• PART SEVEN -- On The Road To Roswell 2007: A Discussion With Dr. Tom Van Flandern
• Thomas Horn

   

  June 04, 2007
• Thomas Horn

   
  
  

  Thomas Horn is the CEO of RaidersNewsNetwork.com and SurvivorMall.com.
• Editors note: This is the seventh in a special series of Raiders News Network interviews focusing on the 60th Anniversary of the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico UFO Incident.
• Tom Horn is joined by Dr. Tom Van Flandern, Ph.D. degree in Astronomy, specializing in celestial mechanics (the theory of orbits), from Yale University in 1969.
• He spent 21 years (1963-1983) at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., where he became the Chief of the Celestial Mechanics Branch of the Nautical Almanac Office.
• During the past decade, Tom has been a Research Associate at the Univ. of Maryland Physics Department in College Park, MD, and a consultant to the Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, MD, working on improving the accuracy of the Global Positioning System (GPS).
• HORN: Dr. Van Flandern, it is a privilege to speak with you today.
• Your research covers a wide spectrum including areas we might associate with Roswell. Before we get to that, please describe your organization, Meta Research (http://metaresearch.org). What does it do and why does it exist?
• VAN FLANDERN: In the 1970s, astronomy funding from universities and industry became centralized under NASA and NSF (National Science Foundation) control.
• In the 1980s, funds became limited, so certain theories were “adopted” and research into alternatives was cut off.
• By the 1990s, it became evident that decision was a huge setback to the advancement of science.
• Meta Research was founded in 1991 under a 7-member Board to look into puzzles and anomalies in the field of astronomy and try to find the best models to explain all the new data pouring in, as contrasted with simply force-fitting the data and existing models into each other.
• Peter Lipton recently described this change in the behavior of science with an archery analogy. Suppose one archer draws a bull’s eye on a barn and shoots an arrow into it, while another archer shoots his arrow first and draws the bull’s eye around where it struck the barn. The end result appears to be the same, but we properly give more archery credit to the first archer than to the second.
• Yet modern science has migrated into imitating the second archer by modifying theories and reinterpreting data as needed to maintain the adopted theories already in place.
• Meta Research’s goal is to reverse that trend by developing theories that fit the data without need of modification or reinterpretation, at least for the field of astronomy. We have had some modest success in that effort.
• HORN: In 1999, you published a book that challenged some of the standard models of gravitation and General Relativity. What caused you to write this book and has it been repudiated or supported by recent advances in our understanding of physics?
• VAN FLANDERN: The book you reference is Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets published by North Atlantic Books.
• It is now in its second edition and fifth printing as more and more people discover the major iconoclastic work of the past 15 years in the field of astronomy.
• It proposes a revolutionary new vision of the origin and nature of everything from humans to the whole universe. Our solar system in particular will never seem the same after seeing it in this new light.
• The book describes models deduced from first principles or basic facts, rather than theories induced from observations.
• It reports many predictions so the new models can be tested and judged. To date, the prediction success rate for all models combined has been over 90% despite very long odds against success either by chance or if the standard models now in vogue were correct.
• I’m sure we will be discussing some of those models in this interview, although time constraints may allow us to only scratch the surface of what’s new in the universe.
• HORN: The American Spectator, Salon Magazine and others have quoted you regarding challenges to Einstein's theory of relativity. Others have said Einstein cheated by adjusting arguments around the values he wanted.
• Do you think that is true, and in what ways if any do you believe relativity is incorrect?
• VAN FLANDERN: Einstein was a bright and humble physicist, whom I admire for many reasons, but especially for his willingness to admit his own mistakes. I have tried to emulate that practice, which requires that the individual not get too attached to his/her own ideas, then continually exposes them to new possibilities of falsification, and welcomes such falsifications when they happen as opportunities to learn new things about the world around us.
• Regarding the relativity of motion, both Lorentz (1904) and Einstein (1905) published competing theories a year apart.
• Apparently, neither Lorentz’s universal aether (the hypothetical space-filling, light-carrying medium) or Einstein’s total absence of aether is correct.
• Today, we would conclude that the truth lies somewhere between the two theories.
• In 1920, Einstein conceded the need for some kind of aether to carry light waves. Then Lorentz conceded that Einstein’s approach was perhaps simpler than his own.
• Today’s relativity of motion is much more like that of Lorentz than Einstein, but Lorentz is still given little credit for this.
• Einstein also gave us “general relativity”, which was a new theory of gravity.
• From the earliest days, this theory had two different physical interpretations for the same math. One was called the “field interpretation”, in which gravity is a traditional force, but is modified by the presence of a “potential field” (equivalent to a localized “aether”).
• The other is called the “geometric interpretation”, in which gravity is not a force but a “curvature of space-time”.
• But the geometric approach cannot explain either the mechanism that initiates motion in bodies at rest or the latest findings about the propagation speed of gravitational force, whereas the field interpretation can explain both.
• Only this latter interpretation is currently being taught in schools.
• For example, these post-Einstein relativists have used the geometric interpretation to predict exotic phenomena such as “black holes” and “string theory”. Yet Einstein himself not only denied the physical possibility of such mathematical oddities, but he wrote a paper in 1939 proving that such things could also not exist in his theory.
• So the criticisms I have levied are about variations of Einstein’s model adopted by modern relativists.
• However, modern relativists have found that invoking Einstein’s name and donning his mantle opens doors to funding and getting published.
• My position is that Einstein was right in more ways than he was given credit for, but modern relativists have introduced new concepts and interpretations in Einstein’s name that the great physicist would never have approved.
• In my opinion and that of a few colleagues, Einstein’s field interpretation was right and modern relativists claiming Einstein’s authority and using the geometric interpretation have strayed from the cause-and-effect spirit of true physics.
• First, what have all the space program's new discoveries taught us about the origin and evolution of the solar system?
• HORN: I want to discuss the planet Mars and the possibility of artificial structures there.
• VAN FLANDERN: The current mainstream theory is that the Sun, its planets, their moons, the asteroids and the comets all originated as condensations from a primeval cloud of gas and dust that was compressed by a nearby supernova explosion 4.6 billion years ago.
• This formation process took about five million years to complete, and the theory indicates that not much of significance has happened to our solar system since then.
• But this theory leaves many unanswered questions such as how the solar system acquired its rotational energy. Most of that “angular momentum” is in the planets even though most of the mass is in the Sun.
• In it, as the forming Sun in the primeval cloud contracts from gravity, it spins up. The spin first flattens the Sun, then elongates it into a football shape. When the spin is fast enough, the two ends of the football break off forming a pair of twin planets and slowing the Sun’s spin. But the Sun continues to contract and the process continues through several cycles of spin-up, overspin, and fissioning planets.
• The best model to address all those unanswered questions is the “fission model”.
• The same contracting, spin-up, fissioning process happens to the rapidly cooling planets, which periodically reach overspin and fission their own satellites. Three of our smaller “planets” were originally satellites of larger planets: Mercury escaped from Venus, Mars escaped from now-exploded “Planet V”, and Pluto escaped from Neptune.
• HORN: What evidence is there that any planet exploded?
• VAN FLANDERN: There is evidence all over the solar system.
• Tens of thousands of asteroids orbit the Sun in the gap between Mars and Jupiter. Probably at least as many of these apparent fragments orbit beyond Neptune.
• These orbits show “explosion signatures”, patterns similar to those found in orbits of fragments from Earth satellites that exploded in orbit around the Earth.
• Comet orbits have similar characteristics unique to an explosion origin.
• The distribution of surface blackening on major satellites is consistent with an explosion blast wave spreading through the solar system.
• Chemical compositions of asteroids, comets, and meteorites are consistent with their once being part of a planet-sized body.
• The assumption of an explosion origin yielded the best predictions of meteor storms.
• Some mass extinction events on Earth are consistent with global bombardment as would follow a planet explosion. Etc. My book Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets lists 100 such lines of evidence and cites where each is documented.
• HORN: What are some examples of genuine predictions made by the exploded planet hypothesis, or EPH?
• VAN FLANDERN: Here is a list of ten major predictions that have now been validated but for which the results were unknown at the time the predictions were made:
• that asteroids and comets should be identical types of bodies except for asteroids losing most of their volatiles because of long-term solar heating.
• that these asteroids and comets would have “numerous and commonplace” satellites of their own.
• that the water in meteorites would be salt water rather than pristine water.
• that high-resolution views of irregular asteroids would show numerous boulders and roll marks from the tidal decay of satellite orbits.
• that predictions of meteor storms would be possible if one assumes the meteors escape from orbit around a comet nucleus instead of by ejection from the nucleus.
• that most asteroid orbits will have a lower limit to eccentricity that increases to either side of the explosion distance from the Sun.
• that “new” comets will all appear to come from a similar great distance, arriving on orbits with period equal to the time since the most recent explosion: 3.2 million years.
• that the velocity with which comets appear to “split” at various distances from the Sun will be consistent with the escape velocity of objects previously orbiting the comet’s nucleus.
• that very slowly rotating moons will get blackened by the blast wave on only one side, and those with tilted rotation axes will get blackened on only one pole.
• that the first sample return from a comet would show evidence of minerals found typically on planets in the inner solar system, not just minerals that can form in a very cold environment in space far from the Sun.
• HORN: How about prediction failures? Even widely accepted theories can have those also.
• VAN FLANDERN: The EPH has made many more predictions for which the results are not yet in. But to date, none of its predictions have been wrong, even when they were contrary to expectations of the many mainstream models the EPH would replace.
• HORN: What are the latest astronomical discoveries that bear on the exploded planet hypothesis?
• VAN FLANDERN: The two most recent missions were Deep Impact smashing a probe into a comet in July 2005, and Stardust returning a dust sample from a comet to Earth in the spring of 2006. The former mission showed that comets are very similar to asteroids inside and out; and the latter mission showed that comets were formed in a hot environment rather than a cold one. Both of these favor a planetary explosion origin for comets over the traditional idea of “leftovers” from the coldest parts of the primeval solar nebula.
• HORN: Astronomers have been finding planets around other stars. Is there any evidence of extrasolar planets exploding?
• VAN FLANDERN: There is. Classical novas are usually thought to be explosions of invisible companions of visible stars. We now have cause to suspect that the invisible companions are planets rather than dwarf stars.
• HORN: What effect would there be on Earth if a planet in our solar system explodes?
• Its features include an iridium layer, microdiamonds, meteorites, shocked quartz, and carbon ash; at least 16 major impacts globally; mass extinction of 70% of all species; inland seas drained; numerous “hot zones” of radioactivity; an extended period of unparalleled global volcanism; atmospheric and ocean compositional changes; and a single global fire.
• VAN FLANDERN: The K/T boundary in geology is found all over the Earth and dates from 65 million years ago.
• They are more than the single-asteroid-impact-in-the -Yucatan theory can explain, although that is still the leading mainstream theory at present.
• These are the kinds of things expected after a distant planetary explosion.
• HORN: What would cause a planet to explode?
• VAN FLANDERN: We have three known mechanisms. The simplest is changes of state in a planet’s core, which can cause explosions or implosions.
• But we now think that gravitons, the carriers of gravitational force, are the most probable cause of both planetary and stellar explosions whenever something collapses the body’s core because the heat deposited by graviton impacts would be trapped by such a collapse and would continue to build up until the body exploded.
• One was of its parent “Planet V” when Mars was still a moon. This was probably the same event that produced the K/T boundary on Earth, and saturated one side of Mars with craters while leaving the other side flat and smooth.
• VAN FLANDERN: Mars shows the scars from close proximity to two explosions.
• It also tilted the pole of Mars, tore away much of its atmosphere, and left certain radioactive isotopes that can originate only in a violent explosion.
• After that first event, Mars and another moon of Planet V were left orbiting each other as they orbited the Sun.
• The other moon, a “water world much like Jupiter’s moon Europa”, apparently exploded 3.2 million years ago, producing an unprecedented flood on one side of Mars.
• This violent history of Mars is the subject of a dramatic 5-minute video on our web site at http://metaresearch.org.
• HORN: On your website there is also a page where high-resolution spacecraft photos of Mars appear to show artificial structures. Tell us about these.
• VAN FLANDERN: The biggest surprise of the space program to date has been the finding of several categories of anomalies on the surface of Mars that, if seen on Earth, would certainly be attributed to human activity.
• These include an abundance of special shapes not normally found in nature, such as closed triangles and pyramids; vehicle-like tracks and trails across otherwise featureless desert terrain; mostly underground networks of huge “glassy tubes” apparently extending for hundreds of miles, visible in places where the surface is cracked, and seeming to connect interesting surface places; odd patterns and symbols; and an abundance of large-scale “artistic” imagery such as the five known faces on Mars and some geoglyphs reminiscent of those on the plains of Nazca in Peru.
• HORN: What stands out to you the most as special shapes on Mars that do not normally arise in nature?
• VAN FLANDERN: Closed triangles with sharp vertices and straight sides are not normally seen in nature.
• 3, 4, and 5-sided pyramids are also rare.
• Yet many of these are found on Mars, but not on any other planet or moon yet examined in similar detail.
• On the Elysium plains of Mars there may be an entire field of pyramid-shaped objects laid out in linear arrays.
• HORN: I've also read about signs of present-day vegetation on Mars.
• VAN FLANDERN: Yes, we see objects that look very much like vegetation and trees in a few special places.
• The “trees” have a central trunk-like shape with large, medium, and small branch-like appendages extending radially outward, and they cast shadows on the ground indicating a height of at least 50 meters.
• In at least some places, these objects change appearance with the seasons in patterns similar to terrestrial vegetation.
• One color photo showed a predominately green coloration in the warmer months. The Martian atmosphere is supposed to be too thin and cold for vegetation. But on Earth, we have special places such as “hot springs” where warm liquid water can bubble up from underground and support vegetation in an otherwise hostile environment.

