Alien porn? That's when they actually are wearing something more than just a glass bell-jar?

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Well think why do so many people claimed to be probed in a certain area when they are abducted.

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If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.
Contact Carl Sagan

So, after nearly 500 pages of tedium, I finally discovered Cook's two "smoking guns:" An anonymous call to the White House scheduling office on January 27, 1986, and an interview Cook conducted with Reagan's astrologist 15 years ago, in which he told him not to launch the Shuttle. I didn't even pay for this book, and I feel ripped off.

Sounds to me like Richard Cook is a media hound. He got caught 20 years ago, backpedalled from everything under oath, and now 20 years later he's trying to jump back on the bandwagon hoping to get back in the limelight.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

probably isn't looking at enough human on human dot matrix porn.

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...the poor square has to say, "Well, I was in some other mystic dimension, called UP!" -C.S.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. -C.S.

Remember, you just have facts, you have mere facts. -worzel (said with sarcazm)

"Pain is just weakness leaving the body." -unknown

Here's the safe-for-public consumption review I wrote last night. Sorry, I already returned it to the library, so I can't answer any more questions about the book's content. If there are any problems with the review itself, I can always fix those.

If Mr. Cook reads this forum, I'm probably going to get a nasty e-mail sometime in the future.

You asked for comments on the review. I found a few grammar and structure issues, noted below.

In one of his paranoid rants, he describes the military's intent to convert the Shuttle into an orbiting battlestation, armed with city-incinerated lasers...,
I'm sure you meant to write "city-incinerating lasers".

...suddenly jettisoning them would have torn the shuttle to pieces or something equally disastrous.
Probably should read either "...done something equally disastrous." or "...had equally disastrous results."

...Cook paints himself as the tarnished, whistle-blowing hero...
People rarely describe themselves as "tarnished heroes", since that implies a person with flaws. He might might consider himself a "defamed hero" or "slandered hero", though, if that's what you meant.

He left NASA in March 1986, having never risen above financial analyst.
This is a bit of a quibble, but saying that he "never rose above" that position implies that he had higher ambitions but failed to achieve them. Do we know this? It might be better to say that he "held the position of" financial analyst, which is more to the point (i.e. he was not an engineer).

If this book was "mostly finished" in 1991, why did he wait so long to publish it?
I wouldn't bother with this point. It's pretty irrelevant, and there are many reasons why a book is not published that are well outside the author's control.

...after grueling through 476 pages of tedium...
'Grueling' is not a verb! How about 'wading' or 'slogging' through 476 grueling pages?

...Reagan's chief astrologist...
The word you want here is 'astrologer'. AFAIK there's no such thing as an 'astrologist'.

...(put down your knifes, people!)...
'knives'.

Hope these were helpful.

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Bring back Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

This is a bit of a quibble, but saying that he "never rose above" that position implies that he had higher ambitions but failed to achieve them.

I agree the wording is misleading. Since Cook was at NASA for only about a year I wouldn't expect a promotion. I interpreted the statement as I believe it was intended, and as you note in your correction: that Cook was ever only a budget analyst and never claimed or displayed competence in engineering or safety analysis. I would focus on that, and add that Cook's boss said under oath that he regarded Cook in the summer of 1985 as still something of a newbie who needed some further guidance in how to engage engineering and management aspects of the agency.

That inexperience is at odds with how Cook has painted himself subsequently: as the lone voice of reason crying in a wilderness of mismanagement and negligence.

...there are many reasons why a book is not published that are well outside the author's control.

Agreed, but this case raises specific, credible suspicion. Since Cook seems to have contradicted his sworn testimony from 1986, it is reasonable to suspect that he wants to distance himself from the consequences of that contradiction. He may, for example, have waited until he was no longer subject to prosecution for perjury before Congress. As a long-time government employee, he may want to have waited until his retirement in order to protect his pension from administrative actions less severe than prosecution. And Ronald Reagan is now dead, and can't respond to Cook's allegations.

When someone changes his story on a controversial topic, the timing according to which he changes it is not irrelevant.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

OMG, I almost fell out of my chair laughing at that!!!!

What an analogy!!

Daryl71 are you going to post your review on amazon?

One thing to add. If Reagan was going to use the Space Shuttle program for giant space lasers, that would violate the Outer Space Treaty and I can't see thousands of NASA employees going along with that.

Don't expect it to stay if you put it there, Amazon is there to sell books so they have a tendency to dislike and remove negative reviews.

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"God bless thee, my son; I will give thee the greatest jewel I have ...
"The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible."Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Has this been verified?

CJSF

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Two years ago moved from my town
I was looking up past the city lights
But the city lights got in my way

See the constellation ride across the sky
No cigar, no lady on his arm
Just a guy made of dots and lines

-from "See The Constellation"
by They Might Be Giants

Probably not. I'm an Epinions guy through and through. Haven't written any reviews for Amazon in a long time. Besides, they have a 1,000 word maximum, which I sometimes exceed even when reviewing the most mundane things imaginable.

I'm not sure if the five-star reviews on Amazon are coming from people who might question Cook's writing, the incredibly skimpy research sources, or the complete lack of a bibliography. The book could have been 99% accurate but I'd still wonder just what Cook was thinking with that "orbital Death Star" shtick.

Perhaps you or Jay (or any of a number of others) might want to read and review this book so I don't sound like a crazed lone dissenter. Unfortunately, both of you are probably still recovering from Dark Moon, so maybe you should give yourselves a break.

I'm not so sure of that. Amazon has some pretty obvious troll reviewers (one of the more notorious being a neo-nazi who gives one star to any book praises the British military in WWII...) who never get banned. If any of them wrote for Epinions, they'd have their membership revoked in a couple weeks.

I've already quoted Ambrose Bierce once today (see the quotes thread in OTB) but it sounds like this book deserves his famous one sentence review. "The covers of this book are too far apart."

Great job Daryl. I admire your intestinal fortitude in finishing the thing.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

I've posted some pretty harsh reviews on moon hoax related material and it is still all there, so I'd expect Daryl's to still be there. I've even seen reviews where the reviewer admits to not reading (or seeing) the book, but provides a review anyway and it still stays.

None of my negative reviews on Amazon has been removed, and I'm not kind to conspiracy books.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

It's been while since I read Dark Moon so I think I'll be OK to look at this book. The last moon hoax/conspiracy book I read was William Brian's Moongate. While it is as bad as the rest, it at least it had some equations that I could evaluate. Right now I'm wading through Rene Ralph's book, NASA MOONED AMERICA and SECRETS OF OUR SPACESHIP MOON by Don Wilson.

Where did you find a copy of Wilson? That thing's been out of print for years.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base