George Noory swallows a turkey

        About half way through the first-hour interview last Monday on Coast to Coast AM, George Noory asked his guest "When you first heard this story from Bill Ryan, did you believe it?" The guest replied "I realized intuitively that it was a true story."

        LOL, as they say. Bill Ryan, the former squeeze of Kerry Cassidy, is about as unreliable a source as can be imagined, as this blog has written before. As for "intuitive realization," that and 25¢ will get you a short phone call. The guest was Len Kasten, and the "story" was none other than Project Serpo.

40 × C
        The story of Project Serpo, in a nutshell, is this: One extraterrestrial being survived the "flying saucer crash" at Roswell in 1947, and retrieved a communication  device allowing him to talk to his home planet Serpo, a planet of the ζ Reticuli binary system 39 light years from Earth. This led to an exploration of Serpo by 12 U.S. military astronauts, traveling at 40 times the speed of light. Both wikipedia and rational wikipedia have articles on this hilarious sci-fi fantasy, and both point out the obvious logical objections to the narrative. Perhaps chief among them is that distance. How do you have a conversation with somebody 39 LY away? How do you travel at 40 × C? Kasten, having no education in relativistic physics, confidently states that it's all done by a wormhole, but what exactly is he asking us to believe? Is there just one wormhole linking our solar system to ζ Reticuli, or is there a network of these things in the universe? Are they labeled? How would an expedition find the entrance to the appropriate one, given that a wormhole has never been actually observed and probably never could be? FYI: A wormhole is a purely theoretical solution to some advanced equations in relativity, and the primary benefit therefrom is an exciting way to teach a difficult subject. If wormholes exist at all, they are most likely transient and an excessively unreliable way of traversing the universe.


        Kasten was on hand last Monday not only to reaffirm his faith in this fantasy but to provide updates. The classic version of the story has it that all 12 astronauts died a long time ago, but Kasten now says that one, called "Mr. Euro", survived until 2014 and met with Pope Benedict. Not only that, but diplomatic relations between Earth and Serpo are flourishing, and nine other expeditions have taken place since the original one. The originator of the Serpo story, who was only known as Request Anonymous, was in fact a high-ranking DIA official, and editor of the Red Book of Presidential briefings. Numerous valuable technical secrets have been derived from Serpo, most notably the key to free energy. Kasten explained that we could all be benefiting from free energy right now, but the Illuminati, "who run this planet," won't allow it. So here we go again with that adolescent rage I wrote about in my last post.

Fact vs. fiction
        Well, of course this is all poppycock. Even the gullible Bill Ryan finally admitted he'd been hoodwinked and partly repudiated the story. George Noory himself may have had doubts about it, but he conducted the interview exactly as if he believed every word. He called it "this incredible story" and that's just what it is. There's a key to understanding this bullshit, and it's this. Len Kasten has a book to sell. "Request Anonymous" is not a high-ranking DIA official but Richard C. Doty, a former security guard with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Doty had a book to sell as well. Bingo.

       Why do I care? Why not let C2C-AM get on with its campfire yarns and stop snapping at their heels? There are two reasons. One is that yarns like this seriously devalue real science. The terrible danger is that impressionable people believe them, and since they are incompatible with real science, the real science gets rejected in their eyes. The other is that I feel a duty to remind the consumers of this rubbish that it's really all about selling books and conference fees. This is just how chat radio works--radio gets interviewees for free (and they lose a night's sleep, often) in return for flagrant  book marketing. Welcome to the real world.

Richard Hoagland has so much to learn

        We already know that Richard Hoagland is utterly incompetent at math, but now it seems he's about equally incompetent as a chat radio interviewer. I've "come across" an .mp3 file of the 30th July edition of The Other Side of Midnight, and it's pretty amusing. This is a two-hour show, five (theoretically!) nights a week, that he's been hosting for over a year now, and he still hasn't learned some basic interview skills such as NOT asking a question then cutting your guest off after he's spoken only ten words in reply. Here's a verbatim transcript:

 25:30 Intervieweee: "This election is a cartoon. It's unbelievable. Erm... You have this guy who's a ... a well-known blowhard, you know, celebrity narcissist character. And then you have this woman who, ah, basically if you understand certain insider testimony she already was president for eight years. She ran the country --  Bill was off signing greeting cards and, you know, messing around with staffers, and Hillary was in there actually making all the decisions. She was really the President."