• HORN: Describe the objects on Mars

  you called "glassy tubes".
• VAN FLANDERN: From an examination of hundreds of these objects, we know that they are tube-like shapes typically 50-100 meters in diameter.
• White bands wrap around the tube about every ten meters along its entire length. The material between bands is translucent, and we can faintly see the white bands on the underside through the tube.
• When direct sunlight is available, it reflects from the tube in a mirror-like way instead of just scattering the light.
• Where a boulder has damaged a tube, we often see a collapsed tube section, where broken white bands lie flat on the surface, and sharp, spine-like portions of broken bands jut out from an intact-but-torn tube section.
• Tubes are visible mainly in fissures or where a flood has eroded away the topsoil. In some places, they can be traced underground in infrared images that can detect such things if they are not too far below the surface.
• Some tubes cross one another (one above, one below) in perpendicular intersections, while others have junctions where one tube becomes two or vice versa. In a few places, many tubes come together in patterns suggestive of “terminals” for train stations.
• HORN: What else is seen that might be of special interest?
• VAN FLANDERN: In certain places on Mars, especially near the location of the former equator of the planet, we see “artistic imagery”, sometimes in abundance, although not always with distinct clarity.
• Moreover, the shapes seen are not random, but depict familiar terrestrial images in organized groupings.
• For example, in one region of Mars named “Cydonia”, we see an apparent mosaic scene showing impressions of sky, land, and water, with animal shapes organized in appropriate sections of the mosaic.
• Amphibious creatures are in the water area, animals on the land area, and aviary creatures in the air area.
• However, millions of years of dust storms and erosion have left many of the images more impressionistic than life-like. Had the images been as distinct as the words I must use to describe them, the shock waves from this discovery would have already traveled around the world.
• HORN: What distinguishes the many artistic faces and other familiar shapes on Mars from faces and shapes seen in clouds and natural landscapes here on earth?
• VAN FLANDERN: It is possible to see even very detailed shapes in random, noisy backgrounds. But some of the Martian shapes appear against flat, featureless backgrounds.
• The context and relationship appropriateness is additional evidence these are not products of geology or random processes.
• But the most compelling proof, to a scientist at least, is the fulfillment of what we call a priori predictions. For example, if you are dealt a 13-card hand and get all 13 spades, you might wonder if that was an accident or the result of a fixed deck because the odds against that happening by chance are 635-billion-to-one.
• Yet every specific randomized deal of 13 unique cards had the same odds against happening by chance. So unlikely events, like unlikely card hands, can and do happen by chance.
• Yet if I predicted that on the next deal, your hand would contain 13 spades, and it did, you could be sure at odds of 635-billion-to-one that was not a lucky guess but the result of a controlled process. That’s how the a priori principle works – through the power of predictions.
• When the Viking spacecraft saw an apparent face on Mars in the Cydonia region, that was interesting but could easily have been a “trick of light and shadow”.
• So scientists formulated tests to tell whether the object was natural (a product of geology and illusion) or artificial (a product of intelligences).
• The first eight such tests initially gave a split decision, 5 to 3 in favor of artificiality.
• Two of those tests were based on the fact that the Cydonia face-object cannot be seen from the ground but must be viewed from above, for example from an orbiting space station. So if artificial, it would logically be built on the equator of Mars and built upright.
• But the Cydonia face was far from the equator (latitude 41 degrees north) and was tilted from upright by an angle of about 35 degrees. Those statistics favored a natural origin.
• Then in 1996 we took a look at the pole shift of Mars to see where the face-like object was before the pole shift. The answer was exactly on the old equator and upright to within two degrees! The odds against that happening by chance were roughly 1000-to-one.
• So if the builders were active before the cataclysm that tipped the pole of Mars (the explosion of the other moon 3.2 million years ago), then both these tests indicated an artificial origin. By the end of that year, all eight tests favored an artificial origin over a natural one.
• As compelling as this conclusion was to any mind open to either possibility, it still needed conformation.
• So in 1997, the Society for Planetary SETI Research (SPSR), an association of about 30 independent scientists, sent a few representatives to NASA to request priority imaging of the Cydonia face-like object by the high-resolution camera on the newly-arrived Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft.
• SPSR then set down criteria for distinguishing artificial from natural well before any results were known. In brief, if and only if the object was artificial, the impression of a humanoid eye, nose, and mouth in the original images should be supplemented by secondary facial features in any detailed new image.
• These specifically included an eyebrow over the eye socket, an iris inside the eye socket, nostrils at the large end of a tapered nose, and evidence of lips in the mouth feature.
• Specifics were set down for the qualifying size, shape, location, and orientation of these features on the mesa. Moreover, the test required that no qualifying features appear in the background so that our minds could form apparent facial features from randomness, as our minds are prone to do.
• When the spacecraft images were returned to Earth in April 1998, every prediction was fulfilled.
• This was like predicting a deal of 13 spades in advance, except that the combined odds against this happening by chance at Cydonia were 1000-billion-billion-to-one.
• That left no doubt in the minds of scientists familiar with the a priori principle that the Cydonia Face had to be an artificial structure.
• HORN: Can you give another example of ruling out a natural origin for some of these artistic features?
• VAN FLANDERN: Yes. One of the animal shapes elsewhere on Mars resembled a puma, but it wasn’t detailed enough to be persuasive and the edge of the spacecraft photograph left the hindquarters cut off and unseen. So the scientist who found the image, J.P. Levasseur, predicted that the image was artificial if and only if the missing hindquarters completed an animal hind-section and legs and contained a puma-like tail extending from the right place on the hindquarters.
• Anything else from an unlimited number of possibilities would indicate a natural origin.
• A few years later, the spacecraft (by request) took another image that included the hindquarters area, and showed the completion of an animal hindquarters and hind legs and a marvelous tail of the right proportions extending from just the right place.
• HORN: So what is the connection between possible artifacts on Mars and the exploded planet hypothesis we were discussing earlier?
• VAN FLANDERN: The explosion of the “water-world” body Mars was orbiting until 3.2 million years ago produced the most recent pole shift on Mars that moved the Cydonia Face from the equator to its present location, tilting it by 35 degrees. This tells us that the builders of these amazing surface features predated the explosion, and that their civilization was probably terminated by that explosion.
• Moreover, we see no evidence of a primary civilization on Mars, making the exploded water world the most likely location for that civilization.
• Indeed, that speculation makes sense on several levels. For example, if we project our own civilization ahead a few thousand years, trips to our Moon will by then be routine for tourists. The first thing such tourists will wish to do is board an orbiting space station to get a close-up overview of the entire Moon. It will then be a natural step for the many activities on the lunar surface – telescopes, mining operations, laboratories, communication centers, and all manner of commercial operations – to attract tourists and tourist dollars by building surface exhibits that can be seen from the orbiting space station.
• So we can reasonably project that the future of our Moon will be not unlike what we are seeing today on Mars – surface exhibits that can be best viewed from an orbiting space station.
• However, if that was the function of the artistic Mars images, that would imply Mars was the civilization’s moon, not its home world. And the latter was lost by explosion 3.2 million years ago – a date that is reliably determined from the orbital period of new comet orbits.
• HORN: What is the significance of that connection for us here on Earth?
• VAN FLANDERN: We are deep into the area of speculation now. However, it seems unlikely to be coincidence that the geoglyphs on Mars are so humanoid and terrestrial in appearance rather than alien.
• And it seems also unlikely to be coincidence that the builder’s civilization on their home world ended about the same time as the dating of the earliest humanoid fossil on Earth, the “Lucy” find in Africa.
• Both are dated to 3.2 million years ago. So it seems that one civilization was ending about the same time that another was beginning. When these findings are tied in with the most ancient “sacred” writings from cultures everywhere on Earth, the mind is compelled to wonder if those stories are perhaps preserving knowledge of human origins elsewhere in the solar system, and of a species transfer to Earth in an effort to survive the cataclysm.
• Answering such questions may in the end turn out to be the most important knowledge for our species to acquire in our future as solar system explorers, more important even than the Copernican revolution when we learned that Earth was not the center of the universe.
• HORN: We will need to do a part two at some point to focus more on the question of origins. Some of this sounds almost like a Star Trek episode where extraterrestrial civilizations need to escape their doomed planet in order to find a new home elsewhere.
• Yet doesn't modern physics still hold that nothing can travel faster than light (186 thousand miles per second), so that touring the Galaxy in a human lifetime (as in "Star Trek") is impossible. Is that theory still valid?
• VAN FLANDERN: No, it is not.
• The geometric interpretation of Einstein’s general relativity theory appeared to require that the speed of light was an absolute upper speed limit. However, evidence has gone against the geometric interpretation in favor of the field interpretation favored by Einstein, Dirac, and Feynman, to mention just a few of the great physicists of the 20th century who weighed in on the matter.
• For example, the force of the Sun’s gravity holds Earth in orbit. All six modern experiments that attempt to measure the speed of gravitational force propagation show that it must greatly exceed the speed of light. From that, we can now be sure that the speed of light is not a limiting speed in the universe.
• So once our technology discovers “gravitons” and masters controlling them, we will not only be able to listen in on any Galactic conversations that may be occurring, but we will also be able to travel about the Galaxy within human life-spans.
• HORN: Have scientists observed phenomenon propagating faster than light?
  
