THE UNDECIDED

The Undecided                                                                                     11/2012

Stories about actual alien contact and UFO functional operation are infrequent, but when they do get published, they are, as Martha Stewart might say, “a good thing”. On the other hand, the stories about humankind’s reactions to the phenomenon are a dime a dozen. Most of these stories document a sighting and that’s about all. Still other stories are always expressing frustration at the government’s obvious and successful coverup and the blocked attempts to get them to come clean, the news media’s ignorant coverage of the subject, and the attention given to obvious UFO charlatans, debunkers, and skeptics. When one is done reading one of these stories or hearing about it in the media, invariably nothing more is ever learned about the actual objects and beings. You wind up knowing no more about UFOs than when you started. I try to avoid writing this type of story as much as possible. Unfortunately for you readers, this is one of those stories.

As you all are painfully aware, we have just completed a presidential election. It was excruciating: 2 years of blather in which unimportant issues were being promoted as important, ignorant news coverage, lying pundits, flip flopping candidates, lying attack ads, state level cheater laws to disenfranchise legal voters, and debates where the candidates tried to avoid “gotchas” immediately followed by incorrect analyses by the pundits. Fact checker groups have sprung up out of necessity as the journalistic profession continued its abandonment of background research.  This two year process then wrapped up with a grand finale by our electoral college which itself is the unnecessary anachronism of an obsolete system that should have been discontinued 50 years ago, and which on rare occasions manages to elect a president in opposition to the popular vote. It was horrible. Starting a couple of months before the election itself, newsmen started saying that the “undecided” voters would carry the election. Others responded to the “undecided” voters by saying something like, “My goodness, if the undecided haven’t made up their minds by now after two years of this, then they must be stupid as hell.”

 So, too, do UFOs have blather that is unimportant, lying pundits in the role of debunkers, lying congressmen, ignorant news coverage, fact checkers in the roles of believers and skeptics, and bad debates where the wrong people are invited, but at least there is no UFO electoral college.

But listen to this, readers.  In the world of UFOs, we have myriads of people who are undecided about the phenomenon. They are still unwilling to commit to the extraterrestrial hypothesis.  Instead of 2 years to mull the matter over in order to decide, they have had 65 years! Are these people even stupider than hell? I don’t know.  I can’t criticize those who have made their decision one way or the other on the question, yes or no. But those who still can’t decide--why is that? (For those of you who have read any of my previous stuff, you might remember that I was in this category for about 40 years. Nyuk, nyuk.)

ELEMENT 115 OPINIONS by Charles Tromblee

ELEMENT 115  OPINIONS                                                        11/2012

One of the problematic areas of studying UFOs is judging information that has come from popular sources who have been found to be lying in at least some of their stories. We all know names of those who are or were prominent in ufology, and lots of them fall into this "lying" category. Does this mean that ALL of the information that they have ever provided on the subject of UFOs is false or is it just some of their information?  One of these people is George Adamski who made some simply ludicrous claims about UFOs, yet he does have at least a few stories which were witnessed by several people who have signed affidavits as to their veracity. Even Timothy Good has professed his belief in some of Adamski’s stories.  My own opinion on why some people lie is that they may originally start out with some great and truthful stories, and then down the line start lying about things.  They commit fraud to keep the ball rolling, make more money, and extend their 15 minutes of fame. Or whatever. I suppose that if you do not choose to reject everything they have ever said once they have been out-ed as a liar (this is probably the best approach), then the bottom line is that it takes a lot of effort just to decide which of their stories is fake and which is real.

This article deals with Bob Lazar’s decision to highlight the alleged role of Element 115 in UFO propulsion. I believe his story to be a fabrication. I will make assumptions about how his thinking process may have functioned in order to make this choice. Mr. Lazar would probably laugh at some of my conclusions, but here they are.

First, let me say some things about Bob Lazar. I am not a critic of Mr. Lazar, and actually am somewhat  impressed by him. We all should admit that the guy is intelligent and creative. He did indeed work at area 51 for a short time. He may even have been given the job titles he has claimed (physicist, electrical engineer) due to having been recognized as an undegreed, raw, natural talent. I doubt that, however. Furthermore, it does appear that the government has erased some of his records, so this means that he does have an important, or at least a secret, story to tell. Also, the videos taken from a distance of test flights at Area 51 on the exact schedule that Mr. Lazar predicted go a long way toward proving that the “being employed at Area 51” part of his story is true. Unfortunately his obvious evasions and lies about his education really detract from his story. I could care less about the prostitution stuff that his detractors usually use to discredit him. That stuff is irrelevant to UFOs (although others could argue that that reflects on his character).

