Project Serpo Issues: Proven Factual Problems

More on those Darn Linguists and their interactions with the language.

As Clown2 and Anony-Hoaxer do NOT know, linguistics was in its heyday at the time period they're writing about. Edward T. Hall is doing some of his most brilliant work on cultures and how they deal with time and how cultures deal with the concept of personal space. Benjamin Whorf has died a decade before this, but Edward Sapir continues his work and Noam Chomsky is just getting started on his Universal Grammars. There are notable linguistics departments at the Ivy League schools, and the University of Chicago puts out so much research and theoretical work that it becomes associated with a whole branch of anthropological thinking: "The Chicago School."

Artificial languages such as Esperanto and Laadan are being created, and within 15 years. PhD linguist Marc Okrand would show up on the scene and develop artificial languages (REAL languages, folks) for the entertainment business: Klingon and Vulcan. These are not "english sentences spoken with funny combinations of words." They are real languages -- I won't go into the complexities, but you can google them up for yourself.

Linguists have translated writings in extinct languages, too.

But the Serpo linguists have apparently gotten their degrees by sending in cereal boxtops to Harry's All Night Degree Mill. When presented with a real-live specemin they manage to communicate enough to get the alien to agree to send along messages to his own civilization including contact information. They then lose all the data (or let the goats eat it) because the "training" for the Eben mission doesn't include any linguisitc immersion.

The "team" is back to square one.

Meanwhile, the galactic civilization that regularly deals with nine or more other intergalactic civilizations and that had figured out Roman/Greek/Egyptian/Chinese/Aramaic/etc some 2,000 years ago struggles like the dickens (ever since the first contact from EBE1 to say he's alive) and finally comes up with a dictionary of sorts containing a mere 500 words.

Some of which they get wrong.

And they can't figure out the sentence structure. However, weird sentence structures of other alien civilizations are No Problemo. The weird and funky grammars of our ancient languages are also No Problemo.

It's just English. English apparently creates its own Cosmic Stupidity Field.

Originally posted by GradyPhilpott

Originally posted by Byrd

There were two females, one being a doctor and the other being a linguist.

If the female linguist was a cunning linguist, then that might clear up several inconsistencies of the Serpo story.

Oh, go to your room!!!! Shame on you!!!

(actually I was trying to Not make that pun, and you leaped right into it, you wicked thing.)

Originally posted by dgoodpasture

It's possible that an advanced race of intelligent beings can somehow measure space curvature and/or exact distances between celestial bodies a bit more precise than our current primitive methods.

I have a worrying feeling that you're not joking.
Why not just say "Ah, these are Eben light years, not human ones..."

Firstly, this must mean that the Ebens already had space travel in the first place for them to even relocate...That just means that it was not their civilizations main focus of interest... not that the technology never existed until then.

No, the obvious explanation is that it's plain wrong, like so much of the Serpo content.

Originally posted by Byrd
*stuff*

Byrd, you rock, in fact you rock harder than Jimmy Hendrix, and as we all know, he ROCKED!!!

I look forward to reading more from you!



[edit on 11-2-2006 by papa lazarou]

on the subject of the alledged chemivals in the water - the ones that remainrf " unknown " for 20 years

a few points :

#1 as the eben aledgedly terraformed the would - they must have added them , or decided that leaving them in the water was accepable . either way - why dont the eben know whats in thier water ??


#2 by anons testimony the chemicals in th water must be :
a) water soluble
b) mildly toxic to humans
c ) be thermally decomposed at

Originally posted by Byrd
Answering a few posts before continuing onward...

Originally posted by nukunuku

Originally posted by Byrd
But not in the system Zeta Reticuli, which is where Anony-Hoaxer said they went. Anony-Hoaxer said the system had three stars.

well we dont know that do we since its so small it cant be seen with a telescope. It has quite a gravity pull though, so its very dense. Anywayz....keep dissecting

Actually, we DO know. And you touched on the answer, though Anony-Hoaxer and his ilk keep hoping you will forget the very point you mentioned: It has quite a gravity pull though, so its very dense.

