Open letter to Linda Moulton Howe

         Coast to Coast AM is not known as a source of scientific fact—quite the converse, actually. Nevertheless, when a reputable scientist is quoted on that show I think the audience is entitled to expect to find a few pearls of fact among the dross of sensationalist speculation that is the program’s nightly bread and butter.

        There were precious few to be found in your report of your interview with John Brandenburg this week. First, his statement that NASA is “part of the Department of Defense for the intelligence community” is totally incorrect. You yourself ought to know that and should not have allowed that statement to go unchallenged. NASA’s charter and purpose is civilian space exploration and aeronautical research. JPL is a science laboratory managed by CalTech. The fact that both institutions carry out classified projects under contract to the DoD in no way alters that fact.

        Brandenburg revealed further ignorance in stating that “Almost all of the astronauts are either active military or ex-military.” This is not true. Currently 18 of 44 active NASA astronauts—a minority—are ex-military, and none at all are active military. The overwhelming majority are Ph.D scientists.

        It’s frankly astounding to hear Brandenburg accuse NASA of fudging data on xenon isotopes in the Martian atmosphere. Where did Brandenburg get the data on which he bases his nuclear theory, if not from NASA? I believe his initial analysis was based on Viking data, and since April 2015 extremely precise data on xenon and argon isotopes has been available from the SAM instrument on Curiosity. I’m quite sure Brandenburg has studied that data, and accordingly ought to be acknowledging JPL’s expertise instead of making false and defamatory statements about the laboratory.

        It was also astounding to hear you and Brandenburg discuss xenon isotope ratios on Mars without either of you making any reference to the alternative theory that the “excess” ¹²⁹xenon arose from decay of ¹²⁹iodine. Iodine is a solid in Martian ambient conditions and therefore would not have been lost at the time when Mars lost most of its atmosphere some time in the first 100 million years of the planet’s existence. There has been time since then for 275 half-lives of the ¹²⁹I > ¹²⁹Xe decay process, and that fact provides a firm enough basis for the theory that it deserves mention in any discussion such as you had with Brandenburg.

Ref: Yes, folks, it's the xenon isotope show! 

Regards,

[expat]

George Noory, YOU'RE FIRED!!!

        Look, Georgie, suppose some loony comes on your show and says something utterly daft like "The real purpose of Apollo was to retrieve Anunnaki technology from the Moon and bring it back." WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY is "Oh really? So what did they get and where tf is it now?"

        Suppose the same loony says "The story about us being warned off the Moon was buzzing all over Houston within hours of the first landing. My friend Ken Johnston worked for NASA and he confirmed it." WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY is "How the fuck would Ken know? He wasn't even in Houston—his contract with Grumman was over. He watched the landing on TV, with his wife and her parents."

YOU FAILED last night with that liar Mike Bara. YOU'RE FIRED!!!!!

NOTE HOWEVER: The book Bara was invited to plug for two hours went from Amazon ranking 365,637 / 16,698 SciFi to 31,636 / 2,419 SciFi overnight.

THAT secret UFO project

        In a prominent article titled Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program (December 16th, bylines Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean,) The New York Times  revealed for the first time a $22 million Pentagon project called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The NYT reporters wrote that it was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring. It ran from 2007 to 2012, and its objectives included investigations of UFOs.

        The UFO connection, of course, was what ensured that this piece was picked up by the mass media, re-tweeted, instagrammed, and googled to death by people passionately interested in such phenomena. But those who were perhaps hoping that this was the magic DISCLOSURE they've been anticipating as eagerly as the Pope anticipates the Second Coming, were disappointed yet again. Judging by the two videos that were embedded in the online version of the NYT article, the cases investigated were reports by military pilots of encounters with unknown aircraft, with nary a suggestion that such things were actually alien visitations. The first was an undated encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object.

         The second was  a 2004 encounter near San Diego between two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets and another unknown object.

The NYT piece included these two sentences:

"The shadowy program ... was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space."

Misperception
James Oberg, co-founder of, and occasional contributor to, this blog comments:

"I understand the media frenzy, but as usual it seems irrational. Reid set up a 'hobby shop' to please a political donor's personal interests, which involved validating the donor's personal devotion to UFO theories. The DoD never seems to have shown the slightest interest or concern in the issue. 

Per the original story: "The former staffer said that eventually, however, even Reid agreed it was not worth continuing. 'After a while the consensus was we really couldn’t find anything of substance,' he recalled. 'They produced reams of paperwork. After all of that there was really nothing there that we could find. It all pretty much dissolved from that reason alone—and the interest level was losing steam. We only did it a couple years.' ... 'There was really nothing there that we could justify using taxpayer money,' he added. 'We let it die a slow death. It was well-spent money in the beginning.' " 

Also --'ufology' has sadly disappointed, never becoming a 'science' -- forty years ago I won a worldwide essay contest with that assessment,  expressing hope it would change -- and so far, no signs of that."

        Oberg also points out that Leslie Kean, co-author of the NYT piece, is a committed UFO promoter and author of  "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record." In a 2010 critique, Oberg questioned Kean's assertion that pilots are the best observers of aerial phenomena. Today he wrote to me that Kean's inclusion is "a  journalistic travesty of the first order, worth making a fuss over, considering her track record [especially the fiasco over her championing a 'true UFO' video from Chile not long ago that turned out to have been a scheduled commercial airliner]."

        Oberg was interviewed by the Canadian CTV News Channel on Sunday night, and here's a partial transcript:

JO: "The report is on airborne threats, and threats come in all flavors. Whether it's equipment problems, or procedural errors, criminals, hackers or real enemies or even space aliens. So anything you see out there, whether it's in the air or in my experience in Mission Control, in space, you want to track it down."
CTV: "James, have you ever heard of this program in the past?"
JO: "I haven't , but I know there are people interested and there should be. In fact, there's another tremendously important reason to pay attention to the reports. You can't study UFOs because we don't have any. But you can sudy UFO reports, [and it] turns out that among the UFO reports ... one of the causes are misperception by startled viewers, especially in Russia and around the Russian border, of secret missile and space activities."

A CAD-CAM technician speaks out
        As for Mike Bara, he seems to have achieved what for him is a minor miracle—being right twice in one year. First he was almost certainly right about the so-called Nazca mummy, and now he's probably correct in dismissing this story as over-hyped.

           In a vlog on Sunday, he alleged that the true purpose of the Pentagon project was money-laundering by Harry Reid and enrichment of his pal Bigelow. He questions whether the voices heard on the video releases were really the voices of the pilots recorded live, and points out that when the first "UFO" zips out of frame, it's most likely because the gimbal camera moved.

        As for the second "UFO," he identifies it as an X-47B attack drone.

        He boasts that he actually worked on the X-47B as "an aerospace engineer for more than 25 years," which to my knowledge is an exaggeration. A CAD-CAM technician is not an engineer but just a draughtsman using a computer screen instead of a sharp pencil.

       But I have to agree with him that these videos are nothing to get too excited about. Well done Mike—dare we hope that one day you'll correct the horrible technical errors in your non-fiction books? No, I thought not...

