Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Prof. Tom van Flandern - Astronomer - New Mars Images
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Good morning.
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That's what music does In the stillness I'm not here
In the trees, the ground bleeds In the ash I look, I'm averaging you
And rising rhythms fade When hours count, the breathless moon
In the moving of the night The shadows and dreams appear
It's the last of night Please, the frantic of the night
Come silent night And let it shine
Anyway, good morning everybody.
Great to be with you.
As you know, I was absolutely staggered by the new Mars enhancements.
I'm just kind of an average person.
And a lot of times when Richard Hoagland would send me a photograph or send me to see a photograph on a website, I just didn't see it the way he did.
And I know that's true of a lot of us.
You know, we're not geologists.
We don't really know, nor are we astronomers, so we don't know what should look natural, or is natural, and something that couldn't be natural, and it doesn't jump out at us, the untrained, people with untrained eyes, quite the way it does now.
At about, oh, a Saturday morning at about 2 a.m., we began to get these enhancements of some of the latest Mars photos.
And some of the earlier stuff.
I'm talking about the last three sessions now of photographs of Cydonia.
And Richard Post posted the latest enhancements up there, and I went... As I said earlier, I actually said something I can't repeat on the air.
Holy smokes, you get the idea, right?
And for the first time, I could look at it and say, I see it!
And that's when I kind of blew my cork and said, Ben, you better get up there and take a look.
Well...
Some people still say, all I see is rocks.
I don't see how that can be.
My still very much untrained eye sees things that, in my opinion, just flat out can't be natural.
They just can't be natural.
Now this is a very non-trivial issue.
Are they natural?
Are they not?
Very non-trivial.
Was there Mars life?
Was it us?
Was it some previous civilization?
Who knows what it was, but was there life there?
It's a very non-trivial question.
And NASA, of course, is still not commenting on these photographs.
But I thought I would bring somebody of great repute on tonight, Professor Tom Van Flanderen.
And we won't hold him too long, but I want him to comment for you on what he thinks about these latest photographs.
So that's what's coming up.
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Alright, uh, let's first find out who we are talking to instead of introducing him, Dr. Van Flanderen.
Sir, welcome to the program, first of all.
Oh, thank you, Art.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Would you mind giving the audience kind of a rundown on your background so they understand who they're hearing?
Well, I'm a professional astronomer.
I studied at Yale in the 60s, have a doctorate in the specialty of celestial mechanics, which basically means computing orbits.
But I've worked most of my career on the studies of the moon and planets of the solar system, the origins of those bodies and the small bodies of the solar system, such as comets and asteroids and meteors, and then some work on cosmology, the origin of the whole universe.
Ah.
Your doctorate came from?
Yale University.
Oh, Yale.
All right.
Yale.
Wow.
And you have done this all your life?
You are now retired?
I'm not quite retired yet.
I'm still a consultant on global positioning system problems and that sort of thing.
But I'm currently active in astronomy research and edit a journal that reports on research results every quarter.
Also, of course, author of one book that you mentioned before, the book Dark Matter, Missing Planets, and New Comets.
No, I'm not.
Let me ask you then the standard question, before we get into these latest photographs,
about the origins. You said you did some work on the origins of us, you know, all that is the universe.
Are you a subscriber to the Big Bang Theory?
No, I'm not. I'm one of the minority of astronomers that feels that the evidence is strongly against the Big Bang.
And there are half a dozen other models on the table too for the origin and nature of the universe,
but they don't get much press because funding has gotten very centralized in recent years.
Now, alternative models all through the field don't compete successfully for funding with the mainstream models, and I think that's a bad trend in science in general, in our field in particular.
Well, if I understand the Big Bang Theory correctly, something smaller than a quark, and we still haven't quite exactly totally discovered a quark, or maybe we have, I'm not sure, but it's real small.
And something smaller than that suddenly exploded into all that is now and you look back time goes out 12 billion or 10 billion or 15 billion years whatever it is I mean a lot of matter that's for sure came from almost nothing at all and what and so that's the big bang but what what are the other competing theories that we don't hear about?
