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Feb. 29, 1996 - Art Bell
34:57
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Richard Hoagland Shuttle Teather
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Time Text
Back now to Richard Hoagland with this, an NBC update from Los Angeles.
According to Tina, I think it's Tina, who sent this along, she says the space shuttle came within 50 feet of the satellite, according to NBC, and saw it floating in space dust.
Still not close enough to get it, though.
The satellite, she says, according to NBC, is expected to enter Earth's atmosphere within three weeks and burn up.
Richard, there's the latest.
Run that running again, they came within 50 feet?
That's what this says, now it could be wrong.
No, the orbits are totally wrong.
There's no way that they could have, you know, come back around.
Oh, you wouldn't think so?
I wouldn't have thought so either.
Well, it's simple celestial mechanics.
That's, I mean, that's... Can't be.
It just doesn't make any sense.
Right.
See, alright, let me start at the beginning on this.
The reason that physics is important is because, ultimately, The physics I'm talking about is a physics that allows you to intervene in the terrestrial environment in a meaningfully positive way and affect change that will preserve the environment.
Okay, that's... Be it earthquake... Yeah, that's the end application.
...or the ionosphere, the ozone layer, whatever.
That's the end application.
That's the end application.
We'll get to that, but what the hell is it?
Well, hyperdimensional physics is actually a hundred years old in terms of the current Terrestrial civilization.
The founder of modern physics, James Clerk Maxwell, who was a physicist working in England, oh, about 150 years ago.
A little over 100 years ago.
Who was a brilliant and wide spectrum kind of person.
I'll tell you how wide a spectrum guy he was.
He was primarily interested in electromagnetism, electricity, things like this.
But in his spare time, he also observed Saturn through a telescope and was the one to correctly propose that the spectral effects seen in the telescope were caused by a ring of separate particles, not a solid ring, but trillions and trillions of separate little bits of junk orbiting Saturn in a plane of particles.
Right.
So, you know, this shows you the breadth of his genius and his interest You know, it's like, where are the giants of modern science?
They're all a century behind us.
He was trying to understand the universe.
He was trying to figure out what makes the universe work.
And in his conceptual model, which has now come down to it in extremely watered-down form, two or three equations called Maxwell's Laws, Which, by the way, govern radio transmission.
Without Maxwell, you and I would not be having this conversation tonight.
Thank you, Max.
And if we did, no one would be listening to us, except you and me in a room somewhere.
Maxwell is responsible for computers, for the internet, for electric lights, for television, for the computers on the shuttle.
I mean, for the whole modern world, without Maxwell, we'd be sitting in the dark.
Worried like our great ancestors about what those little points of light were in the sky.
Maxwell was trying to develop the world's first unified field theory.
Meaning a set of physical equations, mathematical equations, that would unite the physical forces that science of the time had identified in a very powerful unified view of how the universe works.
And there are many of us now who think he did it.
Einstein is claimed to have attempted it and failed.
There are those of us who are becoming devotees of Maxwell's original 200-plus equation, written in a very special form called quaternion, which turned out to be geometric form.
And everyone who knows, you know, me on the show knows that geometry has become one of my passions in the last 13 years.
Yes.
Anyway, Maxwell, it turned out, had developed the first unified field theory of the world, of the universe.
And it was a multi-dimensional unified field theory.
Because he claimed And his mathematics seems to prove in the way that science can only prove something which is to make predictions and see if they come true.
His equations basically said that the forces behind electromagnetism You know, things like moving current in a wire.
Sure.
Generators, radio waves, whatever.
That these, in fact, have their start, their beginning, their origin in dimensions that are unseen to three-dimensional reality.
Geometric dimensions, which are unavailable to human senses until we die.
Because part of what is not known about Maxwell is that he was also a meta-physician.
Maxwell wrote poetry.
And we've got some, and some night I will read to you, on the air, some of Maxwell's... This physicist, this so-called sterile Victorian physicist, some of his poetry, it sounds like some of the most wondrous New Age-inspired intuitions about what happens when we go somewhere after we leave this mortal coil.
Ever wonder where the term mortal coil came from?
Not until now.
Think about a coil. What is a coil? A spring, a vortex.
Yes.
Yes.
The essence of mathematics behind Maxwell's multidimensional reality is a vorticular flow of information and energy. A
coil.