When we look through telescopes, we see stars... and if we photograph them, we can see if they have any color changes or movement changes. In fact, we've photographed the entire sky, many times, and tiny sections of the sky many times. Astronomers (pro and amateur) take thousands of pictures of the night sky each and every night of the year.

Astronomers have spotted binary and trinary star systems with "invisible" (dark) companions that are hundreds of times farther away than Zeta Reticuli stars. In fact, they've found planets the size of Jupiter around distant stars. The way they spot it is that the gravity of these dark companions causes the star to "wobble" very slightly in the sky. You can't see it with your eyes, but you CAN see it in a photograph (you could also see it by using specrtal analysis, but that's a longer discussion).

If Zeta Reticuli was a trinary system, they would have known that years ago -- it would have showed by the way the stars wobble when we photograph that part of the sky over the course of years..

And, by the way, Zeta Reticuli does get photographed by pro and amateur astronomers fairly frequently. Hubble's probably taken some photos of that area, too.

[edit on 10-2-2006 by Byrd]

Just to give a little perpective here. What WE are seeing has happened a long TIME AGO.

Originally posted by Byrd

Originally posted by nukunuku

Originally posted by Byrd
But not in the system Zeta Reticuli, which is where Anony-Hoaxer said they went. Anony-Hoaxer said the system had three stars.

well we dont know that do we since its so small it cant be seen with a telescope. It has quite a gravity pull though, so its very dense. Anywayz....keep dissecting

Actually, we DO know. And you touched on the answer, though Anony-Hoaxer and his ilk keep hoping you will forget the very point you mentioned: It has quite a gravity pull though, so its very dense.

Sorry for all the quotes but they are necessary.

Byrd, isn't it true that close binary star systems can't be seen, but are detected by the variation of starlight? I was under the impression that only a few close binaries have actually been photographed, and it is usually infrared and not visible light. Originally it was suspected that Z1 and Z2 might have been double close binaries, which are extremely rare, but it was later proven that there were no companion stars to the two that are 350 billion miles apart.

BTW, your other points are very insightful.

Why didn't you participate more in the "big" thread?

Seems that you've been biting your tongue up till now.

[edit on 2/11/2006 by Hal9000]

Originally posted by Hal9000

Originally posted by Byrd

Originally posted by nukunuku

Originally posted by Byrd
But not in the system Zeta Reticuli, which is where Anony-Hoaxer said they went. Anony-Hoaxer said the system had three stars.

well we dont know that do we since its so small it cant be seen with a telescope. It has quite a gravity pull though, so its very dense. Anywayz....keep dissecting

Actually, we DO know. And you touched on the answer, though Anony-Hoaxer and his ilk keep hoping you will forget the very point you mentioned: It has quite a gravity pull though, so its very dense.

Sorry for all the quotes but they are necessary.

Byrd, isn't it true that close binary star systems can't be seen, but are detected by the variation of starlight? I was under the impression that only a few close binaries have actually been photographed, and it is usually infrared and not visible light. Originally it was suspected that Z1 and Z2 might have been double close binaries, which are extremely rare, but it was later proven that there were no companion stars to the two that are 350 billion miles apart.

BTW, your other points are very insightful.

Why didn't you participate more in the "big" thread?

Seems that you've been biting your tongue up till now.

[edit on 2/11/2006 by Hal9000]

With having no "scientific" knowledge and using only common or "horse" sense as my GM would call it. How does one determine 350 billion miles apart. Please look at my last respose for this thread. What I have been saying is that all the info from our best observations into space is so outdated from what i have learn from the speed of light. How can we predict the future from the past when their is no reference point for the beginning.

Originally posted by Truthforall
What I have been saying is that all the info from our best observations into space is so outdated from what i have learn from the speed of light.

What I think you mean is that what we are seeing is actually from the past, and your right. Observations from space are as old as the time it takes for the starlight to reach us, but the light from Zeta Reticuli is traveling for some 39 years before it reaches us, because they are 39 light years away. So what we see happened 39 years ago, but on galactic terms, stars take eons to form so what we see is relatively current. A companion star would not form in that amount of time.

Hope that helps.

