NASA's Dr. Stuart Robbins - The Gift that Keeps on Giving - Part I

So I’ve been spending some time at home lately while on a break from my latest über-secret project which will take me back on the road in a few weeks. In the meantime, I’ve been working on my next book, reconnecting with my felines and speaking to a packed houses at the Conscious Life Expo in Los Angeles and MUFON OC about my latest book, Ancient Aliens on the Moon. Of course, I’ve also spent time watching myself in the new season 5 episodes of Ancient Aliens on H2. In the midst of all this, I came across an old attack post from my sworn enemy Dr. Stuart Robbins (Paid Shill For NASA). Stuwie seems obsessed with me for some reason, always looking to tear me down or attack my work with the flimsiest justification. Why he and others of his ilk seem so obsessed with me I cannot fathom, but maybe it’s because I’m on TV all the time (For the record, I LOVE watching myself on TV. It’s a visceral thrill. You should try it sometime Stuart. Oh, that’s right—you don’t have the option…).  

Dr. Stuart Robbins, NERD (National Empire of Repressed Debunkers)

Readers of this blog will I’m sure remember Stuart (PS4NASA); he was the guy who couldn’t properly locate a 2 kilometer square pyramid on the surface of the Moon whilst simultaneously claiming that either Richard Hoagland or I had fabricated the image of said Ziggurat. More on that later.

In any case, his posting was apparently made back in November of 2011, some 1 year after one of my appearances on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory promoting my then current book, The Choice.

 

Evidently Sheldon… er Stuart, had some problems with what I said that night, and was motivated enough to attack me on his blog about it. I’m always fascinated by the ranting’s of the scientific materialist crowd, especially when they are forced to deal with the information presented in The Choice, so I just couldn’t help myself and started reading. Just for fun, and because Stuart (Paid Shill For NASA) is pretty much my favorite whipping boy, I decided to pass a few hours going over his claims/attacks and set the record straight. I mean, if you can’t occasionally humiliate an arrogant, socially repressed Ph.D. worshipping geek for what he is, what fun is there in life, right?

Anyway, on his Exposing PseudoAstronomy blog for November 10, 2011, he starts out, as debunkers (rather than true skeptics) always do, with a scathing personal attack;

“About the Man, Mike Bara

 

I rarely go into someone’s detailed past or give a short biography, but since this post is about him and his claims, I thought it would be informative to give a little bit of context. My background on him is that he hooked up with Richard Hoagland a few years ago and co-authored Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA. Already by this point, you know the man is a conspiracy hypothesist, believes pareidolia-based observations are the real deal, and employs some magical thinking and numerology as he agrees with Hoagland’s mythos (which I’ve written about before and will write about again).

 

After listening to him talking for three hours and taking copious notes about what he says, I can also tell you that he can be classified in general as “new agey” and a general “modern science denialist.” That latter classification is not one I make lightly, but I do for him.

He also looks kinda badass in his photo, like he’d be at home on a noisy motorcycle — much cooler than I do. This is a totally irrelevant point, but since I rarely talk specifically about a person, I thought I’d bring it up in the rare case when I do.”

I guess I should be flattered that he went out of his way to attack me personally, given that he “rarely” does this. Maybe it’s because what I reveal in The Choice is so threatening to his scientific materialist world view that he made a special case out of me. Or maybe he’s just a loser in general, which is what I strongly suspect. His personal attack on me is dripping with envy, and frankly, taking one look at him, it’s pretty obvious he’s never even kissed a girl, or if he has, she wasn’t exactly a “Penny” in the looks department.

 

Dr. Stuart Robbins and friend (Her initials aren't AFF by any chance are they?)

At any rate, his name calling here is both deceptive and classless, which is pretty much par for the course with Stuart and his friends in the debunker crowd. He dismisses 30-plus years of academic study (by people with far more impressive credentials than him) of the Face on Mars and the artificial structures around it in the Cydonia region of Mars as “pareidolia-based observations.” (For the record, there is no such thing as “pareidolia.” It is a phony pseudo-scientific term invented in 1994 by a UFO debunker named Steven Goldstein in the June 22^nd, 1994 edition of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, which should tell you all you need to know about its credibility in the realm of ideas. The term is commonly used by debunkers to give an academic weight to their knee-jerk dismissal of the Cydonia anomalies). He goes on to tell his readers that I employ “magical thinking and numerology” in my assessments of Cydonia and the Face on Mars. All I can say is that if this is true, it puts me in good company with the likes of Erol Torun, Dr. Mark Carlotto, the late Dr. Tom Van Flandern, Dr. James Brandenberg, Dr. Stanley McDaniel, NASA astronaut Dr. Brian O’Leary and a whole host of others who have written and published peer-reviewed papers (which Stuart seems to think are so important) on the subject.

