Subject: Las Vegas report, January 6 2012 We arrived Friday night, registered, got badges, a three-ring binder. For some reason, I got a "press" version. Press there wasn't. They simply do not have any hired experts working their cause. Or if they do, they are inept. There was a write-up (actually a copy of parts of some talks) in an on-line magazine dealing with (I think) intelligent design issues. We sat in on some previews of talks. After a while we got up to go eat, to come back later (a long walk). The following day I counted seated attendance. I got 132, Kees got 240. Somewhat more than the strictly Saturnian attendance at the NPA conference in Baltimore in July '11. Over the next few days there were many interesting and professional speakers which kept us totally engaged. I took notes on anything that stood out. Basically nothing of the "science" except for some of my opinionated rejections of a few theories and a few speakers. I was looking more for the tone of the presentations by the Thunderbolts people, to see if they were edging their way to reason. I do not think it was exactly happening. So let me jump directly to my grousings: Friday night's presentation started with an introduction by Wal Thornhill, "physicist and natural philosopher." I took immediate notice of the fact that suddenly much was made of Velikovsky (he was not mentioned in Baltimore), and Ralph Juergens (only mentioned a few times in Baltimore). Wal also again claimed that he was the only one in the world who had predicted the lightning flash directed at the Deep Impact projectile which reached it from comet Temple-1 before contact (in 2005). He mentioned this at the Baltimore NPA also. The prediction dates to July 3, 2005 *the day before), and then also retroactively placed in January. Quoted from my website: "I made (the same) predictions, first in March, 2005, when I became aware of the Deep Impact mission, which I posted somewhere on my site on July 3, 2005. ... I also predicted that most likely the disturbance of the comet's electrical field by the approaching probe would cause an inrush of electrons speeding ahead of the arrival of the probe, causing an explosive arc at the impact location well before the probe arrived...." -- from http://saturniancosmology.org/deep.php So, uh, Wal Thornhill was not the only one who predicted the flash (and I lose points for suggesting a green flare). Quoting myself from the next paragraph: "I do not need to claim primacy, however, because the flash would be completely predictable from an electrical standpoint." When I started to write the "deep.php" web page, I searched high and low for earlier mention on the Thunderbolts site and on Thorrnhill's site, but found nothing. Only later the claim was made that the predictions were made as early as January (beating my March date). The repeated mention of Velikovsky was overwhelming. Thornhill even went as far as to play a video clip of Velikovsky talking about nuclear war as an introduction to his presentation -- for reasons unclear to me, for nuclear war had nothing to do with his talk. But I'm sure all the attendees felt confirmed that they were in the right lecture room (as apposed, for example, at the "Hair Products" convention down the hall). Talbott started a talk with a reference to the "Velikovsky's comet" and the statement that all other researchers agreed with that notion. What notion? The existence of the "Venus comet" is the most contentiously disputed idea of Velikovsky's complete menagerie, perhaps because of the concomitant claims for the Exodus, and the much more absurd "out of Jupiter" notion which still persists. But then Talbott subtly identified the "Velikovsky comet" with his dragon of the polar configuration and moved it to about 3100 BC (when the polar configuration collapsed), and claimed: "and that after the myth-making epoch there is not a single new archetype. That was an incredible revelation that secured for me the possibility of a unified theory of myth." And that is exactly what I have been busy disproving. The "dragon" did show up, but not until 2349 BC. It was not Velikovsky's planet Venus dragon, but a full-fledged disconnected plasmoid launched from Venus some 20,000,000 miles away. It is the very object used as the icon for this conference -- it was seen again in the summer of 685 BC -- yet not one word of identification was ever sounded. Even more overwhelming were the repeated acknowlegements of Ralph Juergens, and his efforts in explaining the electrical properties of the Velikovskian catastrophes and the likely workings of the Sun. Juergens brought the first mention of plasmoid thunderbolts into the discourse of catastrophism. Does anyone remember that? He reports that W. Bostick (Scientific American 1957) claimed that plasmoids could move "fast enough to travel from Jupiter to the orbit of Venus in the space of a month or so, but not so fast as to blur the