• VAN FLANDERN: Yes, the strongest of the six experiments places a lower limit to the speed of gravity of 20 billion times faster than the speed of light. It also follows that the speed of electric (Coulomb) force is faster than light, and might be as fast as the speed of gravity.
• Light waves (sometimes confusingly called “electromagnetic waves”) and gravitational waves (which have no more to do with gravity than light has to do with electricity) travel at the speed of light.
• HORN: Is gravity a "push" or a "pull"? And what does this tell us about the origin and nature of gravity?
• VAN FLANDERN: Traditionally, we have always thought of gravity as something within the Earth and all masses that pull us and other things toward themselves. But we now have a new understanding of the nature and origin of gravity that is quite different.
• We think the visible universe is filled with innumerable, super-fast “gravitons” traveling in all directions, individually so tiny that they can usually fly through the atoms composing the entire Earth without hitting anything solid. But a small fraction of them does hit solid matter and gets scattered or absorbed.
• For us standing here on Earth’s surface, we are not held down by anything from the Earth but by a graviton wind from space pushing us downward. That wind arrives from all directions. But the Earth blocks a small part of the wind trying to reach us from below.
• So more gravitons strike us from above than from below, and we feel a net push downward. This is known as the theory of “pushing gravity”.
• It predicts five new properties of gravity, and so far these predictions are in good accord with all observations and experiments. Pushing gravity is also the subject of a 20-author book by that title published in 2002.
  
• HORN: How fast does gravity propagate?
• VAN FLANDERN: The experimental lower limit for the speed of gravity is 20 billion times faster than light.
• Light takes 8.3 minutes to travel the 93 million miles from the Sun to Earth, but a graviton would make the same trip in under 25 nanoseconds (billionths of a second).
• Light takes about 30,000 years to travel from the center of our Galaxy to our location, but a graviton would make that trip in under a minute.
• Light from the most distant galaxies we can see takes billions of years to get here, but gravitons would take less than one year.
• HORN: Are these new ideas speculative, or are they now published and accepted?
• VAN FLANDERN: “Accepted” is always a slow process. Physicist Max Planck once said “Science progresses one funeral at a time”, and that adage remains just as true today. The best new ideas can accomplish in the short term is to expose themselves to peer review and the toughest arguments opponents can muster.
• If they survive that, get published, and silence the critics, the rest is just a matter of time for the word to spread and the resistance to die out.
• The gravity papers were first published in 1996, then more aggressively in 1999 in Physics Letters A.
• A few challenge papers appeared, and all were rebutted. Then in 2002 I was joined by a senior physicist, the late J.P. Vigier (in whose honor four international symposiums have been held). We jointly published a comprehensive, 38-page paper in “Foundations of Physics” setting out the full story, including every challenge raised and how it is answered. There has been no further scientific criticism since that review paper appeared.
• HORN: What are the practical implications of faster-than-light travel for SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and interstellar communications?
• VAN FLANDERN: Assuming gravitons exist and propagate billions of times faster than light, no advanced civilization in the Galaxy would be using radio waves to communicate because it takes too long (longer than normal life-spans). So under those assumptions, our SETI program is a waste of time.
• Only when we can listen in to graviton signals will we start to hear the Galactic conversations that may be going on, and achieve direct communication with any stellar neighbors we might have.
• HORN: What about the implications for UFOs and interstellar travel?
• VAN FLANDERN: The same principles apply. To get around the Galaxy, one would need to use graviton propulsion systems. That is still far enough ahead of our civilization’s progress that it would appear magical to us.
• Extraterrestrials and their vehicles could come and go without attracting our attention if they chose to do so. Many UFO reports don’t register on my personal plausibility meter because they envision vehicles that are barely more advanced than the most modern human flying craft, and are so klutzy that they are frequently rumored to crash.
• HORN: The Roswell Incident. What do you think happened there in 1947?
• VAN FLANDERN: I have never personally investigated that incident. But from the reports on both sides of the controversy I have seen, I think criticisms of the classified Mogul balloon explanation have seemed insubstantial, being based more on a distrust of government sources than on verifiable facts.
• HORN: Will you be in Roswell this July? If so, will you be making a public appearance?
• VAN FLANDERN: No. The charter of my sponsoring organization, Meta Research, covers everything from “40 km and up”, so UFOs usually remain a bit out of my field as a professional astronomer.
• But occasionally they do come within it. I did investigate the reported anomalous object photographed by the Russian Phobos 2 spacecraft, and I investigated the alleged UFO sightings over Mexico during the 1991 total solar eclipse because I was there for the eclipse.
• Regrettably, the UFO field, always in need of support and supporters, is not as eager to publish explanations of famous cases as it is to publish unexplained aerial phenomena, which in turn hurts the field’s credibility with serious-but-open-minded scientists.
• Neither of those incidents turned out to involve genuine UFOs.
• HORN: There is so much more I could ask you, which will have to wait for that part-two if we do it. Please tell people where they can learn more about you and your research.
• VAN FLANDERN: Visit our web site at http://metaresearch.org for extensive samples of our research and articles. My book, Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets gives a nice overview of our Meta Science from the solar system to the whole universe, including why the Big Bang theory is wrong and the best bet to replace it.
• For the latest developments, our quarterly publication, the Meta Research Bulletin, has just gone electronic and open source to begin its 16th year as the publication with the best track record for successful predictions in the field of astronomy.
• We also offer a number of CDs with presentation materials and technical details about “Gravity”, “The Evolving Mars Story”, and “A Short Tour of the Universe”. See our web site store for more information about these items and a few books we recommend.
• HORN: Thank you for taking time to be part of the special Road to Roswell series.

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• July, 2008
• Bracing the Satellite Infrastructure for a Solar Superstorm
• A recurrence of the 1859 solar superstorm would be a cosmic Katrina, causing billions of dollars of damage to satellites, power grids and radio communications
• By Sten F. Odenwald and James L. Green
• As night was falling across the Americas on Sunday, August 28, 1859, the phantom shapes of the auroras could already be seen overhead.
• From Maine to the tip of Florida, vivid curtains of light took the skies.
• Startled Cubans saw the auroras directly overhead; ships’ logs near the equator described crimson lights reaching halfway to the zenith.
• Many people thought their cities had caught fire.
•    
  
  Pat Rawlings/SAIC
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  Key Concepts
   
   
  • The solar superstorm of 1859 was the fiercest ever recorded. Auroras filled the sky as far south as the Caribbean, magnetic compasses went haywire and telegraph systems failed.
   
  • Ice cores suggest that such a blast of solar particles happens only once every 500 years, but even the storms every 50 years could fry satellites, jam radios and cause coast-to-coast blackouts.
   
  • The cost of such an event justifies more systematic solar monitoring and beefier protection for satellites and the power grid.
   
   
  <!--/end key concepts--> 
• Scientific instruments around the world, patiently recording minute changes in Earth’s magnetism, suddenly shot off scale, and spurious electric currents surged into the world’s telegraph systems.
• In Baltimore telegraph operators labored from 8 p.m. until 10 a.m. the next day to transmit a mere 400-word press report.
• Just before noon the following Thursday, September 1, English astronomer Richard C. Carrington was sketching a curious group of sunspots—curious on account of the dark areas’ enormous size.
• At 11:18 a.m. he witnessed an intense white light flash from two locations within the sunspot group. He called out in vain to anyone in the observatory to come see the brief five-minute spectacle, but solitary astronomers seldom have an audience to share their excitement.
• Seventeen hours later in the Americas a second wave of auroras turned night to day as far south as Panama.
• People could read the newspaper by their crimson and green light.
• Gold miners in the Rocky Mountains woke up and ate breakfast at 1 a.m., thinking the sun had risen on a cloudy day.
• Telegraph systems became unusable across Europe and North America.
• The news media of the day looked for researchers able to explain the phenomena, but at the time scientists scarcely understood auroral displays at all.
• Were they meteoritic matter from space, reflected light from polar icebergs or a high-altitude version of lightning?
• It was the Great Aurora of 1859 itself that ushered in a new paradigm. The October 15 issue of Scientific American noted that ‘‘a connection between the northern lights and forces of electricity and magnetism is now fully established.”
• Work since then has established that auroral displays ultimately originate in violent events on the sun, which fire off huge clouds of plasma and momentarily disrupt our planet’s magnetic field.
• The impact of the 1859 storm was muted only by the infancy of our technological civilization at that time.
• Were it to happen today, it could severely damage satellites, disable radio communications and cause continent-wide electrical blackouts that would require weeks or longer to recover from.
• Although a storm of that magnitude is a comfortably rare once-in-500-years event, those with half its intensity hit every 50 years or so.
• The last one, which occurred on November 13, 1960, led to worldwide geomagnetic disturbances and radio outages.
• If we make no preparations, by some calculations the direct and indirect costs of another superstorm could equal that of a major hurricane or earthquake.
• The Big One
• The number of sunspots, along with other signs of solar magnetic activity, waxes and wanes on an 11-year cycle.
• The current cycle began this past January; over the coming half a decade, solar activity will ramp up from its current lull.
• During the previous 11 years, 21,000 flares and 13,000 clouds of ionized gas, or plasma, exploded from the sun’s surface. These phenomena, collectively termed solar storms, arise from the relentless churning of solar gases.
• In some ways, they are scaled-up versions of terrestrial storms, with the important difference that magnetic fields lace the solar gases that sculpt and energize them.
• Flares are analogous to lightning storms; they are bursts of energetic particles and intense x-rays resulting from changes in the magnetic field on a relatively small scale by the sun’s standards, spanning thousands of kilometers.
• So-called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are analogous to hurricanes; they are giant magnetic bubbles, millions of kilometers across, that hurl billion-ton plasma clouds into space at several million kilometers per hour.

