Jump to content
The Education Forum

Scientific literacy


Wade Frazier

Recommended Posts

Hi:

I was recently asked about what I mean when I write about scientific literacy, and it inspired a series of posts that are getting their own thread, so here goes.

Scientific literacy means being familiar with the processes and findings of today’s science. Scientific literacy is needed to gain a comprehensive perspective, but a person does not need to be a professional scientist to attain it. I’m not. I purposely designed my big essay so that people do not need to be professional scientists to understand it. If they aren’t scientists, it may be a heavy lift for them, but not really all that hard, if they take the time to do the work. I am going to guess and say that an IQ of 110 is likely plenty to understand the gist of that essay, in something resembling a comprehensive way, if a person does the work, and I am here to help.

We live in a kind of golden age of popularized science right now. I don’t mean the materialistic chicanery of Carl Sagan and the “skeptics,” but that recent book by Ward and Kirschvink is what I am referring to, as polymath scientists write to the lay public (and other scientists) about their cutting-edge work. This has partly come about by the welcome trend of scientists crossing disciplinary lines and escaping from the overspecialization that plagued establishment science. My references for my big essay abound with those works that laypeople can read and understand. One of humanity’s greatest scientific popularizers went out of his way, unasked, and specifically lauded my effort after spending all day reading it (and he is not the only one like that), so I think that I achieved my goal of making something both informative and relatively easy to understand. I also cite a hundred scientific papers or so in that essay, and my readers need to become at least familiar with scientific papers and how to read them. When I was still a science student in college, one of the first things that we did was read papers in Science and Nature, and both publications are designed to be read by a general science readership. They really aren’t that difficult to digest.

I write plenty on the virtues, limitations, and failings of today’s mainstream science. If you read much of my writings at Avalon, for instance, I regularly make the distinction between math and science. I crunch numbers for a living, and there is nothing like that to make you appreciate their limitations. :) Einstein was particularly wary of math and tried to work without it whenever he could. Math has its uses, let there be no doubt about it, but in the early days of science, it got distorted into over-relying on math.

Scientific literacy is like literacy. Being literate means that you can read and understand. Being scientifically literate means being able to read and understand scientific literature, but it also means reading it. Being able to and doing it are two different things, as one is capability and the other is achievement.

I don’t expect anybody to have a two thousand book library in their homes like I do, or to stay up on all the subjects that my essay covers, but people need to get familiar with them in order to help my little project along. That takes work. Maybe I have been too close to it and have been doing it too long, but people have called my work an “avalanche” of information. I don’t quite see it that way, but if people eat one bite at a time, they can digest it, and when they do, a big picture can begin to emerge.

Deciding that those in my effort need some scientific literacy was not something that I just decided one day, out of the blue. It was because the scientifically illiterate really could not understand the rudiments of ideas that are vital for understanding how the world works. I don’t take it easy on economists in my work, for good reason. They are responsible for the nonsensical information that parades as economic theory today, and I can’t tell you how many times I have heard stuff like, “Energy, so what?” Money is not even real, but people think in terms of money and not energy when they think of economics. How ignorant and backward, but the profession abets that delusional state, and it could well be intentional.

I wrote this chapter of my essay as a response to a scientist pal who wanted me to make the relationship between energy and economic activity clearer, as people close to him had no idea how they were connected. It is pretty strange when I get people (not even scientists) who can’t believe that people can’t see the connection, and then I hear from others who can’t see the connection at all. Like the Fed today, just print enough money, and all is well. :)

When I began studying Peak Oil theory back in 2003, I noticed the disdain that scientists had for economists, soon came to understand why, and what nagged me about economic theory since my college days became clear. Scientific literacy means understanding the rudiments of how our world works. If we don’t understand how it works, there is no way that we can intelligently change how it works, and make no mistake: that is what my work is really all about. We are about ready to crash Spaceship Earth, and I am doing what I can so that does not happen, but far more than that, humanity can achieve an Epoch that seems like a fairy tale today, and it all rests on the energy issue, as it always has.

I recently wrote a series of posts on Peak Oil and Global Warming, and scientific literacy in that area means just understanding the basics of those ideas. And those are two areas where the propaganda has snowed the masses. If most people were scientifically literate, the Global Warming “skeptics” would have been laughed off the stage long ago, instead of being Fox News and Heritage Foundation fixtures.

Best,

Wade

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

Here is a little more on scientific literacy. When you become scientifically literate, you can develop your own tools of discernment and awareness. This is highly important, and that critical faculty also extends to scholarship. In a world of scarcity and fear, many scientists and scholars have sold their souls to the prevailing winds of wealth and power. I chronicle many of them in my work, from the “skeptics” to historians that turn genocidists into national heroes (1, 2) and saints, literally, to “good news” advocates who never met a corporate chemical that they didn’t like, to Global Warming deniers, to journalists who are nothing more than mouthpieces for wealth and power, and so on.

Not only are there innumerable sycophants to wealth and power, muddying the waters to keep the herd bewildered, the masses often exercise no discernment at all, with their awareness of such issues being little more than daily gossip and reading the tabloids. There is a mountain of chaff for every kernel of wheat on the fringes, and I am besieged by people shoveling the chaff at me, unable to tell that it is chaff, or they want me to sort it out for them. I have more important things to do. I’ll provide a few examples.

I spent a lot of effort looking at the Apollo Moon missions, and I never saw any of “the moon landings were faked” evidence that withstood scrutiny, and most was laughable, but to this day, I am approached by people who argue for faked moon landings, but they have almost no familiarity with the evidence and all that they can provide as “proof” is recycled disinformation and other garbage.

You will find all manner of “scholar” and “archeologist” that provide “evidence” for technologically advanced ancient civilizations, but none of what I ever saw withstood the slightest scrutiny. Virtually all that they point to are stone artifacts. Stone! Stone is not an advanced material. :) The necropolis at Giza, for instance, was the greatest early instance of elite-aggrandizing monumental architecture, during their Bronze Age, when times were good in the Old Kingdom, and the Egyptians never bettered it – they did not have the resources or social impetus for it. Pyramid-building reached its peak in Egypt 4,500 years ago. All over the world, all early civilizations built elite-aggrandizing stone architecture as a form of “display,” and since no civilization has ever been energetically sustainable, they all collapsed, and the most visible remnants of those vanished civilizations were elite stonework, including the Mayans, those who built Teotihuacan, and South American civilizations. In early civilizations where stone was not as available, they made earthen mounds, as they did in Sumer and in the Mississippian culture. But there is a veritable cottage industry of “scholars” and amateur archeologists in their pith helmets who provide “evidence” of technologically advanced ancient civilizations, with plenty of “mystical” overtones. Maybe there were such civilizations, but I never saw any such “evidence” provided by those people that withstood any scrutiny, and their claims are laughable, especially when compared to what professionals have done.

For another example, there is a small group of “scholars” who argue that Antarctica was ice-free in historical times, and their evidence amounts to little more than novel interpretations of ancient maps. The scientific evidence is overwhelming that Antarctica’s ice sheet began developing about 35 million years ago, as Earth entered another Icehouse phase after 200 million years of a Greenhouse Earth. There is an awesome amount of scientific evidence to support that view, but some “scholars” examine a few old maps and tell their scientifically illiterate readership that Antarctica was ice free a few centuries ago. That is one example of many that I could provide, and if a person becomes scientifically literate and does the work, they are not led astray by that stuff, which amounts to little more than gossip, but there is a huge readership, whose awareness rarely extends past tabloid headlines, that eats it up.

The scientifically literate can, for example, easily understand why my former partner’s heat pump was the best heating system ever put on the world market, or why my first professional mentor’s engine was the world’s best for powering an automobile. There is really not even anything scientifically unorthodox about them, although the idea that they could be married and produce FE is unorthodox. But unorthodox does necessarily not mean wrong, and many of the greatest breakthroughs in science and technology hailed from the unorthodox fringes, such as the ridiculed and ignored Wright brothers. But it takes scientific literacy and hard work to winnow the wheat from the chaff.