form and surface details of such an object." What a strange coincidence then, that in 685 BC, this is exactly what happened. I estimate that the travel from Jupiter, not to Venus but to the Sun, took 11 days, not 30, but still slow enough to have the details recorded and then to be used 2600 years later as icon for a Conference. The ongoing tributes to Velikovsky and Juergens struck me as strange and perhaps a little stilted. I have no recollection of much talk of Velikovsky at the 2001 Conference in Laughlin, and nothing said of Juergens. I was simply astounded at the number of instances with this conference that the name Juergens was mentioned. Dozens and dozens. Yet, over the last few years, every text by Juergens has been removed from the internet. It looked to me like a purposeful coverup designed to shift the primacy for plasma ideas to Thornhill, "physicist and natural philosopher." Recently the admins of the Thunderbolts blog had use my site to list URLs for Juergens' texts. On _my_ webpages I have taken an aggressive exposition on Juergens in the last few years. At some point I rewrote the opening page (lost.php) to say: "It is absolutely astounding that in the 40 years since 1972 no one has taken proper account of the repulsive forces first introduced here by Juergens... (in 1972!)" Juergens is mentioned 12 times on http://saturniancosmology.org/lost.php, my opening page -- 50 times in all. I rewrote that page in January of 2011 -- adding the "Sledge Hammer of Ignorance," as a quote by Hertha von Dechend from "Hamlet's Mill." How could I go wrong with that? In March of 2011 we had lunch with Talbott. The next week I got the first ever mention by the Thunderbolts people or any of their 10 affiliated websites (all of which are written sub-rosa and under assumed names): a link to my site listed on Michael Armstrong's site (Mikamar.biz), in some obscure location and without comments. Armstrong sells the Thunderbolts books. .............. Let me give my reaction to some of the other talks. This is more critical than sensible. I have no notes on really outstanding talks. Talbott talked on myth. I was glad to see this, although it was only an acknowlegement of myth. Nothing new came forward. He equated the plasmoid (used as an icon for the conference) to an interstellar nebula (that is insane!). I think he said "by analogy." I hope so. A planetary nebula is actually a galaxy. Talbott started a later lecture "Historical Reconstruction" with a reference to Velikovsky. "A mention as I always do" said he. And then followed mention of all the elements from his 1980 book -- the "polar alignment" (with Jupiter still blocking the Sun, no less!), "bedrock" elements, "chaos monster(s)", "mother goddess", "warrior hero," and with images from a 1997 slideshow. People at the Thunderbolts Forum have pointed out that "chaos monsters" have no mythological status whatsoever. Nothing has ever been found in antiquity to represent "chaos monsters." It has as much validity as the "Sea People," another made-up name. Mel Acheson talked of theory and data -- interesting. But Mel felt the need to define science and scientists again, bash astronomy some, and to suggest that plasma is indecipherable (nice attitude that gets you nowhere!). Perhaps this is all to be expected at a conference of alternative cosmologists. But it gets tiresome, for it seems that the speaker is talking to a closed group of compatriots, and that sort of bashing has to be off-putting to legitimate speakers and attendees from engineering and science. Acheson along with AP David provided short relief talks throughout the conference, allowing participants to take breaks. These short talks were mostly commentaries. I think David mentioned a "heterodox view of Homer," but I have no idea what that meant, and in fact it seemed more like something coming from the moderator, Bill Mullen. Anyway, David again mentioned Velikovsky and Juergens, and opened up "myth." Cardona talked in promotion of his 3rd or 4th book, "Invading Cosmic Bolides," which was meant to cover the event at the start of the Younger Dryas. I bought the book, and read it. The talk was read from a paper, and he sounded mildly aggravated (why?). He is still holding the Kuiper belt as original to the solar system. Way too many conclusions (in my opinion) are made by analogy (but what are you going to do in a talk?) and via single specific quotations. He also dismissed much of the research of the Firestone group (amazing!) and then extended the fire in North America to the whole world on the basis of an ash layer. But even this last has not been brought forward by Firestone. A layer of carbon soot does not constitute a fire. Such imaginative narration may have served Cardona well in the past, when he was speculating about Saturn millions of years ago, but he is on very thin ice in the outright dismissal of the work of Firestone and Topper (and 23 et