Saturday, October 5, 2013

NASA's Dr. Stuart Robbins - The Gift That Keeps on Giving - Part IV

In the next section, Stuart then goes on to get even more things wrong:

Planets: Burped at Birth, Exploded at Death

"So yeah, back to pendulums with a really really wonky idea of solar system / planetary formation, including the completely fallacious idea that the asteroid belt was once a planet and Mars was somehow its moon (“Mars itself which was absolutely devastated by … Planet V, the signatures are all over Mars” (18:20)). I actually do plan to go into the whole “exploding planet ‘hypothesis’” in some future blog post and likely in some future podcast episode, as well. For now, I hope that most people recognize that this is very hard to make happen by any known process, and the onus is on Mike Bara to really provide VERY convincing theory and evidence for why it’s the case. Yeah, I’m punting, but this is a LONG post."
 

First of all, the Exploded Planet Hypothesis is not my idea, but the idea of the late Dr. Tom Van Flandern, as I have discussed in many forums and even in Part 1 of this post. Stuart (Ph. D. Costco)can claim that the idea of the asteroid belt being the remnant of an exploded planet is "completely fallacious" all he wants, but that's just his completely uninformed opinion, and he cites no data to back it up.  Dr. Van Flandern (Ph.D., astronomy, Yale) lays out dozens of reasons why it is anything but "completely fallacious" in his excellent book Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets: Paradoxes Resolved, Origins Illuminated.

Recommended reading for the truly curious.


Second, Stuart is so dumb he can't even get the simplest facts straight. Nowhere in The Choice or anywhere else for that matter have I EVER claimed that "the asteroid belt was once a planet and Mars was somehow its moon." The planet that Mars orbited was in an orbit very near where Mars is today, and the planet that created the asteroid belt was in an orbit that was -- wait for it -- WHERE THE ASTEROID BELT IS TODAY! For reference purposes, Dr. Van Flandern has called these 2 planets "Planet V" and "Planet K," while I refer to them as Maldek and Phaeton, respectively. So it's no wonder Stuart can't get his head around these concepts or out of whatever orifice he's got it in. He doesn't even listen, much less read, before he shoots his mouth off about things he knows nothing about.

Stuart then demands that I provide "proof" that planets can explode: "the onus is on Mike Bara to really provide VERY convincing theory and evidence for why it’s the case."

Again Stuart, the evidence is cited in my book The Choice, but since you are criticizing it without having read it and making yourself look like a buffoon in the process, I'll help you out. Dr. Van Flandern, in his book, provides the theory and evidence behind the idea. He also cites the evidence on his web site here. For our readers, I'll reprint Van Flandern's summaries:

"The earliest and simplest theoretical mechanism is that of Ramsey [W.H. Ramsey (1950), “On the instability of small planetary cores (I)”, Mon.Not.Roy.Astr.Soc. 110, 325-338], who noted that planets must evolve through a wide range of pressures and temperatures. This is true whether they are born cold and heat up under gravitational accretion, or born hot and cool down by radiation of heat into space. During the course of this evolution, temperatures and pressures in the cores must occasionally reach a critical point, at which a phase change (like water to ice) occurs. This will be accompanied by a volume discontinuity, which must then cause an Earth-sized or smaller planet to implode or explode, depending on whether the volume decreases or increases.
        
The second explosion mechanism, natural fission reactors, is currently generating some excitement in the field of geology. [(1998), EOS 79 (9/22), 451 & 456. See also <
http://www.ans.org/pi/np/oklo/]    A uranium mine at Oklo in the Republic of Gabon is deficient in U-235 and is accompanied by fission-produced isotopes of Nd and Sm, apparently caused by self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions about 1.8 Gyr ago. Later, other natural fission chain reactors were discovered in the region. Today, uranium ore does not have this capability because the proportion of U-235 in natural uranium is too low. But 1.8 Gyr ago, the proportion was more than four times greater, allowing the self-sustaining neutron chain reactions. Additionally, these areas also functioned as fast neutron breeder reactors, producing additional fissile material in the form of plutonium and other trans-uranic elements. Breeding fissile material results in possible reactor operation continuing long after the U-235 proportion in natural uranium would have become too low to sustain neutron chain reactions. This proves the existence of an energy source in nature able to produce more than an order of magnitude more energy than radioactive decay alone. Excess planetary heat radiation is said to be gravitational in origin because all other proposed energy sources (e.g., radioactivity, accretion, and thermonuclear fusion) fall short by at least two orders of magnitude. But these natural reactors may be able to supply the needed energy. Indeed, nuclear fission chain reactions may provide the ignition temperature to set off thermonuclear reactions in stars (analogous to ignition of thermonuclear bombs).
       