And we could go on and on, but we won't tonight.
We could.
I was just trying to get this explanation of what hyperdimensional physics is, basically.
Well, the point is that it is a physics which is transcendent of three dimensions.
You know, up, down, left, right, back and forth.
And there are, are there not, certain points on Earth where these, I don't like to use the word adore, but where this energy may be tapped or manipulated More efficiently.
And these points occur at a certain place on Earth, which is about... Well, they occur on any planet, or around any planet, because it turns out that you can take the physics of the world we know, electromagnetism, gravity, nuclear forces and all that, and put them into these original Maxwell equations.
Mix them liberally with a few other mathematicians like Coxeter and others that Bucky Fuller turns out to have been a big fan of, which you'll find in the references to Monuments of Mars.
And if you stir properly and look at them with the right kind of glasses, you wind up with a set of predictions.
Let's say that certain bizarre events that are inexplicable by current physics are very neatly and adequately explained and predicted by a hyper-dimensional, multi-dimensional, Maxwellian, classical physical view of the world.
When I say the world, I mean reality, which is from here to Alpha Centauri, here to Andromeda, here to the farthest galaxy we know.
All right.
That will bring us then, because of time, to the satellite.
We're not tightly bounded by that hour, by the way, because I want to do this right.
I see, all right.
This is important.
Well, then my right hand comes down by your word.
Well, let's not be carried away.
The reason I'm focusing on the satellite is because it's very clear that NASA, this lead
agency, you know, this cutting edge kind of early warning system between the present and
the future that we all think NASA should be and it used to be and is not now, that what
happened to it is it got bitten the other night by hyperdimensional physics.
And none of the physicists and none of the engineers who created this experiment or who
are now trying to figure out what went wrong have a clue to what really occurred to the
shuttle that night and almost, but for the grace of, you know, this lightning rod, which
was the tether itself, killed seven astronauts.
I mean, this is dangerous stuff to play around with if you don't know what you're doing.
Well, you heard me read the article.
That's right.
They don't have a clue.
And the interesting thing is it happened, Art, 15 years ago.
And NASA has not remembered its own data.
When?
When the night Voyager 2, little unmanned Voyager, was flying by the planet Saturn.
A billion miles from the Sun and I happened to be at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with a bunch of other scientists and space groupies and science writers and all that in the von Karman Auditorium at the wee dawn hours just after midnight on August 26, 1981, late summer.
Voyager was speeding past Saturn through the ring plane and was scheduled to take a series of stunning close-ups of some of the inner moons around Saturn and beam them back to Earth.
At that moment, as it came out from behind Saturn and arrowed down through the ring plane, the same ring plane that Maxwell had measured a century plus before, in an incredibly ironic twist of fate and science and history, something reached out from Saturn, some remarkable force, and created all kinds of havoc on the Voyager 2 spacecraft that night.
And in the press releases that we have written and published around the world, that we have uploaded to your website through your email on AOL, and which have been posted on many other internet sites around the world and sent out to all the news media over the last several days from the Mars mission, we describe in NASA's own words, in its own history, documentation of the Voyager 2 mission to Saturn, The weirdnesses, the strange computer malfunctions, the unexplained thruster firing, the depleted fuel, all of these events occurred at Saturn that night, 15 years ago, to a little spacecraft called Voyager 2.
It also had depleted fuel.
Yes.
The whole thing is a carbon copy.
And the reason is that that night, Voyager 2, in our model, flew through the major, extraordinary, massive, hyper-dimensional environment of the second largest planet in the solar system.
And what NASA unwittingly did...
By creating a 12-mile satellite, you know, shuttle and tethered satellite connected by a wire, 12 miles long.
Right.
They created a much bigger collector in Earth orbit for the same kind of physics and processes and forces that affected Voyager 2 all by itself at Saturn 15 years ago.
So, but Voyager 2, of course, didn't have anything tethered, it was all by itself, but you're saying it entered a far greater If you look at the numbers, the physical effects on an object in space are proportional to a quantity we call angular momentum.
If I'm a little spacecraft flying by a massive, rapidly spinning planet like Saturn, Or, I'm a big spacecraft, 12 miles wide, you know, because that's really the size spacecraft that NASA created the other night.