He then calls me “’new agey’ and a general ‘modern science denialist.’”

Now, as to the “new agey” part of it, I guess I don’t have much of a problem with that. In fact, the whole point of The Choice was to show my readers that there is a substantive scientific underpinning for all “New Age” beliefs, which I cite in some detail that book.

As to the 2^nd part, accusing me of being a “general  modern-science denialist,” nothing could be further from the truth. I in fact embrace modern science. The difference between me and Stuwie is that I embrace ALL of modern science, including those test results and theories that challenge the established scientific orthodoxies which Stuart is so desperate to uphold. Stuart and his ilk conversely work every day to suppress widespread knowledge of this information and the obvious common sense conclusions to be drawn from them. As us “new-agey” types often say, you hate in others what you privately see in yourself, and in fact as I have shown repeatedly, it is Stuart and the scientific materialists who live in denial, not me.

Also, the pejorative term “denialist” is used here to lump me in with the kind of people who deny the Holocaust, and is indicative of the ugliness with which the debunker crowd, like “Dr. Phil” Plait, Stuart and James Oberg conduct their business. The use of that term alone in reference to me should tell you all you need to know about the intellectual integrity and personal character of Stuart Robbins.

Stuart of course tries to defend his ugly comparison of me to those with neo-fascist anti –Semitic world views by saying that he does not employ this term lightly. I guess that makes us somewhat at odds, because while I take your thinly-veiled comparison of me to a Nazi quite seriously, I do take you, Stuart, quite lightly.

Now, to the part about me being more “bad-ass” than you, well, at least you got that undeniable reality correct:

Mike Bara and friend

Plus, I’m even more badass than Stuart because I have tattoo’s…

 
Badass!

After this jealousy-laden personal attack (which takes up the first 560 words or so) Stuart finally gets around to the crux of his problems with me, which evidently go way beyond my relative value as a human being.

He attacks me and my ideas on several fronts, which as I will show are as baseless and unscientific as his previous attacks on the Daedalus Ziggurat and several other subjects. He starts with the core basis of The Choice, which is the Hoagland/Torun theory of Hyperdimensional physics:

“Bara is an ardent believer in Richard Hoagland’s hyperdimensional physics. Starting in hour 2 at 12 minutes 29 seconds in, he claims that hyperdimensional physics means that everything is connected to something higher, a higher spatial dimension, which is where energy comes from.”

This quote is basically correct, but since he starts summarizing my comments at “hour 2 at 12 minutes 29 seconds in” I guess we can assume that everything I said before that he agrees with.  Next, he makes a bold claim about one of my supposed “bold claims.”

“At 13:16 into hour 2, he (Bara) states, “I can back up all this stuff that we’ve all believed in … with some actual physics and physical experiments that pretty much prove that the so-called ‘laws of physics’ that we’re taught in school, really aren’t real, they don’t really work, and they kinda fall apart when you get into them a bit, and there’s something much richer and much more beautiful … a more elegant solution, and that’s the theory of hyperdimensional physics.”

This is a very bold claim, to be able to turn over all of modern physics. It would be nice if he presented actual evidence of this that were well documented. Unfortunately for him, he does not.”

I’m gonna stop it right here to point something out. Radio interviews, especially those discussing books, are by definition general discussions designed to whet the listeners’ appetite to buy the book. The details and evidence he claims to desire are presented in the book itself. It is impossible to provide the kind of evidence that Stuart claims to want in a radio interview without putting the audience to sleep. What he is doing is setting an impossible standard and then faulting me for not meeting it (debunkers playbook, play #4 – “The Jedi Mind Trick”).

I find it interesting that rather than deal with the evidence presented in the book, which is, ahem, “well documented,” he prefers to pick and choose his targets from a promotional radio interview. Maybe he just can’t afford a copy of The Choice on his meager NASA-funded salary. More likely, he prefers to attack me for a general radio interview rather than actually read a book that might answer all of the issues he raises simply because he has no means of arguing the issues. At any rate, I’d be glad to provide Stuart with an autographed copy of The Choice for $25. I’ll even personalize it.