The third planetary explosion mechanism relies on one other hypothesis not yet widely accepted, but holds out the potential for an indefinitely large reservoir of energy for exploding even massive planets and stars. If gravitational fields are continually regenerated, as in LeSage particle models of gravity [T. Van Flandern (1996), “Possible new properties of gravity”, Astrophys.&SpaceSci. 244, 249-261], then all masses are continually absorbing energy from this universal flux. Normally, bodies would reach a thermodynamic equilibrium, where at they radiate as much heat away as they continually absorb from the graviton flux. But something could block this heat flow and disrupt the equilibrium. For example, changes of state in a planet’s core might set up an insulating layer. In that case, heat would continue to be accumulated from graviton impacts, but could not freely radiate away. This is obviously an unstable situation. The energy excess in the interior of such a planet would build indefinitely until either the insulating layer was breached or the planet blew itself apart
.

So that makes three (3) planetary explosion mechanisms, all of which are published in Stuart's precious peer-reviewed journals. Maybe if he had actually looked them up he wouldn't keep embarrassing himself.

So now, Stuart, the onus is on you. I'll wait with baited breath for you to address it. But please try to get the actual theory right before you open you mouth or put finger to keyboard, OK?

On second thought, don't. It's more fun for me this way...

Bara/Science-4, Stuart/Debunkery-0

In the next section, Stuart rambles about Dark Matter, Lloyd Pye and then tells me "Bara needs to provide evidence at least as convincing as the conventional explanation for his ideas to be even considered."

Well first off Stuwie, I have. In my book,
The Choice. Second, I couldn't care less about whether clowns like you who can't even get basic facts right, find 2 kilometer wide structures on MRO images or depend on Wikipedia for their research "consider" my ideas. You are simply not important enough for me to care about, and even if you were, your non-stop comedy of errors on your blog  pretty much puts you out of the conversation in any event. I don't want your consideration. You are a joke.

But like all big disasters, Stuart saves the best for last...



Notes:

W.H. Ramsey (1950), “On the instability of small planetary cores (I)”, Mon.Not.Roy.Astr.Soc. 110, 325-338

[(1998), EOS 79 (9/22), 451 & 456. See also <http://www.ans.org/pi/np/oklo/

T. Van Flandern (1996), “Possible new properties of gravity”, Astrophys.&SpaceSci. 244, 249-261
 

 

Friday, October 4, 2013

NASA's Dr. Stuart Robbins - The Gift That Keeps on Giving - Part III


 
In section 3 of his attack post, Stuart (PS4NASA) goes after me for statements made about the 2012 galactic alignment and challenges me to provide “proof.” Naturally, his challenge is intellectually weak and he could have easily found the proof he claims to want simply by reading The Choice:

2012 Galactic Alignment

It’s nice when one’s research involves going back into their own blog archives. In this case, for background in why the 2012 purported galactic alignment is not worth the electrons its printed on, I’ll refer you to this post of mine.

With that out of the way, Bara stated during the second hour at 27:48 into the hour: “We do get hit by a pulse of energy from the center of the galaxy right around this December 21[, 2012] period, in fact it goes for about a month before and a month after that where we’re really in this energetic pulse from the center of the galaxy at this time.” Then he went on to say that the energy is neutral and we can choose whatever we want to come out of it and it’ll happen. (Did I mention that the tagline for his book, The Choice, is, “You’ve heard of The Secret, now you can make The Choice”?) He also states around 10 minutes into the third hour, “We are aligned with the center of the galaxy [around the winter solstice].” Again, see my post linked in the paragraph above. And he brings in astrology. See the section before this one.