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• August 15, 2008
• MIT-led Team Discovers New Path of Earth's Meteorites
• A team from MIT and other institutions have solved the mystery that has nagged at astronomers the last few years: why the vast majority of asteroids that come near the Earth are of a type that matches only a tiny fraction of the meteorites that most frequently hit our planet.
• Since meteorites are mostly pieces of asteroids, this discrepancy was hard to explain, but the team discovered that the smaller rocks that most often fall to Earth, come straight in from the main asteroid belt out between Mars and Jupiter, rather than from the near-Earth asteroid population.
• The answer to the puzzle gradually emerged from a long-term study of the properties of asteroids carried out by MIT professor of planetary science Richard Binzel and his students, along with postdoctoral researcher P. Vernazza, who is now with the European Space Agency, and A.T. Tokunaga, director of the University of Hawaii's Institute of Astronomy.
• By studying the spectral signatures of near-Earth asteroids, they were able to compare them with spectra obtained on Earth from the thousands of meteorites that have been recovered.
• But the more they looked, the more they found that most NEAs -- about two-thirds of them -- match a specific type of meteorites called LL chondrites, which only represent about 8 percent of meteorites. How could that be, they asked?
• "Why do we see a difference between the objects hitting the ground and the big objects whizzing by?" Binzel asks.
• As the effect became gradually more and more noticeable as more asteroids were analyzed, "we finally had a big enough data set that the statistics demanded an answer. It could no longer be just a coincidence."
• "It's been a headscratcher."
• Why would the objects that most frequently hit us match the distant population better than it matches the objects in our own neighborhood?
• That's where the idea emerged of a fast track all the way from the main belt to a crater on Earth's surface.
• This fast track, it turns out, is caused by an obscure phenomena, called the Yarkovsky effect that was discovered long ago, but only recently recognized as a significant factor in asteroid patterns.
• The Yarkovsky effect causes asteroids to change their orbits as a result of the way they absorb the sun's heat on one side and radiate it back later as they rotate around.
• This causes a slight imbalance that slowly, over time, alters the object's path. An effect that acts much more strongly on the smallest objects, and only weakly on the larger ones.
• "We think the Yarkovsky effect is so efficient for meter-size objects that it can operate on all regions of the asteroid belt," Binzel says.
• Binzel's study concludes that the largest near-Earth asteroids mostly come from the asteroid belt's innermost edge, where they are part of a specific "family" thought to all be remnants of a larger asteroid that was broken apart by collisions.
• With an initial nudge from the Yarkovsky effect, kilometer-sized asteroids from the Flora region can find themselves "over the edge" of the asteroid belt and sent on a path to Earth's vicinity through the perturbing effects of the planets called resonances.
• The new study is good news for protecting Earth. One of the biggest problems in figuring out how to deal with an approaching asteroid, if and when one is discovered on a potential collision course, is that they are so varied. The best way of dealing with one kind might not work on another.
• But now that this analysis has shown that the majority of near-Earth asteroids are of this specific type -- stony objects, rich in the mineral olivine and poor in iron -- it's possible to concentrate most planning on dealing with that kind of object, Binzel says.
• "Odds are, an object we might have to deal with would be like an LL chondrite, and thanks to our samples in the laboratory, we can measure its properties in detail," he says. "It's the first step toward 'know thy enemy'."
• Posted by Casey Kazan, adapted from MIT news source.

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• Spacecraft flies by remote asteroid, camera stops
• By KATRIN SCHIEFER and GEORGE FREY, Associated Press Writers   Sat Sep 6, 9:51 AM ET
• DARMSTADT, Germany - The European deep space probe Rosetta successfully completed a flyby of an asteroid millions of miles from earth, but its high resolution camera stopped shortly before the closest pass, space officials said Saturday.
• Rosetta caught up with the Steins asteroid, also known as Asteroid 2867, just after 8:45 p.m. (1845 GMT) Friday in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
• The probe came within 500 miles (805 kilometers) of the asteroid — which turned out to be slightly larger than scientists expected.
• Officials at the European Space Agency were not sure exactly what caused the camera to balk.
• "The software switched off automatically," Gerhard Schwehm, the ESA mission manager and head of solar systems science operations told The Associated Press.
• "The camera has some software limits and we'll analyze why this happened later."
• Another wide angle camera was able to take pictures and send them to the space center, Schwehm said.
• At a news conference, Uwe Keller, the principal camera investigator, said despite the camera turning off about nine minutes before its closest approach, it switched back on again later and was now working well. Keller said he did not expect the camera setback to affect the rest of the mission.
• Craters of different ages were found on the surface of the gray-colored asteroid, showing a "rich collisional history," Keller said.
• The probe recorded more than 23 craters over 200 meters wide, with the biggest being about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) wide.
• According to measurements by the probe, the diamond-shaped asteroid turned out to be 3.1 miles (5 kilometers) in diameter, slightly larger than an earlier estimate of 3 miles (4.8 kilometers).
• The Rosetta craft was launched in March 2004 from French Guyana, and is now about 250 million miles (402 million kilometers) from Earth.
• Schwehm said the historic mission could give astronomers crucial clues to help them understand the creation of the solar system.
• Rita Schulz, a Rosetta project scientist, said data from asteroids and comets was particularly valuable because they are made of galactic matter that helped create the planets in our solar system.
• "Asteroids are a sort of memory, or the DNA, of the solar system," Schulz said.
• Up until now, astronomers analyzing asteroids have had to work with limited data from brief flybys, such as when ESA's Giotto probe swept by Halley's Comet in 1986, photographing long canyons, broad craters and 3,000-foot (1000-meter) hills.
• As planned, the Rosetta lost its signal to Earth for about an hour-and-a-half Friday night as engineers turned it away from the sun and the craft zoomed through space too fast for its antennae to transmit any signal.
• At 10:15 p.m (2015 GMT) Friday the craft resumed transmission, signaling that the exercise was largely successful — news cheered by ESA engineers and technicians.
• Yet there was another setback Friday night as data was sent to antenna stations far from Europe.

• A NASA laboratory in Goldstone, California was having problems cooling one of its antennas in the summer heat and had to switch the ESA project to another antenna, delaying the analysis of some data by several hours. 

   Rosetta data was also transmitted to an antenna in New Norcia, western Australia. 
• Data from its working camera was being processed Saturday at the Max Planck Institute in Lindau, southern Germany, while further infrared data collected by the probe was being analyzed at the Instituto Nacionale di Astrofisica in Rome.
• The Steins asteroid was Rosetta's first scientific target as it enters the asteroid belt en route to its destination, the comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta is scheduled to reach the comet in 2014.
• Between now and then it will perform some gravitational experiments before going into hibernation, Schwehm said
• The European Space Agency is supported by 17 countries including Germany, France, Ireland and the Netherlands.
• It cooperates with NASA, the European Union, European national space agencies and international partners. It's expected the ESA will become the European Union space agency in the near future.

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• Astronomers Baffled by Mysterious Light in Sky

• Tuesday, September 16, 2008

       
• It's not a supernova. Nor is it a galaxy, or a black hole.
• In fact, astronomers have no idea what the mysterious object that in February 2006 suddenly flared up in an otherwise barren patch of sky might be, or even what it's made of.
• Researchers working on something called the Supernova Cosmology Project had pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a very distant star cluster, 8.2 billion light-years away or more than halfway across the universe.
• But they noticed something else — a point of light where there hadn't been one before.

• Over the next three months, the object got brighter and brighter until it was 120 times its initial luminosity.

        

  Then it slowly got dimmer again, at about the same rate, until by the end of the year it was gone.
• Astronomers led by U.C. Berkeley astrophysics grad student Kyle Barbary put the light coming from it through a mass spectrometer to see what it was made of — but couldn't get signatures for any known elements.
• "Because we can't see anything we recognize in the spectrum, we can't tell if it's even in [our] galaxy or in another galaxy," Barbary told New Scientist magazine in an article posted Tuesday morning.
• It's not a supernova, which would have flared up much more quickly, then died out even more quickly.

• All the scientists know is that it's no closer to Earth than 130 light-years away — and no further than 11 billion light-years away.

        

  As Sky and Telescope magazine noted last week, "that leaves a lot of leeway."
• "We are hoping someone else might have seen something similar," Barbary told New Scientist, "or might be able to shed some light on it."

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• Solar wind weakest since beginning of space age
• Sep 24 03:32 PM US/Eastern
• The intensity of the sun's million-mile-per-hour solar wind has dropped to its lowest levels since accurate records began half a century ago, scientists say.
• Measurements of the cosmic blasts of radiation, ejected from the sun's upper atmosphere, were made with the Ulysses spacecraft, a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
• The solar wind "inflates a protective bubble, or heliosphere, around the solar system," which protects the inner planets against the radiation from other stars, said Dave McComas, Ulysses' solar wind principal investigator and senior executive director at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
• "With the solar wind at an all-time low, there is an excellent chance the heliosphere will diminish in size and strength," said Ed Smith, NASA's Ulysses project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
• "If that occurs, more galactic cosmic rays will make it into the inner part of our solar system," added Smith.
• Scientists say the weakening of solar wind appears to be due to changes in the sun's magnetic field, but the causes of these changes are unknown.

  • And being reported today are "changes in the earth's magnetic core"; thus "weakening" the atmosphere's protection of earth from harmful radiation as well. Is all nature, earth and space, at war with humanity?
  Add Sticky Note
• The weakened solar activity can be beneficial because it slows satellites around the Earth, allowing them to remain in orbit longer.
• The sun normally experiences 11-year-cycles between periods of great activity and lesser activity.
• But, Smith said, the Ulysses mission's recent results, published in Geophysical Research Letters, show that "we are in a period of minimal activity that has stretched on longer than anyone anticipated."
• The Ulysses mission was the first project to survey the space environment over the sun's poles.
• The data the spacecraft has collected has profoundly changed the way scientists view our nearest star and its effects on the Earth.
• The spacecraft has traveled more than 539 million kilometers in more than 18 years, almost four times its expected lifetime.

