Debunking Daniel Sheehan

I watched a large part of this 3-hour 2024 interview with Daniel Sheehan.  Sheehan makes a blizzard of claims of varying degrees of plausibility. I didn't bother fact-checking many, because he asserted them all with absurdly high self-assurance, even though some of them stood out as obviously implausible.  The ones I checked were:

1. JFK was shot from the grassy knoll. This of course was so thoroughly refuted by the Zapruder film and JFK autopsy that for many decades the less-silly conspiracy theorists have felt compelled to claim that both the film and body had been tampered with. (They don't bother to explain why the best shooter would be so badly mis-positioned that the body would need later tampering.) But there is a third debunk for this claim: Zapruder would have seen any shooter behind the fence on the grassy knoll. See for yourself with these images https://t.co/fIkurHrWUS. Anybody who confidently posits a grassy knoll shooter just isn't serious about the case.

2. Betty Hill's star map authenticates her alien abduction story. No, that star map was already dubious by 1980 (see Carl Sagan on Cosmos) and thoroughly debunked by the 2000s. See the summary at https://armaghplanet.com/betty-hills-ufo-star-map-the-truth.html.

3. Yamashita's gold. Sheehan claims that 33B ounces ($1.2T/$32/oz) of Yamashita's gold were spirited from the Philippines to Switzerland to finance nefarious "robber baron" schemes. But the known world supply of all above-the-ground gold is only 6B ounces. It's profoundly unserious to claim that somebody has an extra 33B ounces.

4. The "1934" FDR court-packing scheme was about corporate right of contract. Aside from the date being 3yrs off, this is still just demonstrably wrong. Just read e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_era#Ending. Or just ask your favorite AI:

Was the Lochner Court's resistance to New Deal legislation based on the commerce clause and how much contract rights (regardless of corporate involvement) were protected from government police powers by the 14th amendment? Or was it more based on corporate personhood?

Sheehan's fourth claim here is not as kooky as the three above, but if Sheehan fancies himself a constitutional scholar then he should know better. (As a Libertarian I will half-agree with Sheehan by saying the problem with corporate law is not personhood but rather limited liability. However, any rights-respecting scheme to park unlimited liability on some officers or shareholders would ultimately not make much difference, because of contractual arbitrage.)

2025-02-22 Update:

Sheehan's CV says: "Served as Co-Counsel before Supreme Court with James Goodall (New York Times), Alexander Bickel (Yale Law School), and Floyd Abrams (Cahill, Gordon, et al.)."  This claim is at best a deliberate exaggeration.

• Sheehan misspells the name of  NY Times general counsel James Goodale.
• The district court opinion United States v. New York Times Company, 328 F. Supp. 324 (S.D.N.Y. 1971) lists as the NY Times' counsel only Alexander Bickel, Floyd Abrams, and William  Heggarty.
• The Supreme Court opinion 403 U.S. 317 lists as the NY Times' counsel only Alexander Bickel.
• The NY Times search portal for the case finds several mentions each for Bickel, Abrams, and Goodale, but none for Daniel Sheehan.
• A Google search for "new york times" "goodale" "abrams" "bickel" finds almost 200 hits. If you add "Daniel Sheehan" to that search, it finds only Sheehan's own CV and a couple of Reddit posts debunking it.  (You can't just add "Sheehan" to the search, because Neil Sheehan was the NY Times reporter who broke the case.)
• Floyd Abrams reportedly confirmed in 2024 that "Dan was a young associate that did work on the Pentagon Papers case". Even if that's true, Sheehan clearly is exaggerating and misleading when he claims he was "Co-Counsel before Supreme Court with" the case's lead attorneys.

If Sheehan were actually a noble truth-seeker, he wouldn't deliberately inflate his credentials.

2020 Election Stolen Fair and Square

The 2020 election was "stolen" fair and square: via Russia collusion hype, Ukraine impeachment charade, Reade/Hunter non-coverage, pandemic politicization, pandemic election regulations, de-platforming, vaccine announcement delay, etc.

Isaac Saul at Skeptic.com ably debunks Democrat claims that 2016 was stolen, and Trumper claims that 2020 was stolen (with a detailed focus on Georgia).

Republicans Ted Olson, Mitch McConnell et al. analyze the 64 cases Trumpers filed against the results -- losing all cases but one. Both authors have long been demonized by Democrats -- Olson for his involvement in Bush v. Gore, and McConnell for packing the Supreme Court with conservatives.

Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist complains that Olson's team are anti-Trump, and that their analysis doesn't explore the losing cases in detail. But Hemingway doesn't even try to defend Trumper claims of hacked voting machines and fraudulent ballots, dismissing those long-debunked claims as "red herrings". Hemingway instead focuses on pandemic-related procedural changes and technicalities like having changed counties in the month before the election. Hemingway's article doesn't dare charge that any of these issues resulted in a single faked vote for Biden. Turns out she's as embarrassed by Trump's fraud claims as are the Never Trumpers she vilifies.

The Democrats didn't need to secretly fake ballots or hack voting counts in order to steal the 2020 election. They media "stole" it for them in broad daylight, and then bragged about it.

My 2021 Predictions

I had a good year for predictions. The only thing I got arguably wrong was to predict the jury would convict Rittenhouse on the weapons charge, but technically the prediction wasn't tested as the judge dismissed that charge before the jury could consider it. (I still would bet that the jury would say they would have convicted on that charge if it reached them.)

In March and April I was thinking there was a reasonable chance that SARS-CoV-2 was a lab leak. But after tuning into the debate on Twitter, by August my estimate was 20% and was still dropping in November. In December I said "Expect the CCP to successfully promote indefinite uncertainty".

In May I promoted an article by The Drive about adversary drone tech, and I said "I bet China, not aliens" are behind any serious phenomena that the Navy is seeing.  Now, per Mick West, I would rate mistaken identity even more likely than adversary tech for even the most interesting incidents.

