First, welcome to the board!!


Let me answer some of this for you.


The physical poles do not shift and have never shifted. But the magnetic poles do(meaning north and south magnetic poles flip). This is unoticable except to your compass and has not happened in the enture span of modern (meaning written) human history.

No major exctinction event has ever been found to come along with a magnetic polar shift.

the crater in Arizona is due to a meteor strike. Not Planet x or polar shift.

The tropical plants and fish fossils are easily to show you how they got up there. But first you need to know about Plate techtonics.

The earth's crust (the outher layer of the earth) is made up of several dozen "plates" that foat on a gelatinous "plastic like" part of the mantle called the Asthenosphere. These plates move around and grind together forming the land features we know today. When two plates collide the denser one gets shoved underneath the other. This plate melts as it goes deeper and produces a volcanoe chain above the melting point. A good example of this is the pacific coast of North America. Mt. St helens, Mt. Reneir and the like are all the cause of a Subducting oceanic plate underneath a continental plate.

These subducting plates will cause rising mountains and volcanoes due to the inital collision of the plates and the volcanic action of the volcanoes.

The collison of India into Asia caused the Himalaya mountains. This is Where Mt. Everest resides. And that is solely from a collision.

This explains how mountains are created. So how about the fish and tropical plants? Well very simple actually.

If the fiossilized remains of fish and fosilized plants are on a old beach or lake that has dried up, and this area encounters uplifting due to a plate collision of volcanic forces. Than it can be lifted along with the rock onto the mountains.

Tropical plant fossils in cold areas is even easier: This can be explained by two reasons:

One is continental drift. This is a drift of the continental plate from one area to another. For example India and Australia used to be attached to Antartica. We know this from similar glacial deposits and fossilized remains. These have drifted from Antartica to their present poositions and continue to drift.

The other theory is climate change. During the Mesozoic for example there was no polar ice and the temperature was much warmer overall than currently. Dinosaurs, ferns, and trees lived very close to the south pole in Antartica.

Then at the end of the Mesozoic the climates started to change and the poles froze over. This left frozen and preserved some of the troipical plants. Some of these fossilized.

did that help? ask more i and others will be glad to answer them. :-)

__________________
GIYUL :-)
"It takes Thousands to fight a battle for a mile, Millions to hold an election for a nation, but it only takes One to change the world." - Dan Sandler 2002

Thanks a lot for the welcome. I appreciate it. And thanks for the info. Some I knew, and some I didn't. I appreciate your info. Yes, it did help. I studied Continental Drift in high school many eons ago, and thought it interesting that Africa, for instance, fits well with the Americas. In fact, it was so long ago that the Himalayans were probably hills
I only mentioned the Arizona crater, because collisions were mentioned by someone in this thread. He/she mentioned the moon, and Mars. I apologize if I misunderstood something there. The thought didn't occur to me that the person may have been referring to PX or pole shifts.
And about pole shifts... the main question in my mind is this... couldn't pole shifts or a change in rotation have accounted for the climate change that you mentioned? Or one accompanied by the other? If not, then what did? Do scientists know? As you can see, the knowledge I have about this couldn't even fill a thimble. However, I have always been fascinated by this topic.
BTW, I first became acquainted with these topics when I just happened to turn on the radio, and heard Nancy on CoasttoCoast back in April. And in reading the transcripts here, I though that Phil did an excellent job. The further I read into Nancy's site, the crazier she became. Imagine believing, for instance, that the government wants the "undesirables" (meaning lowlifes in her context... a word that I would never equate with humans) to stay around the coast so they will be killed! Sheesh! She can't be a very happy person. During further research, I stumbled onto this site. Thank goodness for that. BTW, in my studies, I have found that all anger is caused by fear. She gets angry when questioned, because she is afraid of something. What could it be? Being found out for what she is? Being afraid that she may be wrong after all?

__________________
Don't put off till tomorrow what you can avoid altogether.

BTW, the initial post says, "...the year 1983, where a supposed large body, of some kind, was said by scientists to be perturbing Neptune’s orbit,...".
And the forum index page says, "We have 1983 registered users". See the common digits? Coincidence? Of course not! Must've been caused by planet X.