Not holding my breath on that one though.

Next, he gets into specifics with some of the examples I gave in my interview with George, the so-called “Allais effect”:

“Throughout the episode when asked about this, what he does seem to harp on is that during eclipses, pendulums will move backwards or change their rate of swing. Bara presents this, for example, at 11:15 into the third hour: ‘Free-swinging pendulums [before eclipses will] be swinging with the rotation of the earth suddenly start going very rapidly backwards against the rotation of the Earth.’

I actually assumed this was total nonsense, but I was intrigued to find, after 5 seconds on Google, that it’s only total nonsense the way he explained it. There is an actual named effect, the Allais effect (named after frenchman Maurice Allais who later won a Nobel Prize in economics). You can read more about it on everyone’s favorite website, Wikipedia. The effect is that Allais observed that during a total solar eclipse, the rate of swing of a pendulum changed very slightly.

To summarize, experiments about a decade ago on normal pendulums found that the very very very slight differences in period could be easily accounted for by changes in temperature and air currents during an eclipse. The effects on a torsion pendulum (one that twists rather than swings) have been unreplicatable after they’ve been reported. This can really be summarized (as Wikipedia nicely does) by: “No unambiguous detections [of an Allais effect] within the past 30 years when consciousness of the importance of [experimental] controls was more widespread” (original source, subscription required).

So, the evidence for this seems to be a tiny effect that can be explained conventionally or an effect that does not exist.

Bara 0, Science 1.”

First off, I like his little scorecard idea, but it is laughable that he pits me against “Science,” when in fact I’m the one trying to expand the definition of what is and is not science. But he has to characterize me as being anti-science because if -- God forbid – (pun intended) people knew just how baseless most of what the scientific materialists believed was, they might panic. It’s pretty scary to a lot of people that Newton could turn out be a dumb shit.

But let’s deal with his specific claims vis-à-vis the Allais Effect directly.

What actually happened is that during a total solar eclipse which passed almost directly over Paris (where Allais’ lab was located), Allais and his science team recorded some absolutely bizarre and (based on the current physics of the day) completely inexplicable changes in the rotation of free swinging paraconical pendulums. Stuart, in just a few short paragraphs, manages to extensively misrepresent virtually everything about this experiment.

Path of the total solar eclipse over Paris on June 30^th 1954

First, he characterizes the Allais Effect as a “very slight” change in the “rate of swing” of the pendulum.

These next three graphs (courtesy of Richard Hoagland) illustrate that both of these claims are false. The effect is neither “very slight” nor merely a change in the “rate of swing” of the pendulum.

Graphic adapted from Scientific American

As you can see from the graphs, what actually happened, contrary to Stuart’s assertions, was that prior to the eclipse over Paris in 1954, the pendulum was moving as expected, slowly and with the rotation of the Earth. Then, during the eclipse, it suddenly and very rapidly began to rotate backwards, against the rotation of the Earth. In others words, the pendulum didn’t simply change its rate of movement, it actually changed its direction of rotation. After the eclipse had passed, the pendulum then resumed its “normal” slower rate of precession with the Earth’s rotation. This anomaly violates the so-called “laws of physics” to the proverbial Nth degree.

The 2^nd chart, adapted from a review of Allais’ work in the American Journal of Physics, and a 3^rd chart from Allais’ own notes, show that the effect was far from Stuart’s description of it as “very very very slight.” It was in fact well off the charts in its deviation from what would be expected if Stuart’s precious “laws of physics” were operating as expected. In fact, the effect was so dramatic that Allais’ himself described it as “spectacular.”

I will leave it to the readers to determine which perspective is the most reliable with regard to these two issues; Maurice Allais the Nobel Prize winner who did all the actual research, or Stuart Robbins the NASA funded debunker from Colorado.

Stuart then goes on (apparently using Wikipedia, of all things, as his reference) to dismiss the effect and my interpretation of it by making the following claim: “To summarize, experiments about a decade ago on normal pendulums found that the very very very slight differences in period could be easily accounted for by changes in temperature and air currents during an eclipse.”

Oh really?

To support this outrageous statement he links to a paper published in the journal “Physical Review D” in 2003 impressively entitled “Allais gravity and pendulum effects during solar eclipses explained.” That title and the abstract of the paper seem to claim that the Allais Effect is caused by weather. Specifically, it claims that minute changes in atmospheric temperatures at high altitudes during an eclipse could be the cause of the anomalous behavior of the Allais’ pendulums. They do this by somehow producing an undetected “wind” at ground level that acted on the pendulums.