Just to amuse myself, I skimmed Stuart’s postings on the great 2012 Galactic Alignment, and as in most circumstances he manages to get most of it wrong. Although he does agree with John Major Jenkins interpretation to some degree:  Jenkins’ premise is actually somewhat correct in the sense that, yes, the sun will be somewhat near the plane of the galaxy as seen from Earth around the winter solstice in 2012.”

Just how close it is to that plane depends on where you draw the line, and the simple fact is that Stuart’s interpretation of that plane is no more valid than Jenkins’. He then goes on to agree with Jenkins on another point: “…in fact, the sun passes “through” it [the Galactic Plane] as seen from Earth once a year. It just so happens that for the last ~300 years through the next ~300 years, this will happen to coincide with mid-December – winter solstice in the Northern hemisphere and summer in the Southern.”

Stuart states this as if the ancient Maya didn’t know this, and could not possibly have planned their calendar around it. He simply dismisses it all as “New-Age woo and mysticism.” That's real scientific there, Stuwie...

Just for reference, the “galactic center” is thought to be within 1-3 light years of a supermassive black hole that is generally considered the to be at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The nearest visible star is thought to be Sagittarius A*, a bright radio source that is part of the much larger structure known as Sagittarius A (without the asterisk).



The best bet location of Sagittarius A* is Right ascension 17h 45m 40.0409s Declination −29° 0′ 28.118. But, the truth is. No one knows exactly where the assumed supermassive black hole is relative to Sagittarius A*. This is important because he makes quite the stink in his galactic alignment post about the fact that while the Sun maybe be crossing the galactic plane, it isn’t directly aligned with the Galactic center. But again, that’s only where scientists currently guess the supermassive black hole is, and it may or may not be the actual “center of the galaxy” since no one knows exactly where that is either.



Further, as I outlined in The Choice and as Hoagland has commented on many times, the energetic effect is actually more powerful when the planetary bodies are not perfectly aligned. So it is disingenuous at best for Stuart to attack those discussing the 2012 alignment based on the location of an object that no one knows for certain. Further, the evident misalignment with the (assumed) location of the black hole may have no significance whatever, as it may not be at the “center of the galaxy” as it’s assumed to be. Finally, the tests done by Hoagland in 2004 and 2006 indicate that an off-center alignment is actually better than a perfect alignment for measuring the "energy."

In any event, arguing over the exact location of the center of the galaxy has nothing to do with what I published in The Choice or what I said on Coast to Coast AM in November, 2011.

Comparison of the location of the Sun (as seen from Earth) and the assumed galactic center on December 21st 2012.

But OK, I really wouldn’t expect much else from a semi-professional debunker like Stuart, so it really doesn’t mean much. He then goes on to criticize several of the alignment theories based on the idea that “gravity waves” were supposed to cause some kind of calamity on December 21st 2012. Since this has nothing to do with what I wrote in The Choice or what I spoke about on the radio that night, it has no relevance whatsoever to my work. The kind of alignments I’m talking about and the energies involved have nothing to do with gravity, so we can simply dismiss this entire part of the post. He then once again demands that I prove something stated in a radio program interview.

“I’m not even going to go into detail on this. For this claim, it’s up to him to provide the evidence for this energy blast. What it is, what it’s made of (since “energy” is not a nebulous thing that just passes through stuff like new-agers think), why we need to go through an alignment that isn’t actually happening, etc. Otherwise …”

Of course, once again, all of the “proof” Stuart claims he’s looking for is provided in my book “The Choice,” which is what I was promoting that night on Coast to Coast AM. Unless he has read my book, which he obviously hasn't, I'm not even going to address his silly demands. You want proof pal? Read my book.

Bara/Science -3, Stuart/Debunkery-0

Thursday, October 3, 2013

NASA's Stuart Robbins: The Gift That Keeps on Giving - Part II

In Part II of his attack post on my appearance on Coast to Coast AM, Stuart next turns his attention to my alleged belief in “Astrology and auras and crystals and consciousness.” But mostly, he focuses on Astrology and my discussion of the work of John Nelson for RCA in the mid-1950’s:

Chart by john Nelson showing a typical "negative configuration" of the planets from his study.
 