__________________
Don't put off till tomorrow what you can avoid altogether.

yubetcha: The mesozoic being so hot was mainly caused be the increased volcanic activity of the plate boundries and volcanic activity. This released alot on greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere: water vapour, co2, methane, and a few more ones that escape me right now. These greenhouse gasses warmed up to overall temperature of the planet.

Truthfully i do not know the exact causes of ice ages, but i will do some reaserch and be back in a bit. I have a few things to do today so i will try in a few hours. But i promise i will get back to you. :-)

Just to calm you fears, the Physical poles have not shifted and no reaserch i have ever seen or read have proposed that a megnetioc shift affects negatively life on this planet. The most that will happen is a short increase in "cosmic rays" that hit the surface of earth for a very short period of time.

haha lol. So will the forum collapse when the # of registered users reaches 2003? :-)

I thought up this pole shift thing 10 years ago for a story I was writing! I should sue her-- there are intellectual property laws you know! Just curious, is there anything that could cause the kind of shift Crazy Nancy has been talking about?

__________________
Science--can't live without it, but it makes everything so much more boring.

yes, making a sequil to the movie The core. :-)

Now I understand. Thanks a lot. Some of that sounds familiar, but I am not sure. I may have touched on it slightly in high school, back in the antediluvian time ( )but some of it is new to me, and I appreciate it. And yes, I have always wondered what caused the ice age.

__________________
Don't put off till tomorrow what you can avoid altogether.

ok. just did some reaserch. It seems that the popular reason for the cause of ice ages is the procession of the axis of the earth around a circle.

from one site: (here)

The period of these shifts are related to changes in the tilt of Earth’s rotational axis (41,000 years), changes in the orientation of Earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun, called the “precession of the equinoxes” (23,000 years), and to changes in the shape (more round or less round) of the elliptical orbit (100,000 years).

Think of a top spinning. This is what the earth does. The axis of the earth (a stick going throught the center) wobbles a little bit. This axis revolves around and around. (the site does a much better example than i can ever do. Sorry. :-( )


and Nova Gives the rerason of the above combined with a decreased output from the sun or decreased availability to the earth.

I have to say that i did learn something. :-) Have a great day!

Added: if the ice age theory is true, that same procession could also lead to help increase the greenhouse effect.

__________________
GIYUL :-)
"It takes Thousands to fight a battle for a mile, Millions to hold an election for a nation, but it only takes One to change the world." - Dan Sandler 2002

Interesting article. Thanks very much, g99. So we could be on the brink of another ice age. If it isn't the core, or planet X, it's the ice or an asteroid. Sounds like a blockbuster movie. :roll:

__________________
Don't put off till tomorrow what you can avoid altogether.

(bump) I just feel that we need this FAQ back where PX lurkers can view it.

First time post, here. I've been fascinated by this Planet X phenomena and had pretty much dismissed the dire predictions of Nancy Lieder & Mark Hazlewood. However, the guest on the first hour of C2CAM w/ George Noory tonight was James McCanney. He had some rather interesting viewpoints on the approach of something large that he characterized as behaving like a "vacuum cleaner" of sorts, sucking in particles and matter, and having companions such as comets. If my understanding is correct, these comets are approaching our planet from the south. Two comets collided with our Sun on June 1 and 2, 2000 according to the SOHO Image Archive displayed on his website. Subsequently, on June 2, 2000, the Sun experienced "a likely unrelated but also dramatic ejection of solar gas and magnetic fields on the southwest (or lower right) limb of the Sun." He contended that this object could possibly be Planet X and passes by approximately every 4000 years or so. He predicts it will do so again in about 10 years.

I'm not educated in the science of astronomy. I access this site, among others, in an attempt to increase my knowledge. Lord have mercy! There is a huge amount of conflicting information on the Internet. What is your take on the theories and models of Mr. McCanney? He has a new book due out on July 7th. Maybe he should be added to the "cast of characters" on the Planet X FAQs. Thank you.

If an ant were to run full-speed into a brick wall, would the brick wall have a dramatic ejection of rubble and dust? I mean, a really small ant.

Yes, but you've got to imagine that it's like an electric plasma ant, not just one of the little black guys (well, girls, to be precise). Remember, contrary to popular belief (and spectroscopy), comets are NOT dirty snowballs!

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

This may have already been addressed, but to my recollection, Nancy has been claiming a 2003 return data for this imaginary PX since at least 1997 - ehich is well before Hazlewood came on the scene.