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• NASA: 2012 'space Katrina' may cripple U.S. for months
• Damages could be trillions from solar 'perfect storm'
• Posted: January 10, 2009
  6:42 pm Eastern
• By Drew Zahn
   <!--- copywrite only show on NON commentary pages as per joseph meeting 8/23/06 ------>   <!-- copyright --> © 2009 WorldNetDaily 
• A recently released NASA report warns that the U.S. has forgotten the power of the sun, creating a technological society susceptible like never before to massive infrastructure damage from solar storms.
• The study, carried out for NASA by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, doesn't predict some new solar or environmental disaster. Instead, it studies the effects of the sun's normal, cyclical behavior upon modern technology.
• Professor Daniel Baker is director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado and chaired the panel that prepared the report.
• "Whether it is terrestrial catastrophes or extreme space weather incidents," writes Baker in a statement released with the report, "the results can be devastating to modern societies that depend in a myriad of ways on advanced technological systems."
• According to the report, the U.S. has grown so dependent on modern technologies without respect of what the sun can and has done, that it's risking major communications, finance, transportation, government and even emergency services meltdowns.
• And if one of the sun's periodic, catastrophic storms hits the earth the way Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. coastline, the report estimates that damages from the "space weather Katrina" could top $1 or $2 trillion.
• The sun is currently near minimum on its 11-year activity cycle, the report explains, but is expected to produce solar storms that will increase in intensity and frequency as it approaches peak activity levels in 2012.
• The NASA report warns that if the sun's activity over the next few years flares to the level of the May 1921 "superstorm" or the so-called Carrington event of 1859, a "perfect storm" that Space.com called "the most powerful onslaught of solar energy in recorded history," the U.S. may not be equipped to handle the damages.
• "The impacts of severe space weather events," the report states, "can go beyond disruption of existing technical systems and lead to short-term, as well as to long-term collateral socioeconomic disruptions."
• The report listed possible cascading effects of a major solar storm as "disruption of the transportation, communication, banking and finance systems, and government services; the breakdown of the distribution of potable water owing to pump failure, and the loss of perishable foods and medications because of a lack of refrigeration."
• Solar storm history
• The impact of the solar storms is widely, and even recently, recorded.
• In March 1989, a geomagnetic storm took down the power grid over much of Quebec, leaving millions of Canadians without power for hours.
• In January 1994, the NASA report records, Canada's $290 million Anik E2 telecommunications satellite was knocked out by a solar storm, and it took six months and $50-70 million to get it back in operation.
• One of the most dangerous contributors to solar storms is a coronal mass ejection, an expanding cloud of charged particles belched from the sun and sailing through space at supersonic speeds.
• According to a video on Space.com, a CME impacted the earth in 1998, knocking a communications satellite out of space to crash in the middle of the U.S. and disrupting nearly every pager signal in the country.
• But in 1859, a CME of extreme intensity, exceptionally high speed and magnetic fields opposite the earth's blasted the planet. The resulting "perfect storm" temporarily doubled the light of the sun, caused colorful aurora – normally only visible in the polar regions – to be seen as far south as Hawaii and shorted out telegraph wires, starting fires across the U.S. and Europe.
• Coronal mass ejections hit the earth relatively routinely.
• In 1859, however, the telegraph was only 15 years old. There was no satellite or television technology, no power grids, no automated teller machines

  

  and no global positioning systems helping direct traffic on land, air and sea.
• "A contemporary repetition of the [1859] event," the NASA report concludes, "would cause significantly more extensive (and possibly catastrophic) social and economic disruptions."

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• Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected
• By Andrea Thompson
  Senior Writer
  posted: 07 January 2009
• LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Space is typically thought of as a very quiet place. But one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected.
• The roar is from the distant cosmos. Nobody knows what causes it.
• Of course, sound waves can't travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they  can't very efficiently. But radio waves can.
• Radio waves are not sound waves, but they are still electromagnetic waves, situated on the low-frequency end of the light spectrum.
• Even our home galaxy, the Milky Way, emits a static hiss (first detected in 1931 by physicist Karl Jansky).
• Many objects in the universe, including stars and quasars, emit radio waves.
• Other galaxies also send out a background radio hiss.
• But the newly detected signal, described here today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, is far louder than astronomers expected.
• There is "something new and interesting going on in the universe," said Alan Kogut of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
• A team led by Kogut detected the signal with a balloon-borne instrument named ARCADE (Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission).
• In July 2006, the instrument was launched from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, and reached an altitude of about 120,000 feet (36,500 meters), where the atmosphere thins into the vacuum of space.
• ARCADE's mission was to search the sky for faint signs of heat from the first generation of stars, but instead they heard a roar from the distant reaches of the universe.
• "The universe really threw us a curve," Kogut said. "Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted."

• Detailed analysis of the signal ruled out primordial stars or any known radio sources, including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy.

   

  Other radio galaxies also can't account for the noise – there just aren't enough of them.
• "You'd have to pack them into the universe like sardines," said study team member Dale Fixsen of the University of Maryland. "There wouldn't be any space left between one galaxy and the next."
• The signal is measured to be six times brighter than the combined emission of all known radio sources in the universe.
• For now, the origin of the signal remains a mystery.
• "We really don't know what it is,"said team member Michael Seiffert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
• And not only has it presented astronomers with a new puzzle, it is obscuring the sought-for signal from the earliest stars.
• But the cosmic static may itself provide important clues to the development of galaxies when the universe was much younger, less than half its present age. Because the radio waves come from far away, traveling at the speed of light, they therefore represent an earlier time in the universe.

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• Jeremiah 25:30-31 (King James Version)

• 30Therefore prophesy thou against them all these words, and say unto them, The LORD shall roar from on high, and utter his voice from his holy habitation; he shall mightily roar upon his habitation; he shall give a shout, as they that tread the grapes, against all the inhabitants of the earth.

   31A noise shall come even to the ends of the earth; for the LORD hath a controversy with the nations, he will plead with all flesh; he will give them that are wicked to the sword, saith the LORD.

• the Sound of Saturn's Rings
• gregreese
     April 23, 2007
• Audio and Video of Saturn's Rings taken by NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan 2007

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• Unusual Green Comet Thrills Stargazers
• By SETH BORENSTEIN

  ,

  AP
• WASHINGTON (Feb. 18)
• An odd, greenish backward-flying comet is zipping by Earth this month, as it takes its only trip toward the sun from the farthest edges of the solar system.
• The comet is called Lulin, and there's a chance it can be seen with the naked eye — far from city lights, astronomers say. But you'll most likely need a telescope, or at least binoculars, to spot it.
• The best opportunity is just before dawn one-third of the way up the southern sky. It should be near Saturn and two bright stars, Spica and Regula.
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  Amazing Space Images
  
• On Monday at 10:43 p.m. EST, it will be 38 million miles from Earth, the closest it will ever get, according to Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near Earth Object program.
• The story behind the comet is more intriguing than its appearance — the greenish tinge may be hard for many to discern. The color comes from a type of carbon and cyanogen, a poisonous gas.
• Lulin was discovered by a Chinese teenager two years ago. It still has many of its original gases — gases that are usually stripped away as comets near the sun.
• Unlike most comets viewable from Earth, this one hasn't been this close to the sun before, Yeomans said.
• While all the planets and most of the other objects in the solar system circle the sun counterclockwise, Lulin circles clockwise, said NASA astronomer Stephen Edberg.
• And thanks to an optical illusion, from Earth it appears as if the comet's tail is in the front as the comet approaches Earth and the sun.
• "It essentially is going backwards through the solar system," he said.
• It came from the outskirts of the solar system, 18 trillion miles away. Once it's made the journey around the sun, Lulin will gain enough speed to escape the solar system, Edberg said.
• "If you are interested in comets, make sure you see it," he said. "But it's not going to be a real great blast for the general public."

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• Monday, September 28, 2009

   

    

   Truth About The Moon - NASA Black Box Transcripts
• This has to go down as some of THE BEST smoking gun evidence that NASA failed to cover up.
• YouTuber "LunaCognita" has done a fantastic job by searching through the NASA archives to share this information with the world. Check this video out!
• In this examination into NASA's "black box" transcripts, we will look at just a few of the many interesting and revealing comments made by the astronauts throughout the Apollo program that were captured by the CSM's DSE system, as well as touch on some of the scripting protocols employed during the various TV broadcasts made from the CSM during the journey to and from the Moon and while in lunar orbit.
• Contrary to what many think, those TV broadcasts were in fact elegantly scripted affairs, designed to rigidly control the amount of data that we, the general public, would have available to analyze.
• Because of this, the DSE and DSEA internal crew conversation transcripts can provide us, in the astronauts own words, an unscripted and less-guarded insight into some of the incredible things they really witnessed during their journey to and from the Moon.
• During the Apollo lunar landing program, NASA made use of two primary flight telemetry/voice recording systems aboard their spacecraft.
• One of these systems was inside the Command/Service Module, and the other was mounted within the Lunar Module.
• These two systems were known as the DSE (aboard the CSM) and the DSEA (aboard the LM). The "Data Storage Equipment" systems essentially served as Black Box cockpit voice recorders, designed to tape some of the internal conversations between the astronauts while they were out of radio contact with Mission Control in Houston.
• After contact was re-established during the flight, Mission Control could then dump (downlink) the recorded data from the CSM to Earth, where it would be analyzed.
• Unfortunately, NASA today claims that the original DSE Black Box tapes from the Apollo missions are missing and are presumed lost.
• However, these DSE recordings were transcribed shortly after the contents of the tapes were originally dumped from the CSM to the Earth, and several years after the Apollo program ended, these transcripts finally were declassified and then released to the NASA archives.
• In coming segments, we will examine many more impressive statements made by the NASA astronauts that were captured by the various cockpit voice recording systems utilized during not only the Apollo program, but during the earlier Gemini Earth-orbital flights as well. There is much more to come!
• Cheers,
  LunaCognita
• The Moltke Crater Featured In The Video.
  
  Notice the tubular legs evenly spaced coming down from the raised center.
  

  
  
  
  

  NASA Mission Transcripts can be found HERE

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• Strange Huge Light Cloud over Moscow Oct 09, What is it???
• Truthspeaker74
    October 07, 2009
• Any Ideas on what this Could Be???
  Is just a reflection of light?, A UFO?, Just a Pretty Circular Glowing cloud?, The Sun?, CGI?, \he Moon shining above the clouds???HAARP at work?Natural occurance and phenomena?,
  Please give me your thoughts on what this could be thankyou

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• Weather Geeks Champion New Armageddon-Worthy Cloud

              

                                                       By Mike Olson                                                                                                                                                 09.21.09                             

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                Photo: Danielle Maxwell   
• Weather Geeks Champion New Armageddon-Worthy Cloud
• In hill country from Iowa to the Scottish Highlands, sky-gazers have reported some strange, ominous-looking clouds of late.
• Dubbed undulatus asperatus (turbulent undulation), the atmospheric anomaly could be headed where only 80-odd clouds have gone before: into the International Cloud Atlas.
• If it makes the cut, asperatus will be the first new addition in more than 50 years.
• Where did it come from? Gavin Pretor-Pinney, president of the UK-based Cloud Appreciation Society, has a theory: "It's warmer, moister air above and colder, drier air below, with an abrupt boundary in between."
• Add wind passing over rolling terrain and "you get the same wavy effect as on the surface of water."
• The formation has probably been around for a long time, but it's only now getting attention: "Before the Internet and digicams, people might have mentioned it to a few friends and that would be it," Pretor-Pinney says.
• "Once the news got out, I was inundated with emails saying, 'I saw it three years ago; here's the picture!'"
• He's charting those images against atmospheric conditions to document the cloud's unique characteristics. The next step: Storm Geneva to seek formal recognition from the World Meteorological Organization.