“Anyway, there are several short quips about astrology in the C2C interview, so it’s a bit hard to pull out a true gem. I’ve chosen the one at 37:55 in hour 2:
George Noory: “I mean, you’re even a believer in astrology now, aren’t you?”

Mike Bara: “Yeah. well you know again, that goes back – that goes back to the Hyperdimensional physics because the idea is that the planets are generating energy, which is traveling through these higher dimensions, and it is like this wave after wave of energy affecting us here on this planet. And, uh, there’s lots of, uh, interesting cases, there’s lots of experiments that show that-that this is really the case. That the planets and their positions relative to the Earth do have an effect, not just on physical instruments here, but actually on the way we think. And our consciousness.”

 As an example – “the best example” – he tells a story of John Nelson in the 1950s who tried to find out why short-wave radio signals went wonky sometimes. Bara claims that he (Nelson) found a correlation with planetary positions and activity on the sun which Bara says is evidence for this: When the astrology for the planets said good things should happen, the sun was quiet, and then the opposite was the case. If you do a Google search for this (as I just did), you will find this study reported on astrology sites and … yeah, Richard Hoagland’s site in an article written by Bara. A bit more digging and you can actually find a PDF of the article Nelson wrote which was NOT in a peer-reviewed journal, but it was in a technical memo for RCA. The abstract clearly does state that Bara is not misrepresenting the basic findings from Nelson:

 “An examination of shortwave radio propagation conditions over the North Atlantic for a five-year period, and the relative position of the planets in the solar system, discloses some very interesting correlations. As a result of such correlations, certain planetary relationships are deduced to have specific effect on radio propagation through their influence upon the sun. Further investigation is required to fully explore the effect of planet positions on radio propagation in order that the highly important field of radio weather forecasting may be properly developed.”
 
 
First off, I’d like to congratulate Stuart on admitting that I did NOT misrepresent the facts of the Nelson paper, considering how many times he’s accused me of that before. But then he goes on to make his usual errors of fact in the form of four points:
 “There are several important things to note here. First, this was not peer-reviewed meaning that there was no external unbiased rigorous check of his work.”

OK #1, the idea that the peer review publication process is an “unbiased rigorous check” of published research results is laughable. Ask any scientist (Van Flandern, Halton Arp, Pons and Fleischmann, Alfred Wegener and Luis Alvarez come to mind) who has ever published anything controversial about the “impartiality” of the peer review process. It is a joke. The peer review process is used primarily to exclude Ideas and test results which challenge the established scientific orthodoxy, of which Stuart is a stalwart defender. That is why papers about the artificiality hypothesis of Cydonia have had to be published in technical journals rather than mainstream physics journals. The possibility is simply excluded from consideration by the NASA crowd, without even a cursory review of the evidence.

Second, “peer review” is not and never has been a requirement of the scientific method. There’s nothing in any accepted definition of the scientific method which says anything about it. It is an invention of the tenured scientific-materialist class, designed to keep anyone and any idea which is outside their accepted canon from being considered or studied by mainstream science or seen by the public in general.

So, given that, it is safe to say that Stuart is admitting that Nelson’s conclusions – that the positions of the planets have an effect on solar output and that these “configurations” correlate with astrological “aspects” – remains un-refuted more than 50 years after his study was published. If Nelson was wrong, Stuart, then why haven’t any of your vaunted “peer reviewed” journals shown him to be wrong?


“Second, correlation does not equal causation.”

Again this is standard stuff from the Debunkers Handbook 101. The causation is the unacknowledged “fifth force” in the universe, which is known as dynamic torsion. I write about it extensively in The Choice. Had you actually read that book Stuart, rather than simply attack the idea as presented in a promotional radio interview, you’d know that. Unsurprisingly, you don’t. Do some research.