And this guy accuses me of “magical thinking?”

Unfortunately, Stuart -- apparently anxious if not desperate to discredit the Allais Effect (and by implication me) -- failed to make note of several important points.

Allais pendulum operated by his lab assistant Jacques Bourgeot

First, Allais’ labs were underground, air temperature and pressure controlled, and designed precisely to counteract any possible effects on the tests from weather changes. Second, Stuart, rather deceptively, links only to the abstract of the paper, rather than the actual paper itself, which I found in less than 30 seconds on Google. The actual paper says something completely different than Stuart’s characterization that “experiments” have been done to reach the “atmospheric pressure” conclusion.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

The paper itself is nothing more than a model for how a sloppy researcher, presumably one not of Nobel Prize stature (like say, Stuart as an example), could be fooled by placing inadequate controls on the test. There is in fact no experimental data involving pendulums presented in the paper at all.

Don’t you think that’s kind of a big oversight there, Stuwie?

But maybe this is because Stuart didn’t actually read the paper, but instead relied solely on Wikipedia’s interpretation of it: “They point out that “the gravitation anomaly discussed here is about a factor of 100,000 too small to explain the Allais excess pendulum precession… during eclipses” and from this conclude that the original Allais anomaly was merely due to poor controls.

Uh no, that’s not what the authors said at all, nor what they concluded. In fact Wikipedia’s interpretation is exactly the opposite of what the authors stated. Here is what the paper actually says:

“However, the gravitational anomaly discussed here is only a few parts per billion of Earth’s own gravitational force, so it is about a factor of 100,000 too small to explain the Allais excess pendulum precession or the change in pendulum swing period, an increase of 1/3000 that sometimes shows up during eclipses.”

In other words, they admit that their own model, which has yet to be tested, is on the order of 100,000 times too weak to have accounted for Allais’ test results. That’s their best case scenario. And that’s only if Allais’ tests were not conducted under adequate controls. As we now know, Allais did place adequate controls on his tests by constructing specially designed labs solely for the purposes of his experiments.

And nowhere – nowhere—in the paper do the authors conclude that “the original Allais anomaly was merely due to poor controls.” That notion is solely a fabrication of Stuart Robbins and the Wikipedia authors, whoever they are.

Now, let’s examine the other claim made in the paper and seized upon by Stuart. Specifically, Stuart’s statement, quoting again from that bastion of scientific accuracy and integrity, Wikipedia, that there have been "no unambiguous detections [of an Allais effect] within the past 30 years when consciousness of the importance of [experimental] controls was more widespread."

Once again Stuart, you are simply wrong. There have been numerous “unambiguous” confirmations of the Allais Effect over the last 30 years. Starting in 1959. By Allais’ himself.

You see, after his “spectacular” results of 30 June 1954, Allais was anxious to repeat his experiments as soon as he could. He got just that opportunity on 2 October, 1959. This time, the path of the total solar eclipse took it over the continent of Africa, with only a partial eclipse visible in Paris where Allais’ specially constructed lab was located (underground, remember).

Path of 2 October 1959 Total solar eclipse.

Once again, using rigorous controls and methodology, Nobel Prize winner Allais and his team took measurement after tedious measurement. In spite of his labs distance from the path of totality, Allais’ results were – dramatically – similar in both description and intensity to the 1954 results:

So the simple facts are that -- contrary to Stuart’s statement that there have been “no unambiguous detections [of an Allais effect] within the past 30 years,” -- Allais himself detected it a 2^nd time, during the eclipse of 2 October 1959. This attempt by Stuart to ignore Allais’s 2^nd observation and treat it as if it were not a separate experiment comes right out of the debunkery 101 playbook.  As astronomer Halton Arp, (B.S., Harvard [1949], Ph.D., Caltech [1953]) once put it in response to his critics in his excellent book, Seeing Red, “The game here is to lump all the previous observations into one 'hypothesis' and then claim there is no second, confirming observation.” Using this standard debunking tactic only shows how desperately weak Stuart’s position on Allais is – and that he knows it.

And of course, there have been more than just the 2 observations made by Allais.

In 1970, a team of researchers led by industrialist (and physicist) Erwin Saxl and his scientific colleague, Mildred Allen, found the exact same Allais Effect using a completely different methodology than Allais (these may be the “torsion pendulum” experiments that Stuart refers to).