Best,

Wade

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

I received a response to my reply, and had more to write, below…

Great question. Bucky Fuller developed a curriculum for training comprehensive thinkers. Bucky would say that all aspects of developing a comprehensive perspective are important. :) If I had to put a label on my work, I would call it neo-Fullerian. The best curriculum that I know of is my big essay. :) I purposely designed it so that if a person understood the rudiments of what I presented, it would be enough to achieve that level of scientific (and scholarly) literacy and BS-detector that I think is needed for those in the choir to keep their eyes on the ball. The essay’s more than 900 references essentially list the works that I used. It is the most scholarly and scientific essay on my site, and was the only big one that I wrote after encountering Bucky’s work back in 2003. I also spent the summer of 2014 aligning my older essays with the big one, as I readied the big one for publishing. The way that I navigated to my current perspective was reading such works, raiding their references, and daisy-chaining along. Among the scholarly and scientific volumes in my library, many of them I discovered by daisy-chaining from references in other works.

Most of the scientific references in my big essay are to popularized science works, which were designed so that laypeople could read them. On this thread, you can see me refer to Scientific American, especially its special issues. They are written by specialists who are aiming at the general readership. Those are written at the level of scientific literacy that I am aiming for. When Einstein was young, he avidly read such popularized science works. And when reading those popular science works, I was happy to see popularizers referring to other popularized works. So, those popularized works are not only for the lay audience, but for scientists in other specializations, so that they could communicate with each other. Interdisciplinary efforts are where the recent breakthroughs are happening, and most of what I refer to are interdisciplinary works (and there is also a place for historians and social scientists in that milieu – they are also important disciplines).

If Einstein read popularized science as a boy, then you can be sure that popularized science has been around for a long time, but in my lifetime, science began recovering from the over-specialization that plagued it, which Fuller thought was a ruling class tactic to keep scientists enslaved in their over-specialized tunnel-vision. We live in a kind of golden age of popularized science, and in that way, it is a good time to be alive.

Today, scientists are the biggest fans of my big essay, but it was designed with the lay audience in mind. If scientists are going to be my only audience, then I will have failed in what I attempted. The lay audience often has a strange view of science, probably because they don’t understand it. Also, mainstream science is plagued with materialism, which is a religion, not a scientific finding. The so-called “skeptics” are Grand Inquisitors for the scientific establishment, and the scientists that I really respect have little respect for the “skeptics,” and see them as just another kind of religious zealot. I consider organized skepticism to be a criminal enterprise.

So, that can be quite a minefield for laypeople to navigate, to understand the process of science without getting trapped in the fanatical aspects of that hack fringe that tries to turn science into a religion. I think that many people get turned off by the often-dishonest “skepticism” that hails from that politically active fringe and throw science away, and probably partly because they don’t have the mental horsepower to assess any of it in the first place. You need some mental horsepower to navigate those shoals.

Also, and Brian and I discussed this before he died, the road to FE passes through the fringes of today’s science, so that scientists often deny FE’s possibility and reality by referring to the “laws of physics,” when there really aren’t any. Scientists only have hypotheses and theories, and to call their theories “laws” invests them with a quasi-religious certitude that is unwarranted and has served to blind them to a bigger picture. After banging on all of the biggest doors of the scientific establishment, the “progressive” organizations, and so on, Brian began openly wondering if humanity is a sentient species. It is a fair question.

I have found that laypeople, especially in these Internet days, as you note, on one hand are kind of afraid of science and glom onto anything that calls science into question, especially the kind of doubt that lets them go on with business as usual, such as the Global Warming dissent, which was almost entirely funded by the oil companies and friends, and they have a willing audience to dupe, who want an excuse to go about business as usual, untroubled by what their activities may be inflicting on Earth. Hell, my great nation has slaughtered millions of people in the past generation, and I can hardly find an American who knows or cares, so ignoring the environmental calamities that we are inflicting is a vastly easier state of denial to achieve.

Brian and Rupert Sheldrake were/are scientific heretics, but their heresies are the same kind that the great religious heretics were guilty of. They saw how their disciplines got corrupted and were trying to bring them back to their original humble roots. But they still believed in the process of science. The scientific ideal is a worthy one, just like the ideal of a free press, an objective history, democracy, and free markets. The problem is that there has never been a free press, an objective history, a true democracy, or a free market. They are all ideals that have never been seen in the real world, and when scientists think that science is somehow above the fray, and that vested interests don’t corrupt it, they are as deluded as people who think that they get the truth from the newspaper. Fuller remarked on that naïveté among scientists.

This is not something that can be digested overnight, which is why I say that my best pupils go deep and come up for air months or years later. And I am here when they pop up.

I’ll grant you that physics is not easy. It is the hardest of the hard sciences, and other branches of science have often had “physics envy,” which could set back their science. The experiments of physicists are often not amenable to the other sciences, and today you see professions that could be sciences, but they’re not, and they ape the trappings of science while being faithless to its process, such as mainstream economics. Very ironically, the greatest physicists all had worldviews that verged on the mystical, and there is a great unresolved paradox at the heart of physics that laypeople can readily understand, which makes it clear that our current theories are a long way from figuring it all out.

I consider it very possible that the theories that would arise in light of the extant FE, antigravity and related technologies might resolve that paradox. In that light, it is not only a shame that it has been kept under wraps like that, but those technologies can usher in the Fifth Epoch of the human journey, which will dwarf all that came before it. No more poverty, no more environmental destruction, no more war. Who wants some of that? :) Well, we don’t get any while we sleep away in our egocentric pursuits of survival in a world of scarcity and fear. Love and sentience are the only way out that I know of, and attaining scientific literacy is part of achieving the requisite sentience, so that we are not easily led astray by the latest bright shiny object that comes our way. There are a million distractions that beckon, and all sorts of ways to fail on the FE path.

On FE failure, I will give an example that I saw just yesterday. While performing my studies, I ordered some material from a fringe scientist, and now I am on his list for begging for money for antigravity (AKA electrogravity and other terms) experiments, and I received his latest entreaty just yesterday. He and his colleagues are begging for money to complete one of their experiments. While part of me lauds their initiative, another part is appalled by their naiveté. If they ever achieve some success, they are going to move up Godzilla’s radar. A handful of scientists in their labs, begging for money for FE and antigravity research, don’t stand a prayer in today’s environment. This is not the time for tinkering inventors and scientists to lead the way. The only scientist/inventor approach with a prayer is for the scientist/inventor with the goods to give it a worthy group, who will take it the rest of the way, and give it to the world. No other approach along those lines has a prayer, IMO. Been there, done that.

My attempts to build that choir can be seen as an attempt to form that worthy group.

Best,

Wade

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

Here is another scientific literacy post. On the TV show Lost, one of the protagonists was called a man of faith (John Locke) and the other a man of science (Jack Shephard), but it was probably more accurate to call Shephard a man of doubt. Organized religion is based on faith, and mainstream science is based on doubt. But faith and doubt are poor substitutes for knowledge, which is only attainable through experience.

The scientific ideal is a quest for knowledge via reproducible experiments that can verify or falsify hypotheses, which anybody with the proper technology and techniques can reproduce. The religious ideal is to attain direct personal experience of the nature of reality, usually by attaining mystical states of awareness. Both approaches require self-discipline and integrity, and some people are more talented than others. The most talented scientists generally had what we would call high IQs, while the most talented mystics had a flexibility of consciousness that can be hard to define, but the so-called miracles of the Bible, especially the feats of Jesus, is what most would agree is pronounced mystical ability, and Jesus attained it through love, which is something that scientists really can’t define.

Performing “mystical” feats is really not all that hard to do. After 40 hours of meditation training, performing what is called a remote viewing was a typical feat. That is how Brian O’Leary and I had our mystical awakenings. Everybody that I most respected in the FE field had a mystical awakening, and most of us were scientists or scientists-in-training. I performed many “feats” in those early days of exploring my mystical abilities, and I had many preposterous events orchestrated by my “friends,” which guided me to the biggest events of my unbelievable journey. The “skeptics” will tell you otherwise, but thousands of experiments since the 1800s have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that human consciousness has abilities that the current scientific models are at a loss to explain. While such experiments are nice confirmation of those innate human abilities, there is no substitute for doing it yourself, which removes all doubt or faith and replaces it with knowledge.

It turns out that the greatest physicists, who worked in that hardest of hard sciences, all had worldviews that verged on the mystical, which is one of the many skeletons in the closets of materialists, who engage in numerous logical summersaults to ignore or explain those uncomfortable facts away. Those with mystical experiences know better.