NOTE:
        Richard Hoagland has a scheduled podcast on this topic next weekend, with guest Steve Bassett. THAT'S IF he can get his show on the air. Since he switched to blogtalkradio in October, SEVEN shows have been canceled for "technical reasons."

Update:
        The Bassett show got on the air but Bassett was inaudible (see Comment #24 from anonymous.) On C2C december 29/30 Jimmy Church poured scorn on those who maintain that the object was a drone. "If it was, it was a drone that can fly sideways," he said—and then proceeded to tell the story of his UFO experience at Joshua Tree for the nth time.

Billy Carson displays his ignorance for us all

        I'd never heard of Billy Carson before he swanned onto Coast to Coast AM last Saturday night to be interviewed by Richard Syrett. Having listened through the two hours, I'll be quite pleased if I never hear of him again, and my teeth are sore from gnashing.

        Carson runs a web site called 4bidden knowledge, which markets trivia like urban survival kits. He seems to have recently completed a video documentary series for Gaia TV about the so-called "Secret Space Program." He claims detailed technical knowledge of space technology, but since his show features some of the usual suspects of pseudo-knowledge like Mike Bara, Linda Moulton Howe and Erich Von Danikin, I don't think it was facts he had in mind when he threw the show together. Sensationalism, more like.

Anti-gravity, and other myths
        Like all the other theorists of "Secret space programs," Carson maintains that the publicly-announced space missions of NASA and all the commercial companies such as Space-X are mere "window dressing" stunts diverting our attention from what's really going on. He says that hot technologies such as anti-gravitics and zero-point energy were mastered long ago by US aerospace, and have been used for deep space missions including manned journeys to Mars. He even alluded to a Reagan-era program which took 300 people en masse into space on one of those thingies. Richard Syrett—bless him—enquired why nobody noticed such a huge expedition at the time, and Carson suggested that "cloaking" was the answer. Damn clever, these pseudo-space-technologists—they think of everything in their quest to create the perfect unfalsifiable propostion, don't they? To them, it's quite good enough for the likes of Linda Moulton Howe to merely assert that such things have happened, and it automatically becomes true. "Evidence? Of course there's no evidence. Are you daft? The whole point is it's SECRET."^{note 1}

        So what would an anti-gravity space mission be like? There would be no earth-shaking roar as mighty rocket engines come to life, no majestic rising of a rocket on a plume of smoke. Instead, somebody would throw a switch and the spacecraft would simply lose weight. They never say what energy source would achieve this little miracle, it just IS. So then the spacecraft would be free to rise vertically using virtually no propulsion at all—a squirt of monomethylhydrazine should do the job— until it was out of the atmosphere. It would not actually be in orbit—there would be no need for that. Initially, it would hover directly over its launch site, because relative to the planet beneath it, it would still have whatever tangential velocity the Earth's surface has at the launch site latitude.^{note 2} But over time it would slowly drift westward, as micro-drag reduced its horizontal speed. As a matter of fact, there's no particular reason to take a weightless spacecraft out of the atmosphere at all—all the benefits of zero-g could be had in the stratosphere, or even just staying on the ground.

        You could keep going upwards, of course, but in that case your lovely anti-gravity technology is a rapidly declining asset. The force of gravity is inversely proportional to the  square of your distance from the center of the planet. By the time you reach the orbit of the ISS it's already declined by 10%, and at geosynchronous altitude, where the comsats are, it's 0.023g, so you're not getting much benefit from switching it off, are you?

        But anyway, the time comes to set off for the Moon or Mars. Here's where you're really going to need some oomph, because even though your spacecraft has no weight, it still has mass, and you'll need to accelerate that mass in some major way if your journey time is going to be anywhere near reasonable. Zero-point energy, perhaps? Nope, that won't work. Zero-point energy does exist, as a concept in physics, but it cannot be used to do useful work. The proof involves mathematics that Mike Bara and Linda Moulton Howe are unlikely to understand.

       So it looks like you're stuck with the "outdated" and merely "window-dressing" technologies of rocketry. Awwww, what a shame.

        By the way, at some point you're going to want to turn your anti-grav gismo OFF, since the gravity of the planet or moon you're approaching is helpful. Then ON again as you come in for a landing. It gets quite complicated.

Ken Johnston gets another five minutes of fame
        To illustrate the tired old theme of NASA's deceptions, Carson told the story of Ken Johnston's photo collection. He explained that Ken was an astronaut candidate and a US Air Force officer who ended up working for a NASA contractor in Houston. He had in his posession a unique collection of Apollo photo-prints, and when he was ordered to shred them, he made copies first. Behold, Johnston's versions show things that the NASA official release prints do not—alien cities and geometrical craters, for example.

        The problem with that narrative is that it's NOT TRUE. Ken was never an astronaut candidate—he applied for the 1977 astronaut selection but was summarily rejected on grounds that his academic qualifications were inadequate.^{note 3} He was never in the US Air Force—he enlisted in the US Marines in August 1962 and reported to Pensacola for flight training in September 1964. He left the Marines two years later without ever qualifying as a pilot. James Oberg has documented this in meticulous detail. During Apollo, Johnston worked for Brown & Root, which had the contract to manage the Lunar Receiving Laboratory and curate the collection of moon rocks. There was nothing unique about the Apollo photo-sets he had, and he didn't make copies but simply took one set home. Johnston himself never claimed that his photos showed evidence of alien cities on the Moon or geometric craters.^{note 4} It was only when, in 1995, he showed them to Richard Hoagland, that the rumor got started. By that time they had been in Johnston's ring binders for 23 years. I can guarantee that if you held one of Johnston's prints in your left hand and a NASA release of the same picture in your right hand you would see no difference. It was only when Hoagland scanned them and slammed the brightness way up that artifacts appeared. How do I know this? Hoagland himself said it; or rather wrote it.

"In scanning Ken's priceless Apollo 14 C-prints, [I'd] discovered that the computer could "see" what the human eye could not—incredible geometric detail in the pitch black areas, like the lunar sky. The sensitivity of modern CCD imaging technology, in even commercially-available image scanners, coupled with the amazing enhancement capabilities of state-of-the-art commercial software — like Adobe's Photoshop—allowed the invisible detail buried in these supposedly black layers, of these thirty-year-old emulsions, to ultimately be revealed—a "democratization" of technology that no censor at NASA could have possibly foreseen over more than thirty years." --Dark Mission, 2nd edn p. 226 (emph. added)^{note 5}

        There you have it—Hoagland is admitting that something was added in the scanning process. In my opinion, what was added was contamination on his scanner glass. Here's the NASA release of image AS10-32-4820, showing crater Triesnecker in Sinus Medii:

credit: NASA/LPI

Now here's Hoagland's version:

        Look closely and you can see what looks like a stray beard hair in there. An honest researcher would never increase the brightness to that extent, since it guarantees that any imperfection on the scanner glass or the photo-print itself will show up in the perfect black of the lunar sky.

Billy Carson lies about the Apollo 1 tragedy
        On the subject of Ken Johnston, Billy Carson was merely wrong. When the subject got around to the Apollo 1 fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, my teeth got their major gnashing and my bedside radio was in danger of being hurled violently against the wall. Carson went beyond wrong into utterly dishonest calumny, alleging that mission controllers knew there was a fire in the spacecraft but did nothing to save the crew, instead callously allowing them to burn alive. What can be said about a man who makes such a vile accusation with no evidence at all? At a minimum, I would say that he does not deserve any public recognition at all, and certainly not two hours on a radio show with millions of regular listeners.