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• Mission finds bright ribbon at solar system border
• Posted 2009/10/15 at 10:16 pm EDT
• WASHINGTON, Oct. 15, 2009 (Reuters) —
• A bright ribbon of hydrogen atoms marks the edge of the solar system, where the Sun's wind meets emissions from the rest of the galaxy, researchers reported on Thursday.
• They used telescopes aboard the orbiting Interstellar Boundary Explorer spacecraft or IBEX to look toward the heliopause, which is the boundary where solar wind meets galactic wind at the edge of the solar system beyond Pluto.
• Researchers combined images from IBEX with data from the Cassini spacecraft, which is near Saturn, and said it completely alters their ideas about what this border area looks like.
• "The IBEX results are truly remarkable, with emissions not resembling any of the current theories or models of this never-before-seen region," David McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, who led the research, said in a statement.
• 

   

  A bright ribbon of hydrogen atoms marks the edge of the solar system, where the Sun's wind meets emissions from the rest of the galaxy, researchers reported on Thursday. They used telescopes aboard the orbiting Interstellar Boundary Explorer spacecraft or IBEX to look toward the heliopause, which is the boundary where solar wind meets galactic wind at the edge of the solar system beyond Pluto. REUTERS/Science/AAAS/Handout
• "We expected to see small, gradual spatial variations at the interstellar boundary, some ten billion miles (16 billion km) away.
• However, IBEX is showing us a very narrow ribbon that is two to three times brighter than anything else in the sky."
• It consists of hydrogen atoms that were once charged but which have been neutralized, they reported in five separate reports in the journal Science.
• The researchers say the findings can tell them about the interstellar cloud through which our Milky Way galaxy is moving and which the galaxy will leave in about 10,000 years.
• (Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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• Buzz Aldrin: 'There's a Monolith on Mars Moon'
• 
    Phobos
   
       

  "When people find out about [the monolith] they're going to say 'who put that there?!'"    —Buzz Aldrin

• Buzz Aldrin tells C-SPAN that there is a monolith on Phobos, one of the two small moons that revolve around Mars. Mr. Aldrin states:

   

   

  We should go boldly where man has not gone before ... we should ... visit the moon of Mars. There's a monolith there, a very unusual structure on this little potato shaped object that goes around Mars once in 7 hours. When people find out about that they're going to say 'who put that there?!'"

• In a seeming move to deflect controversy, Aldrin goes onto to say that God or the "universe" must have put it there.

   

  Hat tip to Aquarian Solutions for this very unusual revelation.

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• LAMBERT DOLPHIN & THE GREAT SPHINX
• OPENING THE LOST TOMBS: LIVE FROM EGYPT
    Expert Archeologists 
    Dr. Gaballa Ali Gaballa and Dr. Zahi Hawass Featured
    Hosted by Maury Povich
• By Barbara Aho
• On March 2, 1999, the Fox Channel TV featured the above special two-hour program on the opening of the sealed tombs of the Unknown and the Queen's Pyramid at Giza in Egypt.
• The live broadcast presented information on the search for the Hall of Records at the Great Sphinx, which supposedly contains the records of the lost civilization of Atlantis.
• With feigned surprise, Dr. Zahi Hawass, Director of the Egyptian Antiquity Organization, found instead the tomb of the Egyptian god, Osiris!
• This TV special was extremely relevant to our research as part of the inculturation of society into the mythology of the god Osiris and the Gnostic religious system which is slated to supplant orthodox Christianity around the turn of the Millennium.
• Those who have read the  Cosmic Christmas  report and/or have been on our mailing list for some time would have recognized the program as a continuation of the ongoing New Age attempt to validate the ancient mystery religions and return mankind to the worship of Osiris, reincarnated in his son, Horus.
• The mystery religions, aka Mystery Babylon of Revelation 17, worship Horus in various forms, i.e., Freemasons worship the Egyptian Osiris/Horus and Kabbalists worship this same god by the Chaldean name of Tammuz (Ezekiel 8:13).

• Alexander Hislop wrote in  The Two Babylons  :

   

  "The identity of Nimrod, however, and the Egyptian, Osiris, having been established, we have thereby light as to Nimrod's death. Osiris met with a violent death, and that violent death of Osiris was the central theme of the whole idolatry of Egypt. If Osiris was Nimrod, as we have seen, that violent death which the Egyptians so pathetically deplored in their annual festivals was just the death of Nimrod. The accounts in regard to the death of the god worshipped in the several mysteries of the different countries are all to the same effect. A statement of Plato seems to show, that in his day the Egyptian Osiris was regarded as identical to Tammuz; and Tammuz is well known to have been the same as Adonis, the famous Huntsman, for whose death Venus is fabled to have made such bitter lamentations. As the women of Egypt wept for Osiris, as the Phenician and Assyrian women wept for Tammuz, so in Greece and Rome the women wept for Bacchus, whose name, as we have seen, means 'The bewailed,' or 'Lamented one.'" (p. 56)

  • Nimrod=Osiris=Tammuz=Bacchus
  Add Sticky Note
• Watching closely the developments in Egypt are many modern worshippers of Osiris, such as the Skull & Bones initiates of the George Bush family.
• George Bush, Jr., the Governor of Texas, coincidentally announced his candidacy for President the same day as the TV-staged discovery of the tomb of Osiris, while George Bush Sr. plans to be at the Egyptian pyramids on New Year's Eve 1999.
• William Cooper's book,  Behold a Pale Horse,  mentions this Millennial New Years Eve event on p. 73:   

  "Simultaneously a vault containing the ancient records of the earth will be opened in Egypt. The opening of the vault will usher in the millennium. A great celebration has already been planned by the Millennium Society to take place at the pyramids in Egypt. According to the January 3, 1989, edition of the Arizona Daily Star, 'President-elect Bush is spending this New Year's holiday at Camp David, Maryland, but in 10 years he may be in Egypt. Organizers of the Millennium Society say he's already committed to ushering in the next century at the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Giza.'"

  • And to bring this article current to 2009, POTUS Obama gave an "important" address to the Pan Muslim world from Egypt
  Add Sticky Note
• On the internet is found an edited portion of Behold a Pale Horse  in which Cooper predicts a sequence of apocalyptic events which will lead to the discovery and acceptance by humanity of the presumed records of the lost civilization of Atlantis.
• William Cooper also relates to Bible prophecy the role of NASA in a project which he believes is designed to produce an explosion on Jupiter that will be perceived as a prophetic sign.

  • NASA did recently (2009) explode a missile device near the southern pole of the moon; seeking, they said, to detect water from the dust thus shot up from the surface.
  Add Sticky Note
• This and other apocalyptic catastrophes which NASA may be planning and which will lead to the revealing of the counterfeit Christ are covered in our  Cosmic Christmas  report.

• Although it is plausible that a series of catastrophes will lead mankind to embrace the spurious archaeological records as valid, Mr. Cooper makes us wonder whether he is exposing or promoting the mystery religions when he gives credence further on to the Grail mythos of the Rosicrucian brotherhood:

   

  "I am amazed at the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the information that they have unearthed. Most of all I am amazed at their inability to put the puzzle together. The treasure hidden in France is not the treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem. It is the Holy Grail itself, the robe of Jesus, the last remaining pieces of the Cross of Crucifixion, and, according to my sources, someone's bones. I can tell you that the reality of the bones will shake the world to its very foundations if I have been told the truth. The relics are hidden in France." (p. 76)
• William Cooper's mention of the "last remaining pieces of the Cross of Crucifixion" bears an uneasy resemblance to The Rod of an Almond   Tree , a supposed relic from the Cross of Jesus Christ which Peter Michas,  in his book by that name, elevates to a Scepter of Authority which will   validate the credentials of the coming Messiah.
• Authors Michas and Vander  Maten, base their fabulous suppositions on Jewish rabbinic sources and the misinterpretation of Scripture to prove that the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden was passed through generations of Israelites as the rod of Aaron.
• According to the purveyors of the Talmud and Kabbalah, this rod, which possessed magical powers because it was engraved with the  Ineffable Name, YHWH , was planted by King David on the Mount of Olives and later became the cross of Christ.
• Subsequently, according to Michas and Vander Maten, this ancient relic will be returned by  Elijah  the prophet to validate the true Messiah who will take his place upon the Throne (Mercy Seat) at the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem.
• In Matthew 24:24, Jesus Christ warned His closest disciples that there will be false prophets and false Christs preceding the time of His coming whose deception is so well executed that even the elect might be deceived. Having been forewarned, we are already quite deceived if we reject the possibility, indeed the probability, that the Freemasons and their Jewish allies, the Kabbalists, have insinuated themselves, their false messiah and their pernicious doctrines into the very organizations which are posing as  Discernment Ministries.
• The Edgar Cayce Connection
• 
     The Message of the Sphinx  by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval cites a prophecy by the late psychic, Edgar Cayce, to the effect that a Hall of Records at the Great Sphinx at Giza would be rediscovered and   opened between 1996 and 1998 and that this discovery would be related to the second coming of Christ:
• "Headquartered in Virginia Beach in the United States . . . the A.R.E. [Association for Research and Enlightenment] is a multimillion dollar organization that exists to promulgate the teachings and prophecies of the American psychic Edgar Cayce, who died in 1945. Prominent amongst Cayce’s pronouncements were many statements... to the effect that the Sphinx had been built in 10,500 BC by the survivors of Atlantis who had concealed beneath it a ‘Hall of Records’ containing all the wisdom of their lost civilization and the true history of the human race. Cayce prophesied that this Hall of Records would be rediscovered and opened between 1996 and 1998. He connected the opening to the second coming of Christ and asserted that the contents of the Hall would not be shared with the general public until many years after it had first been entered by ‘three who would make of the perfect way of life.’" (p. 306)
• The Message of the Sphinx is a pseudo historical/archaeological work that pretends to unravel the clues of an ancient civilization, Atlantis, which  are found in the Egyptian pyramids and the Great Sphinx.
• A major figure  involved in the exploration of the Great Sphinx at Giza, was Lambert Dolphin,  who directed the Stanford Research Institute project on the very site at which the Fox Channel documentary was filmed.
• Lambert Dolphin, who claims to have became a Christian in 1962, has a website that is promoted by a Discernment ministry, Banner Ministries  of the UK, which recommends Lambert Dolphin's Christian Resource files and Lambert Dolphin's Web Links.