In May there was a flurry of enthusiasm over a claim of fungal spheres growing on Mars. I unsuccessfully offered Robin Hanson 10:1 odds that this claim would fizzle quickly. Nobody seems to be talking about it any more.

In June I created a question on Metaculus about whether it will be widely accepted by 2030 that alien technology has visited our solar system. The community of 59 forecasters agrees with my prediction of 1% chance. If Metaculus allowed lower bets, I would say 1/1000.

In the run-up to the Pentagon's disappointing late-June release of UFO info, I successfully predicted in May that there would by Jan 1 (today) be no public

• CONTINUOUS multi-sensor track of hypersonic or hyper-G behavior
• sensor data contradicting Mick West's explanations of the 3 Navy videos
• imagery any harder to explain than the 3 Navy videos

Alas, I could not get any UFO enthusiasts to take bets on this.

In June I noted a shocking "big news" claim by anti-vaxxer Steve Kirsch about recent mortality data as the vaccines rolled out. An obscure Twitter user pointed out that the alleged anomaly was normal, and I successfully predicted his explanation would hold up.  Kirsch later deleted his "big news" tweet.

In November I successfully predicted the outcome of the Rittenhouse case and ensuing lack of riots. After the verdict I predicted that "2A advocates unfamiliar with Rittenhouse's internet footprint will be disappointed in him as a 2A poster child". The jury is still out on that one.

In November I endorsed the pre-omicron view that the ZeroCovid policies of China/Australia/NZ had clearly stopped making any sense. Omicron reinforces this view. It's going to be interesting if Omicron variolation combines with vaccination to finally turn Covid into "no worse than the flu".  Expect to hear "I told you so" from both China/NZ lockdown extremists as well as from anti-vax/anti-mandate extremists. I predict that everyone will end up believing they were right all along about this pandemic, which means that our species will be no better prepared for the next one.

After the SCOTUS abortion oral argument, I predicted on Dec 1 a 75% chance that the court will overturn Casey's viability line, and this will badly hurt the GOP.

In December I debunked a pro-vax claim about a 4-yr-old dying of Covid, but said that the rest of the list of 253 ["covidiot deaths"] at http://sorryantivaxxer.com are unlikely to be debunked.

In December I published my earlier conclusions on the identities of Q. I say there is only a 10% chance that any substantial fraction of Q's output was done independently of the team I identified. All five of my specific predictions about Trump/Q in that post will continue to hold up.

Q Unmasked

[These notes were drafted April 2021 but not cleaned up and posted because my interest in Q waned as QAnons largely stopped claiming Trump is still really president. Publishing now in Dec 2021 to summarize the available Q evidence. Nothing here is original/novel, but I haven't before seen this info collected in one place.][Dec 2022 update: excellent Q overview here.]

Summary

The original anonymous 4chan Q LARP was hijacked by Coleman Rogers and Paul Furber, who were joined by -- and later expelled by -- Ron Watkins and his father Jim (pictured above).

• 2017-10 Q begins as one of many anonymous 4chan LARPs (FBIAnon, HLIAnon, CIAAnon, CIA Intern, WH Insider Anon), probably as confessed by users Microchip and Dreamcatcher.
• 2017-11 Q identity is assumed by Coleman Rogers (PamphletAnon), working with Paul Furber (BaruchtheScribe), Rogers' wife Christina Urso (Radix) and perhaps Tracy Diaz (TracyBeanz) and Jerome Corsi. Ron Watkins (CodeMonkeyZ) soon joins the team.
• 2018-01 Q moves from 4chan to 8chan, controlled by Ron Watkins and his father Jim. Furber is expelled from Q, and claims Q is now an imposter.
• 2018-08 Rogers is expelled from Q, leaving the Watkins in control.

Timeline

• 2017-10-05 Trump: "Maybe it's the calm before the storm."
• 2017-10-28 #1 "HRC extradition already in motion"
• 2017-11 Rogers+Furber+Diaz create /r/CBTS_Stream
• 2017-11-09 #128 Q begins using Matlock tripcode
• 2017-11-25 Rogers+Furber+Diaz "gain control" of Q
• 2017-12-01c Q 1st post on 8chan CBTS
• 2017-12 Q changes tripcode to M@tlock!
• 2017-12 Jerome Corsi, Infowars
• 2018-01 Q moves from 4chan to 8chan with same tripcode
• 2018-01-05 Furber says original Q tripcode is compromised [e1 49m], Rogers disagrees
• 2018-01 Mon Furber removes both of Q's tripcodes
• 2018-01-09 Q joins Rogers' 8chan /thestorm #515 e153m
• 2018-03 /r/CBTS_Stream removed from reddit
• 2018-04 Corsi says imposter takes over Q
• 2018-04-08 #1082 JFKjr
• 2018-04 Rogers creates Patriots' Soapbox
• 2018-05-19 Q accidentally leaks too-long tripcode NowC@mesTHEP@in--23!!!
• 2018-06-15 Rogers "finds" anonymous Q post unsigned by tripcode
• 2018-07 /r/greatawakening removed from reddit
• 2018-09-18 #2224 /CM pls confirm #2226 Q knows # of IPs!
• 2018-12-12 Q says JFKjr not alive
• 2019-08 8chan goes offline
• 2019-11 8kun replaces 8chan
• 2020-02 Jim Watkins registers "Disarm the Deep State" PAC
• 2020-02-17 #3872 "Game Over" the day Fred Brennan flees Watkins-triggered prosecution in Philippines
• 2020-06-06 #4437 Q posts Python code
• 2020-07 Twitter bans 7K QAnon accounts
• 2020-12-08 last Q drop

Q Fails

• 2017-10-31 #15 The wizards and warlocks (inside term) will not allow another SATANic Evil POS control our country.
• 2020-06-04 #4414 Central communications blackout [never happened]
• 2020-06-11 #4455 What happens when Ds can no longer CHEAT ELECTRONICALLY? Push vote-by-mail? [Oops, Q ignorant of Dominion.]
• 2020-06-24 #4755 The 'Election Infection' cannot stop what is coming.
• 2020-09-16 #4722 They will: not concede on Election Night, contest this legally in battleground states, project doubt in the election results, organize massive riots. Playbook known. [Trump, not Dems, did all 4 of these things.]

Q Uninformed

• Q never mentioned Covid/pandemic until 2020-03-23. Q spent Jan-Feb of 2020 mostly talking about impeachment, and was unusually quiet in March. The "Plandemic" obviously surprised Q, who later said it was planned in advance to disrupt Trump re-election.
• Q never mentioned Hunter Biden until 2020-02-06.
• Q has never mentioned Dominion or Smartmatic.
• Q has never mentioned the 2019 Ukraine impeachment whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.
• Q has never mentioned Miles Taylor, the the HSA chief of staff who secretly wrote in 2018 in the NY Times "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration".

Q Was Not An Intelligence Insider

• Q chose to first go public on 4chan, a site full of racism and porn.
• Q's first 127 drops did not have any authentication (i.e. tripcode)
• Q's first tripcode ("Matlock") was chosen very poorly.
• Q did not understand that only the first 8 characters of a tripcode count, and instead chose longer passwords that gave no additional security.
• Q's passwords were known by random Qtuber Coleman Rogers.
• Q relied on easily-cracked site-specific tripcodes, instead of using off-the-shelf signing tech (e.g. PGP) that works securely and anonymously and portably.

Watkins == Q

• Q was suddenly so concerned about 4chan being "compromised", but had no such concern about Watkins' 8chan/8kun.
• After his problems with 4chan, Q had zero concern for establishing a method of identity verification independent of the Watkins.
• Coleman Rogers on a livestream was able to find and recognize a Q drop that someone had to point out to him was not signed? ("Oh, Q must have forgot to sign it.")
• Q did not post for the 3 months that 8chan was down? ("Nothing can stop what is coming" -- except the Watkins' inability to operate their site.)
• Q was able to post on the new Watkins 8kun site when most users couldn't.

Notes

• Watkins profits from QAnon
• 8chan/8kun advertising
• qmap.pub
• Goldwater news service
• "Disarm the Deep State" PAC
• Q never mentioned aliens, and said [#376] UFOs are a distraction

My Predictions

• Trump will never endorse Q and will disavow if asked directly, but will troll on this topic with weak interviewers/audiences.
• Trump will continue to claim credit for the Warp Speed vaccines, which will continue to be seen as wildly successful.
• Q will never resume classic Q posts claiming "the plan" is still in motion. That became untenable when it was apparent in early November that Trump would be leaving office Jan 20. Aside from a couple last "Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming" drops on Nov 12, the Q operation effectively shut down on election day 2020. And after Jan. 6 and the Dominion lawsuits, the Watkins know they cannot take the legal risk of resuming the old operation.
• Q will probably never post again on 8kun or any Watkins-controlled forum, as the Watkins do want to invite subpoenas for their hosting operations. And Q never took the obvious step of establishing an authentication identity independent of the Watkins, so Q is done.
• Q never had any access to insider government intel, and so will never be able to use such access to re-establish his identity on some post-Watkins channel. Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming -- except Q's amateurish inability to post independently of a pig-farming porn entrepreneur like Watkins.

Q Tripcodes

Matlock  > ITPb.qbhqo

M@tlock! > UW.yye1fxo

Freed@m- > xowAT4Z3VQ

F!ghtF!g > 2jsTvXXmXs

NowC@mes > 4pRcUA0lBE

StoRMkiL > CbboFOtcZs 

WeAReQ@Q > A6yxsPKia.

References

• 2021-01 Gospel According To Q - academic paper analyzing Q canon and stylometry. Includes charts of Q drops by tripcode, and Q aggregation sites.
• Qult_Headquarters - QAnon debunking subreddit
• 2020-12 QAnon Must Be Eliminated - screed purporting to trace the origins of Q
• 2020-04 questions about Q OpSec and adjacency to Watkins and porn
• 2019-06 list of failed Q predictions
• 2019-05 Paul Furber interview - alleges Q was hijacked 2018-01-05
• 2018-09-04 OAN Jack Posobiac interviews alleged original Q Microchip
• 2018-08 ground-breaking NBC analysis of Q origins: Rogers, Furber, Diaz
• 2018-08 list of failed Q predictions
• 2018-08 anonymous patriot's critique of Q OpSec e.g. tripcodes
• 2018-05 Tracy Diaz essay - denies Q complicity

Do Covid-19 Vaccines Contain Luciferase?

Some anti-vax conspiracy theorists claim that the Covid-19 vaccines contain a satanic molecule called luciferase, for tracking vaccine recipients.  They claim that it is one of the vaccine ingredients that is obscured under a trade-secret rationale.

Luciferase wouldn't be an "ingredient" of the vaccine, any more than "spike protein" is an ingredient. When they test a pre-release dummy "pseudovirus" to assess its tissue distribution, they engineer the virus code to express luciferase. In such cases, luciferase isn't IN the vaccine, it's CREATED by the vaccine. (None of the anti-vaxxers I've read seem to understand this part of the biology.)

The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were sequenced (by researchers from Stanford and Palo Alto VA hospital) using spare droplets from some discarded doses. The open-source sequences are online here.

If the vaccine sequences included a section coding for luciferase, surely some anti-vaxxer would have found it already. (Or, maybe none of them understand how this stuff works, and I'm about to blow the lid off this case for them.) One source suggests that the codons for luciferase are GATGAAAAGTGCTCCAAGGA. That sequence is not present in either of the vaccine sequences.

Luciferase is useless as a molecular "reporter" unless combined with a substrate molecule (typically luciferin). Light from the luciferase/luciferin reaction is detectable for a short period using sensitive scanning equipment. Coding for luciferase in the actual vaccine would only make you trackable if they later inject you with luciferin substrate and then put you under their scanner.