A hearty Welcome to azskys! Welcome to the BABB, and I hope you enjoy your stay! Stick around and venture to the other fora here, quite marvelous.

Welcome to the Board azskys!

I do not much about Mr. McCanney (sp?) but I recall that there have been some threads about him before. I suggest using the 'search' button to find threads discussing this gentleman. IIRC, he is someone who's information you should not rely on.

Here's an excellent post (from sci.astro a while back - after one of McCanney's appearances on C2C) from someone who's dealt with McCanney in the past. Note that this post is actually a reply to his original post, where some dates and information were lacking or needed clarification.
----------------------------------------

From: C. Leroy Ellenberger
Subject: Re: Planet-X radio interview 5/16/03 Nancy Lieder on Lou Gentile Show
Newsgroups: sci.astro
Date: 2003-05-17 09:32:13 PST



I happened to listen to the last hour of Jim McCanney's talk with
George Noory last nite, and I am here to tell you, as I have known
since 1983 and as Phil Plait indicated earlier this week on Coast to
Coast AM, that Jim McCanney is a fraud. (In the hour after the debate
with Nancy Lieder, Noory referred approvingly to McCanney's ideas and
Plait indicated in his dismissive response that he had many bones to
pick with McCanney's science.) McCanney is a fraud in a trival sense
because he allowed a caller to repeatedly refer to him as "Doctor
McCanney" when all good 'ol boy Jim has is a M.S. in mathematics from
Tulane (if memory serves and if not, then from L.S.U., at least a
universtiy in Louisana).

I also caught McCanney's act on Coast to Coast a couple weeks ago, or
so, and was appalled at how often what McCanney says is b.s. pure and
simple, as with the miraculously flash frozen mammoths in Siberia, in
which McCanney conflates the recent discoveries of the dwarf mammoths
on Wrangel Island (ca. 10,000 years old) with the famous 1899
discovery of the Beresovka Mammoth (ca. 35,000 years old) which Jim
says was so well preserved that steaks were cut off it and taken back
to St. Petersburg where the Czar dined on them. This is the
grandfather of urban legends, folks, because we know very well that
the Beresovka mammoth suffered much decompostion (despite the
well-preserved vegetation in its mouth and stomach) prior to its
freezing. I refer the reader to the 1990 book by Guthrie, Frozen Fauna
of the Mammoth Steppe.

McCanney refers to Velikovsky and his ideas over and over and most of
the time what he says is just plain wrong. Last nite he said
Velikovsky died in 1976 when it was really 1979; Nov. 17th, actually,
the very same nite that Jim first contacted Lewis Greenberg, the
editor-in-chief of the Velikovsky magazine Kronos, in Wynnewood, PA. I
happen to know this because I was visiting Greenberg that day and
actually talked with McCanney on the phone. He was all excited about
his ideas that he claimed rescued Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision
from derision. He also said last nite that Velikovsky's father was the
director of a museum in Palestine when he was actually a very
prosperous tea merchant in Moscow before the Revolution who eventually
found his way to Palestine, where he was a financial backer of the
kibbutz at Ruhama, where Allenby's HQ had been during WW-I. Jim also
exaggerates Velikovsky's linguistic abilities, since many scholars
have pointed out the numerous errors Velikovsky committed. In one
famous episode, published in Kronos in the mid-1980s, it was shown
that Velikovsky did not even know the standard French idiom for
"rape". Contrary to McCanney, Velikovsky was no Sanskrit scholar,
either.

Perhaps Velikovsky's greatest error was in associating various pagan
deities often identified with Venus, as being Venus itself, when it is
probably more correct that these deities were ALSO identified with a
real comet, since faded or ejected, whose lore was transfered to Venus
when the comet disappeared, as the British astronomers Victor Clube
and Bill Napier explain in their many journal publications and two
books: The Cosmic Serpent (1982) and The Cosmic Winter (1990). When
you get right down to it, Venus is simply TOO MASSIVE ever to have
displayed a visible tail as ordinary comets do, a simple fact of
nature that I am unaware McCanney has ever confronted. For further
insights into the intellectual pathology of the Velikovsky cult, see
my "Worlds Still Colliding" (written for Skeptic magazine, 2001)
<http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/velstcol.html>. Also of interest would
be "A lesson from Velikovsky"
<http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/vlesson.html> and the expanded version
of my 1995 Skeptic article "An Antidote to Velikovskian Delusions"
<http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/velidelu.html>.

