James McCanney tells it like it isn't

        James McCanney is the electric comet guy, the Planet X guy and one of the foremost of the Apollo deniers. Phil Plait has done a good job explaining how wrong McCanney is on most topics in astronomy. So has Stuart Robbins, here.  One that "Bad Astronomy" didn't catch (Stuart Robbins did, here)  is his statement that Venus is tidally locked to Earth. It isn't true (The synodic period of Venus is 583.92 days, and its rotational period is 224.701 Earth days retrograde) but the Earth-Venus system does have the unusual property that Venus shows almost exactly the same face to us at successive closest approaches.^{note 1}. So probably McCanney once heard the above true statement and misinterpreted it to mean the UNtrue statement that Venus always shows us the same face.

        McCanney is a recurrent guest on Coast to Coast AM, although his appearance a week ago (26th May) ended a 7-year drought. C2C likes to promote him as a Professor of Mathematics and Physics from Cornell, although he hasn't taught at Cornell since the 80s.

        For many years McCanney was warning "Planet X is coming!!" He cited the observations of Tom Van Flandern and Robert Harrington, who declared in 1989 that they had spotted an incoming planet four times the mass of Earth, visible only from the Southern hemisphere. Now, explaining why Planet X still hasn't arrived, McCanney says it turned into the Hale-Bopp comet, discovered in 1995. Moreover, he said, there was good evidence of intelligent signalling from Planet X. Well, that's awfully wrong. Planets do not turn into comets,^{note 2} and if there had been good evidence of signalling, it would have been front-page news.^{note 3}

        Conscious, perhaps, that McCanney's statements were at gross variance with conventional astronomy, George Noory asked "Why is NASA afraid to admit these things?" This was McCanney's answer:

"I can't answer your question but I can tell you it's a top-down thing, and the people at NASA are under strict gag orders. People from NASA can't just walk up to the microphone and say something. It goes through an official release, OKed by people like [?] Tony Phillips^{note 4}, people like that."

        I've interacted quite a bit with NASA scientists in my career, and I've never come across one who was gagged or even felt as though they were.^{note 5}

Power and water from the air
        McCanney has a pending patent on a wind generator that not only generates local electric power but also extracts water from the atmosphere.

        The generator is now being installed in units from 2 to 250 kW, and McCanney (rather optimistically, I think) asserts that one day it will entirely replace nuclear and fossil fuel energy sources.

        On Coast to Coast AM he proudly said that the WING generator had won the 2018 Water Abundance X Prize, $1,500,000 . That's not actually true—the winners were The Skysource/Skywater Alliance, but McCanney's generator was awarded a $150,000 second-place consolation prize.

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[1]  The interval between successive close approaches of Venus to Earth is equal to 5.001444 Venusian solar days. So at each  closest approach we see just half a degree more on Venus's West edge, and half a degree less on the East, than at the last closest approach (at the equator that works out to about 53 km). An astronomer would have to live for 2,219 years to see a full rotation of Venus at closest approach.

ref:  Atmospheric tides and the resonant rotation of Venus, Icarus, Nov. 1969, Thomas Gold and Steven Soter.

[2] ...or vice versa. Another of McCanney's errors is the fantasy that Venus was once a comet.

[3] Again, Phil Plait has nailed the Planet X fallacy expertly.

[4] It sounded like "Tony Phillips" but I don't know who he means. No such person is in the list of official NASA spokespersons.

[5] One who I spent a lot of time with during the Viking missions was Chief Scientist Gerry Soffen. What is Gerry most remembered for by writers? He was the first to show the image of  "The Face on Mars". Gagged? I don't think so.