The greatest breakthroughs in science and technology generally came from flashes of insight, which has been called the creative moment and other terms, but it was a close cousin to, if not identical to, mystical insight. I have had both, and they are arguably one and the same.

In the Fifth Epoch, scientific literacy will be like reading, writing, and arithmetic are in the Fourth Epoch: something that all children learn. But the key to the Fifth Epoch is technologies that exist on the planet today that turn the physics textbooks into doorstops. Also, anybody who plays in the FE field for long enough, at a high enough level, knows that those technologies exist, if they can survive the process of discovering it. So, the process is reproducible, but just like with attaining the highest mystical insights, almost nobody really has the right stuff today to go find out for themselves, so they fall back on faith and doubt. In the Fifth Epoch, the religion of the Fourth Epoch, materialism, will also go into the dustbin of history, as the agrarian religions of the Third Epoch steadily lose their influence, and all Fifth Epoch children will explore their mystical abilities, and in ways that reject all of the hocus-pocus of organized religion or today’s New Age trappings.

This entire line of inquiry is rich with paradoxes and conundrums, which Niels Bohr said was where the gold was. Wrestling with paradoxes is where the greatest scientific progress was made, and there is a paradox at the bedrock of physics that shows how far our current theories are from figuring it out. The greatest science of all is likely the science of consciousness, which mainstream science has barely begun to explore, and its often-materialistic stance usually defeats it before it begins.

Materialism is a faith, or a philosophical stance based on unprovable assumptions, if you want to call it that, not a scientific finding, but most mainstream scientists don’t like to be reminded of it. If the limits of today’s scientific inquiry are understood, then it can be an immensely useful process, and the greatest scientists were keenly aware of those limitations, but the hack class of scientists has turned mainstream science into a religion, just like the professional priesthoods turned the enlightened teachings of the mystical masters into another form of social control. They did it from the beginning. So it is, in a world of scarcity and fear.

Best,

Wade

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

At Avalon, I have a poet who periodically posts, as she did today, and my reply is below, with some more on scientific literacy and technology…

I have informed Melinda that I only “need” her to do that once a year, and anything more is gravy. :) On this thread, I have related the story of talking to a man, just before the boom was lowered onto us in Ventura, who had reason to call Princeton’s physics department when he was a young man, and Einstein picked up the phone with, “This is Albert.” The conversation quickly led to Einstein’s speculations on how the cosmos worked, and the man told me that it was like Einstein was wandering the stars as they spoke. That conversation happened not long before Einstein died.

Einstein was well aware of the similarity of religious “rapture” and what he experienced when he pondered how the universe worked. I have known scientific minds that were similar to Einstein’s, and they definitely had a mystical bent. Einstein was a pure theorist who never performed any experiments related to his theories. He never learned to drive, got lost while walking home one day at Princeton, and about the only technology that he handled (other than picking up the phone :) ), was his pencil for writing down his thought experiments, his violin, and the tiller of his small sailboat.

I am in the autism spectrum, as Einstein was, as were the greatest scientific and inventive minds that I knew. Not many of them are gregarious, man-of-the-people types, like a Brian O and Dennis. I think that that “autistic” orientation is what allowed them to “wander the stars” that way and perceive the universe’s “secrets,” just waiting to be understood.

In very real ways, our technology made us, as without advanced tools and the control of fire, we would have never left the forest and might still get around on all fours. And our technologies have always primarily been about getting more energy or manipulating it for our benefit. There are few exceptions.

As I sat down, before reading Melinda’s little gem, I was going to write a little more on scientific literacy and how science and technology can go awry, and it is all about scarcity and fear, and energy scarcity above all. So far, the greatest engine of technological innovation in the human journey has been warfare. The first practical application of Einstein’s theories was making history’s most evil weapons and gratuitously dropping them on a defeated people. Einstein himself owned part of that, and said that it was his life’s greatest mistake.

The Space Race was a partial exception to that warfare model, but ironically, Jack Kennedy tried to end the Cold War, instructed NASA to develop a joint mission to the moon with the Soviet Union, not have a Space Race, and he was murdered soon thereafter, most likely by interests that did not want to see the Cold War end, as warfare presents wondrous profit opportunities, as some soldiers eventually realized.

In a world of scarcity and fear, rapacious systems such as capitalism thrive, and technology can go down a dark path when greed and fear guide its development. If we choose love and sentience (they mutually reinforce each other), then a different path awaits.

Not only do technologies developed and sequestered today turn the physics texts into doorstops (which were likely at least partly developed by reverse-engineering captured ET craft), but basic science has been greatly corrupted by vested interests. Corporate and military fluoride polluters turned a brain-damaging, tooth-crumbling toxic waste into “medicine” that is compulsorily jammed down the American public’s throat, literally. Western medical “science” is almost entirely bogus, with at least half of all medical research corrupted by vested interests (and I have even seen a study that estimated that 90% was bogus).

If an effort like mine can ever build up enough steam to help make FE happen, capitalism and all other scarcity-based ideologies and institutions will go the way of the dinosaur, as the Fifth Epoch dawns. Technology will not be developed under the rubric of greed and fear, and the science that emerges will bear little resemblance to today’s. Today’s animal experiments will be unthinkable, and many other evil practices will fade away into the oblivion of a past Epoch. Who wants any of that? :) With FE, it all becomes feasible, and without FE, almost none of it does.

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

Historians are concerned about what happened, and scientists not only are concerned with that, but also why. As the tools, techniques, and hypothesis become more sophisticated, new questions are being asked and pursued. It is an amazing process.

Dennis’s recent question on water can open up big areas of inquiry. The connection of oxygenic photosynthesis and the atmosphere’s oxygenation has been a very controversial area, and Ward and Kirschvink’s latest book spends some ink on it, and their conclusion is that oxygenic photosynthesis evolved a little less than 2.5 billion years ago. Life had not yet adopted aerobic respiration (why would it, if there was not any oxygen to consume?), and for hundreds of millions of years, oxygenic photosynthesis filled the atmosphere and then some. One speculation is that the atmospheric oxygen level might have reached multiples of today’s level. That high oxygen level would have also caused low carbon dioxide levels, as oxygenic photosynthesis takes carbon from the atmosphere, and that led to the first “Snowball Earth” episode, as Earth became one big ball of ice.

Following the controversy really is fascinating, as various deposits of manganese, uranium, iron, and other minerals provide evidence of high or low oxygen conditions. Again, I am going to get into those issues a bit more in my upcoming essay update, and visit molecular biology a bit more, as the engines of life were built. The energy generation machine of mitochondria is nothing short of incredible, and I am going to devote significant effort to sketching its basics and how complex life is dependent on mitochondrial function. Bird mitochondria operate at peak efficiency in order to fly, which is the greatest energetic feat in the animal kingdom, and that aerobic capacity and related efficiency is closely related to why birds live ten times as long as similarly sized mammals. When the human line learned to walk upright and run, its aerobic capacity skyrocketed, and it is today thought that that is why humans live twice as long as their gorilla and chimp cousins.

These are not areas of idle philosophical speculation, but have great import to the human journey, and gaining some understanding of life at the molecular level has been one of the great advances in my lifetime. Some scientific literacy is essential for understanding those vital issues.

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

This post will be related to the scientific literacy issue, and has to do with how we “know” what we “know.” I vividly remember my Philosophy 101 class in college, and the arguments from Ancient Greeks, Enlightenment philosophers, to modern philosophers. David Hume was kind of the ultimate rationalist, taking Descartes’s “I think therefore I am” idea further, stating that all that we “know” are the thoughts, and that does not even imply a thinker. :) Those days of ferment led to today’s scientific method, and similar approaches are used to produce good scholarship.

Organized religion is built on faith, and science on doubt. They are diametrically opposed approaches. Materialism, however, is as much of a faith as Christianity is, which materialists do like hearing, but it is true. I easily falsified materialism as a teenager, through my personal experiences, and they are not hard for others to reproduce for themselves, and there has been a great deal of scientific investigation, but since consciousness is a non-material phenomenon, it is not very amenable to the process of materialistic investigation. Consciousness is never going to be presented in a glass case in a museum.

Scientists ideally never speak in terms of absolutes (such as “impossible” or “always”), but they deal in levels of confidence, with that ever-present doubt always somewhere in their heads. Take the idea of Earth being spherical. There is actually a hypothesis, with an organization built around it, that Earth is flat, and it is not a joke. Just last year, a pal knew somebody who believed in the Flat Earth hypothesis’s validity. Any teenagers with a little gumption can falsify the Flat Earth hypothesis for themselves. So, the Flat Earth hypothesis is not a very robust one, and no astronauts who have been in space belong to the Flat Earth society. :)

If I hold up a coin and let go, a million times out of a million, that coin will drop to the ground. There is a mysterious force called gravity, which keeps everything on Earth on Earth, unless it can overcome gravity. Hydrogen can overcome Earth’s gravity, if left alone for long enough. Another way is to build a rocket, which is how those spacefaring astronauts no longer believe that Earth is flat. Another is to build antigravity technology, which is one of those sequestered technologies in Godzilla’s Golden Hoard. But not many people are ever invited to a show like that. It could happen to me, but I would rather not play at the level of the game where I become a candidate for that, because I would also be a candidate for being murdered. I do not plan to ever play in that rarified air. I carried the spears of those who played there, and I don’t plan to do that again.

Witnessing an antigravity demonstration moves gravity from being a “law” to being something else. The best scientists always made the frank admission that we don’t know what any of it really is, not energy, gravity, light, etc. So, what are scientists confident about? Well, without some amazing technology or strange mystical power, that coin is always going to drop to the floor. For fossil interpretation, there are four general levels of confidence, from inevitable conclusions to guesses.

In science, hypotheses come and go. Einstein famously said that every theory was eventually killed by a fact, and he fully expected that his theories would one day fall by the wayside, but that the best parts of his theories would survive in the next ones. Well, a century later, his theories are still going strong, although the Black Science world operates from different theories, the kind that antigravity technologies support.

I’ll have more to write on this subject, but it is off to a long day at the office.

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

I have a busy day ahead of me, so this will be short, on what we “know” and levels of confidence. I don’t shrink from controversy in my work, but I generally take the scientist’s/scholar’s approach. I largely keep the mystical stuff in its own pond and, really, the main point of the mystical stuff is to show how materialism is a religion that can be easily falsified, and that the high ethics of the masters, guided by love, is really about the only “mystical” orientation that we need. I am going to make some posts on the JFK hit, the moon landings, ETs, FE, “insider revelations,” and maybe some more topics and what I “know” and what my confidence levels are and why.

I was five when JFK was murdered, and all that I remember is watching his funeral procession on TV as my mother watched, seemingly sick. My mother worked for the Lyndon Johnson campaign in 1964, and there were LBJ stickers on objects in our house for the remainder of my childhood. My parents always voted Democrat, even though my father was a right-wing redneck. I almost went into the military, which was a family tradition, but a couple of years later, I became a pacifist (as a result of my mystical studies) and that voice in my head sent me to business school, which is the province of Republican voters. Although I aced the curriculum, I never quite fit in.

My father thought that the Warren Commission was a cover-up, and JFK came to his military base once and walked right past my father, and when I was older, my father told me that one of his colleagues walked through the halls at work, shouting his approval the day that JFK was murdered.

In the USA, the JFK hit was like 9/11 (or Pearl Harbor), in that every American who lived through it knew what they were doing when they heard of it. And all three events could well have been manufactured by the USA’s ruling class, to manipulate the herd. I have the most confidence regarding those three events that JFK was not killed by a lone assassin. Lee Harvey Oswald was just as he said, a “patsy,” but I really did not pay much attention to the JFK assassination until I met Gary Wean. It was the darkest time of my life, and Gary gave me the best advice that I could get: no authority in the USA, or any “human rights” group, was going to intervene in the evil acts taking place in my home town. It was just another day in the USA, as gangsters run it, with politicians little more than puppets. Gary went out of his way to help me in my hour of need, and his advice directly led to my springing Dennis from jail. So, Gary has been in my pantheon from that day forward.

It turned out that Gary had the inside scoop on the JFK hit, hearing from John Tower three weeks after the hit that Oswald was a military intelligence operative being used in a CIA plot to stage a fake assassination attempt on JFK, to frame Castro, to justify invading Cuba, and it somehow “backfired.” It was really a small part of his book, and because of what Gary had done, he had complete credibility with me. If Gary said that he heard that story from Tower, he did. That is non-negotiable with me. It turned out that Gary wrote about my home town, and the same interests that he fought, who tried to kill him, had also ruined my life, almost certainly on instructions from higher powers. When Dennis did not take the carrot, it was time for the stick.

When I moved away from Ventura, never to return, and hit the books, trying to make sense of what I had survived, the JFK hit was one area that I studied. I have a pretty hefty JFK section in my library. I never saw even one piece of credible evidence that called Gary’s story into question, and evidence kept coming to light over the years that powerfully confirmed it, such as the Operation Northwoods documents.

I am 100% certain that Oswald was not some lone nut, but my readers did not have the privilege of knowing Gary. But if people do their homework, the evidence richly supports the idea that JFK was murdered by powerful interests, and it was all covered up, with relatively token efforts taken by Carter and Clinton, after the Warren Commission cover-up.

Knowing that Oswald was not some lone nut is a very different issue from knowing exactly who did it. Gary was a cop and professional investigator. He met Jack Ruby while tailing Mick Cohen, and Gary took the Jewish mobster angle in his JFK theorizing. Well, Ruby was a Jewish mobster, so the Jewish mobster angle is not farfetched. For what it is worth, while I believe that mobsters, Jewish and otherwise, were involved, I think that they were more hit men than masterminds. Their interests aligned with those who wanted JFK dead, and they were happy to help.

To this day, people approach me with their JFK assassination theories, and the most bizarre that I have been approached with was that JFK staged his own fake assassination so that he could retire from the limelight and let Jackie marry her great love, Ari Onassis. Whew! :) But that is only the most extreme of the bunch. The recent revelation, that JFK was killed because he was going to reveal the ET presence to the Soviets, is far more credible, but the interests who had JFK killed certainly knew that the Soviets knew plenty themselves, so I think that the ET angle was a red herring justification used on relatively low-level operatives such as Hunt.

I am onboard with the idea that the MIC had JFK killed because he tried to end the Cold War, and while Allen Dulles played his malevolent role, and may have been involved in the hit as well as the cover-up, he was likely also a lower-level player. Much bigger hands were moving those chess pieces.

Like Gary, I hear from all sorts of people who want to “solve the crime” and finger the assassins. Personally, I think that it is a quixotic goal of dubious value. To me, the lesson of the JFK hit and cover-up is how evil our system is, in that the head of state can be murdered in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses, and it all gets covered up. That is the most important lesson, and attempts to identify the perpetrators seem motivated to absolve our system and serve up the villains, so that we have another out-group to heap scorn on. The enemy is us, not some outside agents, and every one of us, every day, contributes to how our system works. Nobody gets off by repudiating their responsibility for how the system works, not even me. :) But taking responsibility is the first step to being able to change it, as we cannot change it if we don’t own it. That is how creators go about it, while victims bewail their fate, seeking heroes and villains.

I have more to write on JFK, but it is off to work.

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

I have a little time to write this weekend. On JFK, one pal wrote this post, and it brings up a good subject for the other forums that I post in. Before the modern era of studying mass extinctions, scientists proposed a hundred hypotheses for the dinosaurs’ extinction. It became an intellectual parlor game, and we now know that virtually none were valid, other than the bolide impact hypothesis, and the volcanism hypothesis still has not gone away, as a big volcanic event happened then and sea levels seesawed. I was just reading something on that this morning.

As contentious as the dinosaurs’ demise has been for scientists, it all pales beside the scenarios that have been proposed for JFK’s murder. Probably a thousand different scenarios have been proposed, almost all along the lines of a conspiracy of some kind. As I wrote, the most bizarre that I have personally received is that JFK faked his own death, and I have heard the half-joke that if the Warren Commission had the opportunity to take another crack at it, that they would have concluded that JFK committed suicide! :)

I mention that “accidental” Secret Service theory as an example of the many theories out there. That theory is not as bizarre as the Washington Post’s theory that there were two shooters, who did not know of each other and coincidentally fired at the same instant. Yes, crap that crazy is out there, even spun by such an establishment stalwart as the Washington Post. Most Americans are not aware that a plot very similar to the likely one in Dallas was foiled in Chicago a few weeks before JFK was murdered. There are way too many connections like that one to make any kind of lone nut, “accident,” or “coincidence” theories highly questionable. So, I don’t consider the Secret Service “accident” theory to be very credible. However, there are plenty of lines of evidence that some Secret Service personnel were involved in the assassination, and it can trip the light fantastic to go too far into it, but briefly…

One theory says that JFK’s chauffeur did it, based on a misleading analysis of the Zapruder film, where some reflections are interpreted to portray the chauffeur’s turning and firing at JFK during the event. That is just another example of the wackiness around the issue. Here are some lines of evidence that I think are likely valid, while not all point to the perpetrators, they point to something very different from the “lone nut” scenario.

Douglas Caddy’s interview is very compelling, and I have no doubt that Lyndon Johnson was every bit as dirty as portrayed, with his own private hit man. The idea that Johnson was involved in the JFK hit has plenty of evidence to at least give it credence, but he really was a minor leaguer. But he may well have been in the know, as far as something going down (as Bush the Second may also have known that something was coming), as when the fatal shots rang out, Johnson dove to the floor of his limo. When the limo got to Parkland Hospital, Johnson ordered the limo cleaned up, thereby compromising the crime scene, and he shared a frank moment with a Congressman as he was sworn in next to a bloody Jackie, as the Congressman winked at what appears to be a grinning Johnson.

There were a number of irregularities in the Secret Service’s activities that day, to give weight to the notion that at least some of them were in on it. There has been controversy for 50 years over the Zapruder film and accusations of tampering. I think that the accusations may have something to them, and at least some frames were removed, partly to cover up the fact that the limo came almost to a halt when the fatal shots were fired, exactly contrary to Secret Service procedure. That chauffeur was likely not all that innocent, doing his part to make the head shots easy. There is a photo of him getting off the witness stand at the Warren Commission hearings, wearing a big grin.

I really could go on for days on the many lines of evidence that point very clearly away from the “lone nut” Warren Commission version. The Commission was corrupted from the outset, as the man whom JFK fired over the Bay of Pigs, Allen Dulles, ran the commission. That smelled very similar to when Bush the Second appointed Henry Kissinger to head the 9/11 commission. I had a pal from Manhattan, who lived there when 9/11 happened, and she was skeptical of the “inside job” angle on 9/11…until Bush appointed Kissinger, and then she decided that it was probably an inside job after all.

I’ll say this about the JFK theories: those that argue that the JFK and RFK hits were unrelated don’t have much credibility with me. The Kennedy family has more than hinted that they were related, and I think it very likely that high-profile assassinations and attempts, with a “lone nut” scapegoat served up each time, became a “sport” in the spook world for about a generation. Also, in those years, FE inventors regularly met untimely ends, and when the spooks take you out, great pains are taken to make it appear as something other than premeditated murder. That just comes with the profession.

While there is a mountain of evidence, some very compelling, that point away from the lone assassin hypothesis, if I had not known Gary, I wonder how certain I would have been about the idea that Oswald was not the lone assassin. I think that I would likely be fairly certain, but Gary’s testimony removed all doubt for me, and it has been gratifying over the past quarter-century to see new evidence coming to light that further confirmed Gary’s account of meeting with John Tower.

In summary, I am certain the Oswald was not a lone nut, and I am pretty confident that elements of the MIC were behind the hit, as they had the means, motive, and opportunity to both murder JFK and cover it up. While Hunt stated to Caddy that JFK’s murder was to prevent him from revealing ET secrets to the Soviets, I think that that is a bit of a red herring (which even Hunt may have believed), as the high-level spooks had to have known that the Soviets knew plenty themselves about the situation. I think that the likely scenario is that JFK was not compliant enough to corporate America and the military establishment, and was quietly trying to end the Cold War, which was the raison d'etre of the spooks and friends, and a source of endless profits for the MIC, so he had to go.

All American presidents since JFK have been outright puppets and they know it, and none have been in the loop on the ET issue. My view on the matter is close to Ed Mitchell’s.

But I think that all the Sturm und Drang over identifying just who all was involved and what their role was is a little misguided. The lesson of the JFK hit, to me, is how evil our system is, from top to bottom, in that the head of state can be murdered in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses, and it all got covered up. Trying to finger the assassins more than 50 years later is going to be an exercise in futility, and it serves to muddy the waters, IMO. It is plenty to know that the official version is a pack of lies and the general direction that the assassins likely hailed from. The rest usually flies off into thin evidence and hoary realms of speculation. Again, if you immerse yourself in that milieu for long enough, it can challenge your sanity, and if you ever got close to unmasking the conspirators, your life expectancy would greatly diminish. :)

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

Back to what I “know,” how I know, and what my confidence is. Let’s do FE. I first heard of FE from Dennis about Joe Newman, soon before our Seattle company was stolen. Did Newman have anything? Beats me, but Joe gets credit for being the first person that I heard of on the FE front, but Joe also thought that he was The Second Coming, which is a professional hazard in the field.

The day after I got to Boston, chasing my teenage dream, Dennis got his first FE idea. I soon brought in Mr. Mentor, to see if we really had anything. He did not call Dennis’s idea “impossible” and eventually proposed marrying Dennis’s heat pump panels with his engine to do FE, which was when we began flying high and Godzilla decided to do something about us. Neither Dennis nor I had even heard of Nikola Tesla back then, we were so ignorant of what we had stumbled into. These were the days before the Internet. But we soon began hearing tales of woe, however, and when they dropped the sledgehammer on us, it was no great surprise, but it was still a shock. The moment when I saw those trucks and cars speed into our parking lot was the beginning of the worst year of my life, by far.

When the dust finally settled and soon before I moved away from my home town, never to return, Mr. Researcher told me about his meeting with Sparky Sweet. He did not name Sparky, whose name I did not discover until the next year, when I met Brian, and it was not until several years ago that I discovered that Sparky lived just down the road from us. Sparky had the goods, and no wonder Godzilla became so concerned about our effort. The threat that we presented was not so much Mr. Mentor’s or Victor Fischer’s engines being married to Dennis’s heat pump panels, but Dennis’s teaming up with somebody like Sparky. Of course, Sparky was hounded to a grim and lonely end.

A decade after meeting Brian, I met Mark, and heard his story at an NEM meeting in 2003, and I heard plenty about Adam Trombly’s adventures and those of other fellow travelers. Eugene Mallove was murdered a few months later, which spurred Brian to move to South America, understandably. So, I eventually became very immersed in the FE milieu, from my initial, gung-ho ignorance, and a generation ago, one of my very close associates received a little show from people who were likely part of Godzilla’s disenchanted faction, and several years after hearing my friend’s story, I began witnessing Greer’s Disclosure Project witnesses testify, and what some of them described was exactly what my friend was shown. FE and antigravity technology, exotic materials not far removed from Flubber, and other mindboggling toys were demonstrated to my friend, whose eyes were bugging out of his head. I heard plenty more from other fellow travelers over the years. Neither Brian nor I wanted to catalog the stories, like others have, but Brian knew about 25 dead inventor stories, and I got tired of hearing the stories back in the 1980s.

Internet surfers and YouTube watchers are never really going to “know,” but my adventures and those of my relatively few fellow travelers removed any doubt I may have harbored about disruptive energy technologies and their organized suppression. I have been in the room with FE prototypes, but what was far more impressive was listening to my fellow travelers describe their adventures. Some had world-class professional standing, aside from their FE activities. I had no credibility problem with them. What my friend saw removed any doubt that I might have harbored about FE and its viability. I don’t need to have a show like that. I have seen enough on my journey, and playing at the level where you get a show like that is also playing at a level where you have risked your life for years. No thanks. I had enough of that for a lifetime.

Is that enough for my pupils to “know” that FE technology is at least possible? For my best ones, it is. Sure, there is nothing like seeing it for yourself, but this area is so perilous that unless somebody begins playing at the high levels, risking their lives, they aren’t going to get any closer to working FE devices than interacting with somebody like me, and there are not many like me. Nobody that I know who has played at my level interacts with the public like I do, and I don’t blame them. I have taken plenty of abuse over the years, and even recently, and have gotten pretty picky over the years. My fellow travelers do not bother and wonder what the point is, interacting with the rabble like that. Well, I am looking for needles in haystacks, and this is about the only way that I can do it without risking my life, and I can do it cheaply, too. I don’t need any money to take this approach.

Time to go hiking.

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

Back to what I “know” and how I know it, I am going to do an ET post. I have never met an ET in the flesh, at least that I know of. All American children have heard plenty about ETs, from the media, with many stories quite old. I suppose that War of the Worlds was the first biggie of the modern era. There has been a strange dichotomy of portraying ETs as malevolent threats or the “Space Brothers” who have been secretly saving us. I think that both views are the result of humans projecting their hopes and fears.

Of course, there has also been a cottage industry of debunkers, claiming that it is all a mass delusion, etc. While I heard plenty about UFOs/ETs in my young adult days, and my paranormal experiences made them seem not too unusual, I really did not pay too much attention to the idea, at least until my first stint with Dennis ended. When I began hitting the books, the UFO/ET situation was one of dozens of topics that I tackled. Seth actually told our channeling group where to go watch UFOs in flight and when, and those who went were not disappointed. Quite a few in my circles told me of their UFO encounters, and they were usually high-powered professionals, scientists, etc., not tin-foil hatters.

A year after staggering out of my home town, radicalized, I met Brian, and a half-hour later we were driving past the front gates of the world’s largest air force base and joking about the ETs stored there. The next year, Brian mounted a UFO conference, was soon approached by high-ranking military officials to do classified UFO work, and Brian nearly died immediately thereafter. Ten years later, Brian told me that his brush with death was their response to his “no” reply to their “offer,” as he was made an offer that he could not refuse.

After I got Brian’s NASA bio published, one of the leading space debunkers took on Brian’s Martian credentials. I had been slimed by the “skeptics” for many years by that time, and considered organized skepticism to be a criminal enterprise, but it was educational to be on the receiving end of a space debunker’s work. How stupid it all was. I was embarrassed for the debunker, even as he attacked my bio work. It was not the slightest bit rational, and when he finished heaving his tawdry “debunking” effort, he flitted off to other debunkery. After many years of seeing the debunkers at work, I am not sure that there is any value to their work. I don’t want them to be the focus of this post, but just wanted to note how invalid their work is. The ET and FE cover-ups are related, and constitute history’s biggest cover-up.

I see three ways to become knowledgeable on the UFO/ET issue:

  • Have encounters with them;
  • Be close to people who do;
  • Examine the evidence.



I took all three approaches, and I have been to James Gilliland’s Ranch four times between 2005 and 2015, and saw something inexplicable each time, although the first encounter was the most spectacular. I did not need to go see UFOs to “believe” in them, and went to James’s ranch to go see them, in a situation where the odds were high that I would. I would not have traveled to distant lands to do it, but I was willing to do something local with a high probability of success.

After Brian’s brush with death, he became a leading supporter of Greer’s Disclosure Project, along with Ed Mitchell, whose views on the ET issue are very close to mine. We had a strange encounter with Jackie Gleason soon before he died, and only many years later did it become clear why.

Of course, there is a blizzard of disinformation on this subject, spun by “insiders” and others, with the New Age/conspiracist crowd lapping it up. It is a three-ring circus, and is one of the many minefields that seekers of truth have to try to navigate, and it is not easy. I know as much as I need to know about the subject. I am not waiting for the “Space Brothers” to save us from ourselves, and the “threat” that they represent is almost wholly a concoction of Godzilla and his MIC underlings, as fear is how they stay in the driver’s seat.

I will soon write about the moon landings and “insider” revelations.

Best,

Wade

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

Hi:

I really plan to slow down, I swear ( :) ), while I update my big essay. This may be my biggest update for the next several years, especially if I resume my career as I hope that I do. Back to scientific literacy, and this will start some posts on the Apollo Moon landings. This turned into something kind of bizarre for me, looking into the issue for years before I decided to get to the bottom of it, and that effort partly led to becoming an astronaut’s biographer, who publicly stated that maybe the Apollo missions didn’t land on the Moon.

I have told the story of my journey into the Apollo evidence, and don’t need to repeat much of it, but want to approach it from what the evidence was, how I dealt with it, and how it relates to scientific investigation. The scientific ideal is proposing hypotheses to account for all known evidence regarding a phenomenon, and then seeing how the hypotheses fare in light of new evidence.

That we never landed on the Moon was not my hypothesis, and was not the hypothesis that got me looking into the Moon landings, but I initially looked to see what might have been covered up about them. The whole “faked Moon landings” issue took shape while I was looking into what might have been covered up. My father’s year at NASA had something to do with my interest, plus my radicalizing days with Dennis. I wondered if anything that I had been taught was true.

Steven Greer stated that what got him looking into the ET issue was his uncle, who helped build the Lunar Modules that landed on the Moon. Greer said that for insiders like his uncle, they were aware of things that the public was not privy too, such as the ET presence. Seeing Douglas Caddy’s testimony on why JFK was killed came many years after hearing what Greer’s Disclosure Project witnesses had to say about JFK’s knowledge of the issue, and I have certainly weighed in on my views on the JFK issue lately, but want to leave them behind for now. It is ironic that the Space Race took me to Houston as a child (because of Johnson’s pork barrel politics), but JFK wanted to end the Space Race, which was likely part of why he died. So his murder directly impacted my life.

Before the chorus of faked Moon landings really began, I read William Brian’s Moongate, which did not argue for faked Moon landings, but that there was plenty covered up about them. His chief contention was that there was a discrepancy in published values for the so-called neutral point, which is a point in space for a rocket to the Moon where the pull of the Moon’s gravity is equal to Earth’s. Brian calculated the one that was initially published to the one published during the Apollo missions, and argued that the discrepancy meant that the Moon’s gravity was higher than publicly disclosed, and that NASA had to use exotic technology to land on and take off from the Moon (strongly implying that antigravity was used), not conventional rockets.

For several years, I challenged people to tell me where Brian’s calculation was wrong. Finally, in 1998, chief Velikovskian apostate Leroy Ellenberger pointed me to Archie Roy’s Orbital Motion, and it became evident that the calculation that Newton used, as well as pre-Apollo NASA, was flawed. William Brian’s so-called “neutral-point discrepancy” essentially vanished, and I told him so. You can see a derivation of the more sophisticated calculation and its discussion, here. Once the neutral-point discrepancy vanished, as far as it pointing at covered-up high lunar gravity, the entire Moongate thesis largely collapsed. It was a good early lesson for me.

There were still aspects of the Moongate hypothesis that bugged me, and it was not until 2001 that I co-discovered evidence that eliminated virtually all of my residual doubt, but I am contacted to this day by people who argue for faked Moon landings. However, all that I have seen them do is recycle “evidence” that has long since been convincingly discredited, as far as being evidence of faked Moon landings. Some of it is appallingly bad, as far as “evidence” of faked Moon landings, but the issue seems to never quite go away. Recent images of the Apollo landing sites has taken most of the wind out of the conspiracists’ sails, but there will likely be a hardcore group that will take their place with the Flat Earthers, who are never going to back down until they can go to the Moon themselves (if they ever dare to).

I read the various “faked Moon landings” books when they came out, and Dark Moon came out just after I began going deep on the Moon landings in early 2001, soon after Brian O publicly stated that maybe the Moon landings were faked. Part of me resented getting sucked so far into the issue, but with Brian’s statement, I had to do the work, and what follows will be my journey into the evidence.

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

Scientists and scholars usually have the same goal: discovering the truth. Their methods are cousins, and they handle the evidence in similar ways. Professional care and integrity are ideally exercised, conclusions are supposed to be carefully reached and always tentative, and dependent on the evidence.

Scientific practice has an ideal, as does the historian’s enterprise. Journalists have one, too, however frequently they fail. My erstwhile profession has one, too, although conflicts of interest are the bane of all professions.

I was definitely an amateur as I read those books that argued for fake Moon landings, or cover-ups of aspects of them, and their approach was similar to the scientific process of hypothesis and evidence, but I found that their work was usually long on hypothesis and short on evidence. As I stated previously, by 1998, I was satisfied that the Moongate hypothesis’s high lunar gravity arguments were false, as its linchpin collapsed. A genuine discrepancy in reporting the neutral point did not point to high lunar gravity, but the challenge of calculating the true point. While Kaysing’s book was the first, it was also the poorest of the bunch, little more than a few photographs and a speculative yarn. René and Percy/Bennett threw far more evidence at the reader, and Collier presented evidence that it took some time and effort to dig through, and in early 2001, I decided that the time came to finally dive into it as deeply as I could, and about a month after I did, Brian was on national TV, stating that the Moon landings might have been faked. Then, I had to try to get to the bottom of it.

The Internet was beginning to come into its own back then, even as it was in the midst of its first stock market collapse, as the first Internet gold rush finally abated. I had worked for an Internet company in 1999, and did my Apollo work just before I got a part-time job at another Internet company in the summer of 2001. When I resumed my career after finishing my site in September 2002, it was with an Internet company, where I worked for ten years. Most of the study that resulted in my site did not use the Internet all that much, but was the result of diving deeply into the King County and University of Washington libraries. I could also get books on interlibrary loans. For my big essay, I bought the books that I used instead of using libraries, and the Internet had become a far more formidable resource in the intervening years. My big essay links to many scientific papers, and when I felt that it was appropriate, I linked to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is worse than worthless for numerous topics that I have dealt with in my writings, but for the less controversial ones that have been little corrupted by vested interests, I used it with due caution. Few vested interests have their fortunes tied to the truth of the demise of dinosaurs.

So, in early 2001, I devoted a few months of my life into looking into the Moon landings evidence, compared to what those faked Moon landings books argued for.

Moongate first made the case, and others did later, that the flags that the astronauts planted in the Moon waved in a breeze at times. But in every instance that I know of, the “waving” was the flag wobbling just after an astronaut had touched it. When no astronauts were near, the flags never trembled. This was a very weak allegation and one of the first that I looked into, and it gave me a hint of what was coming.

A common charge to this day is faked photographs and video footage. It might be the most common one, with all manner of amateur image analyst holding fourth. I never saw one image or video footage that was convincing evidence of faked Moon landings.

One charge made many times by image analyzers was that the shadows on the Moon do not run in parallel lines in various photographs. The argument was that there was more than one light source, such as in the studio where the fake lunar environment was staged, but it did not take long to realize that if there was more than one light source, an object would have thrown more than one shadow. I never saw even one instance of an alleged lunar object throwing more than one shadow. What explained that anomaly very neatly was that the ground was uneven, and unless the camera was shooting right in line with the Sun, then the shadows would not run in parallel.

A similar charge was that the astronauts were illuminated when they stood in shadows, such as the Lunar Module’s shadow. One argument was that because the Moon had no atmosphere, that the atmosphere did not scatter light, so anything in the shadows would be pitch black. But once again the faked Moon landing advocates did not think through the issue. Anything that had a line of sight to the illuminated lunar surface was going to be hit by light reflecting off of the lunar surface, and in every “lit in the shadows” instance, there was obvious light being reflected off of the lunar surface, to illuminate those shadows.

Perhaps the most impressive photographic anomaly I saw first discussed by René, and it had to do with the “crosshairs” (AKA “reticles”) in various Apollo photographs being obscured by objects in the photograph, which should be impossible in genuine photographs. The most famous photograph with a disappearing reticle had the famous “C” rock in it, which René argued meant that the rock was a stage prop, with the “C” being an identifier for the stage hands, to place it accurately in the scene. It turned out that the “C” rock and reticle anomaly in that photograph had the same cause: it was not a first generation photograph, but was a copy of the original, at least one generation removed. The “C” was a hair or other fiber that was on either the photograph being copied or the camera lens. In every disappearing reticle photograph that I ever saw, the reticle disappeared behind something that was bright, usually white. That was because in the copying process, the bright areas bled over those thin reticle marks. It was just an artifact of photographic copying, and it was a stretch to begin with, to think that the reticles were “painted” onto the photographs in the first place. Why would anybody do that? I found that this was a common failing of the faked Moon landing crowd, in which the story behind the fakery meant little sense. Why would somebody even think of faking the evidence in that way?

Another charge made was composite, cropped, and otherwise altered/faked photographs. In virtually every instance, the fakery claims did not withstand scrutiny and were usually dismissed almost instantly. However, for many photographs, they were indeed manipulated, even faked. But in every instance that I saw, the fakery was not performed by NASA in space or on the Moon, but by book publishers and NASA’s PR department, as they played fast and loose in the editing room, making their official movies, photographs for posters, and so on. For none of the original photographs or video/film footage was there any evidence of fakery that I ever saw.

A related charge was strange reflections on the Moon, especially in the visors of the astronauts. For the visor reflections, they were simply the differences between still photographs and video footage. People such as Richard Hoagland argued that some visor reflections were evidence of big artificial structures on the Moon that the astronauts helped cover up, and the visor reflections sometimes provided tell-tale evidence. None of that evidence ever withstood scrutiny, as far as I ever saw.

One charge was that the video footage from Apollo 11 was poor and provided to the media in substandard fashion. That was true, but once again, I did not see where it was evidence of fakery.

There were some anomalies that had me going for a while, until I realized that the presenter was misinterpreting the evidence. James Collier indeed found where in the official NASA movie, footage from two different days was depicted as the same day, and in one instance, Collier thought that he found where there was more than one “take” of a scene, but it was just NASA’s PR people playing fast and loose in the editing room, and Collier misidentified a rock-holder as the Lunar Rover. Once again, the charges of fakery did not hold up.

For me, personally, the instance of faked footage that caused me the most excitement and consternation was Bart Sibrel’s “found” footage from Apollo 11, but after a few days, I realized that like Collier, Bart was misinterpreting what he was seeing, charging the astronauts with faking the scene when they weren’t at all, and an innocent staging technique, shooting images of Earth through the Command Module hatch, was given a sinister interpretation of faking the images.

Bart is part of the faked Moon landings crowd that argued that the astronauts never left Earth’s orbit, and all trips to the Moon were fabricated. I still receive this “never left Earth’s orbit” talk from people. That is one of the most ignorant claims that I have seen made for the Moon landings. Many observatories around Earth photographed the missions as they approach the Moon. There are many independent images of the Apollo craft beyond Earth’s orbit.

I vividly recall days spent looking at NASA photographs, with frame numbers and times of when they were taken, as the Apollo 11 astronauts, for instance, took pictures of Earth before going to sleep and after waking up, and I spun my globe at home, rotating it for the hours elapsed, and they matched with what was shown, as far as what part of Earth should be visible to the astronauts. More impressive were photographs of the Moon as the astronauts approached and left, as the photographs showed portions of the lunar surface that are not visible from Earth. Something beyond a low-Earth orbit took those photographs, and as those photos were interspersed with shots of the astronauts in the Lunar Module, etc., it would have been one hell of a production, to intersperse real photographs taken by unmanned probes beyond Earth orbit with images of the astronauts in their capsule as it merely orbited Earth. The scenarios of the faked Moon landing crowd had to get ever more fanciful and ornate to account for the evidence that I was seeing.

There is much, much more to report on my examination of the Apollo program evidence but it is time to go hiking. Somebody has to do it! :)

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

Quite a few of the anomalies that the “faked Moon landing” (AKA “hoax theorist”) crowd came up with were because of what they expected the events to look like on Earth. They happened on the Moon, with one-sixth of Earth’s gravity, with no effective atmosphere, with a surface that would be very different from soil on Earth, etc. There were going to be marked variations from Earth events in how lunar events appeared because of those differences, including the unique technology that was used on the Moon.

Some anomalies were related to the rockets. Some hoax theorists thought that there should have been a crater below the Lunar Module (AKA “LM”) as it sat on the Moon, and a big furrow in the surface under the flight path to landing. In fact, there are photos that show the “furrow,” but it was more like a discoloration and disturbance than a furrow. The lunar surface has dust on it, but it becomes hardpan only a few inches down. So, there would not be any huge craters dug by the rockets, and the astronauts were not going to sink up to their hips in it. Also, in one-sixth gravity, and a very lightweight LM, the rockets did not need to be as powerful as Earth rockets for the lifting LM payload off from the Moon.

William Brian made the case in Moongate that no visible exhaust came from the LMs as they took off, which meant that antigravity technology was used. However, when the LMs took off, as seen when the cameras on the Lunar Rovers viewed them, there was a brief ignition flash, and there was also obvious dust being kicked up from the rocket blast. Again, there were several reasons why it was not going to look like a rocket taking off from Earth, but the hoax theorists used this as evidence of faked landings, and William Brian used it as evidence of antigravity being used. Neither claim held up, as far as I could tell.