Now, as it so happens, I was original editor for McCanney's 3-part
article on the capture theory for the origin of the Solar System which
ran in Kronos IX:1, IX:3, and X:2, in 1983-84. Immediately following
part 2, a critique by me was also published that so incensed McCanney
that he had me taken off the job, but he NEVER answered my criticisms.
Then, in Kronos X:1, he had a letter to the editor "The Axioms of
Astronomy" which contained at least four major errors of fact that I
attempted to correct with a follow-up letter "Axioms and Ignorance".
This correction was rejected on the fallacious grounds that "it was
all a matter of opinion" along with the threat that nobody else's
letter correcting these "alleged mistakes" would be printed, either;
and none was. My "Axioms and Ignorance" was distributed at the
Reconsidering Velikovsky Conference in Toronto in August 1990. A copy
of it can be obtained by sending a SASE (or $1.00 for foreign mail) to
me at 3929 Utah St., St. Louis, MO 63116, USA).

And, lest anyone be seduced by Jim's shuckin' and jivin', the probes
that encountered Halley's Comet in the mid 1980s proved without a
doubt that it is one comet that truly is a "dirty snowball". Jim
returned to me the postcard I sent him with the headline from an
article announcing this confirmation. One problem with the study of
comets is that for a long time they were ascribed a homogeneity in
composition that was not justified, as the many recent discoveries
indicate, and as Bailey, Clube and Napier discussed in their 1990 book
The Origin of Comets.

I think it would be a good idea for George Noory to arrange a "debate"
between Jim McCanney and Phil Plait so that the outragous claims
foisted by McCanney on a the public can be finally put to rest.

C. Leroy Ellenberger, "Per Veritatem Vis"

================================================== =======

From: C. Leroy Ellenberger (c.leroy@rocketmail.com)
Subject: Re: Planet-X radio interview 5/16/03 Nancy Lieder on Lou Gentile Show
Newsgroups: sci.astro
Date: 2003-05-18 12:32:18 PST

I need to eat some crow here because a few of the details in my
remarks yesterday are wrong, which I realized when I was later able to
access my early 1980s files, which are in storage. Corrections are
inserted below, followed by a few new remarks:

c.leroy@rocketmail.com (C. Leroy Ellenberger) wrote in message news:<81479c66.0305170832.41ec2c8f@posting.goog le.com>...
> Possibly my message below will NOT come as news to most of the
> sci.astro readers, but perhaps not:
>
> condo514@yahoo.com wrote in message news:<d05fa13e.0305161450.452a4fe6@posting.goog le.com>...
> > Your choice of prescription PX poison today:
> >
> > 1.) Nancy Lieder on the Lou Gentile show.
> > http://www.lougentile.com/
> >
> > 2.) Jim McCanney on George Noory show.
> > http://www.jmccanneyscience.com/
> >
> > If you have the strength, listen to both and call us in the morning;)
>
> I happened to listen to the last hour of Jim McCanney's talk with
> George Noory last nite, and I am here to tell you, as I have known
> since 1983 and as Phil Plait indicated earlier this week on Coast to
> Coast AM, that Jim McCanney is a fraud. (In the hour after the debate
> with Nancy Lieder, Noory referred approvingly to McCanney's ideas and
> Plait indicated in his dismissive response that he had many bones to
> pick with McCanney's science.) McCanney is a fraud in a trival sense
> because he allowed a caller to repeatedly refer to him as "Doctor
> McCanney" when all good 'ol boy Jim has is a M.S. in mathematics from
> Tulane (if memory serves and if not, then from L.S.U., at least a
> universtiy in Louisana).

It is Tulane!