Well the A common one that is most frequently mentioned in textbooks is called the Steady State Model.
It has been revised considerably.
There are several new versions of the Steady State Model, but in essence it says that the universe is expanding, but as matter moves away New matter fills in in its place, and so that any given moment when you look at the universe, it looks pretty much the same as it did before, or as it will the next time you look.
Kind of like the Horn O'Plenty just continually dispensing matter outward?
That's right, yes.
Oh, that's interesting.
That's very interesting.
Of course, it would require an understanding of the Horn O'Plenty.
In other words, what is it that is dispensing all of this material that's spiraling outward?
Indeed, the well-known distant astronomer Halton Arp has a complete model in which matter is continually being manufactured out of vacuum energy, something that we can We can measure.
We know the vacuum is not empty, that it has a good deal of energy called zero-point energy.
Right.
And his idea is that that is continually turning into matter and replacing the galaxies that expand away.
Uh-huh.
But they were forced to modify it.
I take it that originally it did not embrace the expanding knowledge that we now have,
in other words, that things are moving away?
Well that modification by ARP is still a very viable cosmology and it's still being discussed
and tested.
There are two other main classes of cosmologies that might be mentioned.
Cosmology suggested by Hans Alfven in which we are just in a kind of a local instead of
a universal Big Bang.
The universe may be infinite, but he thinks there was a major matter-antimatter explosion that gives rise to what we're in the middle of.
Then there's the kind of model of which the one I wrote about in my book is a prototype in which there is no expansion of the universe at all.
that the redshift of the light of the galaxies is due to energy loss.
The usual objections to that are easily met, and the universe is the same from time to time.
Not exactly the same.
Everything is...
Stars and planets and galaxies die and are reborn.
There's always change in the detail, but the general picture looks the same whenever you look at it in an infinite universe.
Infinite in time and space and scale.
In these various scenarios, what does anybody imagine is beyond the farthest object?
Whether there's no expansion presently at all, Well, all of the cosmologies have different, sometimes very clever ways of getting around that difficulty, as you might imagine.
There's got to be something past the first object, the farthest out there, right?
There's got to be something.
All of the cosmologies have different, sometimes very clever ways of getting around that difficulty, as you might
imagine.
In the Big Bang theory, it is spoken of very loosely as an explosion of matter into space, but it actually is not that.
The Big Bang, when everything was clustered in a point smaller than a quark, as you say, not just all the matter was clustered in that point, but all of space and all of time also, according to this theory, were in that point.
And the explosion was an explosion of space and of time and not just an explosion of matter into space.
So this kind of boggles the mind to even think such things.
Some of us feel it's even playing with words a bit.
What it means is that there is no such thing as the furthest galaxy.
Space itself is what's expanding and we are told to imagine That the universe is like the surface of a balloon that is expanding.
The balloon, of course, only has two dimensions, but the universe would have three.
The surface of the balloon has two dimensions.
But the universe is like the surface of the balloon where there's no beginning and no end.
It's complete all the way around, but as the balloon inflates, everything moves apart from everything else.
So we are told to imagine the three-dimensional counterpart of that.
Okay, so then there was a time before whatever happened, happened.
Whatever it was.
Except maybe your theory, which says that it's always been there, basically, correct?
Yes, that's right.
The universe is infinite.
The plasma cosmology also says infinite universe, but with a local bang.
Infinity is as hard to imagine as anything else, but there had to be a time
Excuse the phrase there was I have to say that there was a time
When there was nothing there was no time there was nothing but blackness if you believe these other ones. Yeah
And that blackness could not have had time.
There was no reference.
It would have been without reference until you have two objects, one moving away from the other, or can be measured to the other.
There couldn't really be time, could there?
That's right.
And the even harder thing to imagine, no space either.
No space.
That's really hard to imagine.
It is indeed.
But that is part of the Big Bang Theory.
Just to make that particular point that in the Big Bang Theory, it's space that is expanding rather than matter.
Big Bang theorists, when they're getting very strict, will admit and tell you that the galaxies are not actually moving apart from one
another.
