UFOs at Flagler Beach, Florida?

Here is a video from a "local news" station in Flagler County, Florida, reporting on an unidentified ball of flame which several Flagler Beach residents saw earlier this week at about 11 pm, descending towards the Atlantic Ocean.

According to the news reporters, the FAA was notified after several citizens called local law enforcement, and the FAA has confirmed that no aircraft were in the vicinity, and thus the possibility that the citizens saw a plane in distress has been ruled out. Furthermore, the Coast Guard apparently conducted a search of the waters off of Flagler Beach beginning at about 11:45 pm and called off the search at about 8am the next morning, having found nothing.

This has led some to speculate that the ball of fire could have been some kind of UFO. Others are dismissing it as nothing more than a floating Chinese lantern, as described in the news story below:



This particular story is of personal interest to me, as I have fond memories of a day of skydiving from the Flagler County Airport while in the area for a parachute meet during my years on the West Point Parachute Team. The photograph below shows my teammates and I with the beach and the ocean in the background, taken in December 1989 (your faithful author is the individual on the far left of the formation as you face it, wearing a black sweatshirt).



















The area covered in this photograph can be seen in the Google Map, below (the arrows indicate the approximate line of sight and edges of the photographer's field of vision). You can see the line of Interstate 95 cutting across a diagonal near the lower left corner of the photo, and the line of Highway 100 / Moody Boulevard running towards the ocean in the right side of the photo and taking a bend to the left as it nears the coastal town of Flagler Beach. The pier in the videos above is located almost precisely along the line of Highway 100 / Moody Boulevard, to the right of the rightmost skydiver in this photo.

























The presence of a skydiving community near Flagler Beach gives rise to another possible explanation for the activity discussed in the videos above. Rather than a rogue Chinese lantern, perhaps the mysterious light was the result of the following scenario: a prank-loving skydiver took a Cessna up to about 11,000 feet and jumped out, activating pyrotechnic flares or powerful lights attached to his boot or lower leg either while in freefall or after deploying his parachute. He could then have spiraled down for a beach landing, collected up his gear, and been out of there without leaving a trace for the Coast Guard to find when they began their search an hour later.

In any case, I did not notice any alien activity on any of the skydives I made while in Flagler County in 1989. I did notice a pretty nice-looking wave in the first video above, at exactly the 1:00 mark. None of the surfers in the video are actually near that wave, which does lead me to believe that something strange was going on in the area around Flagler Beach when the video was taken.

Disassembly and reassembly of the body in ancient Egyptian texts and ongoing shamanic ritual

We have previously quoted a passage from Hamlet's Mill, by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, in which -- drawing on the study of shamanic culture by Laszlo Vajda -- they explain that:

The real shamanistic initiation of the soul happens in the world of spirits -- while his body lies unconscious in his tent for days -- who dismember the candidate in the most thorough and drastic manner and sew him together afterwards with iron wire, or reforge him, so that he becomes a new being capable of feats which go beyond the human. 122.

Interestingly enough, John Anthony West sees a possible parallel between this graphic spiritual dismemberment and reconstruction of the (living) shaman and the spiritual dismemberment and reconstruction of the dead pharaoh described in the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (some of the oldest surviving texts from any culture on earth).

On page 146 of his indispensable book Serpent in the Sky, John Anthony West juxtaposes these most ancient descriptions in the Pyramid Texts with accounts of the beliefs of modern-day shamans of the Yakout tribe, living in eastern Siberia. First, citing Robert Lafont in Encylopedies des Mystiques, we learn:

A Yakout shaman, Sofron Zatayev, affirms that customarily the future shaman dies and spends three days without food and drink. Formerly one was subjected to a thrice-performed ceremony during which he was cut in pieces. Another shaman, Pyorty Ivanov, told us about this ceremony in detail: the members of the candidate were detached and spearated with an iron hook, the bones were cleaned, the flesh scraped, the body liquids thrown away and the eyes torn out of their sockets. After this operation the bones were reassembled and joined with iron. According to another shaman, the dismembering ceremony lasted three to seven days: during this time the candidate remained in suspended animation, like a corpse, in a solitary place. West 146.

Next to this description, Mr. West places a passage from the Pyramid Texts, from R.O. Faulkner's 1969 translation, in which the similarities are so remarkable that there must have been some cultural connection somewhere in the distant past:

I split open your eyes for you . . . I open your mouth for you with the adze of iron which split open the mouths of the gods . . . the iron which issued from Seth, with the adze of iron. . . This King washes himself when Ra appears . . . Isis nurses him . . . Horus accepts him beside him . . . he cleanses this king's double, he wipes over the flesh . . . Raise yourself, O King; receive your head, collect your bones, gather your limbs together, throw off the earth from your flesh . . . The Great Protectress . . . will give you your head, she will re-assemble your bones for you. . . join together your members. . . bring your heart into your body. . . O King, receive your water, gather together your bones. 146.

The similarities to the two experiences are obvious. Note in particular the prominence of the use of iron, as well as the details of the re-assembly of the body in both the shamanic and the ancient Egyptian passages. Note also that the shamanic initiate is in some sense "dead" when he undergoes this ordeal, just as was the ancient pharaoh.

From these passages, it appears that shamanic cultures have somehow preserved some of the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians (unless you wish to maintain that such details crop up all by themselves by some process of geographical necessity in widely removed cultures with no contact between them whatsoever, a belief that was particularly common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but which is clearly based on erroneous and somewhat ridiculous theories). Certainly, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend believed that shamanic cultures were the heirs of very ancient knowledge, as seen from a quotation cited in this previous post.

What other cultures inherited wisdom from ancient Egypt, or from some now-forgotten predecessor to ancient Egypt? Perhaps there are other cultures which display remarkable patterns of thought common to ancient Egypt but which conventional theory maintains had no possibility of cultural contact or influence. Could the importance ascribed to precessional numbers in many very old Chinese traditions, precessional numbers encoded into the pyramids and other ancient Egyptian monuments and mythologies, indicate some cultural inheritance bequeathed to China from the Egyptians as well?

These are all questions which John Anthony West raises by his insightful discovery of the parallels between shamanic tradition and the descriptions of the afterlife in the most ancient Egyptian texts.

Earth's first Trojan asteroid confirmed: powerful evidence in favor of the hydroplate theory

Just yesterday, we examined the many aspects of asteroids which cause serious problems for conventional theorists but which are readily explained by the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown.

One of the pieces of evidence discussed in that post was the existence of asteroids which share earth's orbit but which do not orbit the earth themselves -- they orbit the sun along the earth's path (and perform complicated dances while they orbit, due to the physics of the three bodies involved -- the companion asteroid, the earth, and the sun).

In the last of the "bullet points" on that blog post, in fact, an asteroid companion of earth, named 3753 Cruithne, was mentioned in the context of the likelihood that such asteroids were most likely ejected from earth itself in the not-too-distant past (probably not more than a million years ago).

Cruithne was discovered in 1983 by astronomer Duncan Waldron (originally of Scotland, now residing in New South Wales, Australia), but its complicated and unusual "horseshoe" orbit was not deciphered until 1997, by astronomers Paul A. Weigert, Kimmo A. Innanen, and Seppo Mikkola, and described in the scholarly journal Nature in an article entitled "An asteroidal companion to the Earth."

Now, unknown to me when I was discussing asteroids yesterday but published in today's edition of Nature (July 28, 2011), Professor Weigert along with Martin Connors and Christian Viellet reveal that their examination of the data of an otherwise-unnamed asteroid known as 2010 TK7 prove it to be the first-known "Trojan" asteroid orbiting the sun along earth's path in the gravitational Lagrange point located 60^o ahead of earth when measured from the sun.

Perhaps the best explanation of what Trojan asteroids and Lagrange points are can be found on the web page created for 2010 TK7 by Professor Weigert et al. Other recent articles which do a good job discussing this new discovery include this one from Tom's Astronomy Blog and this one from astronomer Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Blog (which contains an excellent diagram and discussion of all five Lagrange points around a large orbiting body).

Amazingly, Dr. Brown discusses Lagrange points and the asteroids that inhabit them in his discussion of why asteroids provide powerful confirmation of his hydroplate theory, and he did so well before this new Trojan was discovered on earth's orbit. Dr. Brown notes that:

Without the hydroplate theory, one has difficulty imagining situations in which an asteroid would (a) settle into any of Jupiter’s Lagrange points (let alone one of Jupiter’s symmetric Lagrange points), (b) capture a moon, especially a moon with about the same mass as the asteroid, or (c) have a circular orbit, along with its moon, about their common center of mass. If all three happened to an asteroid, astronomers would be shocked; no astronomer would have predicted that it could happen to a comet.

And yet, Jupiter's L4 Lagrange point (60^o ahead of Jupiter along its orbit) has 1,061 asteroids in it, and Jupiter's L5 Lagrange point (60^o behind) has 681. The hydroplate theory explains how so many asteroids could have made the required "soft landing" into these points.

As discussed in the previous post, the hydroplate theory argues that asteroids are composed of earth material ejected into space in the violent rupture that initiated the flood and left the scar in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that is visible in the image on this web page. The rocks and water ejected into space were moving at about the same speed and with the same angular velocity, and some of them ended up grouping together to form larger asteroids composed of rocks packed fairly loosely (hence the surprisingly low density of many asteroids) and held together by frozen ice. Dr. Brown explains what happened next:

According to the hydroplate theory, asteroids formed near Earth’s orbit. Then, the radiometer effect spiraled them outward, toward the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Some spiraled through Jupiter’s circular orbit and passed near both L4 and L5. Jupiter’s huge gravity would have slowed those asteroids that were moving away from Jupiter but toward L4. That braking action would have helped some asteroids settle into the L4 bowl. Conversely, asteroids that entered L5 were accelerated toward Jupiter, so they would quickly be pulled out of L5 by Jupiter’s gravity. The surprising excess of asteroids near Jupiter’s L4 is what we would expect based on the hydroplate theory.

This same process would explain the existence of asteroids co-orbiting the sun along earth's orbital path (including Cruithne and 2010 TK7), which are difficult to explain otherwise. Dr. Brown says, "But how could a slowly moving object ever reach, or get near, either point? Most likely, it barely escaped from Earth. " In other words, conventional theories have a difficult time explaining how an asteroid traveling through space could approach at such a slow velocity that it would land at one of earth's own Lagrange points delicately enough to stay there and begin to orbit along with earth. However, the problem goes away if asteroids originated from earth in the first place, and those which ended up at the Lagrange points were those with insufficient velocity to escape beyond those points.

Many of the articles announcing the amazing confirmation of 2010 TK7's identity as the first "earth Trojan" excitedly predict that they might become valuable destinations for future space missions, since they are so close to earth and yet may contain rare minerals and non-earth elements (see, for example, this article in Space.com). These predictions are based upon the conventional theory that asteroids come from outer space -- either from other planets or from the hypothetical "pre-solar nebula" that "evolved" into the current solar system.

However, if the hydroplate theory is correct, then asteroids are originally from earth and will not be likely to harbor valuable non-earth elements. Dr. Brown makes the prediction that rocks in asteroids will be found to be typical of those in earth's own crust, and that "expensive efforts to mine asteroids to recover strategic or precious metals will be a waste of money."

One of the most powerful confirmations of a correct theory is its predictive ability: if it indeed represents a better explanation for the world around us, it should be able to make predictions which are later found to be true. Dr. Brown makes many predictions throughout his book, and now that NASA's Dawn spacecraft is orbiting the asteroid Vesta enroute to a rendezvous with Ceres, some of his predictions on asteroids may be confirmed in the next few years.

I take the recent announcement of the discovery of earth's first "Trojan" asteroid to be another compelling confirmation of the hydroplate theory as well.

What about Vesta and the asteroid belt?

You may know that NASA's Dawn spacecraft successfully entered orbit around the asteroid Vesta earlier this month, on July 16th. It began taking photographs and other data -- a recent photo of the asteroid is shown above. Dawn, which launched in September, 2007, is scheduled to remain in orbit around Vesta for a year, departing in July of 2012, after which it will head to the asteroid Ceres, with a scheduled arrival in February, 2015.

Vesta is formally designated as "4 Vesta," since it was the fourth object in the asteroid belt to be successfully identified, on March 29, 1807. The previous three bodies identified were Ceres (or "1 Ceres"), Pallas ("2 Pallas"), and Juno ("3 Juno"). In spite of being number four, Vesta is the second most-massive object known in the asteroid belt, behind Ceres. It is actually slightly smaller in size than Pallas, but about 20% more massive. The somewhat unusual mass characteristics of asteroids is an important clue to their origin, as we will see.

Current literature often designates Vesta a "protoplanet," believing that it is a more "evolved" object than a simple asteroid -- perhaps a remnant of an early forming planet that was interrupted in its development by the intrusive formation of massive Jupiter. In fact, the NASA webpage for the Dawn spacecraft (so-called, evidently, because it was intended to study the "dawn" of the planets when it visited the protoplanets of Ceres and Vesta) states that:

During the earliest epochs of our solar system, the materials in the solar nebula varied with their distance from the sun. As this distance increased, the temperature dropped, with terrestrial bodies forming closer to the sun, and icy bodies forming farther away.

The asteroid Vesta and the recently categorized dwarf planet Ceres have been selected because, while both speak to conditions and processes early in the formation of the solar system, they developed into two different kinds of bodies. Vesta is a dry, differentiated object with a surface that shows signs of resurfacing. It resembles the rocky bodies of the inner solar system, including Earth. Ceres, by contrast, has a primitive surface containing water-bearing minerals, and may possess a weak atmosphere. It appears to have many similarities to the large icy moons of the outer solar system.

By studying both these two distinct bodies with the same complement of instruments on the same spacecraft, the Dawn mission hopes to compare the different evolutionary path each took as well as create a picture of the early solar system overall. Data returned from the Dawn spacecraft could provide opportunities for significant breakthroughs in our knowledge of how the solar system formed.

However, the idea that Ceres and Vesta formed before the rest of the planets, and that they represent primitive "protoplanets" that were arrested in their development before they could become planets, has some problems. In fact, the conventional explanation for the entire asteroid belt is fraught with difficulties from the perspective of physics. Just like the theories for the origin of comets and for numerous other phenomena in the solar system and on earth, the conventional theories have numerous flaws, while the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown provides very satisfactory explanations which are in line with the principles of physics.

Dr. Brown devotes an entire section of his book to the origin of asteroids, giving solid arguments that refute the conventional explanations, and which demonstrate that asteroids and comets are extremely similar both in their composition and origins.

In that section, he points out that there are big problems with both the idea that asteroids are the remnants of an exploded planet and the theory that they are prototype planets (or "failed planets"). Some of the powerful evidence against these two explanations includes:

• The fact that orbiting rocks do not come together to form composite bodies without special circumstances, which argues against the failed planet hypothesis. These unique conditions would have been present if the rocks were initially ejected from earth, in the presence of water, which would have led to the coagulation of some composite bodies made up of smaller rocks held together both by gravity but also by ice, which is what we find in the larger asteroids. The low density of many asteroids is supporting evidence for this explanation.
• The discovery by spacecraft since Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 that microparticles thought to have come from asteroids and collisions with asteroids were much more prevalent close to earth than close to the asteroid belt, indicating that asteroids were probably not the source of these microparticles but rather earth itself at some point in the past.
• The fact that some larger asteroids, including Ceres, have actually captured and retained smaller asteroids as "moons." Some even have two such moons. Because of their small size and the principles of physics, Dr. Brown explains that the only way this could happen would be if the asteroids and their moons were ejected with similar velocities and similar trajectories -- it would not be expected to take place in either the "failed planet (protoplanet)" or the "exploded planet" scenarios. In fact, when observations of such moons paired with asteroids were first described, many astronomers scoffed because they knew that their models did not admit such a possibility (the fact of such moons is now impossible to deny).
• The "peanut shape" of several asteroids indicates that they are composed of smaller bodies joined together. However, for such a shape to be formed in outer space, the smaller bodies had to come together at a relatively slow velocity, probably buffered by the presence of gaseous water. Such conditions would be extremely difficult to explain under the conventional "failed planet" scenario or the "exploded planet" scenario, but would fit the model of the hydroplate theory perfectly.
• The minerals of the asteroids, including the prevalence of iron and nickel in most asteroids (including Vesta) is difficult to explain using conventional theories, but accords perfectly with the hydroplate theory, as Dr. Brown explains. The main problem is that the geology of asteroids including Vesta indicates that they were heated successively to very high temperatures many times, which is difficult to explain in the cold reaches of space where the asteroids are found today and where the conventional theories (especially the "protoplanet" explanation) argue that they have been since before the formation of the earth. However, Dr. Brown's theory argues that the asteroids were on earth, deep beneath the surface, and subject to conditions that would create the kind of intense heating and mineral composition that we find in the asteroids before they were ejected into space, which lines up with known rules of physics and geology just as the conventional explanations do not.
• Meteorites, which conventional theories say must have come from asteroids (including Vesta -- see the discussion in this Wikipedia article) often contain remanence or remanent magnetism. Dr. Brown explains that this remanent magnetism is consistent with an origin on a large, magnetized body such as earth, but not consistent with origin on asteroids, even origins on Vesta. Because the hydroplate theory argues that asteroids (including Vesta) are composite bodies, they do not have a single strong magnetic field, but are instead the compound jumble of magnetic fields from their component rocks, which generally cancel one another out and leave an overall lack of remanent magnetic readings.
  
• The spin of most asteroids is consistent with rocks ejected from the earth, and in fact consistent with the spin direction of earth itself.
• Because larger asteroids are held together with a "weak glue" of ice (which originated in the water blasted into space along with the rocks during the violent explosion that initiated the global flood event), impacts from other space rocks sometimes cause this water to melt and to begin to vent into the vacuum of space. When this happens, asteroids resemble comets: in fact, comets and asteroids are pretty much the same animal, except that asteroids have spent most of their existence in closer orbits to the sun and most of them have lost all of their ice -- with some of the larger ones retaining icy mantles below the surface which are still subject to being released later on by imacts. Most comets, on the other hand, have wider orbits and still retain ice, which is still venting.
  
• The hydroplate theory argues for a fairly recent origin for both asteroids and comets. Just as there are sound principles of physics to argue that comets could not have survived in their present numbers for billions of years, there are also sound reasons to argue that asteroids probably have life spans below a million years (particularly those asteroids which have been found orbiting near the orbit of earth, such as 3753 Cruithne). Some of these are outlined in Dr. Brown's discussion of the origin of asteroids.

In spite of the fact that NASA webpages and the popular press present 4 Vesta as an object whose origin is well known and well understood, the fact is that it is very difficult to argue that it is either a protoplanet that never quite "evolved" into a planet, or a remnant of an exploded planet. The reasons above are elaborated upon more fully on the website of Dr. Brown.

On the other hand, there is every reason to believe that asteroids, including Vesta, provide more powerful evidence for the hydroplate theory and a catastrophic flood on earth within the past 10,000 or so years. Such an event, if it took place, would also shed light on the mysterious capabilities of the civilzations that bequeathed their knowledge to the most ancient builders of the Giza Pyramids, Stonehenge, and to the authors of myths which were recorded in extreme antiquity. This connection is the subject of the Mathisen Corollary book, and this blog.

Birthdate of E.A. Wallis Budge

Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge was born on July 27, 1858. He began learning Assyrian at the age of 15, and the ancient Egyptian language at 25 (the year he began working for the British Museum).

He became a prolific author on subjects of ancient Egyptian texts, history and religion, publishing translations of and commentaries on the Papyrus of Ani (a seventy-eight foot long papyrus, a section of which -- the weighing of the heart scene -- is shown above) as well as many lesser-known works. Many of these are now available online, including some of his books on Egyptian hieroglyphics. While scholarship has progressed in some ways beyond his observations (which are now over a century old), it must be remembered that at the time Wallis Budge was working to advance the understanding of ancient Egypt, the unlocking of the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics by Champollion had only been accomplished four or five decades previously.

(The fact that Champollion's initial breakthrough did not take place until 1822, and that it took some time after that to piece together the entire system, even then imperfectly, is an important argument against the conventional theory that the Micmac writing system recorded by missionaries in the 1600s and 1700s was somehow invented by those Catholic priests based upon Egyptian hieroglyphics).

In his 1911 work, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, Wallis Budge argued that the Egyptian mythology was native to Africa and not a product of influence from Asia. The book is valuable as an insight into the kind of thinking that was common in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, which held that belief systems basically reflected the racial and environmental characteristics of the people of various areas, and that such beliefs would simply evolve among members of one area in different centuries, even without any cultural contact. For example, in his preface to that book, he argues against the possibility that ancient Egyptian beliefs could have survived in altered form in African peoples to this day, saying that "The power of the Egyptians reached no farther than the northern end of the 'Island' of Meroe, and it was not truly effective beyond Napata, the modern Merawi, near the foot of the Fourth Cataract" (xvii).

Instead of admitting to the possibility of any sort of cultural influence, Wallis Budge instead argues that "Modern Sudani beliefs are identical with those of ancient Egypt, because the Egyptians were Africans and the modern peoples of the Sudan are Africans. And making allowances for differences in natural circumstances and geographic location, ancient and modern Nilotic peoples give outward expression to their beliefs in the same way" (xvii).

This argument is typical of the kind of racial and/or geographical determinism that dominated much scholarly analysis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the sentences quoted above, Wallis Budge is actually arguing that African peoples who live in the Nile region will always evolve the same general religious beliefs, even if separated by centuries and with no contact or knowledge of one another. The connection between this kind of thinking and the Darwinism which had such an impact in the decades of the 1850s through the 1930s should be fairly clear: it is very much analogous to asserting that fish or birds in a certain type of environment will always evolve bills or fins which are shaped a certain way.

We have previously discussed the ways in which the beliefs that are prevalent at various periods of time can influence the analysis and the conclusions of scholars in that period, and that they can be almost transparent to those scholars at the time, and more obvious when we look back with the perspective of a century of history. The tenets of Darwinism clearly distorted analysis a hundred years ago, and in many ways continue to do so in conventional academia today (although in different ways than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries).

In spite of the ways in which we might often disagree with his conclusions, the work of Wallis Budge remains very valuable. He was a gifted writer who covered a tremendous amount of material, and therefore becomes a sort of familiar guide to the reader after a short period of time. It would be a shame to spurn his friendly companionship through the mysteries of ancient Egypt simply because he reached different conclusions.

Further, Wallis Budge often had perceptive insights, insights that might be more difficult for analysts of today to make due to the particular blind spots or biases of our own time. Just as in literature the weaknesses of a protagonist are often directly related to his strengths (think of most characters in Shakespeare, for example), the very fact that Wallis Budge came from a very different time than the one we inhabit today allowed him some perspective to see things that we today might overlook, even as it may have also led him to some conclusions which we today perceive to be naive.

One valuable insight, and one which he discusses in many of his works (including the book on Osiris and Egyptian beliefs in resurrection referenced above) is Wallis Budge's discussion of the tension between monotheistic and polytheistic expressions, which seem to peacefully coexist almost simultaneously in many Egyptian texts. We discussed this noteworthy topic in a previous post entitled "God and the gods." Wallis Budge has a similarly-titled chapter in his book discussing the Papyrus of Ani beginning at page 99 (which can be read online here).

E.A. Wallis Budge was a complicated figure, as well as an extremely intelligent and learned man, who rose to the pinnacle of scholarship in England in his time, from extremely humble beginnings. He should not be pigeonholed or dismissed as someone whose contributions have been eclipsed by the passage of time or the progress of modern academia (which in many ways can be criticized as being far more close-minded today and more susceptible to groupthink than scholarship of previous centuries).

On this his birthday, it is appropriate to consider the sizable contributions of this pioneering scholar and thinker, and to be grateful for his life spent in pursuit of the mysteries of antiquity.

Comet origins and the mysteries of mankind's ancient past

Astronomer Tom Van Flandern (1940 - 2009) had a PhD in astronomy specializing in celestial mechanics. He was the former Chief of Celestial Mechanics at the US Naval Observatory. However, he left mainstream science when he began to believe that the conventional explanations for many of the phenomena of the solar system and the universe were incorrect. In particular, Dr. Van Flandern challenged the Big Bang Theory of origins, and the conventional explanation for the origin of comets and asteroids.

In his book Dark Matter, Missing Planets, and New Comets: Paradoxes Resolved, Origins Illuminated (1993), Dr. Van Flandern lays out the problems with the conventional explanations for the topics mentioned above, and puts forward his controversial alternative theories. While I personally believe that the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown provides a better explanation for the origin of comets and asteroids, and one that is backed up by extensive corroborating geological evidence here on earth (see list and links in this post), it is important to note that Dr. Van Flandern was alert to the massive problems in the conventional theories and was bravely putting forward alternative views, even though it made him unpopular among his fellow astronomers.

In a similar way, I believe that the sheer volume of alternative theories for mankind's ancient past is the result of the massive problems with the conventional timeline, which stimulates thinking people to explore other possible explanations. Even though we might not agree with all or any of them in their entirety, we should view these theories as evidence of the problem with the accepted view, and commend those who are willing to risk ridicule in order to put forward a better suggestion.

Dr. Van Flandern noticed the harmonic relationship of the orbits of the existing planets and the well-known fact that there is a gap in the pattern between Mars and Jupiter, and became the leading modern proponent of the Exploded Planet theory, which proposes that there was once a watery "Planet V" between Mars and Jupiter, which exploded, leaving the asteroid belt in its wake. He further controversially suggested that the inhabitants of this exploded planet, realizing in advance the need to leave, came to earth and that we are their descendents.

Whatever one thinks of these speculations of extraterrestrial life, Dr. Van Flandern's arguments about the problems with the conventional explanation for the origin of comets are sound, and his proposition that comets originated with a violent explosive ejection from the inner solar system appears to provide a much better answer than the existence of a hypothetical Oort Cloud.

In the previous post about Comet Hale-Bopp, we examined some of the problems with the conventional explanations for the origin of comets. In his book, which can be read online here, Dr. Van Flandern explains the conventional theory and its problems. First, he explains the size of the proposed Oort Cloud, which is important to understand in order to perceive the problems with the theory. If the entire solar system as we know it, out to the orbit of Pluto, were the size of a US dime (just over one centimeter), then the Oort Cloud would be a shell of comets in a generally stationary posture, hovering far from the sun, an average of six meters away (over nineteen and a half feet out). This analogy reduces the actual distances by a factor of 10¹⁵ and can help us understand how hard it would be for a comet, hovering in stasis, to be dislodged in such a way that it would actually enter the dime-sized solar system and be visible to us on earth at all.

Dr. Van Flandern explains:

These comets [in the hypothetical Oort Cloud] are essentially stationary with respect to the Sun, having mean velocities in the scale model of just 3 millimeters per 1000 years. Passing stars, on the other hand, move relatively rapidly, with typical speeds of a meter or so per 1000 years, and stir up the comets they come very close to. It is deduced that in this way an occasional comet will by chance have its motion redirected towards the Sun in such a way that it will manage to pass within the 1mm-diameter sphere centered on the Sun, within which we on Earth can discover and observe it. [. . .] The number of comets within the cloud is believed to be immense in order to provide the few comets we observe, because the chances are so small of any one comet being perturbed into the observable range. And the absence of certain planetary perturbations in their motion proves that a large number of new comets arriving from the cloud could never have passed so close to the Sun before, even though they complete a revolution around their orbits every few million years. How could these curious objects evolve into such a seemingly improbable situation? 181.

Dr. Van Flandern then goes on to illustrate evidence which argues against the Oort Cloud theory. For one thing, it is difficult to explain a mechanism that would allow comets to coagulate at all in the near-perfect vacuum that exists so far from the sun. Further, the Oort Cloud theory must account for the complete regeneration of the cloud whenever it is wiped out by galactic tides, molecular clouds, and passing stars.

A major problem he and other astronomers have also pointed out is the complete absence of hyperbolic comets -- comets whose orbits are so fast that they will come into the solar system only once, slingshot around the sun, and then disappear into deep space forever, never to return. If comets are launched from an Oort Cloud by the perturbation of passing stars, some should travel so fast that they would have hyperbolic orbits. However, none with such velocity have ever been observed. On the other hand, if comets originated from an explosion in the inner solar system, then any matter that was not initially traveling fast enough to completely escape the sun's pull would eventually reach a point where it came back: such objects would then orbit far out again and return. In other words, if comets came from the inner solar system originally, we would not expect to see hyperbolic comets, only comets making their first return or later returns after such an event.

As explained in the previous post, over millions of years, some of these non-hyperbolic comets might be accelerated by a close encounter with Jupiter to the point that they would be ejected from the solar system, and this is the reason that explanations for comet origins must be fairly recent, because if comets originated billions of years ago, Jupiter would have captured or ejected more of them than exist today. This is why there is an Oort Cloud theory in the first place, but if comets originated in a relatively recent violent explosion from within the inner solar system, it would also explain the number of comets still in existence. However, the lack of hyperbolic comets shows that the Oort Cloud explanation is not a good one, and that an explanation which provides for comet origins from the inner solar system would be far more satisfactory.

Incidentally, Dr. Van Flandern points out that his criticism of the Oort Cloud theory does not imply criticism of the cloud's namesake in any way. In a footnote on page 191, Dr. Van Flandern says "Astronomer Oort always maintained that an origin of comets from within the solar system, perhaps in connection with the event which gave rise to the asteroid belt, was the most probable."

While Dr. Van Flandern proposed an exploding fifth planet for their origin (a planet which must have been watery, since comets are mostly ice), the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown would also provide the same satisfactory explanation as the theory of Dr. Van Flandern. The only difference is that the violent explosion that launched the comets and asteroids came from earth rather than a hypothetical planet between Mars and Jupiter, and that there is extensive evidence for such an explosion -- which initiated a global flood -- in the geological record on earth's surface including on the bottom of the oceans.

It is also worth pointing out that the Exploding Planet theory of Dr. Van Flandern has been used as a launching point for the idea that our solar system was the scene of an ancient extraterrestrial war, a war in which the destruction of the missing planet was the ultimate blow. This theory, which has been put forward by Dr. Joseph P. Farrell in his books including the Cosmic War, also falls into the category of theories written by those who perceive the enormous problems with the conventional academic models and which try to explain the ancient history of mankind on earth in a way that is more consistent with the evidence. Whether or not we actually agree with the hypotheses that alternative theorists put forward, I believe they should be commended for bravely offering alternatives to the accepted wisdom.