UK Vaccinations vs Deaths

As the aggregate data continue to show that vaccinations are inversely correlated with deaths,  variant anti-vax theories are arising. One variant theory is that the vaccine death-jabs were already known back in January to be so non-deadly that midazolam was secretly used in United Kingdom nursing homes for mass murder of the frail elderly (whom the vaccine apparently couldn't kill).

The presence of midazolam in nursing homes has a far less sinister explanation: it is "prescribed in advance for patients who are nearing the end of life should they experience any common and unpleasant symptoms such as anxiety, pain, nausea and vomiting associated with the dying process."

Here are the latest date-aligned data for the UK. The winter surge of deaths there peaked around the time that 10% of the population had received the death jab.

Levels of Alien Belief

A list of alien beliefs, in rough order of increasing implausibility. (By aliens I mean intelligent agents whose origin lies not with conventional humans or their contemporary technology, as opposed to agents whose origins are non-human / extra-terrestrial / extra-dimensional / extra-temporal / supernatural.)

1. Alien craft/effects occasionally get observed, esp. by pilots/military.
2. Government conceals definitive evidence of alien activity on Earth.
3. Aliens mutilate farm animals and/or create crop circles.
4. Alien tech is hypersonic / transmedium, defying our understanding of fluid dynamics.
5. Alien tech is hyper-G / anti-gravity, defying our understanding of gravity/momentum.
6. Aliens have abducted humans.
7. Government possesses alien artifacts/bodies.
8. Government possesses working alien technology.
9. Government has communicated with aliens on Earth.
10. Government cooperates with aliens on Earth.
11. Governments/media are controlled by secret global group(s) with alien awareness/tech.
12. Aliens have significantly influenced human history.
13. Aliens have significantly influenced human evolution.
14. Aliens have been in conflict with each other over Earth.
15. Aliens have created alien-human hybrids.
16. Aliens have installed hybrids as past or present important humans.
17. Aliens have telepathy.
18. Aliens have shape-shifting.
19. Aliens have teleportation or faster-than-light travel.
20. Aliens have time travel.

Covid Vaccine Safety and Efficacy In Israel

The anti-vax group America's Frontline Doctors are promoting an article by Hervé Seligmann claiming that "the Pfizer vaccines, for the elderly, killed during the 5-week vaccination period about 40 times more people than the disease itself would have killed". The article makes a basic mistake that invalidates its main claim.

First, Seligmann makes an apples-to-oranges mistake by comparing Israeli vaccinations from Dec 19 to Feb 11 with a baseline of "death rates per day for unvaccinated are estimated for the 303 days from March 1 to December 20". (Ignore his mistake of saying "death rates per day", he meant "per-day death rates".) A big problem with that baseline is that the vaccinations were just getting started as Israel suffered a third wave of deaths that dwarfed the deaths from March 1 to Dec 20. That's like saying that aiming firehoses at a burning building must be the reason why more people trapped in the burning skyscraper died after the fire trucks arrived versus before.

The first drop of water from a firehose doesn't immediately extinguish a fire, and it's well-known that it takes several weeks for COVID-19 vaccines to reach full efficacy. During that time, it's expected that just-vaccinated people will be more vulnerable to COVID-19 than when the 2nd dose has been given its two weeks to fully kick in. 

Also, note that the earliest vaccines in Israel were given to the most vulnerable populations -- just as the third wave was heading for its peak. Seligmann's data conveniently ends at Feb 11, just as COVID-19 deaths per million in Israel were about to plummet. Israel reached 50% fully-vaccinated on Mar 16, and the data since Feb 11 indicate the exact opposite of the increased COVID-19 death risk that Seligmann claimed.

Indeed, thanks to Israel's data-intensive healthcare system, we now have detailed data on how COVID-19 differentially impacts unvaccinated people there. Studies published in Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine confirm the success of the Pfizer vaccine in Israel.

P.S. Table 1 in Seligmann's article strangely labels the first column as "community". Maybe this is a language/translation problem, but nowhere does he explicitly say that this column counts COVID-19 cases among people who have received vaccine injections but are not fully vaccinated. So for his denominator, he chose

• a vaccine-recipient population that is known to be skewed toward the most vulnerable, and
• systematically excluded its members once their vaccine reached effectiveness, and
• ended his data window just as Israel's death rate was about to plummet.

The meaning of his "community" column was only clarified after I finally found this detailed debunking of Seligmann written in German. (The Google translation is amazing, and actually reads more like native English than Seligmann's own paper.)

Update 12pm: Who debunks the debunkers? The German article makes a false claim here:

But ratios obviously matter more here than absolute numbers. The death rate among vaccinated COVID-19 victims was 709/54588 = 1.3%, while the rate among unvaccinated during the same period was 1566/368826 = 0.425%. However, note that the Pfizer vaccine efficacy in the 21 days between doses 1 and 2 is 52%. So to make the comparison fair, the denominator for the vaccinated case should include all the cases that the vaccine averted. This doubles the denominator, making the relevant 1-dose COVID-19 death rate be 0.65%.   That's only 50% higher than the unvaccinated COVID-19 death rate. That could potentially be explained by the fact that in Israel the vaccine was targeted early to the most vulnerable populations.

Israel's COVID-19 death graph above, with 2.5 months more data than the table above, shows that vaccines do not lead to more deaths from COVID-19. Some anti-vaxers have made a different claim: that vaccines will cause a spike in non-COVID-19 deaths. However, that claim is so far similarly contradicted by the excess-death data from the three countries that are making the most use of the most efficacious vaccines:

In the U.S., U.K., and Israel as of April 11, 156M distinct people had received a vaccine so far, while the population-weighted excess deaths among them had already become negative (as Israel's population is only 9M). As of yesterday, a total of 207M distinct people in those 3 countries have received a vaccination. When will all those "death jabs" ever cause the de-population that some anti-vaxers say the vaccine is engineered to do?

My prediction: in 2021-2023 there will be hysteresis pressure toward negative excess deaths in the U.S. because many of the pandemic deaths were among Americans likely to die in the coming years. Any spikes in excess deaths will be traceable to new variants that might develop, especially in the virus playground consisting of the world's unvaccinated people. But such spikes should be manageable, as emerging data suggests that the existing vaccines have some efficacy against variants. And since our most effective vaccines are based on the new nimble mRNA technology, it will be straightforward to create booster vaccines for problematic variants.