Further, Nelson’s study consisted of hundreds of observations over 5 years. Please enlighten me as to how many times an observation has to be made before it moves from “correlation” to “causation?” All he is doing here is setting a personal and undefined standard, which allows him to dismiss the observations, no matter how many times they’ve been made. “Correlation does not equal causation” isn’t a scientific argument, it’s a t-shirt slogan.

Third, this was a single study, and even if 100% true and valid, it has not been replicated by anyone else that I have been able to find (I searched for about a half hour).

As usual, this 3rd point is also incorrect. As I pointed out in The Choice (a book Stuart hasn’t actually read but feels justified in criticizing), there is in fact at least one paper that supports the Nelson data quite solidly:

“In 2008, the Astronomical Society of Australia published a paper by three astronomers titled “Does a Spin–Orbit Coupling Between the Sun and the Jovian Planets Govern the Solar Cycle?  The paper claimed that they had found a link between the rotation of the equatorial region of the Sun and the Sun’s orbital rotation around the barycenter of the solar system (think of it as the center of gravity). They went on to state that “this synchronization is indicative of a spin–orbit coupling mechanism operating between the Jovian planets and the Sun.” In plain English that means that there was some kind of synchronization or symbiotic relationship between the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn which was actually driving the sunspot cycles.”
Now again, there is absolutely nothing in the conventional view of physics which can account for such a relationship. They even acknowledge as much in in the abstract (summary) of their paper:  “However, we are unable to suggest a plausible underlying physical cause for the coupling…”

In other words, this paper, published in 2008, agreed 100% with Nelson that the positions of the planets effected the Sun’s energetic output (reflected in the sunspot cycle). The authors went on to say “However, we are unable to suggest a plausible underlying physical cause for the coupling…” That of course is because in order to be published in the “peer review” world, they are restricted to the politically acceptable “laws of physics,” and certainly can’t suggest anything exotic like dynamic torsion and Hyperdimensional physics.

So the fact is there is at least one paper out there (which I easily found in waaaaaay less than 30 minutes) which confirms Nelson’s basic premise: That the Sun’s energetic output is dictated by the astronomical (if not astrological) configurations of the planets.
And just for fun, you might want to read up on this confirmation as well, from a HAM radio operator:
As to Nelson, he was pretty much unequivocal in his statement about his own findings in 1974:
"In summation, after more than 25 years of research in this field of solar system science, I can say without equivocation that there is very strong evidence that the planets, when in certain predictable arrangements, do cause changes to take place in those solar radiations that control our ionosphere.  I have no solid theory to explain what I have observed, but the similarity between an electric generator with its carefully placed magnets and the sun with its ever-changing planets is intriguing.  In the generator, the magnets are fixed and produce a constant electrical current.  If we consider that the planets are magnets and the sun is the armature, we have a considerable similarity to the generator.  However, in this case, the magnets are moving.  For this reason, the electrical-magnetic stability of the solar system varies widely.  This is what one would expect."
John H. Nelson, Cosmic Patterns, 1974

Wrong again, Stuart.

Fourth, it has not been used to actually make predictions, which all testable hypotheses must.”

Again, this is a laughably fallacious argument. The results of Nelson’s 5-year study contain an inherent set of predictions; specifically, the results themselves. The simple existence of the results and Nelson’s conclusions “…certain planetary relationships are deduced to have specific effect on radio propagation through their influence upon the sun,” are themselves predictions, making Nelson’s work easily testable. All that remains is for some intrepid astronomer or radio physicist – like say Stuart – to apply for a research grant to repeat Nelson’s work. After nearly 60 years, no one has except for the HAM radio operator noted above and the Australian team. And that speaks volumes about their confidence in overturning his results.
In short Stuart, your claim that Nelson’s work is not testable is false. If he’s wrong, then prove him wrong. I will wait with baited breath as you do so. Otherwise, the work, the results, the conclusions and the supporting Australian paper stand on their own merits, and I am completely justified in citing them in my book and on the radio.
 
So either prove Nelson wrong, or STFU.
 
Stuart then goes on to make a fifth point about astrology, but it has anything to do with Nelson’s study or my main point about it in The Choice. What we are left with is 4 main points by Stuart attacking Nelson’s work, all of which I have now shown to be false, misleading or simply his opinion.