And I'm moving at 17,000 miles an hour around a relatively tiny planet, like the Earth, spinning much slower than Saturn.
If you look at the numbers, the effects can be almost the same.
And NASA, nobody has a clue as to what's going on.
Now, there's all kinds of other little wonderful data points that I will get through, you know, later in our discussion.
The bottom line is that, you know, if you don't learn the lessons of history, you are doomed to repeat them.
Well, how close did they come up there to a disaster?
Incredibly close.
If that cord had not severed, if the massive electrical charge that leaped across and fried
that tether had not broken it like a lightning rod, you know, the shuttle itself could have
been toast.
Or a fuse.
Or at the very least, well, see, they don't even seem to have surge protectors on this
thing.
That's one of the weirdnesses.
I mean, we're talking about abysmal ignorance can, you know, inadvertently kill astronauts.
When have you, have you taped the air to ground?
Uh, yeah, well, I have the actual CNN recording of the astronauts, Jeff Hoffman in particular,
reporting to Houston Live the moment the tether snapped.
I know he made a big... And those astronauts were terrified.
Terrified, and they went out of their way to say, we're not afraid.
Think about this, alright?
How much time do we have before the next break?
Enough.
Okay.
This is the physical situation.
Let's describe the mechanics of this for people who don't know anything about celestial mechanics.
You have a shuttle, which is like an airplane, about the size of a DC-9.
It's in orbit 185 miles around the Earth, slightly inclined to the equator, moving at about 18,000 miles per hour.
It deploys out of this 65 foot long payload bay a tinkertoy tower that rises up 15 or 20 feet.
through that tower like a fishing line is spooled on a five-foot, you know,
connected with five-foot sphere looking like a huge beach ball painted white.
The tethered satellite, the half-ton tethered satellite.
And it slowly played out.
You know, the fishing line is unreal.
The tether itself is this one-tenth of an inch copper wire coated with various layers of plastic.
Kevlar and nylon and mylar and whatever.
How strong was it actually?
It could withstand a force of about 350 pounds.
Okay.
In other words, it could, if you unsmooth all 12 miles on the Earth and dangle it from a 747, under one gravity, it could have maintained its own weight and then sunk, with a good margin.
That's strong.
The actual force on the tether.
And I am indebted to some of our colleagues, particularly Dr. Bruce De Palma, whose name I'm going to mention a couple, three times tonight, for working out these equations for me.
He's in New Zealand.
See what the Internet can do?
Oh, yeah.
You don't have to be anywhere anymore, folks.
You can be a planetary consciousness.
I know it.
It's quite amazing.
It's really amazing.
Anyway, so Bruce worked out these numbers.
It turns out that the actual force between the satellite 12 miles over the shuttle, because it deployed it up, so the shuttle was closer to the Earth and the satellite was farther away, right?
Now, basic celestial mechanics.
The closer you are to the Earth, the faster you're going to go around the Earth, right?
Now, how do we know this?
Because a spacecraft that orbits 100 miles up goes around every 90 minutes.
A spacecraft that's 250,000 miles up goes around once a month.
And a spacecraft that's 22-3 just stays stationary with respect to the Earth.
That's right.
Now, what are those three examples we've just named?
One is Sputnik, 1957, or the shuttle, which is just above the atmosphere.
Or the NOAA satellite.
Or the NOAA satellite, alright.
The second example, which is the far out one, is the Moon.
The Moon is 250,000 miles away.
It takes one month to go around the Earth.
It moves only 2,000 miles per hour.
The other satellites, the so-called geosynchronous satellites, they are at about 22,300.
They move at about 6,000 miles per hour, and their motion around the Earth takes 24 hours, which of course is the rate at which the Earth rotates, which means they appear to hang motionless.
But in fact, they're moving around the Earth in orbit at 6,000 miles per hour, and it takes them one day to go around once in one complete circle.
Right.
All right.
So the basic rule of thumb here is the farther up you are, the slower you're going to move in orbit around the Earth.
Now, the 12 miles connecting, you know, separating the shuttle and the tethered satellite meant that the satellite would want to move slower, right?
Correct.
Think of it as a separate object.
It would want to move slower.
And the shuttle wants to move faster.
So the satellite... But they're connected by this wire, right?
So the satellite would trail... Exactly.