• Since this expose, the first link, which is Lambert Dolphin's Home Page, has been removed from the Banner site, most likely because it displays a banner for the MYTHOS & LOGOS WEB RINGS, which includes, among many others, the following New Age webrings: 

     

  Existentialism Ring
    Circle of the Muses
    Philosophy Webring
    Critical Psychology Webring
    Fairy Tales, Folk Tales and Mythology Ring
    Unity of Spiritual Experience Webring 
    SpiritRing
    Circle of Light Ring
    The Open Your Mind Ring
• Lambert Dolphin's Resource Files  link to the Edgar Cayce Foundation and Kabbalist Chabad Lubavitch in Cyberspace, among numerous other occult societies. [Predictably, the Edgar Cayce link has also been removed since this expose.]
• Coincidentally, Peter Michas' states in the Preface of his aforementioned  book  that he received his education in the Hebrew Roots of Christianity through the Chabad-Lubavich.

• On a page titled  Remote Viewing, Channeling, ESP--and the Power of God , Lambert Dolphin describes his 30 year career at the Stanford Research Institute:

   

  "For thirty years I enjoyed a wonderful and challenging career spanning some 30 years with a large and prestigious West Coast think tank. [SRI] Our projects at the lab were often multi-disciplinary and the climate was one where all sorts of diverse ideas could be exchanged freely. Our projects ranged over the broadest possible range."
• Although Lambert Dolphin mentions the government's involvement with remote viewers for espionage, he does not disclose that in 1977 he traveled to Virginia Beach to negotiate funding from the Edgar Cayce organization for the SRI project at Giza --
• nor that in 1983 he helped to set up the Independent Mars Project’ as consultant   to NASA and leader of the SRI project at the Great Sphinx.

• The following  chronicle of Lambert Dolphin's activities appears in  The Message of the Sphinx:  

  "Back in Egypt in 1977, a year after the Viking images had first reached the Earth, Mark Lehner [A.R.E.’s ‘man’ at Giza] made contact with NASA’s Dr. Lambert T. Dolphin, leader of the Stanford Research Institute project at the Sphinx ..." (p. 313)

   

     

   

  "Later in 1977 Lambert Dolphin traveled to Virginia Beach to negotiate funding from the Edgar Cayce organization for a proposed new SRI project at Giza... In (1983) ‘The Independent Mars Project’ was set up in the United States by Richard  Hoagland, a former NASA consultant, and Lambert Dolphin… " (pp.   313-14)

• It seems that Edgar Cayce, who was known as the "sleeping prophet," entered into deep trances during which he prophesied the existence of a Hall of Records in Egypt with identification as to its specific location:  

  "One of the most persistent accounts given by Edgar Cayce during his deep trances concerned:

   

     

   

   

  "'References and clues [which] indicate Egypt as a repository for records - records of Atlantis and ancient Egypt during the time of Ra-Ta, which may some day be found... that a vast underground repository was established containing a library of wisdom from the lost civilization of Atlantis: 'This in position lies, as the sun rises from the waters, the line of shadow (or light) falls between the paws of the Sphinx...There is a chamber or passage from the right forepaw [of the Sphinx] to this entrance of the record chamber...'"
• "According to the readings, the Hall of Records is to be discovered and re-entered when 'the time has been fulfilled' -- which, Cayce suggested, would be at or just before the close of the twentieth century, perhaps in 1998. The readings allude frequently to Old and New Testaments of the Bible, certain numerous references to Jesus, and depict the rediscovery of the Hall of Records as being linked in some way to a series of events that will prelude the 'Second Coming' of Christ." (p. 88)
• Lambert Dolphin, who led the SRI team at Giza, wrote the following report of his involvement in the project:  

  "In 1977, the US National Science Foundation funded a project at Giza again involving the SRI...According to the SRI team's official report: 'Several anomalies were observed as a result of our resistivity survey at the Sphinx...Behind the rear paws (north-west end) we ran two traverses. Both traverses indicate an anomaly that could possibly be due to a tunnel aligned north-west to south-east..." (Footnote: L.T. Dolphin, E. Moussa et.al, 'Applications of Modern Sensing Techniques to Egyptology', Menlo Park, Calif., SRI International, September 1977)
• Today, the Edgar Cayce Foundation and its Association for Research & Enligtenment credits Lambert Dolphin and his SRI team with determining the location of the hidden chambers in the project's early stages:  

  "According to ECF/ARE historians the 1973-4 and 1977 projects paved the way for work. . . that would succeed in discovering hidden chambers. Exactly how and where is not made clear. At any rate in 1978 the ECF/ARE collaborated with the SRI and provided funds (to the tune of about US $50,000) for a more detailed survey of the Sphinx enclosure and the nearby Sphinx Temple. Should any 'anomalies' be found it was agreed that the SRI was to confirm them with acoustic sounding techniques..." (p. 91)

• The Edgar  Cayce Foundation funded SRI again in 1982, at which time the location of the mysterious chambers under the paw of the Great Sphinx was verified by SRI:  

  "Adding to the intrigue were further discoveries that the SRI made around the Sphinx in 1982 as a result of yet another project financed by the Edgar Cayce Foundation. Mark Lehner . . . described what the SRI did as follows:

   

     

   

   "They brought a very powerful acoustical sounder, which is a long pencil-shaped thing...They put the sounder underneath the paw [of the Sphinx] and always got a good, clear signal - there's no underground cavity blocking it. And they put it along the paw between the elbow and that box on the side...and there was always a good signal. But, at my prompting, they put it on the bedrock floor inside the box - and it was dead in three places where they put it down, as though there is some kind of opening or empty space underneath that was blocking the signal..." (p. 93)
• The  current president of the A.R.E. and Edgar Cayce Foundation is Cayce's  grandson, Charles T. Cayce. According to Hancock and Bauval, these organizations have carried on various initiatives at the Giza pyramid for the past two decades.
• Charles Cayce has expressed his conviction that "the truth about Giza was going to emerge and the 'Hall of Records' was going to be discovered, just as Edgar Cayce had prophesied." (p. 97-8)
• Hancock and Bauval also state that, in March 1996, the Egyptian Antiquities Organization granted a one-year renewable license for the project at the Sphinx and that team members consulted with former NASA consultant, Dr. James Hurtak, and SRI consultant, Richard Hoagland -- the men with whom Lambert Dolphin worked on the Independent Mars Project. Lambert Dolphin's Web Links include various websites which purvey esoteric science, including Richard Hoagland's UFO News. (p. 315)

• In 1985, the Edgar Cayce Foundation and A.R.E. magazine, "Venture Inward," identified the primary agency created to fulfill Edgar Cayce's prophecy concerning the second coming of Christ:

   

   "There has been one systematic search, a sort of direct shot at finding the Hall of Records, when the Edgar Cayce Foundation funded SRI International..." (p. 85)
• For information on the Freemasons' control of NASA and connections with the Edgar Cayce Foundation, please refer to  Cosmic Christmas  under Remote Viewers.
• The Fox Channel documentary opened with the proposition that an advanced civilization once populated Mars until a cataclysmic event caused it to relocate to Earth. This unproven hypothesis which is underwritten by the American taxpayers, is defended in a paper, The Sphinx / Mars Connection also by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock.
• In this report, the Masonic Egyptologists mention Lambert Dolphin's influence and enterprise with NASA consultant, Richard Hoagland, in pioneering the Independent Mars Investigation Project under the sponsorship of SRI.

• THE MYSTERIOUS STRUCTURES THAT MAY UPSTAGE 
     NASA'S EVIDENCE OF MARTIAN LIFE 

   

     

   

   August 17-19, 1996
     from the 'Daily Mail' - London

   

     

   

   by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock
     Could the sphinx of Mars be proof of an alien civilization as great as our own?

   

     

   

   "...Former NASA consultant Richard Hoagland is convinced there may be a 'terrestrial connection' between Giza and Cydonia - the region of Mars where the mysterious structures are located - perhaps a common source that imparted the same legacy of knowledge and symbolism on both worlds.

   

     

   

   "Hoagland's interest in Giza began when he met Dr. Lambert Dolphin , a scientist from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) who had conducted radar and seismographic research to locate hidden chambers near and under the Great Sphinx.

   

     

     

   "Dr. Dolphin was captivated by Hoagland's idea of a 'Martian Sphinx' - the Face - and , in 1983, was instrumental in helping Hoagland set up the Independent Mars Investigation Project under the aegis of SRI..."
• The Sphinx Bulletin  by the same authors indicates there has been no minor controversy between the Egyptian government which has sought to preserve the Egyptian heritage and the Masonic Don Quixotes who see sphinxes and pyramids in the sky rather than windmills, and spend their lives and our substance pursuing hidden caverns containing spurious records of lost civilizations from outer space.

• Finally, a brief portion of the Appendix of The Message of the Sphinx, is worth quoting which shows the professional relationship between Lambert Dolphin of Stanford Research Institute and Dr. Zahi Hawass, former Director and present Undersecretary of State for Egypt's Giza Plateau of the Egyptian Antiquity Organization who, we are told, discovered the tomb of Osiris this week on Fox TV. 

