http://www.okneoac.com/kaysing.html

Read through it. It's a laugh! [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_razz.gif[/img]
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"The contemplation of celestial things will make man both speak and think more sublimely and magnificently when he descends to human affairs." -Marcus Cicero

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: AstroMike on 2002-03-13 22:52 ]</font>

I love the part where he talks about having seen engines in the 10,000-lbf range being fired, and how they "move giant rocks across canyons". What a crock! Just one Rolls Royce engine in a Boeing 747 develops over 60,000 pounds and four of them develop a quarter of a million pounds. The Harrier jump jet thrusts at 37,000 pounds at takeoff, fully loaded, and it doesn't "dig right down to bedrock". Kaysing simply falls into the layman's trap of assuming that rocket engines are always very powerful. And that's because Kaysing is a layman.

The same old radiation argument rears its ugly head.

And sooner or later he has to claim that all space travel was and/or is faked. That's the only way he can deal with the natural progression of technology up through Apollo.

It's especially amusing to hear Kaysing deny the reflected light explanation by saying it can't happen in a vacuum. He cites "black shadows" and fails completely to understand the nature of light.

Kaysing, of course, fails the test regarding moon rocks. He says you can just put earth rocks into a hot oven and get moon rocks. Does Kaysing even know how rocks are made naturally? Obviously not. And we'd like to interview the Seattle geologist who allegedly certified that the moon rocks were made on earth, but of course Kaysing won't tell us anything about him.

He repeats the assertion that Jim Irwin had called him to blow the whistle and then "mysteriously" died of a heart attack. He cannot prove such a phone call was ever made, and he neglects to remind his interviewer that Irwin had a history of heart problems including a prior heart attack.

We hear the accusation regarding Baron, which occupies another thread on this board. Why kill Baron after he writes his report and after he testifies before Congress? It's customary to rub out the witnesses before they testify.

Here's the only salient statement in Kaysing's interview: "NASA and the CIA and the whole U.S. government is a rotten and corrupt organization, designed just to get all the tax money they can out of people, to manipulate their minds, to keep them amused with sporting events and silly TV sitcoms. We, unfortunately, in the U.S. are pretty well brainwashed, believing whatever the government says. And they have control, as you well know, of the media." This, and only this, is the nugget behind Kaysing's work.

The accusation that Christa McAuliffe was murdered is just nauseating. If NASA didn't want her in space for fear she'd spill the beans, why can't she just slip in the bathtub or have a car accident? Why does she have to be blown up on national television in front of millions of people, destroying a $2 billion orbiter and killing six other people?

If Kaysing wants to bilk people out of their hard-earned cash by pretending he knows how rocket engines work, that's between him and them. Accusing people of murder with absolutely no evidence is just wrong.

Kaysing even stoops to criticizing the Apollo 13 movie. In doing so he exposes his ignorance. He lists the correct oxidizer for the lunar module, but gives the fuel as "asymmetric dimetal hydrazine". It was, in fact, Aerozine 50. That's a half-and-half mixture of hydrazine and unsymmetric dimethyl hydrazine. Not the same thing, despite the similary in names. He says it produces an opaque red gas. But in fact that's the reaction of nitrogen tetroxide with the surrounding atmosphere. It burns invisibly in a vacuum.

While Kaysing may have once seen this type of engine firing, unlike an engineer he doesn't know why he is seeing what he sees.

Ralph Rene's name is mentioned. The glorified construction worker who goes around calling himself an astrophysicist. Yet with all his expertise he can't manage to compute a moment of interia.

James Collier is alluded to. He didn't measure the door on the lunar lander. He measured the door on the cockpit simulator and just assumed it was the same size as the lander's.

Find any anti-government conspiracy theory, and there will be Bill Kaysing ready to expound upon it, for his usual fee.