Galaxies stay fixed, more or less, in space, but more space is constantly being added between the
galaxies.
That's the continuation of this Big Bang explosion.
Space is constantly being created.
That would mean we're getting farther away from each other.
There is more space between us and the next galaxy, not because either of us moved,
but because more space was created between us in the interim.
It's a very strange theory when you get right down to it.
I'll bet you when people like yourself and your colleagues get together and sit down over coffee, there are raging, incredible arguments over all this.
There must be.
You better believe it.
Alright, well the reason I wanted to have you on tonight, Doctor, really had nothing to do with all of that, that's just fascinating to me.
It has to do with the Mars photographs, the latest Mars photographs and the enhancements that Richard Hoagland, the latest ones he did.
When I went to the website and I looked at them, and don't bother going to the website right now, folks, at least for a few minutes here, because we're having trouble, but I know a lot of you saw them over the weekend.
Um, my layman's eyes went, wow!
Look at that!
Is there, there's no way that can be natural!
There's no way!
And that's the first time that's ever happened to me.
Usually I look and I, I sort of, you know, chuckle at Richard and I say, I'm sorry Richard, I don't see it.
Uh, with the older stuff.
But this new stuff all of a sudden, I see it now.
I still might be among a minority.
I don't know.
But your eyes are trained eyes.
And you've been looking at them now for two or three days.
And I'd like your opinion.
Yes, well, each of the three photos that we have has some very interesting features in it.
And I'm impressed with what we're seeing in the photos, especially the one that just came out.
Some things that you really do a double take on in there, as you say, and they catch your eye and you just... So it does the same thing to you?
It does to me, yes, very much so, that I have the same kind of reaction as you do.
Let me just put it in perspective for you, if I may.
Looking at these photos, for someone, many of the astronomers have seen thousands or even tens of thousands of photos of different features on surfaces all over the solar system that have been photographed by spacecraft now.
Our moon, Mercury, Mars, the outer Galilean satellites, planets and satellites all through the solar system.
And I have to tell you that though we've seen a lot of different and strange things, what's interesting about Cydonia is that almost everything in this region is anomalous in some way and is unlike anything we've seen even on the rest of Mars, let alone anywhere else in the solar system.
These features are quite unique and they have the characteristics that we associate with artificiality.
That is, instead of being fractal as natural things are, which basically means irregular and continuously irregular the closer you look at it, The Cydonia things tend to be regular, symmetric, and angular.
Lots of right angles and sharp turns and corners on things.
Yes.
Yeah, exactly so.
Exactly.
I mean, I know people come after me for this, but in the ruins photograph, for example, I can quite clearly see what seems to me to be building missing a roof and part of one wall. Otherwise to
me it looks like a building with straight edges. How could that possibly be?
Yes quite so and I agree with that impression and there's another one that
looks like a building with huge windows in it. Yes. Three or four. Yes.
And there are lots of things like that around here, but I have to, because your listeners are not seeing these photographs in front of them right now, I want to To say with some regret that as far as looking at them goes, I've noticed that colleagues who approach the photographs with a skeptical mindset can look at the same things we're looking at and reason to, well, that's unusual but it could have risen in a natural way and they do that item by item by item, kind of ignoring the big picture that everything here is anomalous and you're starting to
Multiply your improbabilities, but nonetheless The things that we've seen in the second and third photos Although I think there's some things that where it's really hard to argue natural origin I know that some of my colleagues do nonetheless argue That natural origin is still a possibility still a possibility all right on that note.
We'll break and be right back my guest This is Professor Tom Van Flandern, an astronomer.
We're talking about Mars, and what's on Mars, in the region of Cydonia.
And we'll bore in on that more in a moment.
Now once again, folks, bear with us.
We're working with the website.
I know a lot of you are trying to hit it.
And it's like a wounded animal at the moment, taking all it can take.
I'm Art Bell.
From the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM.
The Talk Station.
AM 1500 KSTP.
For the Twin Cities and beyond, I'm Art Bell, live on AM 1500 KSTV.
AM 1500 KSTP.