And we all know what opinions are like, don’t we Stuart?
Bara/Science - 2, Stuart/Debunkery - 0

 
UPDATE 10/16/2013 - My colleague and co-author on Dark Mission, Richard C. Hoagland, has found yet another paper published in Stuart's precious peer-reviewed journals that supports Nelson and Hyperdimensional physics. The paper, submitted to the Cornell University Library on 16 Sep 2013, shows that there is a definite connection between the Sun's roughly 11-year sunspot cycle and the planets, most notably Jupiter, which has an 11.8 year orbit around the Sun.
 
The monthly average sunspot number reveals the existence of three peaks around 11 years (red) [11], which are all associated to planetary tides (blue). Tidal periods (P) of single and combined planets by Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Earth, Mercury fit to planetary frequencies around 11 years. Note, in this work tidal timing is a proxy for gravitational lensing by the same planet(s). Courtesy, Nicola Scafetta (2013).
 
As an article about the paper in the  put it:
 
"The Sun’s 11-year cycle is one of science’s greatest mysteries. Astronomers have watched in fascination for centuries as the number of sunspots increases and decreases over a regular cycle of almost exactly 11 years.
 
More recently, they’ve discovered that at the same time, the Sun’s visible light luminosity changes by about 10^-3 while its x-ray luminosity changes by a factor of hundred.
 
Nobody knows why this happens but various scientists have pointed to the remarkable correlation between the solar cycle and the orbital periods of the planets. In particular, Jupiter takes 11.8 years to orbit the Sun and there are a number of other tidal resonances of around 11 years associated with Saturn, Venus, Earth and Mercury.
 
The problem, of course, is that the tidal forces associated with the planets are tiny. Consequently, astronomers have concluded that they can have little or no effect on the Sun."
 
What the article means by "tidal forces" is of course gravity. Unlike the Australian paper cited above, the new paper then goes on to try and assign a cause to this effect. Unfortunately, because like all mainstream scientists they are stuck in the "closed system" Cosmological paradigm, the cause they chose to assign is the absurd concept of "Dark Matter." If they deviate from the Standard Model paradigm and venture into the Hyperdimensional realms, they won't get published. They simply invoked Dark Matter/Energy because it is the only politically acceptable mechanism in mainstream scientific circles.
 
But that does nothing to detract from the really groundbreaking part of the paper, which is the acknowledgement that the planets influence the energetic output of the Sun. This agrees with both Nelson and the Australian paper in acknowledging that such a link exists. The only remaining debate is exactly how they do this.
 
The authors -- again constricted by the rules of what is acceptable science in the mainstream circles Stuart inhabits -- argue that there must be some kind of never before observed "dark particle" flow between the planets and the Sun:
 
"...there is nothing else one could imagine beyond the assumed flows of dark particles, which may settle such an oscillatory behaviour for the Sun being identical with the combined planetary orbital rhythm," they state.
 
But even the article itself raises doubts about the "Dark Particle" explanation: "That’s an interesting but highly speculative idea and these guys will be acutely aware of its shortcomings. For example, nobody has conclusively seen dark matter let alone understood how it might interact with the Sun to change its luminosity."
 
Of course, readers of The Choice can easily imagine a such mechanism. It's called Dynamic Torsion, and has a long and well established experimental history in the papers of DePalma, Kozyrev and others. Dynamic Torsion is a spiraling, directional force that propagates through the Hyperdimensional Aether, the existence of which was recently reinforced by the supposed confirmation of the so-called Higgs Boson.
 
What this all means is the Nelson's study is further supported by new research papers, and Stuart's position is even weaker than I first asserted. But is that really a surprise to anyone?
 
-- MB
 
Notes:



 
 

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

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 22nd, 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 2nd 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 30th 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 2nd chart, adapted from a review of Allais’ work in the American Journal of Physics, and a 3rd 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 2nd time, during the eclipse of 2 October 1959. This attempt by Stuart to ignore Allais’s 2nd 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:


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 (MIHÄ‚ILÄ‚, 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 explainedwas 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: