Roswell: ET vs. Project Mogul: Part Two

Here are some further thoughts about that July 1947 Roswell “flying saucer” that crashed or crashed-landed outside of that town, with some additional emphasis on the prosaic Project Mogul explanation that explains all – not.

Continued from Part One.

The General Ramey Photo-Op: The whole photo-op that was staged in Forth Worth was clearly to reinforce the new official line that Roswell wreckage was just balloon material, and any book about Roswell will contain one or more of the official photographs taken by both civilian photographers and a base photographer. As far as the photographers were concerned, it was an all look but don’t touch quickie session – in and out ASAP. Present were of course Brigadier General Roger Ramey; Ramey’s Chief-of-Staff Colonel Thomas J. DuBose; Major Jesse Marcel (who wasn’t allowed to say one word; just pose and smile for the camera and grin and bear the embarrassment); and Warrant Officer Irving Newton, the base weather officer whose presence was just to confirm for the record that the wreckage displayed was that from a weather balloon.

It should have been sufficient IMHO for General Ramey to just issue a press statement downplaying the Roswell event with the weather balloon cover-up, or cover story, and ordering all other relevant RAAF personnel to back up that weather balloon tale if asked (an order which of course General Ramey, well, so ordered), and thus letting the story quickly fade away as having been explained by something mundane.

Instead, General Ramey goes over-the-top at far greater expense (and exposure) to strut the public stage and demonstrate the (apparent) reality of the weather balloon story or explanation with actual weather balloon materials and actual photographic ‘evidence’ of same. Of course you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that what was photographed in General Ramey’s office may not had any connection whatever with the actual Roswell debris. The photo-op wasn’t really evidence since there was ample opportunity to substitute real weather balloon debris for the Roswell wreckage before-the-fact. You don’t have to watch too many whodunits to realise the numerous ways of the slight-of-hand.

But that exposure wasn’t all positive. If Ramey had not of staged that photo-op there would be a lot less meat on the Roswell bone since it has given the pro-Roswell faction a whole lot of ammo, a whole separate avenue to attack from. Obviously once out of the clutches of the military, Marcel denied that what was photographed in Ramey’s office had anything to do with what he and others found outside of Roswell. It was chalk and cheese. Independent verification for the deception comes from Ramey’s former Chief-of-Staff, Colonel DuBose (who retired as a Brigadier General).  In a signed affidavit (16 September 1991 – after he retired from the military) DuBose stated “The material shown in the photographs taken in Gen. Ramey’s office was a weather balloon. The weather balloon explanation for the [Roswell] material was a cover story to divert the attention of the press.” It’s on the public record.

Despite claims to the contrary, if you go with the philosophy that if you weren’t someone who saw and handled the debris then you weren’t a primary witness, then the photographs taken of the ‘wreckage’ in General Ramey’s office is not primary evidence for Roswell = balloon given the chance for substitution of debris materials to conform to the new official ‘weather balloon’ line.

Transport of Roswell Debris: How Much Stuff Was Removed?

For starters, the amount of Roswell material or wreckage according to the original discoverer W. W. “Mac” Brazel, confirmed by Major Jesse Marcel, well Brazel noted that the debris field was about 200 yards wide and 3/4ths of a mile long (or some 240,000 square yards), the entirety of that massive area covered with this stuff that Brazel couldn’t identify and he had previously found a couple of downed weather balloons on the property (of which he was the foreman, not the owner). That Brazel couldn’t identify the stuff was the stimulus that set in train the chain of events that led to him calling the civilian authorise (local law enforcement) hence they in turn alerting the military at the nearby RAAF. And the rest as they say is history! A Mogul balloon train is at best only 600 feet long – assuming that’s the reality behind Roswell. Alas, that’s not hardly sufficient quantity of stuff to account for the size of the debris field as related by Brazel. Okay, once the debris was discovered and collected, it was transported.   

To Fort Worth: A B-29 was half-loaded or half-filled with crated Roswell wreckage, along with a separate satchel for General Ramey and along with Major Marcel transported to Fort Worth AAF for that General Ramey photo-op. A half-filled B-29 amounts to an awful lot of stuff but that’s what Major Marcel claimed to be the case, and he was there. Apparently then the Roswell material was reloaded onto a B-25 and hence continued on to Wright Field with the bulk of the Roswell cargo. Marcel returned to RAAF the following day.

To Wright Field: Both an FBI-telex (evening of 8 July 1947) and statements by Brigadier General Arthur Exon who was stationed at Wright Field in July 1947 and later became the base CO, an officer in a position to know what went on, confirmed that Roswell debris was sent to Wright Field for analysis. In fairness of course neither the FBI nor General Exon actually examined the debris at Wright Field (because of that military and otherwise official policy of ‘need to know’ officially called compartmentation). The flight from RAAF to Wright Field was via a C-54 piloted by Captain Oliver W. “Pappy” Henderson, which, to be honest, doesn’t make Henderson either an actual eyewitness to the debris itself (that ‘need to know’ again). Regarding your need to know, even if you have a need to know you are only given as much knowledge as you need to have in order to do your job – no more, no less. Most people albeit in the loop rarely see the Big Picture.

To Washington, D.C.: That Roswell debris was forwarded onto Washington, D.C. was confirmed by Ramey’s Chief-of-Staff, Thomas DuBose, in DuBose’s affidavit referred to above. DuBose stated that “The entire operation was conducted under the strictest secrecy.” The orders to immediately ship Roswell debris via Fort Worth to Andrews Air Field (Washington, D.C.) was given by the Deputy Commander of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), Major General Clements McMullen, stationed at the Pentagon. General McMullen’s orders were given directly to Colonel Blanchard at Roswell and also given directly to Colonel Thomas DuBose (Chief-of-Staff to General Ramey) at Fort Worth AAF according to DuBose himself in that 16 September 1991 signed affidavit.  

To Los Alamos: On 9 July 1947 three C-54’s carried Roswell debris from RAAF to Los Alamos, New Mexico via Kirtland Field.

So we have Roswell debris material distributed between four separate locations via six separate military aircraft – that’s a lot of aircraft, especially four C-54’s, to transport the remains of one balloon, even a Mogul balloon. Not even the Roswell sceptics deny that Roswell wreckage was sent to Fort Worth AAF, Wright Field and Washington, D.C. which is all very mysterious if the Roswell wreckage was just run-of-the-mill terrestrial-in-origin balloon stuff.

Why Was Roswell Stuff Transported? We know the Roswell debris was ordered removed from the RAAF premises and ordered transported to Fort Worth Army Air Field; Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson AFB); Los Alamos and Washington, D.C. Why? If the debris material(s) were routine terrestrial balloon and foil type stuff, what was the point? Okay, a satchel full of the material went to General Ramey at Fort Worth for his photo-op PR stunt instead of Ramey going to Roswell AAF (rank has its privileges), but why Wright Field; Los Alamos and Washington, DC?  Of course if the debris wasn’t routine terrestrial stuff but potentially out-of-this-world stuff, well, mystery solved. Wright Field and Los Alamos have the technical labs for out-of-this-world analysis; Washington, D.C. is of course where officialdom has its HQ.  

Timeline Discrepancies: A great deal has been made of some timeline discrepancies given by relevant Roswell witnesses in testimony. I’m not too worried about these slight discrepancies in recollections that constitute a definitive timeline. The Roswell events only seriously resurfaced in 1980, some 33 years after the fact and from those relatively few witnesses still alive. Again, all that testimony was at least 33 years old or greater, often much greater (it’s not always easy to track down witnesses so long after-the-fact). Let’s just say that I’d be hard pressed to recall exact ordering of important/unique events in my life 33 years on. I’d be sure to be slightly off when placing specifics into a broader context.

While on all things fodder for the sceptics, while any one or two facets regarding the Roswell incident can be debated and disputed (other than Roswell personnel confusing balloon material for a crashed disk that’s just too far beyond the pale so that point is not up for debate), there’s collectively just too many bits and pieces when taken together that the total package can not be dismissed or disputed. One quickly begins to butt heads against pure improbability that all facets are pure bovine fertilizer.

Was There A Roswell Cover-Up? Apart from the General Ramey photo-op (which we now know for certain was a cover-up since Roswell has now been ‘explained away’ as a Project Mogul balloon), and because of public pressure for answers to the bona fides behind the July 1947 Roswell event, the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the US Congress, requested all relevant government records and documentation, especially those RAAF records, only to find and so reported in their July 1995 findings that all RAAF administrative records from March 1945 through December 1949 had been inexplicably destroyed, as had been outgoing messages from October 1946 through December 1949. These were documents that by law should not have been destroyed, but from the point of view of officialdom, how very bloody convenient they were. And by the way, the GAO document is a publicly available document which any Roswell sceptic can check. It goes under the title Results of a Search for Records Concerning the 1947 Crash Near Roswell, New Mexico.     

Eyewitness Testimony: UFO skeptics always hammer home the point that eyewitness testimony is about as reliable as a $7 bill. While total rubbishing any and all eyewitness testimony is more than just a slight exaggeration on the part of skeptics that is a valid point as any courtroom lawyer will affirm. In any event, eyewitness testimony regarding points of lights in the sky with no frames of reference is one thing – eyewitness testimony about physical stuff you are actually holding in your hand (like Roswell’s debris) is quite a different matter.

The Nature of the Debris: The eyewitness description of the found and recovered Roswell wreckage doesn’t seem to be at face value something that’s very alien and exotic, not that we collectively have a lot of firsthand experience dealing with alien stuff.

The debris seems to sort itself into three categories. There’s aluminium foil-like stuff that is frequently noted as two-sided; foil on one side; rubberish or leatherish on the other. The anomaly is that this ‘foil’ was extremely strong; it couldn’t be torn or cut; it wouldn’t burn; it wouldn’t permanently crush but would return to its original shape. Then there’s ‘I-beams’ or bamboo-like or balsawood-like sticks. The anomaly is that these had strange hieroglyphic-like or petroglyph-like. Lastly there was a brittle plastic-like stuff, like Bakelite. It doesn’t seem anomalous. All the three categories were lightweight.

Misidentification: There has got to have been tens of thousands of large balloons (weather, secret and other) that have been launched and come back down to terra firma and been found by your average Joe & Mary Citizen, yet there’s only been one Roswell type event where a balloon was allegedly misidentified as a “flying saucer” by not just one but a potful of military officers from the US Army Air Force. If Joe & Mary Citizen don’t ever misidentify downed balloon material for alien spaceships, it’s pretty absurd that military offices in the US AAF would. As we have read from statements by those who actually handled the stuff, there was no chance of a misidentification of the Roswell stuff for balloon materials.

To be continued.



Roswell: ET vs. Project Mogul: Part One

UFO sceptics in general and Roswell sceptics in particular have embraced with relish, or was that swallowed hook, line and sinker, the most recent explanation for the July 1947 Roswell, New Mexico UFO (only it wasn’t called a UFO back then) incident. The Roswell debris was just the remains of a Project Mogul balloon train. However, the Mogul balloon theory suffers equally the faults of the previous weather balloon explanation. 

Here are some further thoughts about that July 1947 Roswell “flying saucer” that crashed or crashed-landed outside of that town, with some additional emphasis on the prosaic Project Mogul explanation that explains all – not.

Firstly, I consider any bona-fide UFO that remains a UFO after investigation by those qualified to do so as bona-fide evidence that something extraordinary – and therefore of scientific interest – is going on. That’s even more the case when the numbers mount up into the hundreds, even thousands worldwide. Every bona-fide UFO case, every solid unknown, is a “WOW” event in the same way that that “WOW” event in SETI circles is cited again and again as something extraordinary.

Secondly, when it comes to UFO incidents, the earlier the better in order to minimize all of the cultural and social related stuff that now goes with the subject and taints it.

There are dozens of excellent bona-fide cases from 1947 through 1952 (especially Washington, DC – July 1952). After that, things get potentially more tainted but there are still lots of good unknowns.

Here’s a case and quote from the Condon Report that skeptics put so much stock in – that Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects - regarding the McMinnville, Oregon UFO photographs taken 11 May 1950.

“This is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical appear to be consistent with the assertion  that an extraordinary flying object , silvery, metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses.”

Then we have footage from the two classic UFO films from Great Falls, Montana (August 1950) and Tremonton, Utah (July 1952) both of which to this very day still carry the tag “unidentified”. One could go one and on with UFO “WOW” cases.

But if one wants THE case, let’s start with Roswell.  

So, even though the following case is ‘explained’, the very fact that it happened so early on in UFO lore and the major participants are no nonsense military officers, and there’s material on the public record that cannot be dismissed or disputed, I’d have to go with Roswell as the cream of the crop (I can see readers rolling their eyes up now).

Roswell Is Boring: Apparently Roswell is not regarded by most of the UFO experts in America as an interesting case. Roswell seems to be considered a very weak case by UFO investigators.  Some prefer this case (like Rendlesham Forest) or that case or some other case as the bees-knees of ufology but not Roswell. However if Roswell is such an uninteresting case, why are more books devoted to that case than any other UFO case? I bet if I Google “Roswell” vs. “Rendlesham Forest” I’d get way more hits on the former! In any event, Roswell is the only bona-fide UFO case I know of where the US military admitted publicly it was in possession of an actual “flying saucer” (and they have been back-pedalling furiously ever since). That alone, IMHO, makes it unique and therefore highly interesting.

Relevant Roswell Personnel: The buck obviously stops with Colonel Blanchard, the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) CO, who dictated and ordered the issuing of the initial Roswell press release. According to the sceptical Roswell UFO tome authored by Kal K. Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don’t Want You To Know [Prometheus Books, Amherst, N.Y. 1997; p.28], “Ramey telephones Colonel Blanchard and conveys to him both General [Lt. Gen Hoyt S.] Vandenburg’s and his own ‘extreme displeasure’ over the fact that a press release was issued without proper authority.” However, Colonel Blanchard was never officially reprimanded, and eventually rose to the rank of a full four-star general in the USAF. That Colonel Blanchard was not reprimanded is puzzling since it was because of his ‘mistake’ that he created a major headache for officialdom, one which persists down to this very day. The obvious question was whether this rise in rank and lack of a reprimand was payment for Blanchard to keep his mouth shut over the reality of the Roswell event. It has been reported (Korff – p.49) that Mrs. Blanchard has allegedly stated that following the death of her husband that he had believed the Roswell debris had an out of this world origin, for what that’s worth.

Former Lt. Walter Haut, the RAAF PIO Officer in July 1947 who wrote up (under the direction and orders of Colonel Blanchard) that press release, stated in a signed affidavit dated 14 May 1993 that “there is no chance that he [Colonel Blanchard] would have mistaken it [“a flying saucer or parts thereof”] for a weather balloon. Neither is there any chance that Major Marcel would have been mistaken.” Haut also stated that “In 1980, Jesse Marcel told me that the material photographed in Gen. Ramey’s office was not the material he recovered.” [See also The General Ramey Photo-op section below.] Haut continued that “I am convinced that the material recovered was some type of craft from outer space.”

W.W. ‘Mac’ Brazel, who discovered the wreckage is on record (Roswell Daily Record, 9 July 1947) as stating that he had previously discovered two downed balloons (presumably weather) on the property and that this new debris did not correspond to that type of artefact.

The 1995 USAF Report: As a result of public and congressional pressure, the USAF reopened the Roswell case in about 1994, publishing their findings in their 1995 document The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert. There’s a whole potful of points to be made with respect to this document and findings, which in brief that Roswell is explainable by a downed Project Mogul balloon.

Point One: The USAF searched internally for relevant documents or records regarding Roswell. They found nothing unusual had occurred involving extraterrestrial materials or alien bodies that was officially documented. Of course that search only could have extended to unclassified or declassified records. And that’s the whole crux of the matter. If Roswell had something to do with or involved extraterrestrial materials and/or alien bodies, and that had been documented, that material and documents would still be classified and hence not be available to those doing this reinvestigation for official historical records. Thus, their findings via a document search that the Roswell case as far as ET was concerned was lacking documentation hence validity and thus incorrect resulted in their ‘final word’ on the matter, a ‘case closed’ conclusion, is bogus. Even if the compilers of this 1995 report knew about classified Roswell documentation involving ET, they couldn’t say so in an unclassified public report.

Point Two: Their search for documentation was confined to what records the USAF had under their control. Omitted from the search were documents that other agencies might have held, including the US Army. That’s a major flaw in that in July 1947 there was no USAF, only the US Army Air Force.    

Point Three: A big deal was made over the fact that there appeared to be no nationwide heightened military alert or operation or security activity during that immediate post recovery interval. There was no higher tempo of operational activity or messages going to and fro, etc. which the report says is highly suggestive that nothing unusual was going on. Well, why would there be, heightened activity that is. We’re not talking “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” or “Independence Day” here. We’re talking wreckage from just one location here, not nationwide invasion by Bug-Eyed Monsters with heat rays and ray guns a-blazing. Was the military going to declare war on ET based on some alien debris?

Point Four: The only thing they found were records about a then ultra Top Secret Priority 1A project called Mogul, instrumentation lofted high into the atmosphere by balloons to detect above ground Soviet nuclear testing. These flights were launched from New Mexico in June and July of 1947. Ah! What goes up must come down; two plus two equals four; Roswell case solved. Roswell wasn’t a weather balloon; that WAS a cover-up story. Roswell was a Mogul balloon! At least the USAF admitted that something out of the ordinary happened.

                                                                                                         

Point Five: The 1995 USAF report did state or conclude was Roswell was not. Roswell was not an airplane crash. Roswell was not a missile crash. Roswell was not a nuclear accident. Roswell was not an extraterrestrial craft. Of course they would say that, even truthfully if no unclassified or declassified documents said otherwise – it’s all that classified stuff that might let that Roswell cat out of the Roswell bag.

Point Six: We finally get around to the official conclusions which in a quickie version amounts to a whopping big MAYBE when it comes to Mogul. Let’s quote the quotes and see where the chips fall. “The Air Force research did not locate or develop any information that the ‘Roswell Incident’ was a UFO event” [Obviously for reasons already gone into]. “All available official materials, although they do not directly address Roswell per se [their italics], indicate that the most likely source of the wreckage recovered from the Brazel Ranch [sic – actually the Foster Ranch; Brazel was just the foreman, not the owner] was from one of the Project Mogul balloon trains.” [Reference: page 30 of the 1995 USAF report.] Of course there was no identification of exactly which one of those Mogul balloon trains.

So in other words, no established causality was found between Mogul and Roswell, its all conjecture. So, no cause and effect was established and Mogul is concluded to be only a “most likely source”. That’s hardly proof beyond reasonable doubt. However, if one turns back to page 22 of the 1995 USAF report, you’re led to believe under the section “WHAT THE ‘ROSWELL INCIDENT’ WAS” was that Mogul was the be-all-and-end-all of the matter. It wasn’t they; it isn’t now.  

Point Seven: I can’t really accuse the USAF of an initial cover-up as most pro-Roswell buffs do since their cover-up orders would have come from even higher authority. I can’t say this 1995 report is a cover-up since for reasons noted above the report, to drive the point home, could not reveal the existence of anything that was still classified.

 Lost and Found: Isn’t it absolutely amazing that the team responsible for operating (launching and recovering) those top secret Project Mogul balloon flights lost one somewhere outside of Roswell, N.M. That’s rather gross, in fact absolute negligence IMHO. And apparently they made no effort to recover their lost top secret property from the RAAF immediately the Roswell incident broke out in the press. In fairness, some of the Mogul flights were “service flights or test flights and thus the powers-that-be might have been more nonchalant about them and losing one. Now Mogul balloons were tagged with whom to contact (University of New York) if found, along with a reward offered and reimbursement for time and trouble taken. No doubt the powers-that-be thought that there was no real chance Joe & Mary Citizen would have figured out the real top secret purpose of the stuff. To Joe & Mary Citizen it would have just been a weather balloon. That misidentification was reinforced on the “to be contacted” tag which clearly noted (that misinformation) that this was “weather equipment”. So, with all that Roswell debris recovered, the RAAF personnel never did find that “please contact if found” Mogul tag, logical if the debris wasn’t from a Mogul balloon flight.

If the Roswell debris collected by the RAAF [Roswell Army Air Field] personnel proved not to be the property of the RAAF they seemed not to have gone through any official channels to find out the proper owners (and maybe get financial compensation for cleaning up their mess). Why’s that? Of course if the materials were from ‘out of this world’ that might explain that.

Here’s a contradiction. Even the 1995 USAF report on Roswell stated it was only probable that a Project Mogul balloon was the cause of the Roswell incident, yet the Roswell debris was in the hands of the AAF (now USAF) and should have been easily identified as the debris from the missing (lost) Mogul flight and therefore there should have been no probability involved in the Roswell explanation, rather instead a certainty.

To be continued.



The Russell Stannard Questions: Life

The following questions (Q) are taken verbatim from those poised by Russell Stannard in his 2010 book The End of Discovery [are we approaching the boundaries of the knowable?]; Oxford University Press, Oxford. I consider these typical of the sorts of modern Big Questions that are part and parcel of the philosophy of modern science, especially physical science.

My answers are based mainly with the thought of our being in a Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe that has been constructed by one or more Supreme Programmers. However, some of the answers apply regardless of what the nature of our ultimate reality is.

Q. Why is the universe life-friendly?

A. The universe is both bio-friendly and not bio-friendly. 99.999% (add a few more 9’s here) of the cosmic environment is decidedly bio-unfriendly and would snuff you out so quick-smart you wouldn’t know what hit you. Of course the cosmos is also bio-friendly otherwise you wouldn’t be here reading this. If you reject a supernatural explanation, that leaves coincidence, a multiverse, or software. Coincidence is stretching things since there are just so many dials that have to be set to a very narrow range. The multiverse appeals to probability statistics – think of those millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters one of whom will type “Hamlet” word-for-word – eventually. That leaves software, or in other words a Supreme Programmer programing our universe in a bio-friendly way. 

Q. Is there extraterrestrial life, and if so, how do we humans stand in comparison as regards intellectual capacity?

A. Given the vastness of the cosmos, and the sheer number of galaxies in the observable cosmos, and the numbers of stars per galaxy with associated solar systems and the number of planets per solar system not to mention possible rogue/orphan planets and how interstellar cosmic organic chemistry associated with life is, well, cosmic, etc., you would have to be pretty brave to bet the family farm arguing Planet Earth being the proverbial cosmic IT when it comes to life. Even going up the chain from the origin of life ‘living’ molecules to unicellular life to multicellular life to intelligent life to technologically advanced life forms and advocating extreme difficulty in getting from one step to the next step on up the line, there must be – if you’re a betting person – millions of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations throughout the cosmos and a goodly number in our galaxy too. Further, we humans are the new boys on the block, so the odds are that any other extraterrestrial intelligences will have been around way longer that we have, and thus have evolved greater intellectual capacity that we have yet achieved. However, the interesting bit is that once intelligence is achieved, natural selection gives way to artificial selection, and part of that artificial selection might ultimately be the transition from biological intelligence to artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence which will further evolve via artificial selection as machine intelligence designs ever better machine intelligences.



The Russell Stannard Questions: Cosmology

There are many Big Questions in science, many of which go back to the ancients, even back into prehistory in all probability. One of the best modern set I’ve found recently were sidebars in a book by Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Open University, Russell Stannard. These are my answers, thoughts and commentary to those Big Questions. Many readers might have ‘fun’ trying to come to terms with these in their own way based on their own worldview.

These are the Russell Stannard Questions* on or about cosmology:

Q. How close to the instant of the Big Bang are we likely to be able to probe?

A. We can currently probe or observe no farther back than 380,000 years post Big Bang because the cosmos was too opaque from the point of the Big Bang to roughly that point in time, 380,000 years into the post Big Bang era. However, gravity waves from the Big Bang event could take us to Ground Zero in theory. The problem is in the detection of gravity waves – in theory yes; in terms of actual observation (to date), no. Of course that hasn’t stopped theorists from going back to even less than nanoseconds post Big Bang by running the expanding universe film backwards to the greatest extreme possible, thus postulating and assuming a quantum sized object was at the heart of the Big Bang. Theorists have extrapolated back way beyond what is reasonable or even logical IMHO given so many unknowns. Theory should cease where currently observations cease – 380,000 post Big Bang. 

Q. Can we be sure that inflation took place?

A. No, because we weren’t there! Seriously, we have no direct observational evidence of inflation, only indirect evidence that a theory or theories of inflation can explain some observations (or lack of observations, like where are the monopoles). This reminds me of those epicycles once postulated to explain observations related to the motions of the planets in the night skies. Those epicycles eventually bit the dust; inflation might too. 

Q. If so, how are we to choose which type of inflation it was?

A. Pick a card, any card! Whatever theory of inflation best matches the observations and best conforms to what is known about the laws, relationships and principles of physics goes to the head of the class. 

Q. Was there a singularity at the instant of the Big Bang?

A. No, there was no singularity associated with the Big Bang event. A singularity in common usage by physicists implies a region of space that has zero volume and infinite density. Sometimes I think these eggheads need to observe the real world where volumes and densities are finite. In any event, the density at the point in existing space where the Big Bang happened had to be less than that of a Black Hole, otherwise there would be no ‘bang’. That in turn implies the Big Bang was a macro event, something that happened way outside the realm of quantum physics.   

Q. Does it make sense to enquire into the cause of the Big Bang?

A. Yes, absolutely! There had to have been a cause, physical or software, and it is quite legit to ask what that cause was and try to answer the question. Of course I never said that would be easy.

Q. Are there universes other than our own?

A. If you reject the supernatural and the software and coincidence, then you are left with the multiverse scenario to explain why we are here. We are in the one successful universe that produced that word-for-word typing of “Hamlet” by those millions of monkeys.

Q. What is the nature of dark matter?

A. Dark matter doesn’t actually exist. It is inferred only because the fallible Supreme Programmer made an ‘oops’ when programming the minimum required for the cosmic background wallpaper in our Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe.

Q. How are we to account for the observed value of the dark energy?

A. There is only ‘dark energy’ if the Universe is really accelerating when it comes to the expansion rate of the Universe. Cosmologists had to invent some sort of explanation for this anomalous observation, so why not call it ‘dark energy’ even if they haven’t the foggiest idea what it actually is. Now you know, and I know, that the Universe cannot be expanding at an ever accelerating rate due to that little factor we all acknowledge called gravity. Gravity exists; so-called ‘dark energy’ is theoretical, ad hoc, an epicycle and iffy at best. An accelerating Universe is like your car going uphill at an ever faster and faster rate without you putting the pedal to the metal. I’m reasonably certain that what has been interpreted as the expansion rate of the Universe accelerating has some other explanation. Perhaps not all type 1A supernovae are really peas-in-a-pod and thus are not the standard candles we think they are. Perhaps the velocity of light isn’t a constant after all and changes over cosmic time. That would throw one heck of a monkey wrench into the scenario. So, ‘dark energy’ doesn’t have a value since the Universe isn’t really accelerating. If, however, the [Simulated] Universe really is accelerating, then that’s obvious evidence for our Supreme Programmer screwing up the cosmic background wallpaper software. It’s just an ‘oops’, an oversight in overlooking the consequences of programming this variable at this value instead of some other variable at some other variable.

Q. Does the density of the dark energy remain constant with time?

A. There is no ‘dark energy’ IMHO so the question has no relevance. However, if the value or density of the alleged ‘dark energy’ is allowed to vary over cosmic time, then one could just about explain any observation relating to any value of the expansion rate of the Universe.

Q. Is there a connection between today’s repulsion of the galaxy clusters and the period of inflation?

A. If there was such an animal as inflation that happened quick-smart and cheek-by-jowl with the Big Bang event, well some force or other had to be responsible for blowing up that cosmic balloon. Fast forward to today and we see galactic clusters moving away from each other as if each had a bad case of B.O. Again, there must be some force acting on these clusters repelling them. I though conventional wisdom put that down to the so-called ‘dark energy’ but if there really is a ‘dark energy’ and if there really was a repulsive force that drove what we allege was cosmic inflation, it might be odd if the two repulsive forces in question didn’t share some sort of physics ancestry assuming they aren’t exact clones.

Q. Is the universe infinite in size, and if so, what exactly does that mean?

A. The universe is infinite in size solely on the philosophical grounds that one can always ask the question ‘what is beyond’ this barrier or at right angles to where I am. There always is a beyond, even if you have to postulate a higher dimension to get there, as it inhabitants of 2-D Flatland can escape by going into the third (higher) dimension that’s so familiar to us. In the Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe scenario, well we’ve probably all seen computer/video games that have a wraparound feature. Something goes off the screen to the right or at the top and reappears at the left or at the bottom. That’s an infinite loop. To the inhabitants, it’s an infinite size where you can go round and round the mulberry bush for all eternity.

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*The following questions were taken verbatim from those poised by Russell Stannard in his 2010 book The End of Discovery [are we approaching the boundaries of the knowable?]; Oxford University Press, Oxford. I consider these typical of the sorts of modern Big Questions that are part and parcel of the philosophy of modern science, especially physical science.



Big Bang Blunders

If you read the Standard Model of Creation Cosmology (the Big Bang event), it reads an awful like the first few verses of Genesis. While I’m sure that is just a coincidence, neither scenario as given is a satisfactory explanation, for vastly different reasons. Here I tackle the physical ones, not the supernatural ones.  

In “Alice through the Looking Glass”, the White Queen believed in six impossible things before breakfast. Exactly what those impossible things were is not stated – so here’s one possibility that reside in the land of cosmological physics.

The Big Bang event is no doubt a concept that nearly everyone has heard about, and swallowed hook, line and cosmological sinker because scientists present this creation of the Universe scenario as fact. It’s not fact; just the most viable theory of many theories and it has serious flaws. The accepted theoretical account of the creation or event that kick-started our Universe off not only has that event a something that created all of matter and energy, but all of time and space as well, and this creation event, to boot, all took place in a volume less than that of a pinhead (something in the realm of the quantum) and for no apparent reason at all. First there was nothing; then there was something. Wow!

Astronomers observe the universe – obviously. At best observations that support the Big Bang event are indirect being made some 13.7 billion years after-the-fact. Those indirect observations that provide evidence for the Big Bang event are the fact that the Universe is expanding (galactic red-shifts); the Universe has a temperature – the remnants from the hot Big Bang called the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) and the amounts and ratio of hydrogen to helium. In reality there are no direct observations as nobody was present at Ground Zero all those billions of years ago.

The galactic red-shift observation boils down to the fact that nearly all galaxies are moving away from each other and the distances between them are in relation to their velocities such that galaxies moving at X velocity will be Y distance apart; galaxies that are 2X velocities will be 2Y distances apart and so on. Translated, it’s what you would expect to see with respect to all the bits and pieces flying off on an exploding stick of dynamite. Thus we have an expanding Universe, and, by running the ‘film’ or the clock backwards, the Universe will have come to a ‘point’ roughly 13.7 billion years ago.

The detection of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (a cosmic temperature detectable in part as static or hiss on your TV set when tuned between stations) was in accordance with theoretical predictions if the cosmos started out as an extremely hot explosion and slowly cooled down as the Universe expanded.

Lastly, when one observes and calculates the relative abundance of hydrogen and helium in the Universe, the two simplest of elements, that ratio is what you’d expect given known interactions part and parcel of particle physics under the extremes of temperature and pressure that would be expected in a high temperature explosion.

So, the Big Bang gets a heads up. Things are looking good. But, and there’s always a ‘but’! There are immediately several issues with respect to this cosmic ‘explosion’ termed the Big Bang event. There are really a couple, well more than just a couple, of anomalies present in the standard Big Bang (standard cosmological model) account.

. The ‘bang’ wasn’t ‘big’ since cosmologists choose to run the clock back as far as they can and thus cram the entire Universe back into a volume less than that of a pinhead*. It’s absurd in the extreme to believe that our entire Universe – everything – could be squeezed into a volume of atomic dimensions.

Repeat - the first nanosecond of creation had the contents of what would become our observable Universe crammed into a volume less than a pinhead. Bull! If you could squeeze the contents of the observable Universe down into a pinhead’s volume, you’d end up with the Mother of all Black Holes from which nothing would escape. Therefore there would be no Big Bang and thus our Universe would not have been brought into existence. You have a violation of pure common sense. Common sense tells you that you can not stuff the contents of the entire Universe into the realm of the quantum, something actually way less in volume in fact than a pinhead. If that’s not anomalous, I don’t know what is!

Another anomaly is that the Big Bang event created time itself. Cosmologists say the Big Bang event created time but without any explanation or recipe given as to how this quasi-Biblical miracle was accomplished. The creation of time can’t even be done in theory, far less in actual practice. Pull the left leg!

Related, the Big Bang event allegedly created space itself. The Big Bang event created space but yet again without any explanation or recipe being given by cosmologists for that either. Creating space too is beyond the theoretical limits of modern physics and certainly cannot be duplicated in the laboratory. You cannot create a something like matter and energy within a zero volume of space which would have been the situation at Time = Zero. Therefore the Big Bang event did not create space. It happened in existing space. That space was somehow created; well that’s another quasi-Biblical miracle. Now you can pull the right leg!

Then there are those violations in our dearly beloved conservation laws. First there was nothing; then there was something. That means the Big Bang event created both matter and energy out of less than thin ‘air’. How the Big Bang created matter and energy, again, without any explanation or recipe given, is another quasi-Biblical miracle. Do these constant ‘this is what happened though we’re lacking the nitty-gritty details’ by cosmologists, as in giving actual putting-cards-on-the-table explanations, surprise you? It should if cosmologists were really fair dinkum about the bovine fertilizer they pontificate. Perhaps they literally believe in the Biblical account of Genesis but like to disguise this with scientific mumbo-jumbo. Anyway, they pontificate that there was a violation of the laws that regulate the conservation of matter and energy. That’s also a free lunch, which is one of those impossible concepts the White Queen believes in before breakfast.

IMHO it’s impossible to create from scratch matter and energy. It’s a violation of the basic physics drummed into every high school science student – “matter (and energy) can neither be created nor destroyed but only changed in form”.

Related, we have an absolute violation in causality. Apparently the creation of the Universe (the Big Bang event) happened for absolutely no rhyme or reason at all. That means there was no first cause attributable for the effect that was Big Bang event. Does that strike anyone besides me as odd, as in fact absolutely impossible? Lack of causality is another of those impossible concepts the White Queen believes in before breakfast.

IMHO, causality demands that a cause creates an effect – the Big Bang was an effect, something caused it, and that something could only have preceded it in time. Therefore the Big Bang did not, could not, create time (as noted above). The Big Bang happened while the clock was already ticking.

Lastly, no energy source for the ‘bang’ is given and you’d think that it would take a hell of a lot of energy to give some serious expansion oomph to something as massive as the Universe. I’ve often read that apparently no energy source was actually necessary (because the Universe is energy neutral – it has as much positive energy as negative energy), which I find more than slightly odd.

My take on this can of worms is that the Big Bang was a macro event that happened in existing space and time. There was a before-the-Big-Bang, which for the time being, is out of observable reach – but then too the Big Bang itself can be ‘seen’ no farther back than roughly 380,000 years after-the-fact. The universe is indeed expanding, but it is expanding through existing space. Space itself is not expanding. In fact, there is no observational experiment that can be made that can distinguish between the two scenarios. 

So, yes there was a Big Bang event, but there is a lot of associated quasi-Biblical baggage which is totally impossible to support by anything approaching what’s taught in Logic 101.  

* I could easily blow up a balloon, and you could easily film it, and from that calculate the expansion rate of the balloon. You could then run the clock or the film and the associated equation backwards. However, would you be justified in extrapolating that backwards shrinking balloon scenario to the point where the balloon was the size of an atom? I think not. Yet that’s exactly what Big Bang cosmologists do, without any justification.



Random Thoughts About Black Holes

Every now and again a thought about this or that occurs to me which I then scribble down for posterity. Here are a few that relate to the concept of the Black Hole.

* Space is not the final frontier. The ultimate challenge is to ‘boldly go’ past the event horizon of a Black Hole and see what’s to be seen. 

* One of the 64,000 $64,000 questions: Can you pour stuff down a Black Hole indefinitely, or does the Black Hole have a finite capacity and ultimately or eventually will have to spew stuff out the ‘other side’ (i.e. – thus producing a White Hole) as you keep pouring in more and more and more? I’d wager the conservation relationships and principles of physics and chemistry hold sway here. What goes in ultimately comes out. That doesn’t mean there’s not a temporary holding vessel. Or, in more human terms, you fill what’s empty; you empty what’s full, but in-between those two there’s storage in the stomach and the intestines; the lungs and the bladder.

* A Black Hole has a finite amount of mass therefore a finite amount of gravity and therefore a finite escape velocity, even if the value of same is in excess of the speed of light – the ultimate cosmic speed limit. Somehow this makes these astrophysical objects really special. However, there’s nothing different in principle vis-à-vis the Earth having a finite amount of mass, gravity and escape velocity. If Planet Earth isn’t all that special for having those three properties, why should a Black Hole be?

* If an electron acquired enough mass (say by being accelerated to near light speed), would it become a Black Hole, and if so, would the ‘inside’ still be an electron, which after all, is considered a fundamental particle? 

* Black Holes would make excellent, in fact perfect, thermos (vacuum) flasks. Pour into a Black Hole the contents of a star, say like the Sun. All that heat is then trapped and I do mean trapped!

* It’s impossible IMHO to have stuff of infinite density and occupying zero volume so whatever is inside a Black Hole has finite density and occupies a finite volume.

* What lies at the heart of a Black Hole? The traditional answer is a ‘singularity’ – a point of (near) infinite density and (close to) zero volume, matter crushed down to the final, ultimate limit – or maybe not.

Start with a hunk of matter. Keep on keeping on adding more and more and more matter (mass) to it. Your original hunk grows larger, ever denser; its gravity swells in proportion. Finally it’s just a fraction away from achieving Black Hole status – meaning its gravity is so strong not even light can escape from its grasp.

So you are a thimbleful of salt away from crossing the not-quite-yet a Black Hole to an actual Black Hole boundary. You can (barely) still see your now super-sized hunk of stuff. Now toss in that final thimbleful of stuff onto the hunk. No light now reaches you – you’ve crossed the threshold or boundary and have got a Black Hole. But do you doubt that lurking on the other side of the not-quite-yet a Black Hole to an actual Black Hole boundary, though unseen, you still have that super-sized hunk of stuff, not a singularity, but a really real solid 3-D hunk of stuff? Or, in other words, if the escape velocity of your hunk is 185,999 miles per second, no Black Hole and no singularity, but if it climbs to 186,001 miles per second you have a Black Hole and your hunk morphs into a singularity? A two mile a second difference makes that much difference? I don’t think so.

* In our Universe there are two kinds of astronomical objects. There are cosmic faucets like stars and anything else that gives off or reflects electromagnetic (EM) waves. That’s the cosmic “In Tray”. Then there are cosmic sinks and drains that absorb electromagnetic waves – Black Holes, the cosmic “Out Tray”.

It would seem to me that over the course of 13.7 billion years, an awful lot of EM (light, IR, UV, radio, microwave, gamma-ray, etc.) photons, not to mention neutrinos and cosmic rays, would have gobbled up and removed from the Universe’s inventory by being sucked into and forever residing in the insides of Black Holes. Since all astronomical observations, hence conclusions about the state of the Universe, rely on the detection of that which is emitted or reflected by cosmic faucets, then it stands to reason that in order to arrive at valid conclusions, what cosmic sinks and drains remove from the Big EM Picture must be taken into account. But is it? I’ve never read any account where the removal of EM photons from the Universe’s inventory has been considered.   