        Carson added that "Betty Grissom could never get any answers out of NASA," and that's not true either. Betty Grissom sued NASA for negligence, and she got her answers although she never considered the $350,000 settlement adequate. For obvious reasons, NASA tore the remains of that spacecraft apart and undertook a meticulous post-mortem analysis. The verdict was an oxygen fire caused by sparking from worn electrical cables.

        Carson added that "the spacecraft is hidden away under tight security." Well, what does he expect? Guided tours for elementary school kiddies?^{note 6}

Not for me, no thanks
        I'm not going to watch Carson's documentary series Deep Space. Created as it was by a man with such a slender contact with the truth, and such a nauseating habit of making vile accusations against the true heroes of our space history, what could it possibly teach me?


========================/ \==========================
[1] That's not a verbatim quote from Carson or anyone else. Just my mockery.  :-)

[2] 1471.5 km/hr eastward at Cape Canaveral.

[3] It was then that Ken obtained a mail-order Ph.D. in metaphysics from the Reform Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado, and began using the title "Dr. Johnston".

[4] Interviewed by Kerry Cassidy in February 2016, Ken said "A lot of these anomalies that people will see -- I don't necessarily see them, 'cause I'm pretty much a straightforward engineer .. We know that if we stare at the wall long enough we can make all kinds of pictures."

[5] In August 2015, on his radio show The Other Side of Midnight, Hoagland totally contradicted himself. Answering a challenge from astronomer Stuart Robbins Ph.D., on this very topic, he said "You don't have to scan. I can't show you an analog print because you're not in the same room. So I have to scan it and put it on the web. But the originals show what we're showing."

[6] As a matter of fact, in January this year, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the tragedy, the hatch of Apollo 1 was put on public display alongside artifacts from the Challenger and Columbia disasters.

Name-calling as a substitute for commentary

        Reacting to the summary dismissal of NBC host Matt Lauer, Mike Bara tweeted on Wednesday:

"Wow what a great morning it is to wake up to the fall of another pious Libtard media icon."

        A day later, his twitter account was suspended, although we cannot know if that particular message was what found disfavor. Pious? Libtard? I'm not a regular audience for the Today show but Matt Lauer strikes me as a talented television host with nothing in his résumé to indicate either piety or inappropriate political opinion. It's perhaps noteworthy that some sources accused him of powder-puffing presidential candidate Trump during a September 2016 interview. So I conclude that Bara's choice of words is just juvenile name-calling. Bara himself, remember, is not innocent of physical contact with random women.

Bara expresses his appreciation of actress Shana Eva at the Conscious Life Expo 2013

At the launch party for Bara's book "The Choice"

With Maureen Elsberry. A new meaning for "Contact in the Desert"?

       It certainly has been an astonishing series of revelations, the current spate of sexual misconduct accusations, from Harvey Weinstein to Geraldo Rivera. In the new atmosphere, powerful men in entertainment, sports and government are going to have to keep their hands off the women. I make no excuses at all for boorish behavior, but my other comment is that it's also going to be a hard time for women in those fields who actually want recreational sex with alpha males.

Update:
        Yesterday morning Bara posted a picture of Al Franken along with the line "Bye bye you piece if shit." When he doesn't have an editor to correct his copy, his spelling and grammar are both tragic.

Which is it, Robert Morningstar?

 James Concannon writes...  

       The civilian intelligence analyst who is wrong about almost everything seems now to have arrived at a final version of his article about the Las Vegas massacre of 1st October. The piece is titled LAS VEGAS VIDEO IMAGES AND SOUNDS PROVE MULTIPLE GUNMEN COMMITTED LAS VEGAS MASSACRE, and his serial amendments have served only to confuse the issue.

        Morningstar writes "I’ve corellated [sic] the videos linked below with this external photos [sic] of the hotel to triangulate the postion of the 2nd Mandalay Bay Hotel shooter who fired from a low platform atop the green roof porch shown above." (emph. added) The videos referred are the taxi driver's video and the video from the hotel across the street (that would have to be the Desert Oasis Motel, a crappy one-storey building.)

        My comments about that are, first, that at no time did the taxi driver have a view of that platform. As she approached the drop-off from the north she could see the sloping green canopy edge but not the gray platform AM* wants for a gun position. My second comment is that the Motel video is useless—the flashes seen on it are from around the tenth floor, and there are no broken windows at that level. I also note, as I have previously, that triangulation is not what the intelligence analyst did. But anyway, that's a clear statement of where he thinks a second gunman was.

        He continues "The Las Vegas Taxi Driver’s Video caught a shooter firing from the lower floor of the Mandalay Bay from a very close vantage point, i.e., pulling out of the Mandalay’s Drive-Though entrance." That would have to be something like this frame, at 04:59:

Here's an approximate daylight version of that view from Streetview:

        Again, the absence of broken windows absolutely rules out gunfire from any floor of the hotel except Paddock's suite on the 32nd.

        He continues "By comparing frames and correlating the driver's position and the camera angle to the shooter's position (indicated by the gun flash) in that frame, and using a triangular section of the unique roof (poviding two 90 degree angles for precise referencing,  I was able to calculate the shooter’s position to be outside the hotel and shooting from a balcony that covers the drive-through entrance of the hotel."

        Once again, the taxi driver had no view of that balcony area at any time. At the moment when she pulled out of the covered area, such a view was doubly impossible since the roof area was above and behind her (see image above.) I've looked at that section of the video multiple times and I do not see a gun flash, and neither do I see two 90° angles. It's my belief that the shooting had stopped by that time anyway. No used shell casings have been found anywhere on that balcony or rooftop.

         So Morningstar has offered us four gunnery positions, all of which are impossible:

1. The balcony
2. The 10th (ish) floor
3. A lower floor
4. A platform on the canopy roof.

WRONG AGAIN, frisbee genius.

Scott Kelly nails it

       Scott Kelly writes that, when his phone rang and it was Steve Lindsey, Chief of NASA's Astronaut Office, offering him command of a long-duration mission in the ISS, he was actually having dinner with his sister-in-law Gabrielle Giffords in Washington D.C. He also writes that his first reaction was to turn it down."Honestly, I'd rather fly as a shuttle commander again," he replied. But then he writes "I also knew I would take any flight assignment I was given." He eventually accepted, even though he'd just been diagnosed with high PSA and there were unmistakable fault lines in his marriage.

        The PSA reading turned into full prostate cancer, and Kelly underwent surgery in November 2007. Just three months later he officially separated from his wife, Leslie Yandell, and started multi-lingual training.  On the flight that followed, he was in space from 9 October 2010 until 16 March 2011, serving as Commander from November on. A year later, the phone rang again and the question was "Would you rather be promoted to Chief of the Astronaut Office or go back to ISS for a full year?" Kelly opted for the Astronaut Office, but was assigned the year-long mission anyway. He retired in April 2016 having clocked an aggregate 520 days in space over five missions.