Now, here again is Art.
Well, good morning everybody.
My guest is Professor Tom Van Flanderen.
He is an astronomer.
we're talking about the Mars photographs.
And if you don't love me now, you'll never love me again.
And this is the place where we'll never break again.
And if you don't love me now...
It's a fine, finally still night in the desert.
Boy, have we been getting blasted with the wind over the last few, but it, uh, finally calmed down.
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All right, tentatively I am going to say that what we are going to now discuss,
or what we are discussing, if you will go to my website at www.artbell.com
and scroll down into the scheduled guest area.
It's on the main page. Just scroll down to the bottom.
You will see Dr. Tom Van Fondren's name And below it you will see, um, one, two, three, four images.
One entitled, The City Square.
One entitled, Archaeology Model Confirmed.
One entitled, Massive Tetrahedral Ruin.
I recommend looking at that one.
And one entitled, Eroding Ruins Like Berlin.
And I'd recommend looking at that one too.
Now, back to Professor Van Flanderen.
Professor, I suppose any one of these taken by itself, you could try and make a fairly strong Debunking argument that it's some sort of natural formation.
But when you look at the Cydonia region as a whole, and you begin looking at all of these different things, which apparently are found nowhere else on Mars, nor any other planet that we have yet examined, in total, if you take them in total, the odds of them being natural must be astronomical.
Yes, that's right.
Actually, the strongest evidence for artificiality of the complex comes from the face object that we imaged in the first strip.
That's because whenever you discover something that wasn't predicted, There's always a possibility that it arose by chance because there are so many possible forms that could arise by chance on something as big as a planet.
Sure.
But in the case of the face, although the original discovery on the Viking photographs 20 years ago was of that nature, you saw something that looked like a face, that could have been chance.
Once you knew that you were looking for something, that appeared to be a face and you were testing the idea
that that particular thing was built and then you look at it in very high detail 10 times better
resolution than before if you find things that are random then that means it was
natural and it was just an accidental that it looked like a face but if you find more details
that look like secondary characteristics of a face that would prove that it was built
Uh, that's the kind of thing that scientists must pay attention to and cannot be, uh, deceiving you, uh, and, and kept by chance.
And, and that is what we found in those photographs.
All right.
Well, NASA's attitude, um, has been one of, uh, chuckling cooperation.
In other words, they have taken the photos of Sedonia.
And they've done so because mainly I think of pressure on from this program and from maybe some others, but mainly this program.
And so they agreed to take photographs, a good PR move.
But they kind of chuckle at the same time, and they've gone silent.
They have made no comment on the photographs they've released.
None whatsoever.
And we are now past the third set of photographs.
Presumably, unless they're rescheduling something, the last photographs that are going to be taken of Sedonia.
And so it's an obvious question, what next?
In other words, from what we've got now, do we have enough The scientific evidence to compel further photographs of the Cydonia region, or are there other areas of more interest on Mars that they will move on to?
In other words, what should we do now?
I think that we have easily enough evidence to persuade any open-minded and well-trained scientist that we have discovered artificiality beyond a reasonable doubt.
And given that, I think personally that it's an imperative that we get some additional photographs.
We especially want photographs of the east side of the face, which was not seen in the photographs we got a couple of weeks ago.
We saw only the west side, the half of the face.
And we missed part of the fort, too, I think.
Yes, we missed most of the fort.
The fortress is a fascinating object because even in the old Viking photographs, The half of it that we saw nothing of in these new images
is triangular, both on the inside and outside of what looks like a courtyard are triangles.
It looks like there's some sort of a perhaps ramp, I might call it that, or roadway that
goes from the desert level up to the top of this wall-like feature.
This is the most building-like feature that was seen in the Viking photos and we would
love to see that in high resolution and see what we really have there.
Well, I guess, what is the rest of what they're looking at, Mars?
They're looking at floodplains, I guess, they're looking at, I'm not sure what.
Huge canyons like Valles Marineris and volcanoes like Olympus Mons and the Tharsis region and lots of craters, lots of mountains, rills, valleys that have been washed out by this huge flood that occurred on the planet.