So what happens is it's kind of a happy medium, and there's some kind of averaging going on, so there's gonna be a force in the tether.
All right.
The shuttle is pulling the satellite along, you know, faster than its higher orbit would normally allow, and the tethered satellite is slowing the shuttle down a little bit, so it's moving a little slower at that 12-mile altitude than the lower orbit would allow.
It's actually putting a drag on the shuttle, right?
Right, and an acceleration on the tethered satellite.
Uh-huh.
All right, because the ratio is, I mean, what?
We're talking half a ton to 100 tons.
So with mass and speed, I presume they can calculate the tension that should have been on that line.
Which is about 24 pounds.
24 pounds.
So that, you know, if anybody's going deep sea fishing, you know that you put a high pound test line.
Because if you get a shark, or a tuna, or whatever, and it jumps, you don't want the line to break.
Right.
Well, this tether was more than ten times stronger, in terms of tensile strength, before it would break, than the force expected on it.
There is no way that thing could have broken because all of the forces are known, modeled, they're even, they're gentle, no sharp jerks, no, you know, nothing hit the shuttle, there was no, nothing should have happened to mechanically break it.
No sharks?
No sharks, no bluefin tuna.
So, when you look at the close-ups, now I have freeze-framed and grabbed frames from the video and put them into Photoshop and other programs and I have it zoomed in and enlarged and enhanced.
This tether looked like it had fried and pulled apart like taffy.
Alright?
Meaning it melted and under the 24 pounds, you know, uh, tell you what, everybody does an experiment now.
You get a candle out and you get a plastic soda straw.
And you put the soda straw so that the candle is in the middle of it, and when it's beginning to melt, you pull the soda straw apart.
Right.
You will see a narrowing down and narrow filaments of plastic.
Kind of a taffy-like thing.
Like a taffy, exactly, like taffy, like that old English taffy you used to get.
Sure, sure.
That's what the end of this thing looks like there in the tower in the payload bay on the close-ups that they sent down to the ground.
There also was a dark discoloration right around the tether Where it was equal with the ring of the tower.
Indicating a burn.
Indicating strongly.
Now this is only visual evidence, alright?
We got no instrument data, because NASA's not telling anybody what the instrument told us that night.
And we need to demand on every website and every science page and every astronomy board in the world that they give us the raw data.
Alright.
Hold it right there.
We'll come right back.
We're going to be adding stations including San Francisco and some others.
So we'll give them a brief update and continue with Richard C. Hoagland and the real story of what happened to that satellite.
Interested?
I'll bet you are.
Stay right there.
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I'm Art Bell.
Good evening, everybody.
A lot going on.
A lot going on.
We are now on Real Audio, thanks to our newest affiliate, WPSL, in Port St.
Lucie, Florida.
And if you want to, uh, they've got an internet address, but it's kind of long, and I'm going to tell you a nice, quick, simple way to get to the real audio that now carries this program on the internet.
Simply go to my webpage.
That's www.artbell.com.
It will give you a link to WPSL.
When you get there, you can download the software for free, and then you can listen to the show, Anywhere in the world, on the Internet.
So thank you, um, Greg Wyatt, Mark Gibbs, all the people at WPSL making all of this possible, and welcome, by the way, to the network.
They're in Port St.
Lucie, Florida, 1590 on the dial, and worldwide on the Internet, along with this program.
My guest is Richard C. Hoagland.
Engstrom Science Award winner was Science Advisor Walter Cronkite, did some work for NASA.
He's a guy who knows about the satellite, now lost in space.
Sort of.
A victim, he believes, of hyperdimensional physics.
In other words, he's telling us what really happened.
All right, as a way of continuing now, Art, something nobody has yet mentioned is as of 1125 Hawaii time, that's where this is coming from, February 28th, the speed of the satellite increased 81 feet per second right before the satellite broke free.
Why would it suddenly do that if it were being fed out or reeled in to keep tension?
Normally, at the NASA page for current shuttle flights, they have detailed photos and video feeds of Operation Spock.
Only three stills are shown regarding the tether project, and only one has a view of the satellite after it broke free.
Richard?
Well, let me leap to the kind of interesting thing that Bruce DePalma sent me tonight.
I had Bruce working for the last two or three days on some alternative, how should I say,
explanations for what the experiment was really designed to do.