        Those are just a couple of highlights from Endurance—a national best-seller published last month and written by Kelly. As a space junkie, I have a full library of astronaut memoir books and I can honestly say that this is probably the best of the bunch. The book may lack the heart-stopping drama of a lunar landing, but it more than makes up for it with its intricate detail both human and technical. Kelly writes of the exhilaration of spaceflight, and the pride ISS crews take in the science they are able to accomplish, but he does not hold back (at least, doesn't seem to) on the pesky annoyances of life up there.

        A case in point: Long-duration spaceflight put an end to the Apollo-era technology of lithium hydroxide canisters for removal of carbon dioxide from spacecraft atmospheres. A six-month mission would use hundreds of the bulky cartridges and the storage space just isn't available. So the ISS has a high-tech system called Seedra^{note 1}, and it seems to be the bane of Kelly's life in space. He writes that he can check the CO₂ level any time he likes on a computer readout "...but I don't need to—I can feel it. I can sense the levels with a high degree of accuracy based only on the symptoms I've come to know so well: headaches, congestion, burning eyes, irritability." He points out that the US Navy Submarine Service doesn't allow CO₂ to get any worse than 2mmHg partial pressure, but the ISS considers 6mm acceptable. Add to that annoyance that the Seedra machine keeps breaking down and is a bitch to repair, and you have the recipe for a lot of pissed-off astronauts.

Scott Kelly and Terry Virts repairing one of the Seedras, from p.88 of the hardcover edition

        Kelly tries to be a boy scout and not complain, but he does wonder if Houston really understands how totally exhausted an astronaut can become after a spacewalk, and he speculates that some training tasks are deliberately set up to be impossible, just to see how the trainees react.

No errors, comrades
        Speaking of complaints, he reveals an interesting difference between astronauts and cosmonauts. As a NASA astronaut, Kelly's base pay was generous and his per diem minimal—actually just $5. For the cosmonauts, it's the other way around—the majority of their remuneration is in per diems, which can be reduced if they are found guilty of "errors." Kelly surmises that complaints can be viewed as errors, and that explains why, when Moscow mission control asks how things are going, the answer is always v'syoh prekrasno (everything's fine) even when it patently is not.

        Kelly reports that relations between the American and Russian crews were always very cordial. During the working day they mostly stuck to their own areas of the huge space station, but they would get together for some meals, particularly on Friday evenings. Exchanges of food were commonplace, as were more important items like tools or replacement hardware. Informal exchanges, however, did not suit the bean counters on the ground, who were charged with adhering to the terms of formal international agreements. Their rules meant that every exchange, be it equipment, water, computer software, even urine—yes, urine, for urine is a resource on the ISS—has to be accounted for, placed on a balance sheet and eventually compensated in cash. Kelly tells the story of one time when the Russian crew offered him some unused space on a Progress module that was due to be detached and sent to burn up in the atmosphere. Kelly gladly got rid of several kilos of trash. The time came when the bean counters discovered the discrepancy in the trash inventory and asked Kelly to explain it. "I guess the trash fairy came in the night" was his wry reply.

Kelly with cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko

        Scott Kelly is an authentic American hero, because he overcame early learning disabilities, and other setbacks, to become one of the most skilled aviators and spacefarers of his generation. His book is a gift to all of us.

Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly with Margaret Lazarus Dean. Knopf, October 2017. ISBN 978-1524731595 (hard cover)

=========================/ \========================

[1] Seedra is just a pronounceable form of the acronym CDRA, Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly

Hoagland's radio show goes from bad to worse to FAIL

Back story: In July 2015 Richard Hoagland, the former museum curator who hasn't had a job since the 1970s, launched a two hour, five-nights-a-week radio show The Other Side of Midnight, live on  Dark Matter Digital Network, and archived for members only. This blog commented several times as he first lost his best producer, Ross Campbell, then got kicked off DMDN, went to KCAA-AM for a while and thence to the cheaper WBCQ ($50/hr cf. $150.) In October 2016 the show folded.

        It was back in June this year, on a reduced "weekend only" schedule. In July the membership fee was doubled from $5 to $10 per month. From 15 July until 8 oct there should have been 26 shows, but seven of them were cancelled for various reasons, mostly technical issues. It became obvious that Hoagland was no longer paying a professional engineer.

        A week ago the announcement was made that Hoagland was abandoning the radio medium and falling back on the oh-so-cheap ($99/month) BlogTalk Radio. The announced show for Saturday night 14th October was Barbara Honegger: Historic 9/11 breakthroughs. NB: BlogTalkRadio is supposedly foolproof.

        What follows is a verbatim transcript of the train-wreck that ensued. The "Keith" referred to is not Keith Rowland of DMDN, the original tech. manager of the show,^{note 1}; but Keith Laney, an imaging expert who had guested on the show numerous times. Laney has no known experience at managing radio or even podcasting.

[JAZZ MUSIC TRACK]
00:05 BH: "I'm hearing music."
RCH: "Yes, yes, you and I should not be going out over the air."
00:20 RCH: "Keith can you hear me?" [MUSIC VOLUME INCREASES]
[..?..] Can you call Keith and tell him..?? I need Skype
00:58 RCH: "OK, well, that's good. ?..?...you should hear it.
01:09 RCH: "OK, Barbara, what are you hearing?
BH: "I keep hearing music."
RCH: "No, I mean, when I called on you, you said you could not hear. What could you not hear?"
BH: "You mean when we were on the air?"
RCH: "Yes, yes, what could you not hear?
BH: "No, I can hear everything but there is a delay. When I spoke..."
RCH: "Ohhh it's..it's...it's a delay. Keith... You.. you're cutting out horribly, I can't hear you.
01:40 BH: "You talking to me?"
RCH: "I'm talking to Keith. My engineer. My temporary engineer. [LOUD THROAT-CLEARING] Keith I cannot hear you.  ... OK. Well obviously we can't solve this so we're gonna have to go to a back-up show, and we will recycle the ?show?, have the proper filters in place by tomorrow night. Guys I am so sorry. .. All right?
BH: "So are we on tomorrow night?"
RCH: "OK, I'm hearing a terrible delay. So this is a technical catastrophe. I guess....?? But, er... yeah, let's try and recycle the ?show? for tomorrow night."
BH: "Yes, that's fine."
RCH: "OK, good. So let me goodnight you, and then goodnight the music. And... good night everyone, and we'll go to a backup show, and tomorrow night same time, same bat-channel. We will try it without the echo. OK?"
BH: "Same time, same place. Tomorrow."
RCH: "Yep, yep.Thank you."
BH: "OK, all right."

==================================
The FB announcement was "OUR APOLOGIES, POSTPONED TO TOMORROW NIGHT DUE TO UNEXPECTED LAST MINUTE TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES THAT WE HOPE TO RESOLVE BY TOMORROW EVENING…"

After a similar experience the following night we were told "DUE TO CONTINUING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES THE PROGRAM WITH BARBARA HONEGGER ORIGINALLY SCHEDULED FOR SATURDAY NIGHT TONIGHT, SUN / MON OCT. 15-16 HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE."