What Have Your UFO Aliens Been Doing?

Assume for the purposes of this post that we believe (as I don't) that at least some UFOs involve alien technology. If so, when did this alien technology reach our solar system, and what can we infer it would do during its tenure here?

By "alien technology" I am indifferent about whether the technology is "manned". I assume that aliens are at least millions of years more advanced than humans. So I assume that aliens have long since traded biological substrates for technological ones, at least for expeditions like a mission to Sol. I also assume that they can imbue their expeditionary technology with alien intelligence and values.

We infer that the aliens aren't grabby, because 1) they haven't grabbed Sol's energy or material resources, and 2) they haven't grabbed the energy resources of our galaxy. Reasoning from the Fermi Paradox, we specifically assume that the aliens

• were the first technological intelligence to start expanding in our galaxy;
• are applying a Zoo Policy to not only our solar system but to nearly all of the exploitable resources of the galaxy;
• are somehow able to coordinate and enforce their Zoo Policy across thousands or tens of thousands of light-years.

Note that this model applies even if the aliens are a federation of civilizations with independent origins, though of course Zoo Policy enforcement then becomes more problematic. (If the first civilization are adamant Zookeepers, they have to ruthlessly enforce their policy on any new civilizations they allow to federate with them.)

We infer that if they forego the exploitation of our solar system's resources, it is because they value any local biosphere's evolutionary investments and achievements. So it's plausible that they would want to protect local biospheres from extinction events. Do we see evidence of this?

Venus and Mars became suddenly unfriendly to life roughly one and four billion years ago, respectively. Neither was due to impacts, and it's not obvious that protective aliens would have intervened in either case.

But it would be trivial for aliens to protect Earth from the impacts that have regularly confronted Earth with mass extinctions. (We ourselves are at most a century away from being able to do so.) So what recent catastrophic impacts should they have stopped if they were on duty at the time?

• 66Mya in the K-Pga extinction an object a few tens of km diameter took out the dinosaurs and all tetrapods >25kg. 
• 35Mya the E-Og extinction was perhaps caused by the Popigai impactor.
• 800Kya the enormous Australasian strewnfield was created by an impact whose crater has not yet been found. It's unclear why this event is not associated with any mass extinction or climate catastrophe.

That E-Og wasn't prevented suggests the aliens arrived too late to stop it. It would be very coincidental that the aliens arrived so recently that they could not stop the Australasian strewnfield event. (And no, the strewnfield is not because the aliens blasted the object to pieces. You prevent impacts but nudging the impactors, not by turning them into shotgun blasts.) With primates blossoming into tool use while also hovering at the edge of extinction, it seems irresponsible for zoo-keeping aliens to risk allowing that impact.  

Many UFO believers speculate that aliens arrived due to our atomic testing. These speculations are some combination of fantastical and scientifically illiterate. The physics of detection and travel just don't work. If aliens are here, they've likely been here for millions of years, but E-Og limits their tenure to <35My.

Aside from protecting local biospheres from catastrophic impacts, what else would the aliens be up to? 

Monitor the Zoo inhabitants? When you set up permanent zookeeping in a solar system, do your monitoring missions use large easily-observed craft with spaceship-like acceleration capabilities? Or do you instead use small, stealthy, camouflaged devices, to allow close-up and loitering observation? If I were hunting alien observation tech, I wouldn't look in the skies for spaceships. I'd instead look in the trees, for birds and insects that are suspiciously hard to catch. Again, we humans are less than a century away from creating a never-ending plague of privacy-invading disguised surveillance drones. No human in 100 years will be using a flying saucer to spy on anybody. So why would aliens use them? (cf. "teasing", below.)

Abduct the Zoo inhabitants? That of course depends on Zookeeper ethics. Zoo Policy doesn't tell us whether aliens value individuals like they value biospheres. If an alien values secrecy but is willing to kidnap and probe an individual human, that alien seems more likely to euthanize the test subject than to return it to spill the beans. So no flying saucers, and no returned abductees. 

Tease the Zoo inhabitants? Some say the aliens tease us with UFOs to test our reactions and prepare us for "Disclosure". But these are aliens with a monastic devotion to leaving the galaxy undisturbed in the eyes of anyone with optical and radio telescopes. So why would they reveal themselves only a few decades after we first noticed their millions of years of self-denial?

Protect Zoo inhabitants from each other? If Mars has remnants of independent life, the aliens would know it and might very well want to protect it from Earth. There have been a lot of failed Mars missions, but Elon Musk hasn't gotten the memo. Shouldn't we expect the aliens to protect Mars? If not now, when? (In Arthur Clarke's 2010, the Monolith aliens told humanity to leave Europa alone.)

Protect Zoo inhabitants from themselves? If you think nuclear weapons give humanity the ability to extinct itself, you might expect the aliens to disarm us. Note that through most of the 1960s, a large fraction of U.S. Polaris missile warheads were inoperable. And there are claims that UFOs have deactivated nukes. So yes, if you believe in alien flying saucers, you probably believe that aliens have the ability to deactivate most nukes if launched. (But aliens surely know that nuclear war could not extinct H. sapiens, and in fact would set us back a century at most. As horrible as that prospect would be to us, the Zookeepers might consider nuclear war to be growing pains -- a minor incident in one of the zoo cages.)

Cooperate with the Zoo inhabitants? Most UFO believers say aliens are secretly cooperating with human governments. Such behavior would be strongly at odds with the Zoo Hypothesis. Recall that ZH says the galaxy looks uninhabited only because the Zookeepers are maniacally committed to not letting knowledge of their presence interfere with the advanced development of other biospheres. So again: why bother keeping the galaxy looking uninhabited if you're going to start working with the local primates around the same time that a Fermi notices you're absent? Oh sure, they're cooperating "secretly", but millions of UFO believers claim it's easy to see through the "secret". If these advanced aliens can't fool the History Channel, they're not very advanced.