   

     The Message of the Sphinx
     Appendix 5
     The Door Inside the Great Pyramid;
     Tunnels - and Chambers Under the Great Sphinx

• Further developments

   

   Since the first English-language edition of this book went to press in February i996 there have been a number of significant developments concerning the opening of the door in the Great Pyramid at the end of the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber (see in particular Chapter 7) and the search for tunnels and chambers under the Great Sphinx (see in particular Chapter 2 and Chapter 5).
• We anticipate that there will be further developments--quite possibly of major historical significance-which we will cover in a future book. It is our intention, meanwhile to monitor this 'running story' and to update our readers in a series of appendices that will be published in future editions of The Message of the Sphinx.
• The update presented herewith, covers the period from March to end-August 1996.
• The Great Pyramid
• At the end Of 1995, as reported in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, the position of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization regarding the 'door' at the end of the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber was apparently one of official disinterest. The reader will recall that Dr Nur El Din, (Chairman of the EAO (now renamed the Supreme Council of Antiquities) had declined Rudolf Gantenbrink's offer to donate the robot to the Egyptian government and to train an Egyptian technician to operate it: 'Thank you for your offer to train the Egyptian technician... Unfortunately we are very busy for the time being, therefore we will postpone the matter...1.
• Similarly Dr   Zahi Hawass had declared: 'I do not think this is a door and nothing is behind it.'2
• In March 1996, however, Dr Hawass changed his mind, declaring in the Egyptian Gazette that Gantenbrink's find was of huge interest and that the door would be opened in September 1996 by a multinational team led by the Egyptian geologist (and NASA consultant) Dr Farouk El Baz.
• Rudolf Gantenbrink would not be involved and 'another robot' -- not Upuaut--would be used to explore the shaft. Participating in the exploration would be a 'Canadian' contingent.3
• The Canadian element, 'Amtex', is headed by Peter Zuuring, a wealthy Dutch-Canadian businessman, who told us that he had shown the Egyptians how the door could be opened 'relatively inexpensively... We're working with Spar Aerospace to design a miniature arm with tools that could first tap the door, knock it open and try to lever things a little bit to see if there's anything loose. But I think ultimately we'll go straight through.'
• In two conversations, Souring told us that he thought it unlikely that the project could start as early as September 1996: the following year, he said, 1997, was far more likely.
• The objective, which might take some time, was to raise the huge sum of ten million dollars to promote a staged 'live opening' of the door on international television networks. 'I'm working with a private guy who is a personal friend of Hawass and we are absolutely going to drum this thing to death. Whatever the event, we are going to stage, it will be televised live.'4
• The Great Sphinx
• In 1993-4 (see Chapter 2 and Chapter 5) Dr Zahi Hawass appeared to be adamantly opposed to the notion that the Sphinx might be far older than ancient Egypt - and thus the work of a lost civilization.
• In addition Hawass had been personally responsible for expelling John West and his research team from the Sphinx enclosure. The team included the geologist Robert Schoch, a Professor at Boston University, and the seismologist Thomas Dobecki (who was to identify a large rectangular chamber concealed in the bedrock at a depth of about twenty feet beneath the front paws of the Sphinx).
• The reader will recall that the EAO official was particularly incensed by the NBC television film, The Mystery of the Sphinx, that was made about the work of John Anthony West.
• The NBC documentary linked the Sphinx to Atlantis and suggested that the chamber of Thomas Dobecki's seismograph had detected beneath its paws might have some sort of time capsule of Atlantean wisdom and history.
• Hawass called these claims: 'American hallucinations. West is an amateur. There is absolutely no scientific base for any of this. We have older  monuments in the same area. They definitely weren't built by men from  Atlantis. It's nonsense and we won't allow our monuments to be exploited for personal enrichment. The Sphinx is the soul of Egypt.'5
• An article in the Egyptian press responding to the NBC film quoted Dr Hawass on his further reasons for expelling John West and his team from the Sphinx enclosure: 'I have found that their work is carried out by installing endoscopes in the Sphinx's body and shooting films for all phases of the work in a propaganda...but not scientific manner. I therefore suspended the work of this unscientific mission and made a report which was presented to the permanent commission who rejected the mission's work in the future.'6
• Headquartered in Virginia Beach in the United States (see Chapter 5), the ARE is a multimillion dollar organization that exists to promulgate the teachings and prophecies of American psychic Edgar Cayce, who died in 1945.
• The NBC film was produced by Boris Said (see Chapter 2) and partially financed by investments from members of the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE).
• Prominent amongst Cayce’s pronouncements were many statements... to the effect that the Sphinx had been built in 10,500 BC by the survivors of Atlantis who had concealed beneath it a ‘Hall of Records’ containing all the wisdom of their lost civilization and the true history of the human race. Cayce prophesied that this Hall of Records would be rediscovered and opened between 1996 and 1998.
• He connected the opening to the second coming of Christ and asserted that the contents of the Hall would not be shared with the general public until many years after it had first been entered by ‘three who would make of the perfect way of life.’"7 ...  (pp.304-6)

• Mars and Giza:

   

   Strange connections and synchronicity
• In our research we have stumbled across a tangled web of clues, connections and overlapping interests appearing to suggest that American scientists with links to NASA may have quietly involved themselves, since at least in the 1970's, in covert 'expeditions' to unveil the secrets of the great pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza.
• The story, oddly enough, appears to be running in parallel with research stemming from the existence of   curious pyramidial structures (and a gigantic Sphinx-like 'Face') that were  photographed on Mars by NASA spacecraft during the 1970s.
• In 1971 NASA's Mariner 9 probe took the first ever photographs of strange 'pyramid' structures on Mars on a region of the planet known to astronomers as Elysium.
• Dr James Hurtak, a graduate in remote sensing technology (and an acquaintance of Mark Lehner's) was one of the earliest researchers to show interest in the Elysium 'pyramids' -- which were officially dismissed by NASA as 'tricks of light'.
• In 1975, despite NASA's apparent indifference, Hurtak predicted that further finds of similar structures, including a Sphinx-like monument, would be made on Mars and that they would all prove to be connected in a great cosmic blueprint to the Giza monuments in Egypt. 22
• Hurtak is an active campaigner against the secrecy of the United States military and related agencies with regard to UFO 'cover-ups' and other similar issues.
• He also claims to have had close links with researchers at California's prestigious Stanford Research Institute, America's second largest scientific think-tank (which has an annual budget from the United States government of over three hundred million dollars).
• SRI's projects have included the 'Remote Viewing Program' (started in 1972), funded by the CIA as an intelligence-gathering exercise, which recruited top psychics to 'remote view' enemy military installations and other sites.

  • SEE: 2009 movie "The Men Who Stare At Goats"
  Add Sticky Note
• In 1973, as we saw in Chapter 5, the Egyptian Antiquities Organization (EAO) granted an official license to the SRI, permitting it to conduct surveys around the Great Sphinx at Giza using ground-penetrating radar and seismographs. The local sponsor of this project was Cairo's Ain Shams University. We recall that in the same year Hugh Lynn Cayce sent Mark Lehner to the American University in Cairo with funds raised by ARE members.
• In 1976 a second NASA probe, Viking I, went into Mars orbit. In the region known as Cydonia it photographed several more pyramidial structures (including the five-sided 'DYM Pyramid') and the famous 'Face'.
• NASA has argued officially that it is nothing more than a small mountain, naturally weathered. But how many mountains have their left and right sides so intricately similar?
• Complete with its distinctive Sphinx-like headdress, this latter feature has been calculated from the NASA images to be 1.6 miles in high.
• Image analysts say that the 'bilateral symmetry' of the Face, mimicking a natural, almost human appearance, is most unlikely to have come about by chance.
• And this impression is confirmed by other characteristics that have subsequently been identified under computer enhancement. These include 'teeth' in the mouth, bilaterally crossed lines above the eyes, and regular lateral stripes in the headpiece -- suggestive, to some researchers at least, of the nemes headdress of ancient Egyptian pharaohs. 23
• Back in Egypt in 1977, a year after the Viking images had first reached the Earth, Mark Lehner [A.R.E.’s ‘man’ at Giza] made contact with NASA’s  Dr. Lambert T. Dolphin, leader of the Stanford Research Institute project at the Sphinx. The reader will recall from Chapter 5 that Lehner was by then already well acquainted with Zahi Hawass.
• Later in 1977 Lambert Dolphin traveled to Virginia Beach to negotiate funding from the Edgar Cayce organization for a proposed new SRI project at Giza. The purpose of this project was to use the latest remote sensing technology to search for hidden chambers around and under the Sphinx -- with Lehner again 'participating as the Edgar Cayce Foundation's "man in Cairo".
• Several underground cavities were detected by this Sphinx Exploration Project.
• In 1978 Mark Lehner proposed a project on the Sphinx to the American Research Centre in Egypt.
• The project, again partially financed by the Edgar Cayce group, was approved and went ahead with Lehner as its Field Director.
• Soon afterwards a United States registered company called Recovery Systems International (RSI) appeared on the scene. As we saw in Chapter 5, it undertook core drillings in front of the Sphinx to investigate the promising underground cavities previously pinpointed by SRI.
• In 1983 Hugh Lynn Cayce died and the management of the Edgar Cayce group was handed to his son, Charles Thomas Cayce.
• In the same year, ‘The Independent Mars Project’ was set up in the United States by Richard Hoagland, a former NASA consultant, and Lambert Dolphin.
• Meanwhile in 1987 Dr Zahi Hawass completed his education in the United States and returned to Egypt to be appointed as the EAO's Director General of the Giza Plateau.
• In March 1996 Dr Hawass announced that the Egyptian scientist Farouk El Baz (whose name...translates into ancient Egyptian as Horus) had been chosen to lead a team to open the secret door inside the Great Pyramid at the end of the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber.
• The reader will recall that Amtex, the Canadian company participating in the project, claim to be ‘working with Spar Aerospace’ to devise a tool to open or ‘go straight through’ the door. Spar Aerospace are better known for manufacturing hydraulic arms used in NASA Space Shuttles.
• As we noted at the beginning of this appendix, Dr El Baz, a graduate of Cairo’s Ain Shams University, is a NASA consultant.
• He has been involved for many years with studies of geological formations on the Moon and on Mars and he is a one-time  personal friend of astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong.
• It was El Baz,  nicknamed King by his NASA colleagues, who in 1969 chose the spot for the Apollo 11 Moon landing. El Baz is the founder of Centre of Remote Sensing at Boston University and presently serves as its Director. 24
• Also in March 1996 the EAO [Egyptian Antiquities Organization] granted a one-year renewable license for the project at the Sphinx -- see above -- financed by Joseph Schor. Project members include Boris Said, Thomas Dobecki, and four senior geologists from Florida State University, who began to work with a million dollars worth of ground-penetrating radar and seismic equipment at their disposal. It was reported to us that team members had consulted with Dr. James Hurtak and Richard Hoagland in August 1996. (pp. 312-15)

• ENDNOTES for Appendix 5 of The Message of the Sphinx 

   

   The Door Inside the Great Pyramid; Tunnels - and Chambers Under the Great Sphinx
     Further developments

   

   1. Sunday Telegraph, 1 January, 1995.
     2. Sat I, Spiegel Reportage, 15 August 1995.
     3. Egyptian Gazette, 31 March 1996.
     4. Documented conversations with Peter Zurring.
     5. Serpent, op. cit., p. 229.
     6. Al Akhbar El Yom, 8 January 1994.
     7. Edgar Cayce Reading Ref No 3976-15, in Earth Changes circulating file, Edgar Cayce Foundation, 1993, p. 38.

   

   Mars and Giza: Strange connections and synchronicity

   

   22. Dr. James Hurtak, The Keys of Enoch, California, 1976. See also the video UFO: Evidence of the Use of Extraterrestrial Technology, Labyrinth Media, UK.
     23. Richard C. Hoagland, The Monuments of Mars, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California, 1992, p. 262. See also Plates 38 and 39. 
     24. Omni Magazine, 'Interview with Farouk El Baz', 1990, p. 75. 

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