>
> I also caught McCanney's act on Coast to Coast a couple weeks ago, or
> so, and was appalled at how often what McCanney says is b.s. pure and
> simple, as with the miraculously flash frozen mammoths in Siberia, in
> which McCanney conflates the recent discoveries of the dwarf mammoths
> on Wrangel Island (ca. 10,000 years old) with the famous 1899
> discovery of the Beresovka Mammoth (ca. 35,000 years old) which Jim
> says was so well preserved that steaks were cut off it and taken back
> to St. Petersburg where the Czar dined on them. This is the
> grandfather of urban legends, folks, because we know very well that
> the Beresovka mammoth suffered much decompostion (despite the
> well-preserved vegetation in its mouth and stomach) prior to its
> freezing. I refer the reader to the 1990 book by Guthrie, Frozen Fauna
> of the Mammoth Steppe.

One trait that is consistent in McCanney's behavior is that he NEVER
lets the facts get in the way of a good story, as shall be
demonstrated below.

>
> McCanney refers to Velikovsky and his ideas over and over and most of
> the time what he says is just plain wrong. Last nite he said
> Velikovsky died in 1976 when it was really 1979; Nov. 17th, actually,
> the very same nite that Jim first contacted Lewis Greenberg, the
> editor-in-chief of the Velikovsky magazine Kronos, in Wynnewood, PA. I
> happen to know this because I was visiting Greenberg that day and
> actually talked with McCanney on the phone. He was all excited about

The date here is incorrect. After browsing thru my McCanney files
later, I realized my first contact with him was in late February 1981
when he phoned Lewis Greenberg while I was visiting. He was interested
in holding a Velikovsky conference at Cornell on May 9th. His first
letter to me is dated Feb. 26, 1981.

> his ideas that he claimed rescued Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision
> from derision. He also said last nite that Velikovsky's father was the
> director of a museum in Palestine when he was actually a very
> prosperous tea merchant in Moscow before the Revolution who eventually
> found his way to Palestine, where he was a financial backer of the
> kibbutz at Ruhama, where Allenby's HQ had been during WW-I. Jim also
> exaggerates Velikovsky's linguistic abilities, since many scholars
> have pointed out the numerous errors Velikovsky committed. In one
> famous episode, published in Kronos in the mid-1980s, it was shown
> that Velikovsky did not even know the standard French idiom for
> "rape". Contrary to McCanney, Velikovsky was no Sanskrit scholar,
> either.
>
> Perhaps Velikovsky's greatest error was in associating various pagan
> deities often identified with Venus, as being Venus itself, when it is
> probably more correct that these deities were ALSO identified with a
> real comet, since faded or ejected, whose lore was transfered to Venus
> when the comet disappeared, as the British astronomers Victor Clube
> and Bill Napier explain in their many journal publications and two
> books: The Cosmic Serpent (1982) and The Cosmic Winter (1990). When
> you get right down to it, Venus is simply TOO MASSIVE ever to have
> displayed a visible tail as ordinary comets do, a simple fact of
> nature that I am unaware McCanney has ever confronted. For further
> insights into the intellectual pathology of the Velikovsky cult, see
> my "Worlds Still Colliding" (written for Skeptic magazine, 2001)
> <http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/velstcol.html>. Also of interest would
> be "A lesson from Velikovsky"
> <http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/vlesson.html> and the expanded version
> of my 1995 Skeptic article "An Antidote to Velikovskian Delusions"
> <http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/velidelu.html>.
>
> Now, as it so happens, I was original editor for McCanney's 3-part
> article on the capture theory for the origin of the Solar System which
> ran in Kronos IX:1, IX:3, and X:2, in 1983-84. Immediately following
> part 2, a critique by me was also published that so incensed McCanney

My critique was titled "The New Solar System: Selected Criticisms",
pp. 86-7.

> that he had me taken off the job, but he NEVER answered my criticisms.
> Then, in Kronos X:1, he had a letter to the editor "The Axioms of
> Astronomy" which contained at least four major errors of fact that I

Ooops! This letter was in Kronos X:3, pp. 109-10, the same issue as my
"Still Facing Problems, Part II" was published in the lead-off
position.

> attempted to correct with a follow-up letter "Axioms and Ignorance".

For what it's worth, the title was actually "On Axioms and Ignorance".

> This correction was rejected on the fallacious grounds that "it was
> all a matter of opinion" along with the threat that nobody else's
> letter correcting these "alleged mistakes" would be printed, either;
> and none was. My "Axioms and Ignorance" was distributed at the
> Reconsidering Velikovsky Conference in Toronto in August 1990. A copy
> of it can be obtained by sending a SASE (or $1.00 for foreign mail) to
> me at 3929 Utah St., St. Louis, MO 63116, USA).

