Tuesday, November 24, 2020

David Sereda tells us a fairy story

       The Rational wikipedia describes David Sereda as an "all-purpose wingnut" — a believer in contact with Pleiadians, zero-point energy, and the healing power of solfeggio frequencies, among other crackpot ideas. He's one of those people who don't thoroughly understand what the U part of UFO means, and proclaims, in at least one book, that he can identify the unidentified, and explain the unexplained. Those blobby things, he says, are spaceships carrying hostile extraterrestrial intelligences.

        He was interviewed last Thursday by another all-purpose wingnut and conspiracy theorist, Kerry Cassidy. His theme was not at all topical—it was a theory that has been hashed and rehashed on websites and in books and TV shows for 17 years. The theory is nothing less than the idea that one of those blobby things was responsible for the breakup and destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia, 1st February 2003. His evidence is this strange time-lapse photograph taken from Bernal Hill in San Francisco by an amateur photographer as Columbia streaked overhead.


        To Sereda, the squiggle is an incoming extraterrestrial attack. He quite rightly says that lightning—an explanation that some have come up withnote 1—is not a possibility. Columbia was too high, and lightning does not last for any substantial fraction of ten seconds. However, he's so enamored of his attack theory that he fails to consider any other mundane explanation.

Just a jolt
        Sereda did not identify the amateur photographer who shot this and four other images over San Francisco. It is, in fact, a man by the name of Peter Goldie. Goldie himself was puzzzled enough by what he had captured that he went to great lengths to contact NASA and offer his photographs as forensic evidence. NASA took notice, and sent astronaut Tamara Jernigan to examine the shots personally. Goldie willingly allowed his camera to be taken to the FBI lab at Quantico, and the story hit the crackpot headlines. Goldie writes:

« Pick a fringe group, be it anti-government, fundamentalist believer, HAARP, chemclouds, right wing, left wing, secret dreams of psychics, etc… they all seem to have an angle on what really happened to the Columbia Shuttle, and it always involves the “purple corkscrew”, my “confiscated” camera and that “they” are forcing me to hide the truth.»
        Goldie's own explanation? He goes with the result of the FBI investigation: a jolt was all it took. He did not have a cable release, so the mere act of opening the shutter would have jogged the camera enough to cause the squiggle. Consider this, too: Goldie took five ten-second shots, panning the camera between each. During the minute that took, at a reentry speed of 17,500 mph, Columbia would have traveled nearly 300 miles. And yet, in every shot the squiggle ends at the point where the spacecraft is. If the squiggle was an attack the intercept point would have fallen further and further back in each photo.

        The cause of the tragedy has been well explained by a foam strike at take-off. Goldie told his story to Rawstory in February 2013. Read it here.

        So, basically, Sereda made a fool of himself last week.

Oberg on the case
        James Oberg investigated this claim in 2008. Here's his report.

Update:
      Sereda told the same fairy story on Coast to Coast AM, 7th December. Unchallenged by George Noory, of course.

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[1] Quest TV floated the lightning theory in a YouTube vid in May this year.

7 comments:

astroguy said...

Yup. Many-a-times I've knocked my tripod during long exposures, and it looks exactly like this sort of thing.

THE said...


A friend of mine, a local in Honolulu, became friends of a sailor who was on the USS Eldridge. He moved to Havvai'i, in order to study Koa wood, because of the conference table that shielded him from the effects of the experiment. This man introduced my friend to Pleadians who live on Oahu. The US Navy controls Oahu.

more-mysterious-lights-appear-night-sky-over-hawaii

expat said...

Nice blobbies

Anonymous said...

LMH has covered the alien base on Oahu in some detail.

They come and go.

Grounded said...

Question for Astroguy: If Jupiter and Mars are in conjunction, is there any measurable increase in gravitational effect, and/or would there be if they were in closer proximity?

Also, if Jupiter were not rotation on it's axis, and/or not orbiting the Sun, would it still produce a gravitational effect?

expat said...

Grounded: Astroguy may not monitor this blog for new comments. He gets notified of new posts from RSS.

For the general principles of gravitational attraction, see the prologue to my recent post about the flat Earth.

Axial rotation does not affect the mass of a body and therefore does not affect its gravitational attraction either.

As to whether a Jupiter/Mars conjunction has measurable effect as compared with an opposition -- my opinion is that there is an effect mathematically. Whether it would be measurable by any instrumentation, I'm not sure. I could work the math.

Grounded said...

Thanks expat. No need for the math. I ought to have clarified, 'significant measurable effect.