But all kinds of features that are natural and known to occur on other planets or moons too.
But in Cydonia we see things that only occur in Cydonia.
And another one that's in the new picture that we've just got this last week, has a
lot of people buzzing, like the tracks that we saw in the first picture.
The new one is a series of embedded triangles.
Yes.
Are you referring to the massive tetrahedral ruin photographs?
No, that was where the tracks were, right?
Right.
That was in the first photograph, yeah.
In the new photograph, there's a series of embedded triangles that's only been noticed in the last few days.
Each time we go back to these photographs and study them with a different resolution or magnification, we discover new features we didn't notice before.
Well, Um, do you think that, you know, you said that any open-minded, well-trained scientist is going to understand or agree with, do you think we have enough open-minded scientists, specifically Dr. Malin, for example, who will be convinced enough to take additional pictures of Cydonia?
Well that is a very good question.
Anyone trained in scientific method would know the difference between predicting something before the fact and afterwards and the difference between a fulfilled prediction that can be dismissed and one that has to be paid attention to.
But unfortunately these rules of scientific method are no longer taught and I think for the very good reason that If they were taught to the young generation today, a lot of the mainstream theories in a lot of fields of science would immediately fall.
And so science has kind of developed a conflict of interest with its own methods.
the sense of self-preservation, scientists don't really want to examine their own theories
critically.
And as a result, not everybody knows these rules for what kind of statistical things
can arise by chance and what kind cannot and have to be paid attention to.
But those who know the rules of scientific method and apply them will see that in the
case of quite a number of features that were found in the face structure two weeks ago
from the April 5th photos, that the odds against that being anything but artificial are, as
we discussed before, better than a billion to one.
A billion to one.
So if they don't go back here, it's because They specifically don't want to, not because there's not a good solid scientific case, but because they have decided for whatever the reason is, they don't want to know more.
I would say that unfortunately there are some people who took hard positions, some for artificiality,
some against, but they took positions too early in the game and that kind of public
position can create a bias.
There are some colleagues in the field who are sufficiently biased that they would, in
the case of people biased against artificiality, they would rather miss the discovery of our
lifetimes than see themselves be wrong about that.
Well, as you know for many many years yourself along with Richard Hoagland has been out on a limb with this for a long time.
And when the first pictures came back, Richard caught a lot of ridicule.
Because it's ah, see rocks.
And now with the latest enhancements out, I've noticed that the even the most severest severe critics out there have kind of gone silent.
It's like No, it looks like something might be there.
I guess we better wait and see what the professionals have to say And I'm just wondering now how this is going to go that first Horrible photograph of the face was one pretty well flashed around the entire world my gosh I'm getting calls from Australia saying that's all they saw was that I call it a cat box picture and you know, it's like Case closed.
It's settled.
That first hard little photograph flashed around the world.
None of this stuff has flashed around the world except on my website.
Maybe a couple of Richards and that's about it.
And it's like case closed.
There is no face now.
Is that where we're going to be left?
Well, some of the people that came out against artificiality a bit too early and were involved in ridiculing the face when the first picture was released on April 5th, have indeed fallen silent.
But I read that not so much that they have changed their minds.
I think they honestly haven't even wasted, would they consider wasting their time to look at these photos and study them.
But I think that we saw NASA crack down and enforce its announced policy of not commenting publicly.
And those who, even though they weren't NASA employees like Mike Malin, but contractors, Those who came out and made public statements that seemed to be NASA views, I think have been told that wasn't going to be allowed because they appear to be representing NASA and that is not NASA's position.
Well, right now, yeah, right now NASA really doesn't have a position.
They have not commented.
They've been totally silent on the matter.
Do you expect them to remain silent or do you think they'll have something to say at some point here?
No, I expect them to remain silent because there are thousands of scientists within NASA and they're as divided as the public is over artificial versus natural.
Too many people have too much at stake on this one.
And so, NASA is to be complimented greatly, I think, for getting together enough to agree to take these pictures of Cydonia.
Yes.