Tom Van Flandern's book provides an excellent explanation of the problems with the currently-held theory of comet origins. It is clear from his own theories and of others who have followed his work that the question of comet origins actually intersects the question of ancient human history on earth as well. I personally believe that the hydroplate theory offers a new and very helpful perspective on these questions, not only the question of the origin of comets but also of the mysteries of mankind's ancient past. The Mathisen Corollary book explores these connections.

Comet Hale-Bopp

Comet Hale-Bopp was discovered on July 23, 1995 by two independent amateur astronomers, Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp, both from the US (New Mexico and Arizona, respectively). It was still a great distance from the sun when it was discovered, and apparently holds the current record for furthest comet from the sun discovered by amateur astronomers, according to the Wikipedia entry on the comet.

Comet Hale-Bopp became quite spectacular in the night sky during the early months of 1997. At that time, I was deployed to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California (one of many times). I distinctly remember walking out late one night to catch a couple hours of sleep on the hood of my HMMWV (I was a battalion supply officer at the time, and thus was not sleeping out on the ground with a line company the way you do when you are a platoon leader, company commander, or company executive officer) and seeing the gorgeous comet hanging high in the night sky over the desert. I said out loud, "That has to be a comet!" (I was alone in a remote logistics point; there was no one else around to hear me).

Amazing as it may seem, I had not heard of the impending arrival of the comet, having been consumed in the prior months with uploading a battalion's worth of Bradley Fighting Vehicles and other large equipment for the deployment, which was a fairly unusual deployment in that we were taking special "Force XXI" vehicles to the desert for full-speed maneuver testing. Also, the internet at that time was nothing like the internet and web of today, and was not something I was regularly visiting, especially during the full-time activity of being a Battalion S4 in the Force XXI Brigade preparing for an NTC rotation.

After various "battles" and training exercises, members of the leadership of the task force and Brigade Combat Team would regularly report to portable trailers that would be moved about in the desert and hooked up to generators, where we could review the successes and failures and discuss them in a formal "after-action review" (AAR), and at the beginning of these, the observer-controllers from NTC would often put together a short video clip of the news that was taking place in the outside world. Shortly after the night on which I noticed the comet for the first time, we were horrified to learn in one of these AAR clips about the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult members, who believed they were leaving the earth to join a spacecraft which they thought was trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.

The origins of comets are a great mystery, and the conventional theories for their origin are fraught with problems, as hydroplate theory author and West Point graduate Walt Brown explains in this section of his website. For one thing, comets tend to be "swept" out of solar orbit by the massive planets of Saturn and especially Jupiter over the centuries (either sucked into those planets or ejected right out of the solar system by the slingshot effect of Jupiter's tremendous gravity), and if comets we see today have really been in action for billions of years, many of them would likely have been swept up long ago. Based on some calculations, comets are either being resupplied by some unknown activity, or their current numbers suggest that they originated less than 12,000 years ago.

Another problem Dr. Brown discusses is the fact that most near-parabolic comets falling toward the sun appear to be doing so for the first time ever. Dr. Brown discusses the evidence for this observation, which involves the speeds of comets and the number of comets that fall into categories of different speeds (see discussion and diagram labeled Figure 155 on this page).

In order to try to explain these problematic features of the comets we find in our solar system, astronomers invented a speculative solution known as the Oort Cloud, a hypothetical cloud of dust at some distance outside the solar system from which comets must be ejected by the perturbations caused by other stars in the galaxy. This solution has several problems, including the fact that it has difficulty explaining short-period comets, whose orbits do not go past Jupiter at their furthest point (aphelion).

As with so many other difficulties of geology, the hydroplate theory explains the origins of comets quite satisfactorily. In fact, Dr. Brown demonstrates that almost all of the characteristics of comets are consistent with the theory that they originated from the violent ejection of massive amounts of water on earth at the initiation of the cataclysmic flood event, within 12,000 years ago.

Comets are just another data point which seem to indicate the accuracy of the hydroplate theory versus its competitors. The Mathisen Corollary book examines the ways in which this innovative geological theory may also explain many mysteries of mankind's ancient past as well.

The image above shows Comet Hale-Bopp in April of 1997, above the desert of California's Death Valley, very close to the National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, California, where I was when I first noticed it.