Entertaining Crackpottery

[lpetrich]

Carl Sagan's first venture into popularization was his collaboration with Iosif Shklovsky, Intelligent Life in the Universe, published in the late 1960's.

In that book, he described how he appeared as an expert witness in a court case. A certain Helmut Winckler claimed to be contacted by some very benevolent and very concerned Saturnians who took him for some tours aboard their flying saucers. They adjusted the Earth's spin axis by a few degrees because it was getting dangerously tilted, and they visited the Great Pyramid of Egypt, where they found a one-man flying saucer with a crown of thorns. One of their number had visited the Earth about 2000 years ago. They even located a vein of quartz with a remarkable property: it cured cancer. HW tried to go into business to mine that quartz, and it led to a lot of falling out and that court case.

CS was called to assess the likelihood of HW's claims. Astronomers would have noted a much smaller deflection of the Earth's spin axis, and Saturn was uninhabitable by most Earthly organisms. He got quizzed by the defense attorney on how we can really know what Saturn is like from a distance.

One of George Adamski's followers noted that the mainstream scientific view about Mars's surface is that it is cold and dry with a thin atmosphere. He claimed that we could never know for sure without going there, but that there is another solution: Mars's inhabitants could come to us. Which is what George Adamski had described.


CS also noted in that book that there used to be in Almaty, Kazahstan an Institute of Astrobotany. Some of its members argued that Dialectical Materialism implied that there is life on every planet, and that if Mars or Jupiter was lifeless, it would disprove the philosophical basis of Communism. This provoked an agonizing official rebuttal to the effect that Mars or Jupiter being lifeless would not falsify Diamat.

[lpetrich]

Does anyone remember this Usenet celebrity?

Ludwig Poehlmann - Ludwig Hansen - Ludwig van Ludvig - Ludwig Plutonium - Archimedes Plutonium

Here is some of his theorizing. He is noted for claiming that the Universe is a giant plutonium atom and that galaxies are dots in its electron cloud. Why plutonium? He explains.

[Horwood Beer-Master]

[Jason]

[Svartalf]

Fuck you with the rail that's to be used to ride you out of town.

[Jason]

Thanks Svartalf.