[Insert Homer Simpson D'oh icon]

Update:
        The 21st October show was CANCELLED, Hoagland complaining that after "hours and hours of checking" the settings suddenly changed. Personally I don't find that credible. However, he did get through an entire 3-hour show on 22nd October—Robert Morningstar commenting on the Las Vegas massacre. Now why, I hear you ask, would AM* be considered an expert on the topic, considering that he can't even get the name of the perp right? He first called him Steven Pollack, then half-corrected it to Steven Paddock. The actual name is Stephen Paddock.

Thanks to Bellgab commenters "Nobody" and "Pablo Smash" for info

===========================/ \=============================
[1] The very first three words ever heard on the show were from Rowland. The words were: "I said go!"

Robert Morningstar gets the Las Vegas massacre story hopelessly wrong

James Concannon writes...

        First we have Kerry Cassidy listening to the voices in her head and reporting them as if they were factual, and now we have Robert Morningstar, frisbee expert, publishing 3000 words on the Las Vegas massacre and getting almost nothing right. I will respect his claim of "All Rights Reserved" by not quoting from the piece, but I will review it and comment on it.

        For a start, Morningstar gets the name of the perp wrong. Throughout his essay, he writes "Steven Pollack" instead of Stephen Paddock. He may have corrected the text by the time you read it, but the original version was wrong. OOPS.

Original text © 2017 Robert Morningstar

        Reading this essay through, we don't have to wait long for the first major error. In the very first line Morningstar claims that this event was the worst killing in the history of the United States. Well, compare 58 dead with 268 (Battle of Little Bighorn), 2,996 (World Trade Center) and 700,000 (American Civil War.) What Morningstar is unsuccessfully grasping for is that the death toll was the largest of any mass shooting by an individual.

       Morningstar's whole thesis is that Paddock did not act alone—that there was at least one additional gunman at the Mandalay Bay. He gets started along that road by telling us that Paddock must have had help getting 23 firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition into Suite 32135. Well, perhaps... my remark on that is that bellmen at the Mandalay are quite used to carrying heavy equipment, since many pornographic videos are shot in Vegas hotel rooms.

        Morningstar embeds this video in his text, purporting to show gunfire from around the 10th floor of the Mandalay Bay. But that's impossible—there are no broken windows at that level, and the alternative explanation that the flashes are reflections is infinitely more credible.

        A second embedded video, recording the onset of the attack and almost all the carnage, is used by Morningstar as if it proves the "second gunman" case. Very few of the gunshots sound like the weapons fire we're used to hearing in films and TV—some sound almost like a slow drum roll, and some are more like loud clicks. The distinction between the two sounds is the heart and soul of Mr. Frisbee-man's case. But bump stocks were found on 12 of Paddock's 22 rifles, and two of them were mounted on bipods. Does it somehow strain Morningstar's logic to suggest that more than one weapon was used, perhaps even simultaneously, by a single shooter?

         Morningstar originally stated that he had triangulated (how?)^{note 1} the position of the second shooter to the ledge at third floor level.

        That idea has too many problems to be credible. How would a sniper get access to that ledge, and come back down after the event, without being observed? Why were no shell casings reported on that ledge? Is that vantage point too low to be effective, considering that bleachers at the concert venue would obstruct the view from that angle?

        Morningstar next alleges that both the Bellagio and Flamingo hotels were sprayed with gunfire that night—a claim that has specifically been denied by authorities. He shows us smartphone video made by René Downs, but that video does not show what he says it shows. It shows crowds of excited people in the lobby and corridors of the Bellagio, prevented from exiting because the hotel (like all others on the Strip) was in lockdown.

        Our favorite frisbee expert wraps it all up by alleging, with no evidence whatsoever, that Pollack [sic] was working with the FBI over an arms deal that "backfired badly." Morningstar styles himself a "civilian intelligence analyst" but if this essay is a fair sample of his analysis I'd say he's a major, major failure.

Credentials
        In addition to making himself his own CIA, Morningstar writes that he is "a specialist in photo interpretation, geometric analysis and computer imaging." The Rational wikipedia lists six specific examples of where Morningstar's photo interpretation has been dead wrong. In May 2016 this blog listed 28 errors of interpretation by him. Once again, OOPS.

Update:
        Morningstar re-worked his essay into an article for UFO Digest. In it he suggested that a second gunman could have been positioned on the balcony over the main entrance to the hotel. The image below shows how more than half the concert audience would be obstructed by the stage and bleachers from that position:

=================/ \====================
[1] Let's remind ourselves how triangulation works, shall we? You take optical bearings on the object of interest from two different places as far apart as is practical. Transferring your bearings onto a map then pinpoints the object.

This, however, is not what Morningstar did. He took a single freeze-frame from the taxi driver's video (perhaps around 03:00?) and visually matched a part of the canopy to arrive at what he now says is a position on the balcony over the drive-through hotel entrance. Fatal to his case is the fact that no shell casings have been found at that position—many windows overlook the balcony and canopy and it's inconceivable that such obvious evidence would have been missed.

At exactly 03:03 there are two flashes, but they are not associated with any sound of gunfire and it's impossible to tell what the actual source is. They look a lot like flash photography to me. If this is what Robert AM* claims to have "triangulated," he's a flim-flam man, not an intelligence analyst.

Kerry Cassidy on the road to Mandalay

        Kerry Lynn Cassidy wants us all to believe she has secret information sources that enable her to interpret current events more correctly than the professional media. Judging by her track record, I'd say that's just what Kerry wishes were true as opposed to anything with any actual truthiness. Yesterday she wrote "Years ago Camelot was told that 2017 was to be the final date for the showdown related to the currency reset." Well, there's not much of 2017 left for that one to play out, and there's no sign of this "reset" at all. Sean David Morton was another one who fretted about conspiracies in relation to currency, and look where that got him (in Federal jail, in case you hadn't already heard.)

        If you've guessed that the context of Kerry's remark is the horrible massacre that killed 58 country music fans in Las Vegas last Sunday night, you're correct. In a blogpost titled "War of Worlds: Pirates of Mandalay Bay : Illuminati versus U.S. Navy?" Kerry lays down her usual mix of paranoia, untruth and misunderstanding. She begins:

"The location of this latest false flag however real the human casualties relates to the history of Mandalay and Kipling, the British illuminati versus possibly what they may see as the U.S. Navy "pirates".  This may well be a turf war between illuminati factions over who will run the financial system and how and when it gets taken down and reformulated into the NWO currency.
::
No doubt this is also all about controlling the guns (and getting the U.S. populations under control by attempting once again to take away their guns).  One would think by now they would know this will never work."

         My reformulation of that last comment would be "One would think the likes of Kerry Cassidy and Alex Jones would have realized by now that relentlessly interpreting shooting tragedies this way has no basis in fact or experience. From Sandy Hook to Pulse to Dallas to San Bernadino, such speculations have been shown to be hopelessly wrong. Guns have never been confiscated or even significantly reduced as a result."

Shooting blanks
She continues:

"The claimed shooter Stephen Paddock is a Manchurian Candidate if I have ever seen one...  Avid gambler, accountant and property manager.  Why?  Gamblers are heavily under mind control and in this case Paddock was an avid video poker player.  This only facilitates inserting subliminal commands necessary to activate a sleeping assassin.  Most likely he had no idea what he was doing. However, with the number of other shooters operating that night there may be no real way to tell if Pollack's gun was shooting blanks as a distraction or not."