The jist of my letter was that McCanney was wrong or at least way
off-base concerning the "four" axioms that supposedly have held
astronomy hostage against progress "at least since the early 1900s"
and "have remained unaltered over the course of this century". Here is
his list of those axioms:
1a. the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago,
1b. the order of the planets has never changed,
2a. the universe began in a "big bang" about 10 billion years ago,
2b. the universe has been expanding ever since,
3. gravity is the sole force that governs the cosmos, and
4. comets are frozen ice balls which melt [sic, sublime] when near
the Sun.

The reader will understand that the 4.5 billion year age for the
universe was not derived until 1953, contrary to McCanney's notions,
whose prejudices in his letter blind him to the existence of the
pioneering work in cosmic electromagnetic effects by such as
Birkeland, Fermi and Alfven dating back to the 1890s.

>
> And, lest anyone be seduced by Jim's shuckin' and jivin', the probes
> that encountered Halley's Comet in the mid 1980s proved without a
> doubt that it is one comet that truly is a "dirty snowball". Jim
> returned to me the postcard I sent him with the headline from an
> article announcing this confirmation. One problem with the study of
> comets is that for a long time they were ascribed a homogeneity in
> composition that was not justified, as the many recent discoveries
> indicate, and as Bailey, Clube and Napier discussed in their 1990 book
> The Origin of Comets.
>
> I think it would be a good idea for George Noory to arrange a "debate"
> between Jim McCanney and Phil Plait so that the outragous claims
> foisted by McCanney on a the public can be finally put to rest.
>
> C. Leroy Ellenberger, "Per Veritatem Vis"

In the course of my interaction with McCanney between 1981 and 1984,
he indicated to me that he endorsed Velikovsky's notion that the
geomagnetic field is produced by the rotation of the electrically
charged Earth, but this ignores the fact that of the at least 13
processes proposed for the origin of Earth's magnetic field, ONLY the
dynamo-in-the-core model is able to produce the observed geomagnetic
field and its behavior.

One of the first bones of contention between me and McCanney arose
over his model for the Galaxy in which he posits that the stars move
through the galactic core, not around the galactic core, as is usually
envisioned. Tom Van Flandern had many objections to this movement of
stars through the core when I discussed McCanney's model with him at
the time, but these objections carried no weight with Jim.

In footnote 9 of Part 2 of his Kronos article (vol. IX:3, p. 77)
McCanney states: "In light of the present paper, Venus is without
doubt a young, highly active planet." Judging from his comments
Friday nite on Coast-to-Coast, Jim still believes this. However, this
cannot be true because the Magellan probe detected no volcanic
eruptions while the atmosphere below the clouds (the lowest 30 km) was
shown to be stable against convection, having a sub-adiabatic
temperature gradient. But McCanney either ignores such negative data
or else dismisses it as the result of NASA hiding the truth from the
public in order to prevent giving any credit to McCanney for his
revolutionary ideas.

To show how McCanney never lets the facts get in the way of a good
story, consider the article "From Exodus to Voyager II: The Velikovsky
Connection", which he wrote for submission to OMNI, wherein he
relates: "Studying at Princeton in 1946, Immanuel Velikovsky began to
unravel the tales of destruction handed down from cultures of ancient
lands. . . . Scientists levelled a boycott on MacMillan Press forcing
it to sell publishing rights and Velikovsky was thrown out of
Princeton for conducting his 'pseudo-science'. The 'crazy old man' had
to be stopped. It was a young aspiring astronomer named Carl Sagan who
led the onslaught, bringing the 76 year old Velikovsky to face an
inquisition of traditional scientists at the 1977 meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)."

Here are the major errors in this brief excerpt: 1. All of Velikovsky
research in the 1940s was done in Manhatten, mostly at Columbia and
the New York Public Library. 2. Velikovsky did not move to Princeton
until 1952. 3. Macmillan in 1950 did not sell its publishing rights
to Worlds in Collision, but rather transferred them to Doubleday. 4.
Since Velikovsky was never on faculty at Princeton (or anywhere else),
he could not have been "thrown out". 5. In 1950 the onslaught against
Velikovsky was led by Harvard's Harlow Shapley. 6. In 1977,
Velikovsky was 82 years old, not 76. 7. However, the AAAS session
where Sagan and Velikovsky clashed was in 1974, not 1977 (the year the
partial proceedings Scientists Confront Velikovsky was published) at
which time Velikovsky was 78 years old. I submit that anyone writing
an article for publication who had any concern for the factual truth
would not produce a manuscript as error-laden as this one is,
especially when written by someone who has a strong affinity for the
subject and when the correct facts are so readily available.