"But the photographs," he exclaims. "The photographs!" Forget it, Bill. Nothing you may have learned at Rocketdyne and nothing you learned getting your English degree makes you a photo analyst.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: JayUtah on 2002-03-13 23:43 ]</font>

Who or what is "NTHS" Bill is conversing with?

And tell me, Christa McAuliffe wasn't the only woman on _that_ Challenger mission, was she?

No it isn't. It is a crying shame. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_evil.gif[/img]

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Isn't it just a bit odd that he claims McAuliffe was killed because she refused to say you couldn't see stars in space when she had never been in space to begin with and couldn't actually know if it was true or not?

I've seen this interview before. It's posted on a few sites around the net. But boy is it ridiculous. It just sickens one. Hopefully the average person is smart enough to see through this crock of bull.

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...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

Isn't it just a bit odd that he claims McAuliffe was killed because she refused to say you couldn't see stars in space when she had never been in space to begin with and couldn't actually know if it was true or not?

Apparently they had to do it before she got up there. They apparently didn't want a "cilivian" to see the stars, someone whom they purportedly wouldn't control.

Unfortunately although it's almost impossible to be chosen as a shuttle pilot without military flight experience, no military experience is required to be a mission specialist. Dozens of "civilians" have flown on the space shuttle. I'm not exactly sure what Kaysing means by "civilian", but it seems that a whole fleet of potential loose cannons has flown, with no more devotion to the alleged NASA kabal than McAuliffe.

My point was mainly that Kaysing's hypothesis fails not only on factual grounds, but also because it's an ad hoc explanation. Sure, given the desired conclusion and a selective set of observations it can't be disproven. But it's obviously an affirmed consequent. He starts with the desired conclusion and then works his way back to a set of antecedents that seems to support it. He fails to see if, given his postulated set of antecedents, a more plausible scenario unfolds and arrives at a different conclusion.

Let's say I'm the head of NASA. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the moon landings were hoaxed and I know about it.

If I'm worried about "civilians" exposing the "true nature" of outer space, the last thing I would do is authorize a Teacher In Space program. I would say something like, "It's too dangerous for non-astronauts," or "Our launch schedule and flight assignments are way too sensitive to allow glorified passengers."

If I couldn't kill the program, I'd set selection standards way too high. And if someone managed to meet them, I'd make training a living hell in the hopes he or she washed out.

If I were faced with no other option than to eliminate the candidate prior to his reaching orbit, I would certainly not do it in a way that implicated NASA. People die all the time. They stick knives in toasters. They fiddle with the radio while they drive. They slip in bathtubs. They get carjacked or mugged.

But if I wanted to kill two birds with one stone, I'd arrange for it to happen during a training exercise. Some injury in the Vomit Comet, or something else. That way I can go before Congress and say, "See, I told you it was too dangerous." And there would be no future candidates.

But the last thing I would do is arrange for a fatal accident in front of millions of television viewers, dozens of on-site schoolchildren spectators, at the expense of an orbiter and including the deaths of six other people whose families will also be beating down my door demanding an explanation.

The last thing I would do is construct a scenario that would bring down the wrath of Congress and a beloved President upon me. The last scenario I would attempt is one that would result in months and months of intensive investigation -- of me -- and a condemnation of the agency I run.

This is the problem with the hoax theories. They sometimes seem to fit the evidence (duh, they were invented to do so), but in a more straightforward analysis they are ****-poor ways to run a conspiracy. From Kaysing's point of view, every death must be considered suspicious and somehow intertwined with the theory. From a hypothetical conspirator's point of view, you don't let things get to the point of requiring a highly public murder.

Now before anyone gets any ideas that I'd actually do anything like this, let me reassure you that I'm obviously ethically opposed to all I've schemed during my tenure as a hypothetical NASA administrator. But if we're going to bring people back to reality we have to apply our intellects even to distasteful scenarios to show how ludicrous and ill-conceived the hoax believers' hypotheses are.