What I think you mean is that what we are seeing is actually from the past, and your right. Observations from space are as old as the time it takes for the starlight to reach us, but the light from Zeta Reticuli is traveling for some 39 years before it reaches us, because they are 39 light years away. So what we see happened 39 years ago, but on galactic terms, stars take eons to form so what we see is relatively current. A companion star would not form in that amount of time.

Hope that helps.

Hal,

In your illustration with Zeta Reticuli is that it took 39 LIGHT YEARS not earth years. Their is a very very big difference here.

Originally posted by Truthforall
In your illustration with Zeta Reticuli is that it took 39 LIGHT YEARS not earth years. Their is a very very big difference here.

Well a light year is based on Earth time, so it is relevant.

More specifically, a light year is defined as the distance that a photon would travel, in free space infinitely distant from any gravitational or magnetic, in one Julian year (365.25 days of 86,400 seconds each).

from en.wikipedia.org...

In Eben time it may be a different number because it is based on a different reference, but the distance is the same.

Originally posted by Hal9000In Eben time it may be a different number because it is based on a different reference, but the distance is the same.

Eben's don't keep time and you cannot make any assumptions with regards to physics or mathematics on the planet Serpo as it has been resolved that numbers work different on the planet.

that is one of my favorite things about Serpo. On that planet 2 and 2 does equal 5.

Originally posted by Truthforall

Hal,

In your illustration with Zeta Reticuli is that it took 39 LIGHT YEARS not earth years. Their is a very very big difference here.

Just wanted to remind you that light years are a measure of distance, while years (earth or otherwise) are a measure of time.

Originally posted by Hal9000
Byrd, isn't it true that close binary star systems can't be seen, but are detected by the variation of starlight?

There are a number of ways to detect it, and I'm not sure which would be used at what point.

I was under the impression that only a few close binaries have actually been photographed, and it is usually infrared and not visible light.

Not quite true... I have a telescope and my skywatching manual gives me quite a few double stars that can be seen by my 10x power telescope (it's a delightful scope, but not as good as the telescopes at universities and research facilities during the 1950's. So visually, they have been seeing these for some time.

Originally it was suspected that Z1 and Z2 might have been double close binaries, which are extremely rare, but it was later proven that there were no companion stars to the two that are 350 billion miles apart.

It's the angle at which we view them... they are close together in the sky when viewed from our angle. But if we stood on, say, Alpha Centauri, we'd see that they were really not that close.

BTW, your other points are very insightful.

Why didn't you participate more in the "big" thread?

Seems that you've been biting your tongue up till now.

I have been.

Views from a moderator/supermod carry a lot of "official weight", even if we are only giving our personal opinion. Sometimes our presence quashes discussion and research -- and then there's the opinion of many that skeptics are truly a plague on society and progress.

After the first few replies and defenses that I read, I simply couldn't bear to read more. I stepped away to let the community come to its conclusions through debate. But when Parrhesia (thank you) opened up a thread solely to discuss the factual problems, I felt free to step in.

As you see, the hoax is obvious. It follows the pattern of most of the UFO hoaxes I've seen, with stupidly obvious flaws and inconsistancies -- and I still haven't finished the full minor catalog of idiocies.

What I hope happens is that readers here will stop to think and the next time they see Stories From Clowns, that they will stop, read, research, and think.

[edit on 12-2-2006 by Byrd]

Originally posted by ignorant_ape#1 as the eben aledgedly terraformed the would - they must have added them , or decided that leaving them in the water was accepable . either way - why dont the eben know whats in thier water ??

Excellent point. A number of people apparently caught this one.

#2 by anons testimony the chemicals in th water must be :
a) water soluble
b) mildly toxic to humans
c ) be thermally decomposed at

Originally posted by Byrd...
What I hope happens is that readers here will stop to think and the next time they see Stories From Clowns, that they will stop, read, research, and think.

I freely admit I was a fence-sitter happily waiting for the next crumb of info to come along and show me the trail I was supposed to be following. I guess I was too busy trying to undo the tale from within the box.

Byrd, kind Sir, as I continue to keep up with your veritable shredding of the Serpo event I sit here slackjawed and aghast at my own gullibility regarding this particular tale.