One of the many side trips and anomalies of the UFO world is element 115, a topic introduced by the controversial Bob Lazar in 1989.  The story of element 115 has been an intriguing one for 23 years. Element 115 became a popular topic in the UFO world after Bob Lazar claimed in 1989 that it comprised the heart of the UFO propulsion system. He claims that now the US Government now has 500 pounds of it somewhere, presumably recovered from various UFO crashes. I do not believe what Lazar has claimed about element 115, but kudos to Mr. Lazar for coming up with a story that is so intriguing, and for even being aware in 1989 that superheavy elements yet undiscovered may indeed have an “island of stability” as they say in the physics field of heavy atom discovery.  Kudos, too, for inventing a story which for the last 23 years has remained un-provable as a truth or a lie.

To make an educated guess as to why Mr. Lazar picked a superheavy element to be the heart of an alien antigravity drive, we have to know a little about superheavy elements. We all know that from high school chemistry, electrons ”like” to fly around atomic nuclei in layers (shells) with a given amount of electrons for each shell. It is pretty organized. The total number of electrons for a neutral atom equals the number of protons in its nucleus. What was NOT taught in my high school or college chemistry classes is that protons and neutrons also “like” to be pretty organized in the nucleus in several fixed layers or shells. The nucleus is always “straining” within itself as its protons are trying to fly apart from one another due to electrostatic repulsion, but in a stable nucleus are kept in check by the strong force which binds the particles of the nucleus together. Neutrons help separate the protons from one another within the nucleus, thus moderating the maximum electrostatic repulsion that the protons experience. Thus a nucleus is inherently unstable, some more than others, depending on its mix of protons and neutrons. The bigger the nucleus, the more likely it will be unstable as measured by an element’s radioactive half life. Atoms greater in nucleus size than lead all have measureable half lives, and when you get into the superheavy atoms, the half lives are very short. However, there is high probability that there exists in superheavy atoms (like 50% heavier than lead) a few elements that are stable. The Nobel Prize winning nuclear scientist Glenn Seaborg postulated an “island of stability” for superheavy atoms while serving as chairman of the AEC from 1961-71. Then in 1969, a research paper [1] performed calculations that predicted the island of stability to be located at Z = 110 to Z = 114 (Z is the number of protons in the atom’s nucleus), with the best stability at Z = 110, N = 184. (N is the number of neutrons in the atom’s nucleus.) It is a fact that physicists now predict a possible island of stability located at about elements Z = 104 to Z = 116 and N = 176 to N = 186. The inexactness is because the predictions are usually done assuming a spherical nucleus, but now it is known that large nuclei can be deformed, and this changes the stability point of proton and neutron quantities. Those same physicists also hypothesize that a second such island of stability could also exist at around Z = 168, but since we can hardly build an atom that lands on the first island of stability, let’s forget about the second one.

Now let’s get back to Mr. Lazar. Why would he choose a superheavy element explanation to be the core principle behind antigravity propulsion?

            1. He had just read something about it?

2. He never did “choose” element 115 because he actually confirmed it empirically from the UFO reverse engineering?

 My opinion on question 1: In 1989 a scientific paper was published which discussed the possible “island of stability” for superheavy elements. 1989 was also the year in which Mr. Lazar spoke of element 115. One investigator of Mr. Lazar claims that he most likely had read this paper before he made his startling Area 51 claims. I believe this, but it is not essential, because, as previously mentioned in this article, Glenn Seaborg hypothesized the island of stability in the ’61-71 time frame, and a 1969 scientific paper also discussed it. So he could have read either of those earlier sources too.

My opinion on question 2:  As previously stated, I believe his story about element 115 to be false.  I grant that Mr. Lazar may have been working at Area 51 as a non-degreed engineer or as a technician. However, his duration of employment there was only about 10 visits to Area 51, hardly sufficient time in my opinion to draw all of his startling conclusions. But this could be explained by his story that he had replaced 3 engineers whom he claimed had perished in an explosion while doing an experiment on a UFO. That is, he, from studying their logbooks, simply is repeating the conclusions that they had already drawn.  However, one galling thing about his claims is that he says that the equipment provided to him to use in his investigation was an oscilloscope and a digital voltmeter.  If that was the case, then how in the world could he or his deceased predecessors have reached the astounding conclusions about gravity amplifiers, the nuclear strong force “leaking” past the outer boundary of element 115 and then distorting gravity nearby to be available then to be amplified by those doggone gravity amplifiers, the decay of Element 116 (created from 115) which releases an antimatter particle, super efficient thermal generators, and such?  I suppose that if you found a sample quantity of some 115, you could measure its volume and then weigh it to determine its density by which you could conclude that it is element 115, but how could you draw some of the other conclusions with only a voltmeter and oscilloscope? None of this adds up so it sounds unlikely.