Ahead of many of the other interesting targets on Mars, just because of the possibility that there could be something really special here.
And I can only hope now that we're able to be persuasive over the next few weeks that we have indeed found something very special here so that they will continue photographing the area of Cydonia and some of the anomalous objects we haven't even glanced at yet.
So then you would have to imagine that inside NASA right now, quietly, where we can't hear it, there is a gigantic debate going on.
Probably lots of fighting.
Yes, I would imagine that, yes.
Can they go back and re-image Cydonia over the next few months without great threat to the spacecraft or great threat to the remainder of the mission?
That's an important question.
Well, the circumstances are that Mars is now wrapping around the far side of the Sun from Earth.
The result is that it's going to be too close to our line of sight to the sun for the next few weeks for communications.
So the spacecraft will be shut down during that period to conserve power.
And somewhere near the end of May, it will emerge again from this conjunction condition and we'll be able to power it up and communicate again.
And there will be then an additional period of time when it could take photographs of Cydonia every nine days as it did during the month of April.
Would we get what you were hoping for or could we get that?
That is a look at the face the way you want it during that period?
Most definitely.
There will be opportunities to do that and to see the eastern side of the face and to get the fort.
And several of the other anomalies, the DNM pyramid would be an interesting one.
We'd like to get all of these things and see just what we have in these objects.
And indeed, the ones I just named are probably, they hold the potential to be so artificial that it would become almost obvious even to the skeptics.
But that's a potential that hasn't been realized yet.
We have to actually get the pictures before we know what we've got there.
Well, is there any way, Doctor, that you can imagine that with what we now know as a result of these three attempts, these three photographs, these three strips, is there any way that the evidence is not so weighty, saying go back and take more, that they could legitimately make a scientific decision not to do so?
There are going to be people who will argue that way, but I think that if one uses the rules of scientific method, the answer is compelling.
That one has to actually set aside some of those rules in order to maintain an argument that we haven't already obtained compelling evidence for some artificiality at Cydonia.
But the rest of the story is, if we don't get those additional photos in the next few months, the periapsis, the point of closest approach to Mars of the orbit, is precessing around the planet.
And each pass is at a higher and higher altitude.
And pretty soon the passes will be at such a high altitude, we won't be able to have enough resolution.
Moreover, the sun angle is getting worse.
and the shadows longer and everything darker.
So that by late in the summer, it will no longer be possible to get good images in Cydonia.
And then they're going to resume the aerobraking, during which time they can't take photographs,
and then they'll begin the mapping mission, which will last two years until the spacecraft exhausts all its fuel.
And during that time, we would only get additional photographs by lucky circumstance.
So, in other words, basically, it's the next few months, or possibly not at all.
Possibly not at all.
And the next two missions to Mars already scheduled will have no cameras on board.
So for as far ahead as we can see, the next few months are our opportunity, then or perhaps not again.
We may not answer this question in our lifetimes if we miss this chance.
Wouldn't surprise me.
Doctor, what is your book?
Dark Matter, Missing Planets, and New Comets.
And where can people get it?
North Atlantic Books is the publisher, either their favorite bookstore or they can order it through my website at Metta Research.
Will you have a link?
We have a link there right now.
Okay, good.
We have a link there right now, so I would recommend that to everybody.
Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets, it's right there on the link at the moment and people can zoom up to it.
Doctor, I didn't want to hold you long.
I just wanted to get your reaction, and I think we've got it.
And I really appreciate your coming on tonight.
Well, it's always a pleasure, Art, and you have an audience that I'm very happy to see is interested in these matters, and the public support for Imaging Cydonia is what brought it about, and I just hope that support continues.
I don't see how any honest person could not be interested in this.
Doctor, thank you so much.
Thank you.
Take care.
That's Professor Tom Van Flanderen.
So there you are.
If you have not seen the photographs yet, you're welcome to go up and take a look at www.artfill.com.
In this case, just go down to the name Dr. Tom Van Flanderen.
And, uh, take a look and see what you think.
It takes a little looking, but it's there.
It depends on, I guess, your mindset as you look from the high desert.