Hopefully the average person is smart enough to see through this crock of bull.

Most average people will simply dismiss it by the absurdity of its conclusion. But a few will be taken in by Kaysing's claims to have been an engineer and will assume he knows what he's talking about because they simply lack the specialized information to see right through him.

Kaysing's intended audience is the lunatic fringe, who need no proof for the conclusion; they believe it already. But they use Kaysing to delude themselves into believing there is really some evidence that ought to appeal to the scientific mainstream. It makes their beliefs appear a little less loony to average people.

Judith A. "JR" Resnick. She was a civilian biomedical engineer and flew on Discovery STS 41-D in 1984.

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

Oh, cripes! I just looked at the Host home page, oops, the "Om Page." "Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church!"

"This book is dedicated to all who helped liberate the people of Tibet from the tyrannical oppressions and paranoid delusions of the Dalai Lama."

"All words mean whatever I say they mean. ..."

Kaysing has found a home.

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

I guess so, when you realize how much of a nut Kaysing is.

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~AstroMike

Since Kaysing believes that a big government entity can kill people by pretty much any means (Apollo 1, for example), I find it interesting that he doesn't mention their seeming inability to bump off an 80 year old man.

*shrug*

The Incubus

Anyone else agree?

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"Science is a way for us to not fool ourselves." - Richard Feynman

Ooh, ooh, lookie: "A Narrative of the Early Years of American Psychedelianism". You're right: Kaysing has found The Place for Folks Like Him--that is, Reality-Challenged. This site not only hosts Kays, but [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_mad.gif[/img] Holocaust Denial [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_mad.gif[/img] , and [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_rolleyes.gif[/img] "The Jews control all the media!" [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_rolleyes.gif[/img] web pages. Not to mention the "solipsistic nihilism and Psychedelianism" [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_lol.gif[/img] . These guys are still smoking whatever they were smoking back in the 60s.

The ("If you remember the 60s, you weren't doing it right") Curtmudgeon

I remember the '60s, its the 70's and early 80s I have trouble with.

Kaptain (I got a late start) K

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Yeah, these guys have been eating the brown acid, for sure...

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I'm a Christian.
I believe the world is billions of years old. Why? Because God gave me COMMON SENSE!

...Personally, I think it would be interesting to build a large, self-sufficient moon colony, leave it a few generations, and see how many people THERE claim that EARTH is faked. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

Acid? I don't need acid, I have sleep-deprivation! [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

Yeah, you mean water falls from the SKY? That's ridiculous! I mean, what could hold it up?

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

The concluding paragraph struck me as absolutely surreal, something you would see in a Simpsons spoof:

It doesn't occur to conspira-wackies, I suppose, that assassins so well-equipped as to drop napalm on a commercial radio transmitter might have little trouble finding Bill by way of his PO Box #.
Conspiracy theorists are apparently immune to the murderous suppression that they claim afflicts mere mortals who might stumble across the "Truth". This is part of their delusional ego-trip. All sorts of talented and important people are vulnerable, but the conspira-cons themselves are so wily and courageous as to be unaffected. How heroic! What power! We should all be grateful.

In many cases, the very fact that conspira-loons are still drawing breath and running around loose disproves a large part of their claims.

Where the heck is KOME radio? Has anyone ever checked his story about the napalm attack on the transmitter? I recall hearing, or hearing about, this allegation some time ago, but haven't been able to locate any reference to it other than Kaysing's. Has anyone got any corroborating info, or is this just another delusional ranting from a nutcase?

Sheesh, just google kome radio: it's in San Jose.

(Gilroy is south of San Jose, and is well known as the garlic capital of the world. If you love garlic -- and I do! -- drop in on their world-famous garlic festival.)

Silas

Thanks, Silas. I love garlic, too. I'll have to get to Gilroy and check it out. So did the transmitter get napalmed? If so, I hope we aren't getting contaminated garlic from the surrounding farms!