But the effect Saxl measured was once again contrary to Stuart’s description of a “very very very slight” change in the behavior of the pendulum. In fact, the effect was so dramatic that Saxl wrote:

“These variations are too great to be explained on the basis of classical gravitational theory, by the relative changes in position of the moon with respect to the earth and sun. This leads to the same conclusion arrived at by Allais -- that classic gravitational theory needs to be modified to interpret his (and our) experimental results…”

In other words, Stuart, the results were “unambiguous.”

The 1954 Allais results (left) and the 1970 Saxl-Allen tests

Details on the Saxl-Allen experiments can be found here, and the results were published in the February 15, 1971 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal, “Physical Review D” (Yes, the same journal Stuart attempted to cite in his lame attack on me and the Allais Effect in general).

But wait! There’s more!

As you might expect, there are numerous other confirmations of the Allais Effect over the years that are just as “unambiguous” as Allais’ and Saxl-Allen’s examples.

The Wikipedia article which Stuart uses as his main (only?) research source also makes this brief notation in the same section where it mentions the torsion pendulum experiments of Saxl and Allen: “Jeverdan in Romania claimed to have observed anomalous pendulum behavior during a solar eclipse in 1961 (Jeverdan, 1981) – decrease of the period by about 1 part in 2000 – the so-called ‘Jeverdan effect’, but his report was not published in a mainstream English-language scientific journal.”

First of all, the fact that his results were “not published in a mainstream English-language scientific journal” is made to sound as though this reduces its credibility. In reality, this is wholly irrelevant, since science conducted and published in languages other than English are just as legitimate that those that are. Allais’ initial papers were published in French, for example, and only revealed to the English speaking world with the help of Werner von Braun, after the bizarre Hyperdimensional anomalies of the Explorer 1 satellite (see The Choice).

The second and wholly relevant point is that Jerverdan also observed completely anomalous (i.e. in violation of the laws of physics) behavior in his pendulums, as had Allais and Saxl/Allen:

Jeverdan: “At that moment a surprising fact occurred, the pendulum produced a perturbation by describing an ellipse whose major axis deviated in relation to the initial plane by approximately 15°. The eccentricity of the ellipse was 0.18. At the end of the eclipse the pendulum continued to maintain the elliptical oscillation, but the major axis approached increasingly to its initial plane.”

A hypertext version of Jervedan’s initial report can be found here.

So, contrary to Wikipedia/Stuart’s assertion that been “no unambiguous detections [of an Allais effect] within the past 30 years…” we find – after about 5 minutes of searching on Google – that there are at least 3 confirmations of the Allais’ Effect: Allais in 1959, Jerverdan’s in 1961, and Saxl/Allen’s in 1970.

But surely, that can’t be all, right?

Of course not.

During the Solar eclipse of 31 May 2003 which passed over Europe, three scientists from the University of Bucharest recorded yet another unambiguous observation of the Allais Effect. They had previously confirmed the effect during an eclipse in 1999 (Mihaila, I., Marcov, N., Pambuccian, V., and Agop, M.: Observation of the Allais effect during the solar eclipse of 11 August 1999), but more on that later.

Their results, published in the PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROMANIAN ACADEMY, Series A, Volume 5, Number 3/2004, pp. 000-000, showed once again that eclipses, in defiance of all of Stuart’s precious “laws of physics,” were directly affected by the alignment of the Sun, Earth and Moon.  In fact, as the authors put it: “Our measurements showed that during the sun eclipse, the motion of the plane of oscillation of the pendulum is really slower than the motion predicted by the Foucault effect. Thus we obtained a new confirmation of the Allais effect.”

As if this wasn’t enough, on 1 August 2008, a solar eclipse passed across northern regions of Canada, Greenland, Russia, Mongolia, and China. A team of 3 scientists in 2 different cities (Kiev, Ukraine, and Suceava, Romania) more than 270 miles apart, conducted experiments using 8 different instruments, including 5 torsion pendulums. Remember, Stuart/Wikipedia claims that these types of pendulums have “failed to observe any effect” except for the Saxl/Allen experiments.

The results were, as you might expect, staggering. Not only did all the devices register a measurable effect, the effect was the strongest after the eclipse had ended, and exactly as the Hoagland/Torun Hyperdimensional physics theory predicts. While it seemed to stump the researchers, it is entirely consistent with Hoagland’s observations during the Venus transit of 2004 and the Galactic alignment experiments of 2006 (again, see The Choice).