        I'm not a poker player at all but I believe hundreds of thousands of men and women play video poker. How anyone would "insert subliminal commands necessary to activate a sleeping assassin" without activating everyone else is a problem for me. Besides, I doubt Cassidy has any evidence that Paddock spent any more time at video poker than the average teenager spends nattering and texting on his or her smartphone.

        The speculative connection to the British Illuminati via Kipling would be hilarious if it didn't show such gob-smacking ignorance and insensitivity to the agony of families who have lost sons, daughters, mothers and fathers. Not that we expect anything approaching sensitivity from Kerry—four days after the Charlie Hebdo assassinations she wrote "Where are the bodies?" as if she wouldn't even believe it had happened without seeing for herself the mutilated corpses of cartoonists.

        In a much briefer post a day earlier, Kerry Cassidy wrote "The signs are everywhere that the shooter in the Mandalay Bay massacre was a patsy and that shots were coming from other directions as well as on the ground"—to which I have to say WHAT signs? She also revealed just how gossamer-thin her "evidence" is, writing "I think there are some striking similarities to shooting in Manchester concert in the UK.  Man-dalay / Man-chester / Manchurian." That's about as convincing as the connection Kerry Lynn Cassidy / Killing LasVegas Concert / Kinky Laughable Codswallop.

Update:
Snopes has now looked at the evidence for a second gunman and confidently declared it FALSE.

The Extinction Event Did Not Happen Yesterday

        I'm not even going to write the name of the ignorant liar who made a few hundred dollars by telling everyone that Planet X, or Nibiru, would impact the Earth yesterday and wipe out all life. I do not wish even my microscopic influence on public opinion to add to the publicity this liar has already had. Still less am I going to name his wretched, wretched book about a non-existent planetoid. If any readers wish to read 115 pages of self-published poppycock they can surely find it for themselves.

        I understand this nincompoop is now claiming that he's been misquoted by the media and he never said September 23rd—the true date is some time next month. That's what end-of-the-world liars always do, isn't it? Keep advancing the date. It's truly pathetic.

        Last night Coast to Coast AM, with Jimmy Church as relief host, poked a bit of fun at this prediction, as the hours of September 23rd ticked away. Quite a lot of fun, actually. In my opinion they should have been poking fun at themselves, for having helped to make this nonsense credible in a show aired 19th January. The other guest that night was a numerologist—they made a nice pair of delusional con-men (con-persons, I should say.)

        C2C's bio-note tells us that this ridiculous person studied astronomy "at a mid-Western university," but it also noted:

"[This barefaced liar] has concluded that the prophetic Book of Revelation actually foretells the apocalyptic arrival of Planet X in our time period, and he added that Bible Code expert Rabbi Glazerson also backs a similar timeline."

So this is not just nonsense but biblical nonsense.

        This barefaced liar writes of his own work "This book is a must-read and a Survival Guide to the most important story of the century." Fuck You. It never happened.

Update:
        Exposing Pseudoastronomy also tackles this topic this week, being a bit kinder to the barefaced liar than I am.

Update:
October came and went. No Nibiru—what a surprise.

Jimmy Church slams Sean David Morton

        Jimmy Church is a four-days-a-week podcaster, and a fairly frequent relief host of Coast-to-Coast AM. As I've written before, I think he's pretty good. His show is called Fade To Black, and many of his guests are the standard pseudoscience mob that this blog exists to mock, and I guess that's who he means when he talks about "our community." Last Monday, he gave his audience a quick update on the fate of Sean David Morton (sentenced that very day to six years in the slammer,) and then editorialized as follows:

18:31: "No matter what you feel about the government, or the IRS—the IRS may be the most evil thing in the history of the known world—and I get that, I understand.. um, but no matter what your feelings are about the feds, and the IRS, if you have a check in your hand for half a million dollars, and you know it ain't your money, you don't cash it. We all know right from wrong. We do. We really, really... if we don't know right from wrong then we shouldn't be out in public. But, if we do know right from wrong, and we have our faculties about us, holding a check for half a million dollars in your hand that you know is not yours—don't cash it. And if you do, that is a decision that you make as an adult. Nobody is forcing you—you make the decision on your own. And he made that decision. The... the complications with the case, and how many charges were there, and... you know, the bottom line is, you don't cash the check. [..?..] Anyway, he got caught. OK? And he and his wife were found guilty. [..?..] He tried to hide the funds—they split it up, and took out $7,000 in cash, kept that, split up the rest of the money, put it in a bunch of different accounts, and [..?..] when the IRS asked for the money back, they said NO. The IRS literally said "we want the money back," and they said "No. come and get us." Well, OK. They did. [...] The bottom line is that they were officially sentenced today and that's it, they're going to prison."

"But, I have been silent on this whole thing. [...] I don't wish prison on anybody—this is a non-violent crime. It's a non-violent crime. And prison sucks. It absolutely sucks. So, I don't wish it on anybody. All I'm saying in this case, is sometimes you bring things onto yourself. You go and cash a check for $500,000 hoping to get away with it, and you don't, well you get caught [and] that's the end of the story. There's a couple of other things about Sean that... that kind of need to be said here. OK, today I went and watched a video on the ConspiraSea Cruise,^{note 1} actually an excellent video by the way. Ahhm... and well presented. But in this video ..ahhm, Sean is sitting there, and this is what he says publicly out of his own mouth. He says that he went to Stanford, that he went to Oxford, and that he was a doctor. [...] And then he says that he's an award-winning director, and a screen writer. And so, I stopped right there and I did just a little personal investigation on the web, just to check the record, the IMDB things. There's no "award-winning director" of anything anywhere, there's no screenwriting credits of anything. ..... So anyway, but then he said this, in this video that he has the largest internet radio station in the world. Now, hold on a minute here. He's in prison, but you can't say things like that ... Ok, fine, I can't change what people think, but me, I'm a black-and-white numbers guy. ... So it's very easy to go and check out a few things. Where is his web site ranking, for his web site? If it is the No. 1 radio show in the world that means it's quite simply that you have revenue that is God-like. You must have in your driveway seven different color Lamborghinis, one for each day of the week. ... That's what that means, and when he says something like that, that is a crazy thing. So you go and you look up... it's easy to check, go look at his web site, go look at the ranking. I don't know what it is. I don't remember—it's something like 12 million. Know what 12 million ranking world-wide is? It means you have maybe one person a day going to that web site. One. The largest internet radio broadcast in the world. Go and look—who's the network, who's the syndication? It's gotta be somebody BIG. It's got to be a household name. .... You must have 5 million,10 million ... All of the things that he has said about himself—and he's turned around and defrauded the government and then convicted of that—what do we depend on here? And what upsets me with all of this is our community is represented by a guy like that ... claiming screen credits, and the largest show in the world, and it's all B.S. And so for us, [..?..] that's what makes me upset, he's never been a guest on this show, so I have that going for me. But it's everybody else.  And it allows them to go 'Look. This is why that community is crazy, because they're represented by this. It's all ficticious, it's not true.'"