* Black Holes won’t ultimately evaporate via Hawking radiation since input of matter and energy will exceed output. In other words, more matter and energy will find there way into a Black Hole than will escape via that Hawking radiation.



Dark Energy and Expanding Space

We have been aware that our Universe has been expanding for going on nearly a century now. Of course we are also aware, from a quite considerable earlier time that what goes up must come down. In other words, gravity grabs. The Universe has lots and lots of gravity, so presumably, what goes up (i.e. – the expansion rate) must come down (i.e. – the expansion rate must at least slow down, maybe even stop and reverse). Cosmologists were very interested in finding out exactly what the rate of deceleration was. How fast was the Universe’s expansion rate decreasing? It’s like you car might be going uphill, but at an ever slower and slower rate.

Okay, so, several teams of astronomers did the relevant observations and crunched the numbers and guess what – the Universe’s expansion rate was accelerating, gravity be damned. That’s sort of like driving your car uphill and having it go faster and faster without you putting the pedal to the metal. Well, that surely was an unexpected result. So, they needed an explanation. The astronomers (team leaders anyway) got the Nobel Prize, but that was for the discovery, not for the explanation. You see, there wasn’t any explanation. So, what do we want – an epicycle. When do we want it – now! What was the ad-hoc epicycle to be? It was called “Dark Energy”, a sort of antigravity that was pushing the Universe apart faster and faster and faster. Trouble is, nobody then, or now, has the foggiest idea what Dark Energy is, yet in order to account for what this epicycle does, it must represent some roughly 70% of what makes the Universe up. That’s a lot of epicycle that lacks any plausible explanation. Did someone mention rabbits and hats? 

When considering all things cosmological, it’s become apparent that astronomers only observe about 4% of the matter plus energy that should be present. That is, about 96% of the matter plus energy that should be present and detectable to account for the observed behaviour of our observable universe is missing! Now 1% might be understandable given measurement uncertainty (error bars), but hardly 96%! So, cosmologists have postulated concepts termed ‘Dark Matter’ and ‘Dark Energy’ to make up the deficit. However, nobody has the foggiest idea what exactly ‘Dark Matter’* and ‘Dark Energy’ actually are. Neither has actually been detected, either out there, or in the laboratory down here – obviously. The anomaly here is that ‘Dark Matter’ and ‘Dark Energy’ are both ad hoc theoretical concepts to make sense of various astronomical observations, but without benefit of any actual observation of ‘Dark Matter’ and/or ‘Dark Energy ’to back things up. That’s a rather slight-of-hand trick, and until cosmologists put actual observational money on the board where their theoretical mouth is, it’s all an anomalous pie-in-the-cosmic-sky.

Further, there is a quintet of really big problems with Dark Energy.

Problem One: Conservation laws – the bedrock of physics that are rammed down your throat in high school - are violated. Apparently the density of Dark Energy remains constant while the volume of the Universe expands. Expanding space creates additional Dark Energy which further expands space which creates additional Dark Energy; round and round in an endless cycle. That’s something from nothing. That’s a free lunch. Of course the phrase “Dark Energy” was just tacked on to ‘explain’ the accelerating universe, though it explains nothing. We, to repeat my earlier observation, still haven’t a clue what Dark Energy actually is, even though the concept has now entered its mid-teenage years, enough time you’d think for cosmologists to pin this anomaly down.

Problem Two: If Dark Energy is real energy, and it has to be in order to provide universal oomph and accelerate the cosmos, and energy and be converted to matter (Einstein’s famous equation), what kind of matter can Dark Energy turn into – traditional stuff like standard matter and antimatter or something exotic?

Problem Three: Space is a not-thing. You can’t hold it, measure it, or detect it with your senses. Space is not a physical something. Space has no effect on anything else. Energy is a thing. You can measure it and detect it and note the various effects it has on other things. A thing (energy) cannot be a property of a not-thing; a not-thing cannot contain properties that are things.

Problem Four: Ultimately, if space is a thing, a thing that’s a something, then space apparently has the property of elasticity. If space is expanding and carrying matter (i.e. – anything from individual atoms through entire galaxies and clusters of galaxies) along for the ride (as opposed to individual atoms through to entire galaxies and clusters of galaxies expanding throughout existing space) then one would expect to observe our Sun-Earth distance getting greater; the Moon-Earth** distance expanding more rapidly than tidal forces allow for; our entire solar system’s diameter increasing; ditto the diameter of entire galaxies. Alas, there’s no such evidence. Galaxies that we see today that existed billions of years ago (because it took their light that long to reach us) have the same sort of geometrical structure as galaxies that are much closer (hence more recent in age) to us. Galaxies don’t expand so the space within them isn’t expanding either. That just leaves the voids between galaxies, or between clusters of galaxies to do the expanding. But that begs the question of why the discrimination between the space between Earth and the Moon and the space between our galaxy and Andromeda Galaxy or the space between our local cluster of galaxies and our nearest other cluster of galaxies. It’s all nonsense. If space itself is expanding; all of space is expanding, not just select bits or areas.  

Problem Five: Despite promoting expanding space via an intrinsic property of space, the Dark Energy, as the greatest thing since sliced bread, no scientist can give you the equation; the recipe for creating space, especially the creation of space out of absolutely nothing. Wouldn’t we all like to create some extra space in the home out of absolutely nothing? Just spray some Dark Energy out of a can and you’ve instantly added an extra bedroom or poolroom to your abode. It’s easy to say that space is constantly being created, but hardcore equations speak louder than waffle-words. Would you trust a cookbook written by someone who can only theoretically find their way around a kitchen?

Something is really screwy somewhere!

*The requirement for Dark Matter to explain gravitational anomalies goes back to the early 1930’s, so cosmologists/particle physicists have had eighty years to figure this out, but without (to date), any runs on the board.

**The Moon-Earth distance can be monitored to extreme precision, as in down to inches, thanks to the mirrors left on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts.