Very scary stories told that we have all heard and debunked

[727Sky]

I really do enjoy this Youtuber (The Why Files) and the way he presents his subjects.

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Another great story that is only a story and nothing more

[DuckforcoveR]

I am stunned that in all my years neck deep in conspiracy sites, this is my first time hearing of Serpo.

[BIAD]

I am stunned that in all my years neck deep in conspiracy sites, this is my first time hearing of Serpo.

If you recall the number of military personnel clothed in red satin one-piece overalls and sunglasses in
Spielberg's movie 'Encounters Of The Third Kind', they were based on the Serpo story.

[Ninurta]

I've viewed the Warrens for years as mere showmen, not serious paranormal researchers at all. The things they have said during "investigations" are complete hogwash, and display a supreme unfamiliarity with the paranormal or supernatural - it has always sounded like bullshit made up as they go along. I class them in the same category as Zack Bagins, a TV "investigator" that has absolutely no knowledge of the things he claims to be "investigating". One day, those "things" will probably eat him alive, due to his utter lack of knowledge of the things he claims to be dealing with and "investigating".

It's those kind of folk, like the Warrens and Bagins, who give "paranormal investigation" a bad name. There is no telling how many True Believers they are misleading.

I became aware of the Serpo story in 2006 or 2007. From the start, I was skeptical of it. The story included the magic words (or poison pills) of "Zeta Reticuli", and that is what clued me in that it was all faked. The Zeta Reticuli connection crept into the UFO narratives in connection with the Barney and Betty Hill abduction, but many years afterward. It came from a researcher named Marjorie Fish.

During the alleged Hill abduction, Betty Hill claimed to have been shown a star map by the alien leader. She reproduced the map she claimed to have been shown, and that was published in John Fuller's book on the case, "The Interrupted Journey". Ms. Fish got the map from that book, and then set about constructing a series of 3D models of stars with coordinates given in the Gleise Catalog of nearby Stars (1969 edition). She then viewed the models from a variety of viewpoints until she found what she believed to be a match to Betty Hill's star map, and identified the alien homeworld as orbiting Zeta Reticuli.

There are flaws in her analysis. First and foremost, the maps do not match at all once the connecting lines are removed. It's those lines drawn in by Ms. Fish that "lead the witness" into seeing a matching pattern that is not there at all. When you remove the lines and just overlay the star patterns, there is no match at all.

The Zeta Reticuli narrative originated with Marjorie Fish, not Betty Hill, although Hill endorsed it because she was desperate to find the homeworld. Earlier, she had endorsed a newly discovered quasar in Pegasus as the "homeworld", because she saw it in a star map in a newspaper reporting on the discovery of the quasar. Ms. Hill was so desperate to find the homeworld to "verify" her map that she would pounce on any identification to support her story and lend credence to it.

I discussed that matter with Stanton Friedman before his death, but he had a vested interest in propagating the Zeta Reticuli misidentification. It had already crept into the UFO community so deeply it could not be dislodged, and he had ran with that in several of his own books, to the point that he could no longer back out and maintain book sales, so he just told me that he "couldn't see" what I could in the maps.

Specifically, what I pointed out to Friedman was that the two foreground "stars", the ones Fish identified as "Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli", exhibited crescent phases in Ms. Hill's original drawing. Only solid bodies like planets and moons have crescent phases. Self-luminous stars do not - they glow from everywhere on their bodies, so no crescent phase, caused by light impacting a solid body from a different angle, are obsevered on stars.

I did the same as Ms. Fish, but using the newer, updated, and more accurate Gleise Catalog of Nearby Stars 3rd ed. (provisional) (1991) to try to find the Hill pattern. If we assume that the two foreground bodies are actually planets instead of stars - either a double planet or a planet and a large moon - and further assume that the largest star in the center of the map is the home star of those planets as is indicated by the angle of the crescents shown on the planets, then remove the lines and planets to highlight the actual star pattern, the closest I've been able to find is not Zeta Reticuli, but rather a view from Beta Coma Berenieces towards the solar system of the sun. That star (B Comae) has the added advantage of being near the north galactic pole (89 degrees galactic north, one degree off from the pole), which would be a more logical view direction (for a star map covering a larger area than a single planetary system) than simply a random altitude and azimuth predicated on the orientation of any one star system within the viewed or mapped area - those separate star systems are all oriented randomly, each with a different orientation from the rest.

A more logical frame of reference for such a map would be in a larger reference system, outside the individual reference frames of the constituent stars. The Galactic coordinate system would fit that bill.

Anyhow, Zeta Reticuli has crept into the narrative and been accepted as "fact" in the UFO community to the point of it being almost a religious dictate nowadays. So I automatically discount ANY story that claims "them thar little grey fellas done up and tol' me they come from Zeta Reticuli!" as a pre-meditated hoax using the fake narrative of Zeta Reticuli in an attempt to lend itself some sort of "credence", just because that is canon in the UFO community.