Bottom line: most alien-UFO claims and theories are nearly impossible to square with what we can infer from 1) how long aliens would have to have been here, and 2) what they would and would not do once here.

Hellyer Reports On The Galactic Federation

I'm researching the alleged and expected impact of aliens on human science and technology. New York Magazine cited Paul Hellyer as an author claiming there has been such impact. Hellyer was Canada's Minister of Defense in the mid-1960s, but apparently that did not get him read into the secrets about alien contact with Earth. He did not learn about it until 2005, when he read The Day After Roswell -- as he says 14m into this YouTube interview. There he also says:

• 20m An unnamed general told him there have been face-to-face meetings between government officials and aliens.
• 22m The most convincing book on UFOs is "Undisclosed" (he means Unacknowledged) by Steven Greer. [Film version debunked.]
• 24m The most convincing UFO sighting is 1980 Rendlesham Forest. [Debunked.]
• 28m A military witness saw an alien who had been shot for landing on a base without authority.
• 31m Bilderbergers control the mainstream English media, and "pay big-time" to suppress UFOs.
• 33m After a 1963 UFO "armada" over Europe, a 3-year NATO study that concluded that 4 alien species have been visiting Earth for thousands of years. [NATO response.]
• 34m The Bush administration had weeks of foreknowledge of 9/11. [My 9/11 posts.]
• 41m The Cabal controls media coverage of UFOs.
• 44m Aliens have for thousands of years been interested in Earth resources e.g. gold.
• 45m Aliens are concerned about Earth nuclear weapons because "the wavelengths that are set off by an atomic weapon just keep going right out into the cosmos and consequently are of real and direct interest to other sentient beings all over the cosmos".
• 47m Post-WW2 Nazi scientists worked on "missiles, atomic weapons, and anti-gravity machines like flying saucers, and became a very import part of the Cabal" and are responsible for the government policy of perpetual war.
• 59m The Cabal is ready for a false flag allowing them to finish world conquest: "a fleet of airships capable of going around the world and attacking cities just as if they were coming from outside the Earth, with the end of the taking over the world".
• 60m The U.S. signed agreements with 2 alien species allowing abductions in exchanges for alien technology, but the aliens didn't hand over abductee lists as agreed.
• 61m The U.S. created alien clones to conduct false-flag abductions by the government's fake aliens.
• 62m Aliens could have taken over Earth at any time.
• 64m Humans were created to love each other and take care of each other. Our species is an experiment.
• 65m Eisenhower turned down an alien offer of peace and prosperity.
• 68m The alien "galactic federation" is worried about Earth, but won't interfere.
• 68m Hellyer has a close friend who receives mental communications from an alien species called "Positas" [spelling from YouTube auto subtitles].
• 69m Aliens say: Earth is one of the best planets in the universe.
• 70m Aliens say: stop using clear-cutting, fracking, and fossil fuels. Use zero-point energy instead.
• 75m Upon hearing that someone named Joe Rogan criticized him, Hellyer said this Rogan must be part of the Cabal's disinformation plan, and perhaps is paid for it.

Lots of juicy stuff here, but alas, no interesting claims about alien influence on science and technology. The search for such influence continues.

Paranormality Flees Our Sensors

The brilliant XKCD called it in 2013. But this percentage graph underplays the story. Try this:

Note that the red scale on the right is 10X the scale on the left.  So really that graph looks like this:

And even that vastly underestimates the deployed imaging capacity, because smartphone pixel counts increased 10X in just the ten years after the iPhone launched:

And all the above is only about smartphones. It doesn't even consider security cams, traffic cams, weather cams, doorbell cams, dash cams, helmet cams, and trail cams. (Only the latter 3 cam types apply to Sasquatch, but all except trail cams apply to UFOs.) Such cams have also exploded in the last twenty years. And unlike smartphones, they patiently record without human intervention. I couldn't find data for deployment of such cams, but we can safely assume it's up at least 100X since 2000. 

Nor do I have data about the vast increase in military imaging capacity, which gave us the three (quite debunkable) Navy UFO videos. We'll ignore this category, since believers would claim that the military suppresses such imagery anyway.

[2021-06-13: A commenter points out: "The amount of SAR radars, satellite imagery, IR satellites observing earth and atmosphere has exploded. Sonic booms can be detected using seismic devices. L-band SAR can detect ionospheric fluctuation in resolutions of hundreds of meters to a couple of kilometers. All-sky imaging of meteor trails can be made using long wavelength arrays on earth detecting almost 10,000 trails per hour. Even grain of sand sized meteor leaves a shockwave."]

The above analysis yields a 20-year increase in deployed imaging capacity of at least 10,000X. So if UFOs are real, we should have expected to see a 10,000X improvement in the combined quantity and quality of UFO imagery. 

So where is it?

When Iran shot down its own airliner, it was caught on both security cam and dash cam. When Sully landed in the Hudson, two security cams caught it. "Caught on camera" is a genre you could watch 24/7 now, but it didn't really exist 20 years ago. If you search YouTube for "top meteor videos", they are amazing -- and mostly from the last decade, and mostly from dashcams and security cams. 

But search for "top UFO videos", and you will be very disappointed. I find no data on counts of UFO imagery, so a good proxy should be UFO witness reports. They increased a meager 3X since 2000 while deployed camera count increased by 100X in smartphones alone.

I also lack data for Sasquatch image counts, but squatchers have an extra problem: drone-mounted FLIR rigs are now quite affordable, and they can easily pick out warm-blooded megafauna in a forest at night. Sasquatch should now be as easy to find as these two deer:

Is it really a coincidence that paranormal phenomena retreat exactly to the blurry edge of humanity's sensor grid, even as that grid suddenly expands its capacity by a factor of thousands in just a couple decades? Either UFOs and Sasquatches are somehow clever and motivated enough to dynamically fine-tune how much ankle they show us, or maybe they are just part of the noise that is inevitable at the periphery of our sensor capacity.

