "Face on Mars" gang. And things didn't get any better for the Hollow/Artificial Moon people's case when you threw in Jim Marrs, because I remember thinking what a loon he was from those times I saw him on the TV series "UFO Hunters". True, Marrs didn't espouse a Hollow/Artificial Moon Theory per se, but ANY endorsement by him on practically ANY topic would call for a very large grain of salt to be taken concurrently!

Trekker said...

I wonder what those Paracelsus anomalies are? Are they collapsed lava tubes? Any ideas?

james concannon said...

Here's the LRO view at 0.5 m/px. One of them looks a lot like a collapsed lava tube. The other..., hmmm, dunno. I'll ask astroguy.

Anonymous said...

I think the "deputy manager of Clementine" scientist was likely Dr. Brandenburg. But then, I never heard him claim the Moon was hollow.

james concannon said...

Ah yes, you're right, it's in the Dedrickson link.

james concannon said...

Correction -- Here's the LRO view.

Trekker said...

Yes, I was looking at that this morning. Following the links in the blog, it seems that the best view is the photo you posted there - M118769870L

Carlotto gives a link to the five views from the LRO here: http://target.lroc.asu.edu/fcgi-bin/fprovweb.exe?_xtype=text%2Fhtml&lat=-21.6474&lon=165.2133&cmd=include+%22lroc_test_extract_data_at_ll.msh%22

the first being the clearest and most defined.

james concannon said...

astroguy suggests ejecta blocks, perhaps rolled down from higher on the crater rim.

Trekker said...

Ah, didn't think of that!

Dee said...

I know, I know, the following is a ridiculous nit pick but how do you define "scientist"? For Mark Carlotto it might all depend. He holds without much doubt an advanced degree, a PhD Electrical Engineering from a good university which usually has a rather broad scope, at least it had back in 1981. It's not unusual to then develop scientific expertise on related topics like computer science or instrument bases analysis, even crossing over to some other disciplines. Simply put: being a satellite imaging specialist does not exclude being a scientist.

Perhaps we should maintain the definition that a scientist is someone who conducts scientific research. And for a "qualified" or "bona fide" scientist this research should be conducted then under qualified or credible circumstanced in terms of "peers" like a community or a company connected to the larger scientific field. We can include the publications as one part of that, very common but not always the case.


Certain Carlotto could be qualified as scientist based on this SETI biography: "From 1981 to 1993 he was a senior member of the technical staff at the Analytic Sciences Corporation. During the period from 1981 to 1983 he was also an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the College of Engineering at Boston University. Currently he is a senior staff scientist with General Dynamics. Dr. Carlotto has published a number of technical and scientific papers in the areas of image processing, pattern recognition, remote sensing, geographic information systems, artificial intelligence applications, and optical computing".

To determine the case of Carlotto being a scientist might be clear looking back but what about now?. Publishing in recent time in refereed journals like the NEARA Journal, the Journal of Space Exploration or Journal Of The British Interplanetary Society would make somewhat of a case although journal impact factors are generally lower than 0.5. But still we are not defining here the notability but the scientific component.

Then we have his current job description of "senior staff scientist" at General Dynamics which pans out to be a credible description involving research and publications usually associated with the role in the industry.

For this reason the claim that "he's a satellite imaging specialist, not a scientist" is now debunked by a little background check. However I'd like to add that Carlotto might not qualify as scientist, now or in the past, for the field of planetary science or any kind of exogeology. Although based on his amount of publications in this field, the term "scientific research" might still apply to some smaller degree. Just not with much weight attached to it. It all depends where you draw the line perhaps. In practice these lines are not that clear in my opinion.

james concannon said...

OK, OK-- I've added a parenthetical note.

Anonymous said...

Dee: If Carlotto is still insisting there's a "face on Mars", then that makes him a crank with a science background!

Trekker said...

Is anyone still insisting the Face is a 'face'? I thought even Hoagland had moved on from that, after the HiRise close-up made such a claim impossible to hold up.

Anonymous said...

"I know, I know, the following is a ridiculous nit pick"

Yes. Yes it is. As is the seriousness everyone takes this nonsense.

expat said...

« Is anyone still insisting the Face is a 'face'? I thought even Hoagland had moved on from that, after the HiRise close-up made such a claim impossible to hold up. »

Yes. Mike Bara achieves this minor miracle by basically pretending the HiRise image never happened.

Anonymous said...

Well Well well....interesting line of reasoning...determining wether or not a scientist is a scientist or to what degree a scientist is actually a scientist. Does that mean that people yapping on about a specific scientific topic makes them scientist's by proxy because it's PC and profitable ?

So the logical questions that follow is based on some "so called scientific" developments over the years within the same reasoning..the questions are...
Is
- Al Gore a scientist?
- Bill Nye a scientist?
- David Attenborough a scientist?
- Leonardo DiCaprio a scientist?
- Emma Thompson a scientist?
- Mark Ruffalo a scientist?
- Robert Redford a scientist?
- Rajendra Pachauri a scientist?
- etc etc....

Yes I know the topic is off-topic but the line of reasoning that is brought to the fore by someone almost demands further questioning

Adrian

OneBigMonkey said...

I am currently in a 'discussion' on a message board with a couple of individuals who see artificial structures in poor quality, low resolution images taken in lunar orbit by Apollo. I have shown them high resolution versions, images taken by several different probes, made 3D models to show them different viewing angles, you name it they have been presented with it. "No" they cry, "those images have all been doctored, or are fake, or both. We like the piss poor ones that allow us to see buildings through squinty eyes and continue with our delusions".

So yeah, some people just will not accept reality even if you nail it to their eyeballs.

purpleivan said...

I think the issue is of non scientific reasoning, i.e. ignoring hard, irrefutable evidence, supported by 99.99% of the scientific community makes you a crank, regardless of a science background or not.

expat said...

« We like the piss poor ones that allow us to see buildings through squinty eyes and continue with our delusions". »

Yeah, like Mike Bara insisting that the ziggurat photo contrived by kksamurai is the ONLY authentic image of that part of the Moon.