And "Serpo" made that exact claim, so, hoax.

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[EndtheMadnessNow]

I really do enjoy this Youtuber (The Why Files) and the way he presents his subjects.

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Another great story that is only a story and nothing more

Thanks for sharing that vid. I like his tin foil hat fish bowl prop sitting on top of "Inside the CIA" book. LOL! I added that channel to the top of my list!

Hysteria 51's Project Serpo: The Intergalactic Scientist Exchange Program (2018)

You can read all about it here with some fantastical imagery memes: MODERATOR's INTRODUCTORY NOTES FOR “Project SERPO” Release #36

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BIAD - Holy Encounters, I did not make that connection!    Err, prolly forgot. Almost want to rewatch that movie again.

So, so much that I subscribed to, some hook, line & sinker back 10 or so years ago that in past few years I'm now discovering it was all charlatans & counter-intel psyop stooges going back to the Paperclip days.

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A more logical frame of reference for such a map would be in a larger reference system, outside the individual reference frames of the constituent stars. The Galactic coordinate system would fit that bill.

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Speaking of which, do you know how to transpose a lat/long coordinate here on Earth to a celestial coordinate? That possible? Know of any such online star map. I'm no astrophysicist and not even sure if I'm putting the question in correct context.

Thanks!

[Ninurta]

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A more logical frame of reference for such a map would be in a larger reference system, outside the individual reference frames of the constituent stars. The Galactic coordinate system would fit that bill.

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Speaking of which, do you know how to transpose a lat/long coordinate here on Earth to a celestial coordinate? That possible? Know of any such online star map. I'm no astrophysicist and not even sure if I'm putting the question in correct context.

Thanks!

I think I do. If I understand you correctly, you would like to project the Earth's geographic grid into space to locate stars via the earth lat-long grid. That's implemented in the "equatorial" system. It takes the Earth's equatorial and geographic grid onto the celestial sphere.

There is an astronomical (but free) program called "Stellarium" that you can use to view the sky. It will display both an equatorial and an azimuthal grid projected onto the night sky. The Equatorial grid (Measured in Right Ascention and Declination) is fixed to the sky - a star will not move in reference to it - and the azimuthal grid is tied to the location of the observer on Earth. This means that if the program is sped up, the equatorial grid will appear to move as the Earth rotates, but each star will maintain it's position with respect to the grid. The azimuthal grid does NOT move with the sky (as it is tied to your position on Earth), and the stars will apear to slide along it as the Earth rotates.

There are 24 "hours" of Right Ascention, so each RA zone is 15 degrees wide. Declination is measured in degrees, + or - according to whether they are above or below the celestial equator.

Some background on these coordinate systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_ascension

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equatorial...ate_system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomic...te_systems

ETA: to do coordinate conversions between the equatorial and galactic coordinate systems to get the coordinates for the stars in the CNS3 converted to galatic 3D coordinates, I had to teach myself spherical trigonometry, because the university did not offer a class in it. So we set up an independent study for me to research it and teach it to myself, and I got class credit for it even though no such class existed until we set it up. Spherical trigonometry is a bit different from planar trigonometry, because any triangle on the surface of a sphere has corners that add up to 270 degrees rather than the standard 180 degrees of a flat triqangle due to the curvature of the surface it is projected on to. That curvature "opens up" the triangles corners to a wider angle.

Then to get the 3D coordinates, I had to take the converted coordinates and combine them with the distance coordinate to obtain placement coordinates in 3D space - X, Y, and Z coordinatess.

There used to be, and probably still is, a website called something like "3D Starmaps" by Nyrath (real name Winchell Chung) that delved into these conversions some. I myself used FORTRAN on a VAX computer to process the catalog into my coordinate system so that all I had to do after understanding the conversion principles was to write a FORTRAN program to do the conversions for me, then output them to a file. I didn't sit there with a pencil, paper, and a slide rule and do all 3500 or so of them by hand!

ETA2: Nyrath's star mapping website: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/starmaps/ 

Links to informational pages about the math of it and such are at the bottom of that page. I didn't check this evening, but at one time you could get the CNS3 there as a file you could process on your own. Back in the day, I got it through academic chammels from Gleise and Jahreiss, the authors and compilers of it.

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[EndtheMadnessNow]

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A more logical frame of reference for such a map would be in a larger reference system, outside the individual reference frames of the constituent stars. The Galactic coordinate system would fit that bill.

.

Speaking of which, do you know how to transpose a lat/long coordinate here on Earth to a celestial coordinate? That possible? Know of any such online star map. I'm no astrophysicist and not even sure if I'm putting the question in correct context.

Thanks!

I think I do. If I understand you correctly, you would like to project the Earth's geographic grid into space to locate stars via the earth lat-long grid. That's implemented in the "equatorial" system. It takes the Earth's equatorial and geographic grid onto the celestial sphere.

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Oh wow! Yes, this is exactly what I had in mind and thanks for the old school history on it. I'll do some reading, thanks for the links/info.