Or maybe Mitch Hedberg is right: Bigfoot and UFOs are blurry in real life, and all the "blurry" pictures of them are as clear as such pictures could possibly be. So we will never ever see a picture like this:

Or, we could get such a picture tomorrow, and I will switch teams. Is there anything that could happen tomorrow to make a UFO or Sasquatch believer switch teams?

2021-06-13: Mick West wrote about this subject in 2019: the "Low Information Zone".

Bob Lazar's 2011 Nobel Prize

UFO whistleblower Bob Lazar's claims about science make some basic mistakes. They were spotted by physicist David Morgan as early as 1996, showing that Lazar doesn't seem to understand:

• the omni-directionality and mass-energy requirements of wormholes.
• the fundamental differences between gravity and the strong nuclear force.
• that gravity is a field and will have to be quantized, using something like the graviton.
• that a spin-2 boson like the graviton can only be attractive, not repulsive.
• that the abundance of heavy elements beyond Polonium (element 84) depends on past supernovae in the galactic neighborhood, and not on the nature of subsequent star systems.
• the basics of charge and energy conservation in the creation of antimatter.

That is, Lazar seems to lack a basic grasp of how his claims contradict the vast majority of modern cosmology and especially quantum theory. The latter is famously one of the best-confirmed theories in all of science. 

Now, it could be that the vast majority of modern cosmology and quantum theory is fundamentally wrong, but that's not how paradigm shifts have been working over the last century or more. When Special Relativity and General Relativity and quantum mechanics replaced earlier theories, they still agreed with the previous theories in normal domains, and the differential predictions only happened in domains of the very small/brief or large/eternal. 

Lazar is talking about divergence in a domain scale of a basketball-sized device that he could turn on and off as it sat on his laboratory bench. That is not the scale at which to expect a paradigm shift. In over 30 years, Lazar still hasn't done his homework in demonstrating a grasp of the scientific theories he claims that he saw invalidated on a lab bench. It's the most important development in the history of science and technology, and Lazar just wants to be left alone to run his mail-order chemistry-set supply business. Yes, he claims that he shuns publicity and doesn't care if anyone believes him, but that's also a great way to avoid serious cross-examination.

In one sense I feel bad for Lazar, because when he came out in 1989 he was only one lucky guess away from looking like a genius. Here's how. It was well-known then that Einstein called his Cosmological Constant the biggest mistake of his career. Einstein's constant represented a hypothesized repulsive force, that Einstein abandoned after the 1929 discovery of the Big Bang expansion of the universe. Lazar in 1989 could have just said that UFOs use a mysterious form of anti-gravity similar to that implied by Einstein's Cosmological Constant. Lazar could then claim to have anticipated the greatest scientific breakthrough of our lifetime: the 1998 discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.

But instead, poor Bob built his UFO propulsion idea on regular old-fashioned antimatter and black holes, and his energy budgets don't add up at all. 1998-style dark energy is still poorly understood. Its ideas of negative pressure probably apply only to the universe as a whole, and not to tiny items like spaceships. But if Bob had just mumbled about the Cosmological Constant instead of mumbling about antimatter and element 115 and wormholes, he'd arguably deserve at least a share of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics, which was awarded to the team that made the 1998 discovery.

More red flags show up in Lazar's 2019 interview with Joe Rogan. Not only does nobody on the show know enough science to raise any of physicist Morgan's 25-year-old objections above. In addition:

• Lazar just sits by and lets Rogan and his hagiographer Corbell act as though the 2016 detection of gravity waves was some big confirmation of a daring Lazar prediction. Lazar surely knows that gravity waves have been predicted as far back as Einstein.
• Ditto for the first synthesis in 2003 of element 115, which Lazar sits by as Rogan googles it. Tom Mahood explains: I have a 1969 article from Scientific American with a cool 3D graph showing an “island of stability” around 114. This was also repeated in my undergrad physics textbook. But maybe most interesting is an article (“Creating Superheavy Elements” by Armbruster and Munzenberg) published in Scientific American again talking about a potential island of stability around 114. The article’s date? May 1989, the same month Lazar began his interviews with KLAS TV in Las Vegas.
• Lazar at 1h51m subscribes to the idea of Project Looking Glass. In UFOlogy, this is an alien device that uses time-travel technology to allow its government operators to look forward into alternate futures. Mentioning Looking Glass further undercuts Lazar's credibility, as it exponentially expands the amount of apparent government failure to leverage its alien technology. (And it would be weak soup to make the Panglossian claim that our current timeline is the least bad option available to the wielders of Looking Glass.)

Lazar is not a dumb guy. He doesn't need Looking Glass to know what kind of forums and audiences he should avoid in order to face only friendly and scientifically-illiterate questioning. There are lots of skeptical critiques about Lazar's missing educational records, criminal conviction, etc. Those are weak soup too. 

A case like Lazar's is only really interesting insofar as it can be tested in two important ways. First, it should yield predictive claims about when or whether science will catch up with Lazar's theories. Second, it should yield claims about how the government's possession of alien science and technology should have influenced the last half-century.

This article argues that Lazar's story is weak regarding (1). I'm writing a longer analysis regarding (2) that lists the many ways that alien science and tech could have influenced the last half-century, but hasn't.

9/11 Memes

9/11 Conspiracy Confirmation Futures Contract

Consider the many conspiracies in history that have enjoyed sudden revelation/confirmation, such as

• 1920: player confessions reveal the 1919 World Series was fixed
• 1957: Apalachin Raid confirms the existence of the mafia
• 1967: Ramparts Magazine exposes Operation Mockingbird
• 1971: burglarized FBI files expose COINTELPRO
• 1974: White House tapes confirm Watergate cover-up
• 1975: Church Committee exposes MK-ULTRA and CIA assassination plots
• 1986: Congress exposes Iran-Contra
• 1997: National Archives reveals Operation Northwoods

The 9/11 conspiracy and cover-up would have required hundreds of operatives to execute, and thousands of co-conspirators to cover up -- far more than any of the conspiracies above that eventually broke open.  How long before somebody inside the conspiracy flips or slips?

