"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.