As for you slapping some sense into me, as the recipient would state in those old Aqua Velva? commercials,
"Thanks! I needed that!"

So... in any "mission" there is some point to the exercise. You're going somewhere to accomplish something and you will return with some kind of data (diplomatic agreements, information, material, etc.)

Ebe #1 translated the messages and provided us with that information. Ebe #1 sent six messages.
— The fifth message suggested an exchange program;
(NOTE: It is believed, but NOT documented, that Ebe #1's U.S. military caretaker had suggested to Ebe #1 that an exchange program be set up which would allow our people to visit and exchange culture, scientific information and collect astronomical during a space trip by an American military team or what eventually became known as The Team Members.)

Let's use some analogies, here -- just to give us some background for thinking about this. This civilization has been in existance (we'll define "civilization" as "the rise of the city-state") for around 4,000 years longer than ours has. So, when we were still beating each other over the heads with bronze swords at the battle of Troy, they were enjoying the equivalent of what we have now in the 21st century... or even better.

So by 1950, they were living in... well, we could use "Star Trek" as a reference. They can navigate large stretches of space and avoid all the stars, they have some sort of shielding that prevents them from being frozen to death in space or blasted to a crisp by radiation in space. Because they have space travel, they have some sort of thrusting engines and methods of storing/reconstituting food/water for long periods of time. They have machines to mine the metals or to fabricate the ceramics for the ship components. They have knowledge of chemistry, refining, timekeeping (because you need to have something that keeps time with an extreme degree of accuracy to do things like measure distances and how much fuel is burned to get a machine to a certain location, among many other things.)

NOTE: many of the "Star Trek" devices proposed in the 1960's are coming close to reality today. I understand that a galactic civilization advanced enough to travel through space would have things that were pretty incomprehensible and unduplicatable to us (as our modern scanning electron microscope would be vaguely understandable to Archimedes, but there would be no way that Archimedes and his fellow Greeks could make one.)

The following thought exercise takes that into account.

THOUGHT EXERCISE: our team of Scientists Who Look Spiffy In Uniforms are sent off in an "exchange program" to (say) the equivalent of Star Trek's Federation Earth.

* After 10-20 years, they don't bring back a full language.
* they bring back a description of the planet and its geology -- something that Federation Earth Equivalent could have handed to them (and in great detail), translated, in a day's time.
* they bring back a description of the flora and fauna of one planet -- something that Federation Earth Equivalent could have handed to them (and in great detail), translated, in a day's time.
* they bring back a description of the culture of one planet something that Federation Earth Equivalent could have handed to them (and in great detail), translated, in a day's time.
* ditto the chemistry of the planet, the stars, and lifeforms on that and other planets.
* ditto information that would allow us to improve our manufacturing processes, information about new materials (the types of ceramics, for example, that we are just now making (the "solid air" stuff, eg), solid-state technology and beyond.
* ditto mathematical information about the nature of the universe.
(why? well, because the aliens would have cataloged and studied this and their university-equivalents and scientist-equivalents would have put this information in book-equivalents to be studied by their student-equivalents who were going to be working in these equivalent fields.)

In fact, the Federation Earth Equivalent could have handed them all that data plus astronomical data of objects we're only now beginning to be able to detect in a day or two. The Team Of Scientists With Great Hair (plus their two guards, the commander, and two pilots) could have all gone out to see the geology of the planet in great detail along with an eco-tourism trip within 2 months... just in case someone thought Those Darn Sneaky Aliens were trying to fool us about the planet and wildlife for some reason.

Instead, we get a 3,000 page book report that's incomplete in every detail. The aliens, in exchange, get a bunch of peeping toms.

Lucky them.

Speaking as an anthropologist, one of the big implausabilities was the behavior of the Team Of Mail-Order Scientists and the aliens. Very specifically, the Team Of Mail-Order Scientists behave in a fashion we refer to as "colonial."

(If you like, look up "colonialism" under Google -- colonialism and India or Africa are good ones, but colonialism and any indigenous people such as the Maori or the AmerInd tribes is also good. Quite a deep field, as you can see. I'm only going to touch on a tiny bit of this, rather than go into the full details.)


Remember, we're dealing with members of an advanced alien civilization (think "Vulcans" or "Romulans" or even "Klingons" or "Ferengi" -- I use "Star Trek" simply because it's probably familiar to most people around the world.) They have a culture, laws, social rules, social structures of kinship, and they have technology and knowledge.

In the presence of Our Team Of Clowns, they behave as though they are the equivalent of our primitive tribal societies who are functionally illiterate and technologically in the "throwing rocks at each other" stage.

For example:

Ebe2 is the smart one. She seems to understand our language more than 1 and 2. She even seems to understand our basic math. We started with the basic math. 2 plus 2. Then progressed on. She understood and even caught on so quick that she continued on without our help. We realize she has a great IQ when she repeated 1000 times 1000 and came up with an answer.

The humans treat her like a pet that has learned a new trick. This being is a sophisitcated member of an advanced society and a scientist -- depending on which message you are reading. Instead she's a marginally intelligent version of a Labrador Retriever. If she had a tail, she'd wag it.

The leader of the Ebens is a larger creature than the others. He seems to be more aggressive than the other Ebens. When I write aggressive, I don't me in a hostile way. He seems to be the boss, similar to me, as the team commander.

Notice that Anony-Hoaxer announces that HE is the Commander of the Team Of Clowns. They get into a difference about the fate of the body of crewmember 308, and Anony-Hoaxer exerts his Colonial Determination and forces Eben-Leader to back down.

The Team is allowed free access as though they are lords of the planet.

There's no adjusting to their culture, adjusting to their ways... in fact, they take along weapons (travel within the society, armed) and bang away at the local fauna, which upsets the Ebens but Our Team gets around this somehow.

Big Bwana meets Little Brown Brother. The Ebens do all the conceding or most of it and Our Team sets all the rules of interchange.

I'd say thr striking thing about Eben technology is how backward it is.

For a race supposedly thousands of years more advanced than us, their gadgets don't look much better than 21st century at best.

A 500-word translator? Gimme a break...

And now we come to the nastiest, most despicable, dishonorable, vile and loathesome part of the whole hoax -- using scientist Carl Sagan as an "appeal to authority."

Their actions are beyond contempt at this point. In this repugnant attempt to cover all the holes in their stupid story (which started coming apart at the seams as many posters noted with the very first post), they offer up to us as sacrifice a man who is loved by many and who is very conveniently dead.

Who can't stand up for himself and say "You wretched little men are beyond contempt and the idea that I would associate myself with such a blatant hoax is beyond belief."

I'll stand up for Sagan, though.

Let me note what these scum said about Sagan:

2) One of the principal home-based scientists (astronomer) contracted to assist us was Dr. Carl Edward Sagan. Initially, he was the biggest skeptic of the group. But as information was slowly analyzed, Dr. Sagan came back to the middle. I can't say he fully accepted every single piece of data, but he did agree on the final report.

They play on Sagan's well-known stance as a skeptic (he authored Demon Haunted World )and then expect us to believe that this PhD polymath was SOMEHOW changed from a skeptic into someone who "agreed on the final report" -- in spite of the holes that even people without advanced degrees are pointing out.

I've hit only the highlights of the most inane points of the whole hoax; others who have a better background in physics and math than I have shredded it even further and no doubt geologists could hammer at it still further. Yet these odious, cowardly hoaxers want you to believe that somehow Sagan managed to forget all those problems and "signed off" on the final product....

...Sagan, who was friends with many eminent scientists of far better caliber than I am or the skeptics posting on the list and who could (unlike me) wade through Differential Equations and complex maths and physics.

...Sagan, who analyzed folklore and mythology and hoaxers.

...Sagan, who knew and was friends with some notable science fiction authors (including, I believe, Issac Asimov who held a PhD in biochemistry.)

Victor Martinez buys into this wholeheartedly:

CONNECTING THE DOTS: "Project SERPO's" final report was written in 1980 with Dr Sagan having been brought in half way through the project. It is believed that he wrote his 1985 bestseller, CONTACT, based on his insider knowledge of the most secret project in human history: a human-alien exchange program of which he signed off on its final report!

Martinez has apparently never reead CONTACT, though he may have watched the movie version of it.

Sagan, as I said, knew scifi writers and knew editors. He had friends that he talked to about his book. To connect the dots, simply talk to these people and to his widow, Ann Druyan (who produced Contact and cowrote several of his books as well as producing ), and you'll find out very quickly that the idea that Sagan "borrowed/fictionalized" Serpo to write CONTACT is beyond stupid.

Anony-Hoaxer continues his shabby and repugnant lies:

After reading Dr. Sagan's remarks on the Serpo project, which is about 60 jam-packed pages of calculations, I found one paragraph which states that in order to use Kepler's law – in the case of Planet Serpo – one had to vary the exact gravitational pull placed on Serpo by the two suns. Serpo did not have large planets, like Jupiter and Saturn to affect the gravitational pull as the Earth does. Serpo's gravitational pull was different than anything Dr. Sagan had ever seen before.

This was Anony-Hoaxer's lame attempt to answer a point raised by someone who actually knew some astronomy and dumped the math at Anony-Hoaxer. This despicable liar then tries to cover save his hoax by appealing to Sagan as Authority -- Sagan who is dead and can't defend himself by using one of the lamest attempts to weasel out of any "gotcha" :

in order to use Kepler's law – in the case of Planet Serpo – one had to vary the exact gravitational pull placed on Serpo by the two suns

Fortunately, this disgusting little liar has no real idea what he's talking about. Sagan would not have used Newtonian/Keplarian physics in studying a three-body or m-body system with a possible erratic orbit... he would have hotfooted to CalTech with the data and discussed with Thorne and others whether it was preferable to do a variable time-step Runge Kutta and how to map the data onto a Poincaré section.

Actually, he would have had the Ebens contacted and asked their scientists and mathemeticians about the formulas and would have presented this new study in mathematics (remember, he had a strong ego and loved the spotlight) to the world. We would have had a whole new subbranch in cosmology and mathematics, and it would have had Sagan's name on it.

This is the kind of homework that hoaxers can't do. Anony-Hoaxer, who apparently is pathological liar, can't produce any semblance of what Sagan really would have said because there are no formulas.

And, of course, evidence that this is a huge lie exists in other forms, because Sagan (as does any scientist) left behind boxes of letters and journals of notes along with other manuscripts and his exchanges with Kip Thorne and his students at Caltech (who worked out the formulas for the wormhole used in CONTACT) -- they're all still around. This is demonstrated by the 2005 book by Tom Head which reproduces some of the Sagan material.

But Anony-Hoaxer and Clown#2, who have no real integrity are completely unaware that this huge body of work exists. As far as they know, scientists die and nobody keeps their letters and the mysterious Archive Fairy shows up and shreds all their notebooks and research files at the instant of their deaths.

The Sagan section of this scam ends that with the truly pathetic effort to make a Believer out of everyone:

There are numerous figures and calculations to support this. I will forward them at a later date. Have your list stay tuned.

And, of course, he fails to do that because (as I said) someone on the list turned out to have a decent background in astronomy/physics and math and started poking holes in his precious little hoax.

It was at that point that he started running with his tail between his legs. That's why he only wants to talk with true believers -- they won't ask to see the 30 pages of math that he says Dr. Sagan produced.


In conclusion...

Anony-Hoaxer is a despicable, pathological liar who puts out hoaxes for his own egotistic satisfaction, to see how many people will fall for it. The Cadre of Clowns who hop out of the woodwork to add their own fantasies to the whole filthy swamp of lies should be drummed out of the human race. It has been suggested that one or more of them has a financial angle here, hoping to sell a book of lies that will be a "best seller" because of the hype here on the Internet.

With this, I'll bring my analysis to a close... though there's still more that can be addressed. But I'm tired now, and I'm going to rest.


I hope that my analysis will enable some of the readers to spot the pathological liars like Anony-Hoaxer and the Pack Of Clowns and that the next time one of them comes out of the woodowrk to fabricate another fable at the world, that my readers will stop, check, and analyze, and then stand up and point fingers at the Liar and the Clowns and shout, "SHAME!!! Shame on you all!!!"

[edit on 13-2-2006 by Byrd]