As they put it: “…the authors consider that it is an inescapable conclusion from our experiments that after the end of the visible eclipse, as the Moon departed the angular vicinity of the Sun, some influence exerted itself upon the Eastern European region containing our three sets of equipment, extending over a field at least hundreds of kilometers in width. The nature of this common influence is unknown, but plainly it cannot be considered as gravitational in the usually accepted sense of Newtonian or Einsteinian gravitation.”

They also quickly dismissed the Stuart/Wikipedia notion that the effect was caused by subtle changes in local weather conditions: “The sealing of the housings rules out any possibility of interference due to air currents or humidity variations.”

So the fact is, after a very remedial search of the web, I found no less than 5 published research articles confirming the Allais Effect, which Stuart, using Wikipedia as his authoritative source, dismissed as being due to atmospheric effects. So again, it seems he is so anxious to attack me that he either fails to do any serious research before he makes false claims, or he simply has no interest in following the rules of scientific debate he claims to champion. In either case, he once again has embarrassed himself with shoddy research and an overdependence on questionable sources.

And none of this even goes into the 1999 NASA eclipse debacle, which Stuart seems oblivious to.

From my book The Choice: 

 

“In 1999, NASA physicist Dr. David Noever planned to set up experiments to test the effect during an eclipse in August of that year. He succeeded in getting several European laboratories (and one in China, which was in the path of the eclipse) to set up pendulums. Allais wrote a long briefing paper for Noever, in which he explained that the experiment had to be done in a very specific way, with very specific equipment and with very specific protocols. He lamented the results of some of the more recent attempts in the 70’s and 80’s to confirm his findings, even dancing around the idea that many of them had been set up to fail from the beginning.

“Science has lost at least forty years. Not only have my experiments not been [properly] followed up, but they have been successfully hidden,” he wrote.  And it’s hard to argue with him given what happened next.

Instead of following Allais’ suggested protocols, Dr. Noever ignored him and set up experiments in several places around the world using the type of pendulum that Allais’ said would most likely not produce a positive result. After the eclipse, which NASA had touted on its website as being the final answer on the so-called “Allais Effect,” Noever simply collected the data and dropped off the face of the Earth. He had been scheduled to write a contributing article about the experiments in a compilation book about gravity from Aperion books, but according to the editor, Matthew R. Edwards, he never submitted it. “Yes, unfortunately the article by David Noever never materialized. I don't know why; he just stopped communicating. Apparently, his European colleagues had the same experience with him. They claim he has left NASA and took all the eclipse data with him! Does anyone know the background story, and where the 1999 Eclipse data is???”

Noever and members of his team eventually re-emerged at a private internet company, and he has made almost no public comment about the results of the eclipse experiments of 1999. In other words, NASA’s Dr. Noever took all the eclipse data paid for by the taxpayers of the United States and ran off with it.”

And of course, Richard C. Hoagland also confirmed the Allais Effect using a completely different instrument (a vibrating tuning fork) during the 2004 Venus Transit. These “Accutron experiments” are covered in 2 different postings on Richard’s website:

http://www.enterprisemission.com/Von_Braun2.htm

http://www.enterprisemission.com/Hyperdimensional-Eclipse.htm

You can also find a discussion of this data in my book The Choice. You know, that’s the book that Stuart hasn’t actually read but feels qualified to criticize based on a single promotional radio appearance.

As to why not all attempts to replicate Allais’ results have succeeded, Allais himself was unequivocal on the issue: The experiments have to be set up right. In fact, in 1999 he wrote to Noever and NASA explaining why their experiments would fail unless very tight protocols were followed. Even though they were not, Noever’s subsequent behavior indicates that at least some of the results were scary enough to the scientific powers-that-be that he decided to suppress them.

As you can see from the above, there’s a reason that Sheldon and I… uh Stuart and I reach different conclusions about a great many space and science related subjects – I do more research than he does. In fact, given his utterly stupid statements, I think it’s obvious he doesn’t do any research at all before he attacks me, other than to browse Wikipedia.

So let’s just go through Stuart’s list of claims here one more time, shall we?