There are allegedly almost 1700 architects and engineers who support the controlled-demolition findings of Architects And Engineers For 9/11 Truth.  AE911T claims that "most of those who take the time to examine this evidence acknowledge that the official story can’t be true".  If AE911T is right about how compelling their evidence and arguments are, then the truth of controlled demolition will spread inexorably in the technical community, and will eventually reach a tipping point and become the consensus view.

Here is an opportunity to profit handsomely from your personal insight and conviction that truth of 9/11 controlled demolition is obvious and compelling and must eventually triumph in the marketplace of ideas.

NORAD and 9/11

NORAD was never advertised as being able to prevent hijackings.

Throughout most of my life, there have been thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at the U.S. Some of those nuclear weapons were targeted straight at the SAC bases on which I and my family lived during both the 1962 DEFCON 2 and the 1973 DEFCON 3. When I was a kid and the network signal went out on the TV, I quickly switched channels to another network, to test whether New York had been vaporized and I thus had only a couple minutes to live. And yet, none of those nuclear weapons ever hit the U.S., or were ever used to coerce us.

So yeah, I’d say NORAD lived up to its advertising.

As for the gap in our defenses revealed by Mohamed Atta on the morning of 9/11: that problem was fixed within an hour by a small group of heroes in the skies above Pennsylvania.  Their number included Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham, Jeremy Glick, Todd Beamer, and Sandra Bradshaw.

DownsizeDC helping the enemies of freedom

To comments@DownsizeDC.org:

I am a member of the California Libertarian Party Executive Committee and the 2006 LP Platform Committee. Since my Green opponent in my 2006 congressional race is a national leader of the 9/11 conspiracy movement, I had the misfortune of acquiring more expertise on 9/11 conspiracies than probably any other leader in the LP or the broader freedom movement.

I write to tell you that you're being duped by leftist enemies of freedom.

Yes, I know you say:

DDC) most of the conspiracy theories that have emerged are speculation, or worse, lunacy. [...] The American public has been turned off by these theories. [...] We believe Al Qaeda supplied the manpower and flew planes into buildings. We believe foreign policy blowback was the primary motive. We believe that it's about the questions: The Jersey Girls deserve an answer. (DDC

Nearly all the victims' families have already gotten an unprecedented per-victim average payoff of $2.3M of taxpayer money, in exchange for which they agreed not to pursue legal action. The 9/11 conspiracy movement will never be satisfied with the independence of any investigation official enough to have subpoena power. If you want well-indexed answers to the conspiracists' questions, see http://911myths.com/, http://debunking911.com/, and http://www.jod911.com/. That your "background" page gives no hint of such resources suggests that you're more interested in cynically pandering to anti-government paranoia than in answering questions about 9/11.

During my campaign I prepared my own set of Questions For The 9/11 "Truth" Movement. If you're serious in saying that "it's about the questions", then you'll ask ask such questions of the conspiracists, and link to such resources on your background page. If you're serious about the questions you ask, then you'll post links to the answers that are already available from public resources. If you don't know how to find them yourself, I'll do it for you. You ask:

DDC) Why had the US military defenses, particularly NORAD, failed to stop any of the four hijacked planes, particularly when the plane crashes were separated by nearly two hours? (DDC

http://911myths.com/html/stand_down.html

DDC) What about the lack of response, both by the President, who sat in a public school in Florida after the second plane had struck, and his Secret Service detail, whose standard procedure is to grab the President and move him to safety, the morning of 9-11? (DDC

http://www.911myths.com/html/bush_on_9_11.html

DDC) Why have the 9-11 emergency recordings and tapes, plus 500 interviews done of the Fire Department, right after 9-11, been withheld from the public? (DDC

They haven't. http://wcbstv.com/national/topstories_story_228010652.html

DDC) How is that when we have the largest structural collapse in US history and the largest loss of life since the Civil War, not one Congressional official wants to know how this happened? (DDC

NIST conducted an exhaustive investigation of the collapse, and their massive report explains how it happened in excruciating technical and scientific detail.

DDC) Why was a potential suicide-pilot/conspirator who turned himself in nearly a year before 9-11, plus intelligence about hijacking American planes from fourteen nations, plus the Bush-requested Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, ignored? (DDC

The conspirator was not a pilot. The FBI interrogated him for three weeks in 2000. The FBI criticized British authorities for not making him available for the 9/11 investigation. http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38448

Intelligence about hijacking threats wasn't simply "ignored", but intelligence failures surrounding 9/11 have already been exhaustively documented. See pp. 344-348 of the 9/11 Commission Report, and more details at http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq36.html.

http://www.911myths.com/html/august_6_memo.html

DDC) Why did the Justice Department, based on a FBI threat assessment, begin flying the Attorney General and other department officials by private charter jets, as reported by Dan Rather, CBS News, on July 26, 2001? (DDC

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/15662785.htm

http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?entry=4701

DDC) Why was Osama bin Laden, Al Quaeda, and their Taliban supporters, allowed to escape first to Jalalabad, then to Tora Bora, and ultimately into Pakistan? (DDC

There were disputes over how many troops to use in the battle of Tora Bora, but it's ludicrous to suggest there was a deliberate decision to allow OBL and al Qaeda to escape. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tora_Bora

DDC) Why did the administration first block, then stall, then hamstring, and only then, stubbornly cooperate (if you can call it that) with an investigation? (DDC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_your_ass. Do you really think subpoenas are going to turn up any answer other than this?

DDC) Why did only about 30% of the questions provided by the Family Steering Committee get asked and answered by the 9-11 Commission? (DDC

Of the 51 original FSC questions, the overwhelming majority have answers that even casual web-searching can find, just as I did for your questions above. Pick any five, and I'll answer those as well. Better, yet submit them all to the tireless webmasters of the anti-conspiracy sites I listed above, and see how fast they all get answered.