Albuquerque 2013 report (April 27 2013) The 2013 Thunderbolts / EU Conference happened Jan. 3 to 6, at a Marriott hotel shaped on two sides like a stepped pyramid, in the city of Albuquerque, a word I finally learned how to spell. We met Andrew Fitts at registration, a person who had recently taken much interest in my work. Andrew had started the thread "Cook's Saturnian Cosmology" at the T-bolts forum. At four pages it has remained uncensored and unobstructed, with 3,630 page views since Oct. 19, 2012 and barely contended by anyone. But there is more: On the 2nd day Andrew suggested a forum for saturniancosmology.org. Kees set it up, registered it, added whatever utilities, and propagated it. It basically took ten minutes. It is called LostWorldForum.org -- and available for comments, questions, and observations. It's run by Andrew. Now to the business at hand: (1) Mythology ......... Let me introduce this with some history of the treatment of my website over the past few years. Dodeca, out of Utrecht, emailed me in April of 2008 saying that he had posted the URL for the site (my site), and it had been removed within one hour. "What's up with that?" he asked me. I knew what was up: I was a threat to the Thunderbolt people, as are other alternative cosmologies. As Claudia said, "they thought they owned the territory, and then you showed up." But over the next year or so, newbies would again discover my website and post references to it. These were always followed by postings of Thunderbolt regulars, with insane entries such as, "I read Cook's stuff in the last day [sure] and I disagree with his geology, I like sliding continents [or some such gimmick] much better." What geology? I don't talk of geology. More often it was disagreement with baseline elements like C-14 dating, exactness of dates (when no one knew anything about dates), questions like "Where does he got all that stuff," suggestion that Cook must be making things up, and opinions like, "many wild ideas in my view." This last was followed directly with, "considering that there were NO PLANETARY INTERACTIONS, just aurora effects. And then there is the idea of a brown dwarf entering the Solar System AND SPLITTING TO PRODUCE Saturn." Another comment: "The thing that makes me cringe is the chronology, I don't know how he arrives at dating these events. He seems to be combining Cardonna, Talbott, Velikovsky, and others and coming up with his own speculative scenario. How does he arrive at so many very precise dates?" Other Thunderbolt forum comments: "this site is full of crap", "it's mostly opinion-based", "a very limited investigation", "rampant speculation and quite misleading". Then, "the material provides no basis for determining what is substantial." This last from Talbott, plus, he added: "Occasional worthy fragments are embedded in the work, if someone could just find a way to recognize them before wasting too much time." Better yet, by Dave Smith who is a moderator: "Please note, the speculations offered by Jno Cook at saturniancosmology.org in no way represent the views of the main proponents of Electric Universe theory. Whilst he often quotes and references people from the main arena of EU discussion, Cook has his own very specific theory which is NOT supported by the proponents of EU." "Cardona, Talbott, Thornhill et al DO NOT in any way support the precise dating of and events offered by Cook, or such published account of such support would be offered." And then, in October of 2012, Andrew Fitts started up a thread "Cook's Saturnian Cosmology" and he managed to set adrift a topic which had never been airborne before. Andrew additionally contacted me via email. We agreed to meet at the Thunderbolts / EU Conference in Albuquerque. A few comments were made at the thread, as it expanded to four pages, but Andrew would always respond with "Thank you, Billy-Bob," and then go on with his intended text as if there had been no interruption. He instantly won my approval with that method. In the meanwhile I was promoted, in secret (I was told) to the PhD's and other "serious" members of the official discussion group operating on a listserv called "intersect." Here's how this went down: In mid December 2011 I received an email from Walter Radtke, one of Talbott's lieutenants, who at an earlier time had been his office manager: "Would you like to join the Kronia Talk Revived email list? Traffic is pretty light. It's for members of the Intersect group who want to discuss the mythological aspects of the EU grand schematic." Radtke had attempted to enlist me to the original "intersect" listserv in 2007, but he had been vetoed by Talbott. In January of 2012 we had lunch with Talbott at my request -- I made no proposals or requests, we just spent time at cosmological chitchat. Since then my URL has been listed at Mikamar (the book seller for Thunderbolts), although at an obscure location among "helpful links" and without comment. It was the first concession ever. And, of course, for some inexplicable reason, Andrew Fitts's thread about my site since October of last year was left to stand at the T-bolts forum. I do not know why the change in attitude. Perhaps it was my lunchtime charm. I asked Radtke who was on that listserv, and what he thought I might contribute. In answer I got: "The list was formed to re-engage conversation about the mythological aspects of EU but also because there are topics that are proscribed on the Intersect list such as religion and politics as they apply to mythology." And I was told by the moderator that Cardona "was still there" and vd Sluijs was on board. But they are not, or are no longer, and the troop at the listserv has said nothing more interesting than "use spell-check more often (Jueneman) and "I saw the moon passing Venus" (the moderator) (it was Jupiter, BTW, not Venus). So much for Radtke and the revived Kronia listserv. I have yet to post or make any moves. I'll do that in February. Then we will find out if this is a search for new concepts, or the setup for an assassination attempt. Perhaps they are stuck on mythology and are looking for outside help; after all, nothing mythologically significant has developed in 41 years. [August 2014: it never went anywhere] When a separate Mythology and Dating thread was started at the T-bolts forum some years ago, it was a disaster, and was stopped and deleted after a few months. It evolved into an endless series of arguments, sniping, disagreements, reevaluations, quotations, references, source books, and diverse other qualifications. (The defunct hidden thread, starts at "http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=245") I much prefer Andrew's single minded, "Thank you, Billy-Bob." (2) Preliminary...... Some people recognized me, among them people met at the earlier Baltimore or Las Vegas conferences. And even Talbott, who stopped me in the hallway after I had escaped from a panel presentation (panels are boring), and who asked (having no doubt checked his Rolodex), "is Keys here." "Oh yes," I said, and added to appear harmless, "and the presentations are much better this year." "Wait till next year," answered Dave. He is back in swing. I was actually somewhat hesitant about _this_ year, since all the promo had promised PhD's, and other investitured experts. But early on Talbott remarked that they had not yet breached the ramparts of academia. That does not surprise me, but additionally I wonder at the need for this. There is no reason why the EU and Thunderbolts theories cannot stand on their own without validation from the academics. I did not lay out any business cards on their book-display table space, as I did last year (for one day), because the space was much smaller and well guarded, and because in the last year file hits jumped from 1.2 million to 3.8 million anyway. Enuf's enuf. Andrew talked to Cardona. Andrew asked when Venus first showed up. Cardona mentioned something about the Greek Athena. (Perhaps he will claim that Isis and Athena are not the same.) Andrew ended by noting that he had been reading Jno Cook's website, and asked what did Cardona thought of it. Cardona startled and turned silent. Earlier on the first day Cardona had introduced himself (first time in four conferences), and had asked how "Jno" was pronounced. I told him. He followed up with, "Well, if you want to pronounce it that way.." I was going to pull out a credit card to show him how I use it legitimately, but he walked off. More: On Saturday Kees and I were sitting in the first floor lounge area (a bar), when various people congregated around us. First Adam, who I had met in Baltimore, then Mathew and David who were doing video interviews. Then Michael Mgirkin and some Canadian dude. I was engaged in answering question from the assistant videographer, David, when he tried to get me to place dinosaurs in human history. To orient myself to his needs I asked if he was a young Earth advocate. He answered, Yes. Kees claims that at that point I turned to Adam from Baltimore. But actually David was distracted by Cardona's arrival, who shook hand with everyone, and held mine long to tell me that "John" was the oldest extant name in history. I presume he meant Oannes as related by Berossus, a priest of Babylon, who told this to the Greeks after 300 BC. That ended the conversation with Mathew and David, who turned to Cardona with questions. Cardona was able to evade dinosaur answers with much arm waving. The bar closed and we went to our room. Roger Poisson brought his wife Diane. Roger is an EE, who is now reviewing his old Field Theory books. I don't have mine anymore. I met him in Baltimore. When we found Roger, he had a small crowd around his table, all looking at the timeline from the Saturnian Cosmology text. A woman, Jean Hafner of Albuquerque, sitting next to me, told me to shut up. "Excuse me?" She claimed I also could not sit still, like her little brother. We started a correspondence and word edit -- still ongoing. (3) Remarks on the presentations.... The presentations this year were much better than last year. This was Kees's opinion also. I'll update you on changes and non-changes in attitudes, add my usual gripes about the dire need among these people for recognition and status. I am not going to recap lectures, some of which were much too complicated to make sense of in one paragraph. Jean Hafner has promised access to notes by two Albuquerque "mad scientists" at a later time. I'll ask if I can forward them. I am thus only remarking on those element that struck me as stilted, ingenuine, or annoying. - Bill Mullen, as moderator, placed the Saturn mythology in 1972, and the Thornhill and Talbott connection in 1994. This establishment of a history for the concepts seems a bit artificial to me, but was probably meant for newbies. It also pointed up that nothing of the mythology has advanced since 1972 -- that is 41 years! But who is to know? - Wal Thornhill talked dismissively of standard notions and scientists. He claimed that contemporary human behavior was determined by the "doomsday" event of circa 3200 BC. Velikovsky was claimed as "setting" Thornhill and Talbott "on the path." - Bob Johnson showed an image of nova 1987-A without the secondary rings. Here the "confusing" dual rings were left off for the same reason that Firestone, West, and Warwick-Smith left off the rings when using 1987-A as an illustration in "The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes": it's confusing to see genuine effects of a plasma pinch or explosion. Johnson's thesis basically was that Juergens's three sources, on which he based his theory of the sun's electrical structure, were in error, thereby also invalidating Scott's analysis. Johnson's solution was to substitute a plasmoid for the structure of the Sun. That might be considered. It would equate to a all too well known ball plasmoid. It also means a composition (known since the 1950s) of mixed electrons and protons. Andrew reported later that Los Alamos labs or Peratt (Plasma Universe) now state that they have nothing to do with Thornhill: The Plasma Universe and Plasma Cosmology have no ties to the anti- science blogsites of the holoscience 'electric universe' [owned by Thornhill]. -- LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY, 18 September, 2011 - Stephen Crothers: Great. He has had a running disagreement with ALL the physicists who can figure out Einstein's math (I should say, both of them) to show how the calculations were in error. - Michael Steinbacher, who also is the photographer, presented his third article on landforms. I would re-date his first, neglect the second ("the Earth turned over" -- a good topic for a conference called "The Tipping Point" -- joke), and modify his third somewhat. Michael pointed up the destruction of the landscape in New Mexico and adjacent states (the Colorado plateau): broken mountains and belowground magnetic discontinuities. He suggested a circular "plasma storm" covering 4 states. The circularity of the landscape might indeed be suggested. I asked him what the elevation was in Albuquerque. It's 5300 feet. That identifies it to me (along with eastern Colorado) as a shear-plain, part of the high plains resulting from the impact at Hudson Bay at the start of the Younger Dryas. Interesting. I had not taken notice of the shear-plain quite that far south below Colorado. Learn something at every turn. - Scott Wall maintains the list of confirmed and to-be-confirmed predictions for the Thunderbolts website. At the end of his lecture, Wall suggested the electrical excavation of the Great Lakes. This would have been obvious to anyone who could imagine the result of anode electrical strikes, but Wall suggested that a solid fused surfaces would be found at the lake bottoms (like the claim for Bolsena in Italy?). This is a typical plasma concept derived entirely in the imagination. Plasma never acts the same twice. Plasma remains inscrutable. Likely, a fused bottom will be found if a plasmoid emakes the electrical contact, like at Crater Lake in New Mexico, or the target stands still, like the Moon. But this is distinctly not so for the Great Lakes; even shocked quartz which might have resulted from an impact, is missing at the Great Lakes. It is all pure scoured sandstone and deep layers of rock, down to the Precambrian. Roger Poisson trolled his question period with questions about the Great Lakes, but didn't catch any fish (that is funny). Poisson later told me that he had learned, when he lived in Michigan as a kid, that the Great Lakes were electrically excavated (I was not the first!). I asked him. He said some professor in California had made that claim. (But everyone today "knows" that the glacier excavated the lakes.) Kees went up to him with a card for SaturnianCosmology.org and the URL for Chapter 9 "The Events of the Younger Dryas." No, Wall had never seen the Saturnian Cosmology site. - Ron Hatch, representing an independent GPS firm, spoke of "corrections" to GPS measurements. Of course he was asked if corrections for relativity were made. He claimed they were not needed. - Mullen read