[Examples of real research done by the "alternative" community]

"You know, and I do my best every single day to make sure that we... we have fun with this show, that we're honest with this show—anybody can go and check our numbers. When we say something... Go and check, the numbers are all public, they're all there for the world to see. I am proud of what we have done here. ... And that's our community, and it just kills me that this went down. It's unfortunate that he got caught and he went to prison. Melissa got taken down for the count. I doubt that she would have done any of this if it wasn't for his influence, and now she's spending two years in the federal pen. And if they could go back and do it all differently I'm sure that they would. Now they've got time to go and quite frankly think about this, and how they represented all of us. They lied to us and the rest of the world. And that's it—I've held back from speaking about this, but our community just needs everything that it can to be represented correctly."

        It beats me how Jimmy can protest that Morton was giving his "community" a bad rep for saying things that are totally wrong, when at the same time one of his pet guests is Mike Bara. Bara gets everything wrong.

       From the report on ufowatchdog, what made me giggle was that this "Legal scholar," at his sentencing hearing, declared that he had been mistaken in representing himself at trial, and now requested legal representation. Denied. If he behaves himself (unlikely) we may be seeing SDM again in four years or so. Jimmy Church is dead right about one thing—prison sucks.

Thanks to Stuart Robbins for the audio

====================/ \======================
[1] ''One Week on a Cruise for Conspiracy Theorists - ConspiraSea'' --Youtube. Morton (at 06:16) "I'm a legal scholar.. I host the Number #1 radio show on the Internet"

Mike Bara goes the full delusion

        Yesterday Mike Bara came up with another vlog, eagerly lapped up by his admirers (all four of them), in which he attempted to connect hurricanes Harvey and Irma to the recent eclipse. He also explained that hurricanes are GOOD because they create jobs.

        For data support, he cited perhaps the most unreliable source imaginable—namely, Richard Hoagland's Accutron readings^{note 1} at Coral Castle during the Venus transit of 8th June 2004. Bara said that what was significant about Hoagland's data was that the disturbance created by the transit event continued after the event was over. So, you know, seeking to justify his link between a solar eclipse on 21 August and the formation of Harvey (17 August) and Irma (30 August).

        So is it true that the disturbance persisted? If so, you'd never know it from Hoagland's data which only continue for approximately another hour. Would-be interpreters of Hoagland's data are somewhat thwarted by the facts that (a) he got the time of the transit wrong,^{note 2} and (b) he has published two different and incompatible traces. First was this one:

credit: Richard Hoagland

        He said fourth contact happened at 07:21 (all times EDT), and the trace continues until approximately 08:20. His second attempt was this:

credit: Richard Hoagland

        Note that both traces show a spike to 364.474 Hz at what Hoagland (wrongly) calls the time of third contact, but then the first version shows three spikes to 360.53, 360.42 and 360.30 Hz respectively. The second version has two following spikes to 360.7 at times that are not the same as those of the first version, and does not even continue until the transit is over at fourth contact.

        So what should we say about Mike Bara's idea that the eclipse was linked to a hurricane that developed four days earlier, and that Hoagland's data support a link between the eclipse and a different hurricane nine days later? Poppycock is the word that comes to mind. Certainly not science.

The magic number
         A second thread that Bara picked up was also Hoagland-based. He told us that both Harvey and Irma developed at a latitude of 19.5°N, and that is the latitude at which "hyperdimensional energy" is permanently available on any spinning sphere such as a planet.^{note 3}

        Well, let's see. Harvey developed from a tropical wave East of the Lesser Antilles. Those islands stretch all the way from Anguilla (18.2°N)  in the North to Grenada (12.07°N) in the South. Irma developed near the Cape Verde Islands (15.06°N). FAIL. Hurricane José is next in line, currently gathering strength at roughly 15°N. FAIL AGAIN.

        Perhaps Mikey believes that merely by passing through that latitude, hurricanes pick up power. In fact, that's the implication of the way he phrased it. Does he think meteorologists and hurricane-trackers would not notice this effect?

        At one point in the vlog, Bara held up a copy of his 2011 book The Choice, saying "I explained the significance of 19.5 in this book." What he actually wrote, in justification of the idea, is that the following planetary features are at 19.5° latitude:

• Neptune's Great Dark Spot
• The Great Red Spot of Jupiter
• The erupting volcanoes of Jupiter's moon Io
• Olympus Mons on Mars
• Mauna Kea volcano

        Know how many of those are actually at 19.5? NONE OF THE ABOVE. If he'd written Mauna Loa instead of Mauna Kea he'd have got one right.

        None of the top ten volcanic eruptions in history, and none of the most destructive earthquakes, have been at 19.5°. The case for instantly available energy at that latitude is not merely weak but non-existent.

An actress speaks
          Jennifer Lawrence opines that Irma is nature's payback for electing a chump named Trump. In his vlog, Bara advised JL to "leave the science to the science people". I think he should do exactly that.


Further reading
         Since Mike is a doctrinaire climate change denier, and mocked climate science as "bullshit" in this vlog, here's an antidote.

Scientist Slams Climate Change Deniers In Brilliant Viral Post --Katharine Hayhoe's take-down of people just like Mike Bara who put their faith in pseudoscience.

=====================/ \================
[1] For a briefing on what "Accutron readings" are, see this.

[2] Hoagland reported third contact at 07:03:53, but this table issued by NASA Goddard says it was 07:07:33 at Miami, same longitude as Homestead.

[3] For a derivation of the 19.5 figure, see this blogpost. Simple enough geometry that neither Mike Bara nor Richard Hoagland is capable of.

Mike Bara comments on a former "best pal" who's now a convicted felon and in jail

       For any readers totally unfamiliar with the world of conspiracy, here are briefings on the two personalities involved:
Mike Bara
Sean David Morton

        Mike Bara started a Youtube channel about eight years ago--a mixture of his public utterings^{note 1} and diary-type material spoken straight to camera. He really does have a gift for talking to a video camera in a natural and engaging way--such a pity that most of what he actually says is garbage. Well, lately he seems to  have moved the vlog material to the Book of Farces. Yesterday he posted a vlog of general chit-chat, including this:

