So there I was, listening to Friday open lines on Coast to Coast AM (Not to mention is was both Friday the 13th open lines AND Full Moon open lines, which almost guaranteed some real fringe people coming on) and who better to be the guest for the first hour than 'Professor' McCanney.

He started talking about his usual plasma physics stuff, and his whole 'theory' (That still drives me absolutely insane) that comets are big giant vaccum cleaners and actually get bigger as they travel around the cosmos and suck up all the 'ionized particles' (Obviously he's never seen a comet outgassing).

BUT...

He said one thing, one statement that was so beyond belief that I almost, ALMOST threw my radio right out the window when he said it. As it stood, I screamed and clawed at the side of my head in disbelief. He was talking about HIS Planet X theory, about how it and a big swarm of comets are coming at us from an angle only visible near the South Pole.

Now, sit down, because you're going to scream...

He said that the biggest proof he has that Planet X and all those comets are coming to get us all is that none of the astronomers down in that part of the world are talking about it!

Well hell, James, I'm not talking about hitting you over the head with a baseball bat 24/7 so it must be imminent, huh?

AARRGGHH!!

This drives me nuts too. Not just McCanney - the Zeta crowd also seem to be under the delusion that, if something is close to the South Celestial Pole, it can somehow creep up on us. It doesn't matter how many times you point out that 1)both poles are theoretically visible from the equator (if you have a really good horizon) and 2) that, if they go and look, Polaris, marking the North Celestial Pole, is high in the sky from Europe and the US, so by analogy the SCP is an easy sight from Australia/NZ, South Africa, Chile - all of which are places with major observatories (particularly the last).

No - complete detachment from reality...

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

A new registrant was just asking about McCanney in the "Planet X FAQ" thread. You might want to give him your insights into McCanney.

Yeah, that would tend to upset a lot of astronomers in the soithern hemisphere if they couldn't see the SCP. Sure would make setting up your GEM quickly a lot harder. Sigma Octantis? What's that?

Yeah. Sometimes I just totally want to sit these people down with a good set of visual aids. Nothing complex - just revert to the old idea of the 'Celestial Sphere' surrounding the Earth (y'know, trying to go properly 3-D might do their heads in). But I have this bad feeling that they'd come away with the idea that I'd told them the stars really were attached to a transparent sphere that rotated once a day. We'd be back to geocentricity in no time. Sigh.

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

Late in January, I remember the BA reported that some Zeta drone reckoned that the destruction by bushfire of the Mount Stromlo Observatory near Canberra was part of the Planet X cover-up...