Rens vd Sluijs's presentation. Vd Sluijs got sick after arriving, and returned to England. Maybe caused by my T-shirt, which read "Velikovsky heeft toch gelijk". Van der Sluijs suggested that the Peratt column terminated at the Earth's north and south pole, despite Peratt's claim that the column passed by Earth entirely. He dated this as 14,000 BC to 9,500 BC (I can certify 10,900 BC to 8,347 BC), and ties this to the Gothenburg magnetic excursion. As would be expected, the cause of the columns was held to be an exceptional output of the Sun. Vd Sluijs is now berating Peratt on the "limitations" of his study. Another falling out? Vd Sluijs also attempted to find proof that the columns were everywhere (because they were reported to have been seen everywhere), and settled on the "pencil" formations shown by Birkeland in his electric magnetized terrella experiments in 1895. The point of view of a polar column was not carried forward. I think vd Sluijs seems to have no concept of the size of the polar plumes, and the fact that the plumes of both (magnetic) poles would be seen everywhere on earth. There is also a complete lack of understanding of electricity and magnetism. That the magnetic poles, rather than the geographical poles, should have been selected as the contact point for plasma columns seems all too obvious. - Dwardu Cardona, in his talk, still holds the Jastrow essay of 1910 about the Babylonian diaries as being valid for all of time since 3200 BC -- the worst case of decontextualizing an "ancient record" ever. He is still "picking data" (his words) and offering opinions as facts (my words). These are phrases from my notes, and they might suggest my impression of cherry picking data. I might be wrong, but I got that as a distinct feeling. However, to say that the Younger Dryas was not all that cold, despite what Firestone had written, seems brashly opinionated. Firestone, in fact, had nothing to say about the Younger Dryas temperature; others had determined the temperature to be "as cold as it had ever been on Earth," and had said so long before Firestone, et alii, came out with their impact theory for North America. Few of the speakers seem to have much of a handle on plasma, but especially plasmaspheres. I did not see much of cohesive terminology or descriptive effects, even from Thornhill or Johnson. It has to be admitted as a first principal that plasma effects are entirely unpredictable. The second principal is that most often there will not be any "plasma effects" except as imagined. Talbott talked of "plasma particles" and Cardona had "plasma spatterings." What is that? Cardona also still places the Duat as a ring around Saturn in the north, and claimed that a Egyptian glyph of a star in a circle proved that. He also spoke of "picking up objects in the Kuiper Belt". I am not sure what was picked up. Maybe Mars? - David Talbott again showed his slide show of 1997. I am always ready to pick up a few new considerations and iconography from these lectures, but they expand only at a snail's pace from year to year or from conference to conference. Talbott still claims a 6 mile deep excavation at the north pole of Mars due to a stupendous electrical "scar" (meaning an arc). Others, however, have since shown that this hole most likely was an ocean, complete with strand lines. It would explain some of the many water markings on Mars. It would also explain the shift in the equator of Mars, above which there are almost no electrical scars. These facts could easily be woven into a narrative of Martian events. This is the "smoking mirror" of Mesoamerican iconography. Still the "one story" and "no others anywhere." Chaos as "clouds of ejected particles" (likely plasma in glow mode). And the world mountain as a plasma outpouring from Mars (it was Jupiter). There was more. I agree with much, but some misses the mark -- in my humble opinion. (4) random afterthoughts.... - On the first day Thornhill was repeatedly given credit for "having demonstrated" this or that, as if the speakers were beholding to him. I didn't get the connection. - There seem to be many efforts at establishing "first thought of" dates as a manner of establishing primacy. - Most speakers who attempt to incorporate plasma concepts, miss the mark and exhibit a complete lack of understanding. - The LostWorldForum.org needs a FRO file, Frequently Refuted Objections. - Being correct doesn't prove anything. - Never say "nano" or "quantum." We gave Walter Radtke a lift to the airport. His plane for SF left a little earlier than ours. I had Walter sit up front, because Kees, who drove, is a more charming conversationalist. Radtke told of his life: Army, cars, building motorcycles. His 35 year old VW bus had died recently. I mentioned the need for ecumenicalism among catastrophists. Walter, hearing that we were going to Portland, suggested looking up Talbott. "He is a very pleasant person," said he. I said, "I had lunch with Talbott a year ago in an effort to de-satanize myself in his eyes." Walter cracked up. (end)