"In other news, erm; Sean David Morton was picked up this week ..[??] .er,  I don't know if you guys know who Sean was, but he was a very famous...erm, psychic... guest... big star on Coast to Coast in the 90s. Er, he was a close friend of mine for a few years in the 2000s and early 2010s, and erm, kind-of went down a road I couldn't follow him, and I ended up splitting with he and his wife Melissa, and they both got arrested this week. Sean had skipped out on bail.. er, trial..um.. that he was up for... for various different charges by the Government. Ummm, I'm skeptical of the case against him, from what I understand about it--however, I do know that he invited this upon himself, that he fought everything from a very... um, unfortunate perspective, and he.. you know, he basically made things, erm... [unintelligible] ....and kind of got himself into trouble. And got himself arrested this week. As I understand it the cats are fine. um... Melissa raises Norwegian forest cats. Last time I checked, there were several people coming over to the house to take care of them, to move them to other homes. They will eventually find good homes for all of them--I don't think she'll be getting out of jail any time soon. And, um.. I will say this: I am very resentful of the people who are taking great joy in this. Sean could be a bit of a dick, and he's invited this conflict in his life, um.. and I... you know, I'm... I'm sorry that he chose this path, I think he has probably some lessons that he needs to learn, but I don't take any great joy in, erm... in this happening to him and I don't think anybody else should either. I think it's, er.. I think it's er...er... I think it's an unfortunate thing for um.. he and... and his family and Melissa, and I wish that they both could have found a way to learn their lessons in a different manner. It's really too bad. So. And I'm not going to take any joy over him going to jail, like some people are in the UFO community. Some people in the UFO community are dicks, and that's just the way they are. So. Um.. You know my other comments about that are that... that I think that, again, for me truth is more important than unity. And I don't think that there is unity in the UFO community, there's a lot of rivalry... I think it's unfortunate that some people chose this moment to take it out on Sean. Sean was, er,  probably as well known as Georgio [Tsoukalos] is today. Although he didn't really have a TV gig -- So. It's a shame. Erm..And, you know, I mean, Sean's going to have to deal with what he's going to have to deal with. When I get back to California I'll probably ..??? And I hope that.. I hope he survives. I hope he makes it through his.. er, his jail time. And I would encourage him to... to co-operate. Um.. Take his punishment, and... er, try to move on with his life after this. To me it just shows you.. it just shows me that.. that being in conflict with the world does not gain you anything. I've been in conflict.. all the time, I've been in conflict with people telling everyone how bad Mayweather was going to destroy McGregor^{note 2} Um, So, you know, it just doesn't ultimately in the long term [...???...]

        At least he did say that SDM brought this upon himself, and that he "could be a bit of a dick," but where, I wondered, was the acknowledgement that Morton and his wife had literally cheated their clients out of millions of dollars? Where was the sense that Morton's astounding legal incompetence and hubris had exacerbated his situation instead of alleviating it? (see prior blogging). If Bara remains, as he says, "skeptical" about the case against Morton, it's because he just doesn't want to know. The blog ufowatchdog has all the deets.

        Sentencing is now set for Sept. 18th at 11AM with an 87 month prison term requested by the prosecution. I freely admit that I'm one of those who is "taking great joy in this." Screw you, Sean, you arrogant bastard--and especially screw you Melissa, with your "I'm not in prison and never will be."^{note 3}

Update 30 August:

        What's the betting the Feds popped a tracer on Melissa's car, that's how they found the crims at Desert Hot Springs so easily?
===================/ \==================
[1] Interestingly, the channel includes a set of four lectures jointly delivered by Bara and Morton in 2012.

[2] Refers to a boxing match dubbed "The Biggest Fight in Combat Sports History" which had happened the previous day. Mayweather won by a 10th round TKO.

[3] Comment on a Youtube video, quite quickly deleted. The full text was "Screw you. I'm NOT in prison and never will be. You are a jerk just like ALL MEN!! You lie to women, cheat on them and use them. I hope YOU die a very slow and painful death."

Robert Morningstar: Another busted prediction

James Concannon writes...

        The Great American Eclipse did not disappoint. A spectacular show, happening dead on the predicted times to a fraction of a second. That, of course, is because the predictions were made by science.

So how did pseudo-science do? Abysmally, is the answer.

On April 13th the science dunce Robert Morningstar posted this prediction (edited):

"A TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN & MOON CROSSING OVER THE NEW MADRID FAULT ZONE COULD CAUSE EARTHQUAKES DURING & AFTER PASSAGE on August 21st, 2017.  

This is in keeping with my theory that the growing strength of the gravitational forces of Sun and Moon at the moment of a total solar eclipse and their subsidence afterward can trigger earthquakes on both in the area of totality and on the other side of the Earth with [sic; presumably he means within] 36 hours of the event.  

My main concern is that the pinnacle point of totality will occur as the Sun and Moon line up over the New Madrid Fault lines as it passes over Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky and points East as it they head toward the South Carolina coast, which is a massive coastal fault zone."

        Robert is an expert in frisbee. He's so totally inexpert in astronomy that he doesn't realize that the gravitational attractions of the Sun and Moon combine once every month, in an event known as New Moon. Do New Moons cause more earthquakes? Well, they certainly didn't this July and August. Here's the data:

10th July: Full Moon

24th July: New Moon

7th August: Full Moon

21st August: New Moon & solar eclipse

        No statistically significant changes in the general seismic pattern are attrributable to the phase of the Moon. The strongest quakes were as follows:

10th July, Full Moon: 4.7 MMS, Mexico
24th July, New Moon: 4.0 MMS, Baja California
7th August, Full Moon: 4.7 MMS, Costa Rica
21st August, New Moon: 4.3 MMS, Costa Rica

        On each of those days there was a smattering of quakes in the continental US of magnitude < 4, including the usual Magnitude ~2 array along the San Andreas fault in California. On the other side of the world, the Himalayas saw three quakes in the 4.5 MMS range. There's nothing whatsoever in this data to suggest a link between New Moons and seismic activity. And bear in mind, lunar perigee occurred on 18th August--another event that pseudoscience likes to spread fear about.

        Thanks to useful articles like this one or this one, and recent discussion on this blog, we now know that the gravitational attraction of the Sun is 160 times more powerful than that of the Moon. However, tidal forces are created by the difference between the pull of gravity on the near side of planet Earth and that on the far side. Since the Sun is 412 times further away from us than the Moon is, the differential is nowhere near as great. In fact, the tidal force generated by the Sun amounts to only 45% that of the Moon.

        The best thing that could happen to Robert Morningstar at this point is that his fans stop paying attention to him. His information is pathetically misleading.

Update: Moving the goalposts
23 August: AM* has now posted this response:

"1. Within the last 24 hours since the tansit of the eclipse, there have been 13 seaquakes (in a rising crescendo") near Puerto Rico and Hispanola..
Although most Americans stopped tracking the eclipse at South Carolina, it did dontinue its track SouthEast into the Atlantic. According to my theory, seaquakes were anticipated, there and on the opposite side of the Earth where the Ring of Fire is "tingling" with activity.
2. On our West Coast, The San Andreas Fault is also percolating with small earthquakes every few hours and the perturburances continue up the coast all the way to Washington State and Vancouver, BC.
3. The Seatle area where "America's Eclipse" began, has experienced 2 small quakes since the transit.
4. On the opposite side of the Earth, where I contend that an eclipse's tectonic effects are usually more pronounced (but delayed in time up to 72 hours), 4 earthquakes have occurred in the 24 hours since the Sun-Moon transit.
5. Earthquakes have shaken the Phillipines (1), Indonesia (2), and have struck as far East as Borneo (1), which had one seaquake off its northeast coast."

         So having specifically cited the continental USA, within 36 hours either side of the eclipse, he now wants us to consider seismic events in the  Phillipines and Indonesia delayed by 72 hours. Even more hilarious, he draws our attention to a swarm of tiny earthquakes up the San Andreas fault--as if there was ever a time when there wasn't such a swarm.

         For info, here are earthquake maps for the ten days 10-19 August--events that by Morningstar's own definition are unrelated to the eclipse. In other terms, they represent "normal conditions." First, The USA and Caribbean region:

Now, the other side of the world:

        These maps prove that ascribing events of magnitude 2,3,4 or 5 in locations like Seattle or The Phillipnes to the effect of the eclipse is ridiculous and fraudulent.