1. Stuart’s claim that  “experiments about a decade ago on normal pendulums found that the very very very slight differences in period could be easily accounted for by changes in temperature and air currents during an eclipse” is false. No such experiments ever took place. The paper he references in regard to this theory was merely speculative, and even the authors admitted that their theory was on the order of “100,000 times too small” to account for the measured “Allais Effect.” -- CONCLUSION – FALSE

2. "The effects on a torsion pendulum (one that twists rather than swings) have been unreplicatable after they’ve been reported” This claim is also false. During the August 1, 2008 Solar eclipse a Ukrainian team of scientists working in concert with a Romanian team 270 miles away got unambiguous “Allais Effect” results using torsion pendulums isolated from any local weather variations. This confirmed the earlier torsion pendulum results of Saxl and Allen. – CONCLUSION -- FALSE

3. No unambiguous detections [of an Allais effect] within the past 30 years when consciousness of the importance of [experimental] controls was more widespread.”  This claim is also false. Over the last 60 years, there have been numerous unambiguous confirmations of the Allais Effect, as long as the proper protocols were applied. These occurred in 1959 (Allais), 1961 (Jeverdan), 1970 (Saxl/Allen) 1999 (Mihaila, I., Marcov, N., Pambuccian, V., and Agop, M and probably many more), 2003 (MIHĂILĂ, MARCOV, PAMBUCCIAN, RACOVEANU) 2004 and 2006 (Hoagland) and 2008 (Goodey, Pugach and Olenici). And there may be many more confirmations from the 1999 data but we won’t know unless NASA’S Dr. Noever releases the data. – CONCLUSION -- FALSE

4. “So, the evidence for this seems to be a tiny effect that can be explained conventionally or an effect that does not exist.” As Nobel Prize winner Allais described it, the effect was far from “tiny,” but rather “spectacular.” The notion that the Allais Effect “does not exist,” has also been put to rest in both The Choice and in the numerous research papers and articles listed in this post. –CONCLUSION -- FALSE

So I guess that’s 4 strikes and you’re out, Stuart.

Given that everything Stuart has claimed about the Allais Effect has been proven false, I think we should reset the scorecard:

Bara/Science 1, Stuart/Debunkery 0

Oh and there is one last amusing postscript to this issue. Stuart doesn’t seem to have noticed it, but the paper he cites as his only argument against the validity of the Allais Effect “Allais gravity and pendulum effects during solar eclipses explained” was primarily authored by the late Dr. Tom van Flandern, an Ivy League educated astronomer who was also the Chief of the Celestial Mechanics Branch of the Nautical Almanac Office and worked there for over 21 years. The reason this is important is that early on in his blog piece, Stuart attacks me as someone who “believes pareidolia-based observations are the real deal,” an obvious reference to my position that the Face on Mars is artificial. Obviously, Stuart regards anyone who takes such a position with contempt.

With Jordan Maxwell & Dr. Tom Van Flandern (Astronomer, Ph. D Yale) at the Central Coast UFO symposium in 2009.

The problem for Stuart is that this same Ivy League educated astronomer takes the same position I do regarding the Face on Mars. Or, as Dr. van Flandern put it succinctly on his website:

“In my considered opinion, there is no longer room for reasonable doubt of the artificial origin of the face mesa, and I've never concluded "no room for reasonable doubt" about anything before in my 35-year scientific career.”

So you can’t have it both ways here, Stuart. Dr. van Flandern is either a genius who can explain away Allais or a pareidolia influenced dolt, like me. Which is it?

Stuart also unknowingly attacks Dr. van Flandern’s work in a section entitled Planets: Burped at Birth, Exploded at Death. He mocks the idea of the Exploded Planet Hypothesis, of which van Flandern was the primary proponent. So again, Stuwie, you have a dilemma. Is van Flandern the genius who proves with his theoretical paper that there is no Allais Effect? Or is he the Yale Ph. D astronomer who agrees with me on the Face on Mars and the Exploded Planet Hypothesis?

C’mon Stuart. Inquiring minds want to know…

Notes:

http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf074/sf074a05.htm
http://www.geocentricity.com/ba1/no054/eclipse.htm
http://home.t01.itscom.net/allais/blackprior/mihaila/2003/mihaila2003.pdf
Mihaila, I., Marcov, N., Pambuccian, V., and Agop, M.: Observation of the Allais effect during the solar eclipse of 11 August 1999
http://www.allais.info/docs/pugarticle.pdf
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/ast06aug99_1/
http://metaresearch.org/media%20and%20links/press/on-improbable-claims.asp http://www.enterprisemission.com/Von_Braun2.htm
http://www.enterprisemission.com/Hyperdimensional-Eclipse.htm