Now why would Mr. Lazar have chosen element 115, and not, say, element 110, 112, or 114 as his favored element? After all, Z = 110-114 was the suspected range at the time for the island of stability.

            3. He actually had empirical data pointing to element 115?

            4. He chose outside the 110 to 114 range so as to make it look like he had not read the 1989    paper?

            5. He chose a number higher than 114 so as to push the likelihood of future discovery (of his fraud) further into the future?

            6. He chose a higher number than 114 because his explanation on how the UFO propulsion works depends on some instability (i.e. radioactive decay) so he chose outside the suspected stable range?

            7. He had another reason for choosing 115?

My opinion on question 3: This is doubtful based on the previous discussion.

My opinion on question 4: This is possible.

My opinion on question 5: This is possible but unlikely because he would have chosen a higher number such as 117 or 118 or even 126 to provide many more additional years of fraud discovery protection.

My opinion on question 6: This is possible.

My opinion on question 7: This is what I think is the explanation behind his choice of Element 115 and not any of the other superheavy elements. In 1921 an eminent scientist named Charles F. Brush published a paper which claimed that his experiments using bismuth and a few other metals showed that bismuth behaved differently than the others during tests of gravity. I could not find this paper. In 1922 someone named Harold Potter refuted Brush’s results. In 1923 Brush published another paper [2] which confirmed his bismuth results. This paper described precision Galileo-style drop tests of about 4 feet done against a brick wall using equal sized discs of bismuth, brass alloy and cadmium. The bismuth discs fell faster. I would not trust these results for two reasons: One is that the bismuth results were obtained over several test runs and the bismuth difference was always pronounced at the beginning of the run, and diminished during the run. This indicates a measurement problem to me, but it could have been due to a more subtle underlying cause [3]. Second, surprisingly there was no mention in the test setup description about bismuth’s known diamagnetism, and magnets and other metals were used as part of the test apparatus. Bismuth is the most diamagnetic element known. It could have interacted either with the magnetic field or other magnetized metals in the apparatus. Just guessing. There were no tabular results published in the source that I read nor was there much quantitative discussion. No one appears to have experimented with bismuth in this manner since 1923. Anyhow, it is my theory that Mr. Lazar knew of this experiment or else he had heard rumors about bismuth’s antigravity properties. Given that elements in each column of the periodic table have similar chemistry properties, it was a clever move of Mr. Lazar to choose Element 115 because it falls directly below bismuth in the periodic table. This means that if bismuth has weird and exotic peoperties, then an element right below it on the periodic table might have even more weird, exotic, and intense properties.

After all of this, it must be mentioned that Mr. Lazar could still be right about the stability of element 115. Even though it has now been successfully synthesized, the few atoms synthesized decayed in only 220 msec, and not in the days, months, or years implied by Mr. Lazar. One big problem in synthesizing superheavy elements is getting the neutron count up to a high enough quantity. If this problem is ever overcome, physicists expect the half life of the superheavy elements in and around the island of stability to go up astronomically. If it were synthesized in a stable configuration of protons and neutrons, then that would go a long way toward getting a sample to measure for residual antigravity properties.

[1] On the nuclear structure and stability of heavy and superheavy elements,  Nuclear Physics A  Volume 131, Issue 1, 23 June 1969, quote drawn from the abstract of this 66 page paper. The abstract is on the internet at:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0375947469908094

[2] http://books.google.com/books?id=6lcLAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA75&dq=charles+brush+gravity&lr=&sig=ACfU3U3075IvfHOV8kY2e79dzTJ2yKAmkA#PPP1,M1

Discussion of a Kinetic Theory of Gravitation II; and Some New Experiments in Gravitiation 4/20/1923 by Charles F Brush pgs 75-84

[3] T. Townsend Brown, while performing force measurements on his electrogravitic capacitors in the 1926 to 1930 time frame, noticed that the electrogravitic force would start out larger and then start to lessen over time as more measurements were performed. He discovered that a charge buildup in the capacitor’s dielectric was occurring which needed time for recovery. From “Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion” by Dr. Paul LaViolette, 2008.