Some hoax allegations are better than others, and on the Internet, hoax theorists can be found who crunch some numbers and conclude that the Moon should have dust from space on it that is miles deep. If that was the case, then so would Mars, but we don’t see that (of course, the same crowd often alleges that the Mars probes are faked, too, but I don’t buy that, nor does almost anybody else on Earth). That kind of naïve number crunching is meaningless.

An issue that René brought up, as have many other hoax theorists, is that the radiation of space would have killed the astronauts, so they never left Earth orbit to go beyond the safety of the Van Allen belt. As I noted, there is a great deal of NASA-independent and USA-independent evidence of the Apollo craft on their way to the Moon. I have not seen a hoax theorist make the case that those craft beyond Earth orbit were unmanned, which is their only “credible” rebuttal. The radiation issue was a very real one, and is one of the biggest issues that a manned mission to Mars or Venus faces, as it would be exposed to the Sun’s radiation, especially solar flares, far longer than the nearly two weeks that the Apollo 17 mission lasted. But solar flares don’t flood the entire solar system with deadly radiation, but are more like shotgun blasts. This was certainly one of the biggest risks of the Apollo lunar missions, if a big solar flare erupted and was aimed at Earth during a mission. In fact, the biggest solar flare ever measured up to that time was during the Apollo era. The radiation issue was real, but it was not the instant death issue that the hoax theorists stated. The greatest radiation that the astronauts were exposed to was during their trips through the Van Allen belt, but it was the fastest that the Apollo craft traveled, too, when they passed through the Van Allen belt and got about the annual limit for radiation workers in an hour. So, it was certainly risky, which came with the Apollo missions. The heroism of the astronauts was real enough. They were certainly risking their lives.

My father once told me that John Glenn was asked if he wanted to be the first man to walk on the Moon, and Glenn replied that he would not mind being the first man safely back from the Moon. :) The missions were relatively hitchless, Apollo 13 excepted, and hoax theorists can be forgiven for thinking that the missions went too well, but that is very circumstantial evidence and nothing solid to hang one’s hat on.

Another source of hoax theorist musings is the behavior of the Lunar Rovers on the Moon. All sorts of objections were launched, from how the Moon dust behaved as it was kicked up to how the Rovers handled. I watched all of the alleged anomalies, and I never saw anything that was not explained by one-sixth Earth gravity, a very lightweight dune buggy, and no atmosphere. A related issue was the Rovers’ video cameras, which were controlled by a technician in Mission Control. It took more than two seconds for the cameraman to react to events on the Moon, due to the limitation of the speed of light, but I never saw any camera movements that seemed to react as “impossibly” fast as the hoax theorists alleged.

Another allegation is that the astronauts worked on a set on Earth, and the footage was simply slowed down by half, to simulate Moon conditions. But other than a some short clips that can be manipulated that way, that allegation does not stand up. Film speed games do not explain the lunar footage.

Another allegation is that the Moon rocks are fake. That one does withstand the slightest scrutiny. Those rocks are tested by scientists to this day, and when they were dated using radioactive testing, they were older than any rocks on Earth. How the heck a rock can be faked like that is beyond my imagination.

Dark Moon was the most professional of the hoax theorist works, but the new “anomalies” that they presented collapsed under scrutiny, such as an alleged discrepancy in the angle that a reflector was set out with on the Moon. The title of Dark Moon is a misinterpretation of a comment made by one of Apollo 13’s astronauts, making a mountain out of nothing at all.

I never saw one technical aspect of the Apollo missions ever be shown as evidence of faking the Moon landings, which did not collapse on further scrutiny. A common disinformation tactic is to deluge the reader with “anomalies,” as if to overwhelm them by the sheer volume. Mr. Skeptic did that with me, where he heaved a disinformation bomb at me as he stalked me on the Internet, and anybody who promoted my work soon heard from him. It was about 20 “facts” about the “fraudulent” nature of Dennis’s efforts, but it was a mélange of half-truths and outright fabrications. When his lies were exposed, he simply made up new ones as he easily gulled the naive. So, I am very familiar with that tactic, and it is trotted out today, within days or even hours, to label an American mass shooting (which happen with disturbing regularity in my great nation) as a “false flag” attack. This tactic is used for many “conspiratorial” musings, but as with the Apollo missions, if you examine the anomalies one-by-one, they usually evaporate upon further inspection.

Conspiracists who do that really do a disservice to the entire study of elite skullduggery, spinning grand conspiratorial yarns on the flimsiest of evidence. It serves to discredit the entire field, and as Ed Mitchell remarked on the ET cover-up, many of those wild allegations are actually hatched by elite disinformation specialists to muddy the waters, and hyperventilating and paranoid conspiracists and a gullible public laps that crap up, often intentional crap, mind you, thinking that it is the good stuff. That is how scientifically illiterate onlookers can seize on almost nothing at all and call Global Warming some kind of hoax, and so on.

There were numerous sinister connections to the Apollo program, and I will get into them in coming posts, but although sinister, such as using death camp Nazis with a history of fabrication and obfuscation and the MIC’s murder of whistleblowers, they still do not add up to faked Moon landings.

Best,

Wade

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi:

The Onion often has the best take on these issues, such as when it called for a new bubble back before it really got bad, and the Fed promptly obliged them, but bizarrely reinflating the bubbles in the same asset classes, which is new in bubble-ology. When this latest one goes down, it is going to dwarf 2007-2009. The Onion also predicted what the USA’s invasion of Iraq would do to the region, which could very well end up in World War III. So, its article on how the Internet conspiracy theorists convinced Neil Armstrong that he never walked on the Moon is rich stuff.

But here I am, the biographer of the Apollo era astronaut who publicly doubted whether the Apollo missions really landed on the Moon. What gives, and why do I even bother? Well, because there are vitally important issues wrapped into it, and I will try to disentangle some of them.

I know whistleblowers and have been called one myself. Ralph McGehee is a whistleblower who is about as credible as it gets. A close relative was a whistleblower in the federal government, who later realized that he was lucky to be alive. That was back in the Vietnam/Space Race era. A close friend testified at a whistleblower trial. He was afraid to come forward for years, after the proprietor of the house of prostitution that served the local Department of Defense (DOD) junkets disappeared, to never be seen again, just as the spotlight focused on her when the whistleblower action began drawing attention. The DOD contractors in California just made people disappear, including a federal magistrate. The evil is very black in California, as I discovered firsthand. Those DOD contractors are the same companies that built the equipment used in the Apollo program. I have many connections to that milieu.

For instance, when Mr. Mentor’s engine began making waves, the federal government assigned the man who helped save the space program to analyze his engine. He figured out why those rockets kept blowing up in the early days of the USA’s space program. What I did not write on my site was that that scientist-engineer delivered a veritable textbook to the man in charge of fixing the problem, and the man almost threw it back at the scientist-engineer, because nobody was going to tell him what the problem was. They actually had to sneak out the blueprints and alter them to fix the problem. My father heard of that man’s work when he worked at Mission Control. That is how the real world works, not the Hollywood version. That also all happened in California. There were suspicious deaths in the Apollo program related to those aerospace companies, such as Thomas Baron, who died less than a week after testifying.

Today, there are no effective protections for whistleblowers in the USA, who are in prison today (Manning, Drake), live in exile (Snowden, Assange), or met untimely ends. The USA specializes in crucifying whistleblowers. This is nothing new. That case that my friend testified at actually helped lead to the whistleblower laws, which have been almost entirely gutted since then. I recall, just after the USA’s genocidal invasion of Iraq, reading an article published by a union of federal workers, which noted how the Bush administration was not only not protecting whistleblowers as obliged to do under the law, but it was actively persecuting them. It only got worse under Obama.

In summary, NASA whistleblowers meeting untimely ends certainly has a familiar ring to it. However, in all instances that I know of, crucifying whistleblowers had to do with covering-up crimes or preventing disclosure of poor corporate practices, even criminal corporate practices. I never got the sense that covering up fake Moon landings was anybody’s motivation, and in fact, no whistleblower has ever come forward on faked Moon landings. Plenty of people have claimed to be JFK whistleblowers, such as being triggermen, etc., but nobody alleged to be on the inside ever came forward and “admitted” to helping fake the Moon landings. Nobody. So, the whole “whistleblowers were silenced over the fake Moon landings” angle just doesn’t cut it, IMO.

Much more is coming.

Best,

Wade

Edited by Wade Frazier
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...