Hoagland: "Hang on David, Hang on. How the hell do you know that?"

Intervieweee: "Multiple insiders have spoken to me, and have said that, ah..."

Hoagland: "Hang on, let me stop you..."

        The interviewee was in fact David Wilcock, a delusional author specializing in apocalyptic predictions. His bio claims, in part, that "Multiple insiders with access to highly classified information have shared what they know with David." He throws the expression "quantum physics" around almost as capriciously as Hoagland himself tosses out "hyperdimensional physics" and "torsion field." It's quite evident that neither of them has any actual understanding of physics. About half-way through this interview Wilcock informed us that if you look in a microscope anywhere in the universe, and you zoom down to the sub-atomic level, you'll arrive at the exact same point, the "seed." This is, er... not exactly correct.

It's paranoia time
         If one single word could encapsulate this extravaganza, it would be PARANOIA -- on the part of both Wilcock and Hoagland. Paranoia at an almost Kerry Cassidy level of intensity. Both of them seem totally convinced that  the Illuminati are enslaving all of us. Even the Alex Jones-inspired term "prison planet" came up without anybody's tongue in his cheek. Numerology also gets wrapped in to their thinking, as when Wilcock commented on the fact that Stanley Kubrick died of a heart attack on the exact same day (7 March 1999) that Richard Hoagland had his own infarct^{note 1}.

18:41 Wilcock: "When we hear about something like people trying to ice you and actually icing Kubrick 666 days before January 1st 2001, it's not only not a coincidence, and it's not only a deliberate thing that was done. It is actually a black magic attempt to create energy through these human sacrifices."

        Hoagland himself keeps insisting -- without evidence -- that his cardiac emergency was a deliberate attempt on his life, rather than a natural phenomenon of a mid-50s man in a stressful situation. Kubrick was 70 when he died, and most people would look no further than his age and his highly stressful occupation for a causus morti. Wilcock didn't think to let us know whether this "attempt to create energy" was successful or, if so, what exact form the energy took.

        The bullshit was laid down thick and fast. Hoagland spoke of "psychotronic energy," which he explained as the use of hyperdimensional physics (of course!) to control human beings. Wilcock alluded to some "intention experiment" conducted by Maharishi Mahesh in the 60s, whereat meditation by a large number of people succeeded in reducing strife in the world by 72%.

47:36 Wilcock: "Look, there's no war strategy, there's no B2 bomber, there's nothing that they've ever spent money on that could even begin to accomplish a 72% reduction in terrorism. This technology -- and it is a technology -- has overwhelming significance and if you think about how threatening that would be to the power elite... They need us to stay depressed -- they need us to stay locked up in a world of weaponized food and alcohol and drug addictions to prescription drugs or all kinds of different things they're pushing on us. They don't want us to be happy, they don't want us to be empowered, they don't want us to be healthy, and they need us to stay depressed because if too many people get happy it changes the physics and they will not be able to maintain power."

        "Weaponized food" -- what a perfect description of that chicken vindaloo I had last Friday night. To me, there's something adolescent about this "THEY are controlling us" mindset. It's so reminiscent of children getting enraged when they discover that their parents have all the power in the family. There too, food -- the provision or withholding of it -- is often a symbol of power, or perceived as such. And what is teenage angst but the denial of happiness by a cruel world? When Wilcock says "if too many people get happy it changes the physics..." I become convinced that not only does he not understand physics, but he doesn't even know what physics is.

        At one point, discussing the mighty changes sweeping through the whole solar system^{note 2}, Hoagland came up with a wonderful ploy. Pluto, he said, was not only a planet but an artificial body, "an archive." He said "I predicted that -- months before they got there." So here's the Hoagland formula for self-defined success:

1. Make a nonsense prediction.
2. Claim that it came true.
3. Pat yourself on the back.

Brilliant.


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[1] Actually, according to his own notes, Hoagland's event was a day earlier.

[2] It's brightening, according to Hoagland and Wilcock. Strange that astronomers with access to actual instruments haven't noticed that.