Not even in terms of what happened to it, but what it really was designed to do.
Once the space agency or any government agency lies to you, and you can prove they've lied to you over and over again,
as we now know through the Mars data, the Moon data, and all that,
you get to, you begin to wonder about everything.
Of course.
You begin to wonder about even the most innocuous and apparently innocently sounding experiments, and you begin to see a pattern of things that don't quite add up.
And I was not going to mention this until the end of our time together, but according to Dr. De Palma... First of all, let me tell you who Dr. De Palma is.
Bruce De Palma is the inventor of the N machine.
A former MIT and Harvard physicist who is now operating his own laboratory in New Zealand, because he felt that he couldn't really continue these experiments on US soil.
He has been investigating a technology based on the work of Michael Faraday.
Michael Faraday is another one of those giants along with James Clerk Maxwell to whom we owe the modern world.
It was Michael Faraday in 1837 who basically built the world's first electric generator.
A DC generator.
And it is that technology that we are going to invoke later in the evening in terms of explaining what may have happened to this satellite.
Okay.
Because what Faraday found Unlike what you are taught in every textbook, everywhere in the world, from MIT to Milan, from Moscow to Minsk, is that you do not need to have the field of a magnet rotating relative to a conductor, a wire, in order to generate an electric current.
What Faraday found and what De Palma has spent 25 years trying to figure out and put to use as a practical power generation technology.
Or so-called free energy.
I hate that term, because it's not free.
It demeans it to say it's free.
It makes it easy to criticize.
Exactly.
And in fact, it's a politically loaded term, because things in this society that are free, we do not value.
So there's a whole other dimension to that that we could get into, which I will not.
I will avoid the sidetracks here.
Okay.
The point is that what Faraday found is that if you have a wire, and you have a magnet, And you rotate the magnet and the wire together.
You still get a current.
That I don't understand.
Oh, it's a stunning puzzle.
A major anomaly in physics, both classical and relativistic physics, that no one has adequately explained.
And there have been some extremely sophisticated experiments.
Some of them carried out by the Department of Defense.
In Rome, New York, and other places to try to understand why the Faraday rotating disc in a magnetic field generates a current.
Because every textbook in the world, every physics text, every high school, every college course says you have to have relative motion between the wire and the field to get a current.
The whole basis of this so-called tethered satellite experiment was that the Earth is basically rotating at a thousand miles an hour, right?
Right.
Right.
Spinning.
Yes.
Every 24 hours.
The Earth is like a bar magnet.
You can kind of model the Earth's magnetic field as a planet with a bar magnet stuck in the middle of it.
So that you've got a North Pole and a South Magnetic Pole.
Right?
Sure.
If I move a conductor in that magnetic field, says classical physics theory, I should get an electrical current.
And so the idea of trailing a 12-mile piece of wire between the shuttle and a satellite above it through the Earth's magnetic field at 17,000 miles an hour relative speed was designed to produce a voltage in this wire and generate a current.
And there were numbers published by NASA.
What did they expect?
They expected about 3,500 volts.
They expected about half an amp.
You know, these are In standard terms, they expected about as much energy as would be used by a hairdryer, alright?
A kind of a small hairdryer, at that.
Now, we are told that this experiment was designed to somehow demonstrate and prove and explore a practical means of generating electricity in space.
Now, I gotta tell you, and DePalma will back me up, that it makes absolutely no sense at all To imagine putting out satellites and wires and all the persnickety things that entail to generate less electricity that is used by your computer.
I mean, several hundred watts is nothing in space.
Solar panels or nuclear power or whatever is much more efficient and much less dangerous.
And the reason that the shuttle can't go and get the satellite now and bring it home so we can find out what
happened to it.
Not enough fuel?
No, no, no. They're worried that if they got close to it, this wire would wrap itself around the shuttle,
mummify it, and they basically couldn't get the payload bay doors closed, and they couldn't come
home.
Well, I heard they didn't have enough fuel to get to it.
Well, that's not true.
Not true?
The reason is that, well, it depends on what it did after it cut loose, and that has to do back to the thrusters and the depleted fuel, you know, the nitrogen and all that.
Apparently it accelerated by its lonesome after it left the shuttle.
You know, normally you'd think that it would be like a slingshot, where if I'm You know, twirling a stone around and I let go of the rope, the stone will fly off at a tangent at a given velocity.
Sure.
Well, the normal separation rate of the satellite and the tether from the shuttle was supposed to be a few feet per second.
Instead, we wound up with a situation where the separation rate of the shuttle and the tether in the satellite was 250 miles per hour.
Wow!
Now, where'd that extra speed come from?
Answer?
Extra force.
Yeah.
Now what created the extra force?
Well, I am strongly suspecting that's where the fuel went.
But something commanded those little engines on that little shuttle wide open.
And it just accelerated and accelerated and accelerated until the fuel ran out, and that's why we have an empty gas tank.
A giant spike probably took out the computer.
Well, what it did is it entered weird commands in the computer, which basically like someone going through a cataleptic fit.
Yeah, of course.
Or an epileptic fit.
But you see, this is exactly what happened to Voyager 2 that night, 15 years ago, in 1981.
When it passed through the Saturn?
When it went through the ring plane of Saturn and the Plasma Wave Experiment from Fred Scarfe, dear departed Fred Scarfe, who was one of the most lyrical and imaginative scientists in NASA, worked for TRW, was the principal investigator on the Plasma Wave Experiment.
What he did was he would convert his sensor readings into audio recordings so you could hear them.
Yes.
Let me read to you, you know, since we're skipping around, Let me read to you from the official mission history published by NASA back in 1982.
Which is on your board, by the way.
If people want to read all this stuff, you know, the description of what happened to the satellites, the physics and everything, there are two releases that are going to be on Art's website and are all over the world and on the internet.
Simply use my name as a way to find them, or the Mars mission, or tethered satellite, or any combination of those keywords.
We have links between my webpage and yours, right?
Yes, and you will find it.
We actually uploaded these tonight.
We had to go through AOL to your email, but you should be able to... I'll get them and I'll get them.
Let me read to you from NASA's own history.
August 26, 1981.
As the Voyager spacecraft re-emerged from behind Saturn at 11.58pm, this is now 15 years ago, its radio signals were received at the Deep Space Network Station in Australia and transmitted directly to JPL, that's the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
Mission Managers.
I'm still quoting from this official Mission SP.
The SP number, by the way, if you want to get this in your library and read about it, is... Let's see, where am I here?
Where am I here?
It is...
SP-451.
Published in NASA headquarters in 1982, called Voyages to Saturn by Dr. David Morrison.
It's the official NASA record of the Voyager missions.
Anyway, reading from Morrison.
This is Morrison's own words.
Mission managers and engineers watched the signal carefully to make sure all went well.
Their initial delight at the reacquisition of signal from behind Saturn quickly turned to worry and despair.
The telemetry signals, remember it takes you 45 minutes to get a radio signal back from Saturn?
Sure.
A billion miles away?
The telemetry signals were not normal.
And several instruments aboard the spacecraft showed unexplained and peculiar transmissions.
Engineering data indicated that near ring plane crossings The small control thrusters on the spacecraft had made several unprogrammed and unexpected firings.
Worst of all, the scan platform, with its cameras and spectrometers, was not pointed where it was supposed to be.
As more engineering data from Voyager accumulated, it became evident that the scan platform had frozen in its back-and-forth or azimuth motion.
Unfortunately, it had stopped in a place where sensitive instruments could be damaged by sunlight.
Thus, at about 2 a.m.
on August 27th, instructions were transmitted to move the scan platform to a safe position.
By 6 a.m.
it was apparent that the spacecraft had responded, and that the initial problems with the other systems had apparently repaired themselves.
Leaving only the scan platform to be dealt with.
Did they reboot the universe?
No.
They didn't?
No.
Because obviously the satellite took a hit, a spike, a... Pat, now let me continue.
At 9 a.m., the critical playback from the on-board tape recorder began, but even after the tape recordings had been received, it was still not evident how the failure had occurred.
Does this sound eerily familiar?
Sure.
It did not appear to be a discrete event associated with the ring plane.
But rather a progressive degradation of the capability of the scan platform to move as directed.
Notice now that Morrison is focused totally on the scan platform and seems to have forgotten all the other weirdnesses on the spacecraft.
Right.
This could become apparent in a minute why this is important.
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