alii). Cardona's cause for the Younger Dryas (reading this from his book) is a "flaring" of an overhead Saturn (or proto-Saturn) at the time when it enters the Sun's heliosphere (at 100 AU from the Sun, that would take 8000 years to do). He has it that the Younger Dryas "was not as freezingly cold as the Ice Age out of which it had emerged." Say what? First, the last ice age had ended 2000 years earlier, and second, the Younger Dryas was far colder than any previous ice age! The mechanics of this, and of much of "plasma science" are simply science fiction when applied to the Solar System. Cardona has the Sun and Saturn (with Earth below its south pole) involved in "a protracted series of rebounds, deviations, and crossovers of the respective plasma sheaths" (I have absolutely no idea what any of that means), at a location of 100 AU from the Sun. Let me point out that if Saturn was expected to be captured by the Sun, it would have moved into the Sun's domain at 100 AU at a modest speed. If Kepler's equations are applied to this, it would have taken about 8,000 years for Saturn (with Earth in tow) to reach the inner domain of the Sun. More science fiction: Talbott equated (in his talk) the image of the model plasmoid (the icon) with an astronomical "planetary nebula." Although admittedly a visual analog, it could never have been seen by anyone in antiquity. Similarly Thornhill equates the plasmoid shape to a Z-pinch in a plasma stream thousands of light years long and (my notes read) seen by humans. Get serious! How have all these researchers failed to take note of the information which has described plasmoids -- information, in fact often written by them -- or ghost written for them? See for example "Thunderbolts of the Gods" (2003). Currently the plasma mechanics is understood as gigantic structures spanning the Universe. Effects are shown as fake-color slides and talked about, but the talk is entirely lacking in specifics which could be applied to the solar system. Thus no one seems to have any idea of what to do with the plasma ideas on the local level. This despite the fact that Juergens laid all of this out in 1972, and, in fact, managed to develop a complete overview in three articles. I first knew something was going wrong when Van der Sluijs, years ago (and before be dropped all belief in the planets), held that the plasma tail of Venus was envisioned by him to have bent around the ecliptic to have slapped Earth broadside -- causing awesome damage. That was just an insane idea that a sixth-grader might entertain. Plasma in space is the most diffuse of all substances. Earth has passed through the plasma tails of comets without a single measurable indication that this was happening. It is not like standing in the exhaust of a car. But I don't blame them. All this stuff is so unrealistic as to be almost completely beyond comprehension and belief, and certainly beyond anything which could be concocted by the imagination. Unless you grow up playing with electricity, work with devices which depend on plasma flow, are able to imagine sub-atomic particles, and interactions at the level of atomic physics, it is not going to come easily. There is also a complete lack of comprehension about field theory at the solar level, although admittedly nothing much is explained of current conditions either. As an outsider, and these people are almost all outsiders, you have to imagine what might happen, using such universal laws of nature that you think might exist. The "laws," from what I have seen and read of the Thunderbolts people, are almost always wrongly conceived. They simply do not know what they are talking about. To come out with blanket statements like "gravitational and electrical interaction" simply is not enough. .......... Saturday morning, as I mentioned, Mel Acheson suggested that plasma was indecipherable. This may be the tack to take, for nothing said makes any sense. There is now a complete set of web pages posted by bishop Sykes, explaining plasma, but it is utterly boring even if not outright wrong. There is also a set of illustrated pages by Johnson and Johnson, explaining plasma in technical terms, and without partial differential equations or much in vector math. It gets out of hand technically, pointing up factoids which are not needed for an understanding, and without a single relationship to field theory in the Solar System. It's all about the Universe. I'm hoping that Talbott will become inspirationally enlightened. Right now he remains on a track which concludes all of mythology at a date of about 3100 BC. Said he: "There was a point at which I realized there were a 100 mythic archetypes or points of agreement and that they are all connected, and that after the myth-making epoch there is not a single new archetype." Cardona is off on a fantasy of his own, now supported with a 2008 essay by Thornhill. Van der Sluijs has left the fold entirely, dropping the planets, and all else, and imagining it all to be represented as auroras. You cannot get away from the fact that by this time a few thousand articles have been written. No one is going to be converted to another cosmology. I'm not going to be recognized, for I fall too far from the realm of their possibilities. Nor are most other radical cosmologists. Many were invited to speak once, and were never heard of again. There are no references, as a result, anywhere on the Thunderbolts site to Dennis Cox, John Ackerman, Patten and Windsor, Gilligan, or Clube and Napier. But I am still way ahead. After the installation of a graphic file-hit display at the Thunderbolts site, their last published totals ran 826,000 file hits annually (ending in January 2012). I'm currently logging 3,000,000 hits per year. A few more talks: Greg Volk introduces himself as a "young earth Christian." I have felt that the Saturnians assiduously avoided such (which would equate them with a certain class of Young Earthers who take that tack). He talked of "absolutism" (I'm not sure what direction that took), did some Einstein bashing, and proceeded to prove things by analogy and leading questions, like "the speed of light is not determined by space, OK?" (Did I get that right?) Don Scott again introduced the analogy between a biased junction transistor and the outer layers of the Sun. Presented as new, but this had been brought out in 2001, as I recall. Lucas talked of math formulas, "It's an Electric Universe After All" -- but it is difficult to make instant sense of mathematics. He talked again later, extending his theories from particle physics to biology, of which I bought none. Bob Johnson, talked of roots and blood flow, all as electrically controlled, as simple as induced fields, very microscopic, but it works. Sunday: Talbott talked again of "archetypes", "the Saturn myth is as true today as it was earlier" (35 years ago), needed to add, says he, "the polar configuration." "There is no other story" (like mine, perhaps). Then talked of the "great conjunction" probably meaning the "conjunction" identified in the Vedas, but started to confuse this with the "great year," which is something different altogether. He mentions that he stopped researching in 1991, and sold his library. I went up afterwards and handed him a children's book on Mars, printed after the first space ship reached Mars, but still depicting little green men -- "to replenish his library." They figured, said he, that the low northern hemisphere of Mars as due to arcing -- wearing away the surface. I figure it was an ocean which was boiled away. Robert Schoch was a cohort of John Anthony West ("Serpent in the Sky" (1979)) and did an early dating study on the sphinx, placing its construction 7,000 to 9,000 years ago. Could be; that places at the same time as Gobekli Tepe, but all the wrong form (compare Gobekli Tepe with Malta). I think the sphinx more likely dates from between the first and second dynasty. Anyway, his topic was "termination of the ice age" and specifically talked about Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia, mentioning starting dates in 8000 BC (what I figured too). [Dating has since moved back to 11,000 BC.] He is organizing a trip to Gobekli Tepe. Here is another "plasma expert" fantasizing on the effects of plasma on Earth. Here he is throwing in the Peratt column and figures -- which lasted 2500 years -- to explain the three years (his estimate) it took for the cold snap of the Younger Dryas to vanish. He wrote or talked as follows: "In the past, much more powerful plasma events sometimes took place, due to solar outbursts to coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the Sun, or possibly emissions from other celestial objects. Powerful plasma phenomena could cause strong electrical discharges to hit Earth, burning and incinerating materials on our planet's surface." "Plasma hitting the surface of Earth could heat and fuse rock, incinerate flammable materials, melt ice caps, vaporize shallow bodies of water creating an extended deluge of rain, and send the climate into a warming spell." None of which is even remotely likely, unless it was plasma in arc mode, in which case it would be very localized, and maybe cause cooling dust, shutting down sunlight, not warming. "The release of pressure that follows the melting of thousands-of-meters-thick ice sheets can induce earthquakes and even cause hot rock under pressure to melt and erupt to the surface as volcanoes." OK, I give up. This person has not one clue when it comes to (a) the content of the published essays by Peratt, (2) a sense of time for the past, (3) what plasma will or won't do -- and, especially in terms of the devastations mentioned by him: mostly will not do. The "burning and incinerating" that he specifically has reference to happened almost exclusively, and at set latitudes, between 800 and 686 BC. (r3)