Finally, I close with the following quote from the OMNI manuscript in
which McCanney explains how the orbit of "comet Venus" was
circularized so fast in the Worlds in Collision scenario: "Venus'
elliptical orbit was changed to lie completely to the inside of
Earth's orbit due to its energy exchanges with Earth. Slowly its
elliptical orbit became circular from the continual _drag_ of the
comet tail. This effect, first noticed by the astronomer Encke and
developed by late 19th century mathematicians, has been the key to
understanding one of the most difficult analytical problems facing
Velikovsky's hypothesis. The problem was this: how could the highly
elliptical orbit of a massive comet quickly change to a near circular
orbit. Traditional astronomy afforded no explanation, so theorists
'proved' Velikovsky's story to be impossible. It is now known that
the 'tail drag' performs this function. Within no more than 100
years, Venus settled into the orbit it maintains today. It cooled
rapidly from incandescent state by heat loss from its many volcanoes,
some of which are still active today."

I am sure the reader can find many errors in this paragraph. Here are
some that strike me: 1. Venus had NO tail because Venus is too massive
EVER to have had a tail as ordinary comets do, which makes McCanney's
"tail drag" concept irrelevant. 2. What Encke discovered was that the
ca. 3.3 year period of P/Encke was not constant and this variation was
later explained in terms of the "jet effect" from degassing as the
comet lost volatiles due to sublimation (not melting as McCanney says)
near perihelion. 3. There is NO proper solution to Velikovsky's
problem with the circularization of Venus because any solution for the
sequence of orbits in Worlds in Collision that conserves both angular
momentum and orbital energy requires that the sequence start with
Earth closer to the Sun than Venus now is; see "Top Ten Reasons Why
Velikovsky Is Wrong about Worlds in Collision"
<http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/vdtopten.html>. Such a state is
contradicted by all the proxy climate data we have for the Holocene
deduced from tree rings and the ice cores of Greenland and Antarctica.

C. Leroy Ellenberger, "Per Veritatem Vis" & "Vivere est vincere"

Sarah - that ain't a post that's a website No - thanks for that - I was just about to start checking out McCanney's dodgy academic credentials (cos I remember how dubious they were from sci.astro) when you posted it. Phew.

I do have a feeling that, since Sitchin retired from the fray a while back and Lieder and Hazelwood are entirely discredited, that McCanney is the next one on bat. I do not get the impression, however, that he wants to start a cult. It seems more likely that, like Sitchin and von Daniken, he just wants to sell some crummily-researched books and retire on the proceeds.

__________________
Fin
Skep-ti-cult® member #488-28303-790

My thanks to the Welcoming Committee and SarahMc for sharing the Ellenberger post. As to the ant debate a la Checkmate & ToSeek - you're laughing with me, right? Don't answer that! :roll:

So - okay, I see where I need to brush up, ahem, actually educate my self a little. It's clear I don't know my *** from an axiom of astronomy. I got out my trusty Funk & Wagnall and read about the Solar System, study of. Sure takes the fun out of Pole Shift.

With my recently acquired book learnin' and googlizing on keywords James McCanney a bit more, I've formulated a new nomenclature just cuz I like that word. It's the "Paranoid Planetary Annihilation Model". Not bad, huh? I'll develop the data later.

You know, I think having a debate between Phil Plait and James McCanney on C2C would be a hoot! Plus, it could provide a catharsis for one of them to expose NASA, the Governing Elite and the Council on Foreign Interplanetary Relations while finally have their astronomical expertise validated in front of millions of people at 1 AM who don't know what the heck they're talking about as they cower under the covers and hang on every word! Not that I do that!

I hear you guys snickering out there....

Thanks again!
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"The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes."

Mark Twain (...whose birth and death coincided with the return of Halley's Comet, 1835 -1910 - now that's poetic synchronicity!)