S27E67: Solar Superstorms and the Quest to Mars: SpaceX's Starship Prepares

[00:00:00] This is SpaceTime series 27 episode 67 for broadcast on the 3rd of June 2024.

[00:00:06] Coming up on SpaceTime, it seems last month's powerful solar storms have returned,

[00:00:12] the next test flight for the world's biggest rockets slated for June the 5th,

[00:00:17] and astronomy shown to be set in standing stone. All that and more coming up on SpaceTime.

[00:00:24] Welcome to SpaceTime with Stuart Gary.

[00:00:44] That spectacular sunspot region, which triggered some of the most violent solar storm activity in

[00:00:49] decades, has returned. After disappearing around the southwest limb of the sun two weeks ago,

[00:00:55] active region AR3664, now newly renumbered as AR3697, is back and it's brought more

[00:01:03] geomagnetic storms with it. It announced its return with a spectacular X2.8 class solar flare,

[00:01:10] followed by a coronal mass ejection which luckily wasn't facing the Earth. A comparison of AR3664

[00:01:18] as it revolved around the far side of the sun and its reappearance into view off the southeast

[00:01:22] limb of the sun shows that it has shrunk in size but still retained significant magnetic complexity

[00:01:29] with coronal loops and solar flares erupting almost continuously, producing numerous C and

[00:01:34] M class solar flares as well as at least two X class events. The violence exhibited by the sun

[00:01:40] during the first four years of the current solar cycle is already rivaling the level of solar flare

[00:01:46] activity experienced throughout the entire 11 years of the last solar cycle, and remember we

[00:01:51] still have seven years to go in this one. Solar flares are energetic eruptions of electromagnetic

[00:01:57] radiation from the sun's surface. They're generated by magnetic field lines deep inside the sun

[00:02:03] passing through the sun's visible surface, in the process producing sunspots, slightly darker

[00:02:09] regions of the sun caused by the magnetic field lines dropping local temperatures. These field

[00:02:15] lines then loop out into space before returning to below the solar surface. As different latitudes

[00:02:21] of the sun rotate at different rates, these magnetic field lines become twisted, eventually

[00:02:26] snapping and reconnecting, in the process releasing huge amounts of energy. As the solar flare erupts,

[00:02:32] it can also drag billions of tons of plasma and magnetic field from the sun with it in the form

[00:02:38] of a coronal mass ejection or CME. Solar flares are categorized according to their strength,

[00:02:44] similar to the Richter scale used for earthquakes. The smallest ones are B class followed by C's and

[00:02:50] then M, with X being the largest. Each letter represents a ten-fold increase in energy output.

[00:02:57] So an X class solar flare is 10 times stronger than an M class flare and 100 times stronger than

[00:03:03] a C class. Within each letter class there's also a finer scale from 1 to 9. C class flares are usually

[00:03:10] too weak to noticeably affect the Earth, but M class flares do cause radio blackouts and minor

[00:03:16] radiation storms that can endanger astronauts. Although X is the last letter, there are solar

[00:03:22] flares 10 times more powerful than an X1 class, so the X class flares can go higher than a 9.

[00:03:29] X class flares can fry satellite electronics, they can cut off communications and navigation systems,

[00:03:34] trigger power grid blackouts on the Earth's surface, and cause the planet's atmosphere to

[00:03:39] wobble like jello, increasing atmospheric drag on spacecraft and forcing them to use up more fuel

[00:03:44] to prevent orbital decay. But they also trigger the stunning auroral displays, the Aurora Borealis

[00:03:51] and Aurora Australis, the northern and southern lights. Last month's geomagnetic storms were the

[00:03:57] strongest since the Halloween storms of 2003. Between May the 3rd and May the 9th NASA's Solar

[00:04:04] Dynamics Observatory recorded no less than 82 notable solar flare events. They were spawned by

[00:04:11] two active regions on the Sun, 3663 and the far more violent 3664, clusters of sunspots which

[00:04:19] grew so complex that they erupted repeatedly for a full week. They also triggered at least seven

[00:04:24] coronal mass ejections aimed directly at the Earth, and SpaceWeather.com is now reporting

[00:04:30] that they may have produced the most powerful auroral display in 500 years. The vivid auroral

[00:04:36] curtains of color were seen as far south as Mexico and the Bahamas, and as far north as

[00:04:41] Adelaide and Perth. In fact the storms were so intense that the US National Oceanographic and

[00:04:46] Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, which forecasts solar storms and their impacts on our planet,

[00:04:51] issued a storm warning for the first time in nearly two decades, and NASA preemptively shut

[00:04:57] down science instruments on several spacecraft and placed at least one into safe mode, just to be sure.

[00:05:03] Whether we're in for the same experience over the next two weeks, only time will tell,

[00:05:08] but we'll keep you informed. This is Space Time. Still to come, the next test flight for the

[00:05:14] world's biggest rocket now set down for June 5th, and the archaeological studies which show

[00:05:20] astronomy is set in stone. All that and more still to come on Space Time. SpaceX says Starship,

[00:05:43] the world's largest and most powerful rocket, is now likely to undertake its next test flight

[00:05:47] on June 5th. The flight from the company's starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, will follow a similar

[00:05:53] trajectory to the last three missions, with a super-heavy booster stage programmed to undertake

[00:05:58] a controlled landing in the water, while the upper stage Starship section will attempt to

[00:06:03] achieve orbit and eventually a controlled re-entry and soft splashdown landing in the Indian Ocean.

[00:06:09] Success of this fourth test mission is vital for NASA's plans to return humans to the lunar surface

[00:06:15] in 2026 aboard the Artemis III mission. That's because a modified version of Starship called the

[00:06:21] HLS will dock with the Orion-Artemis III capsule in lunar orbit and transport two of the Artemis

[00:06:27] crew members down to the lunar surface for what's expected to be a week-long stay near the Moon's

[00:06:32] south pole before returning them to the orbiting capsule for the return journey to Earth. However,

[00:06:39] all three previous test flights have ended in Starship's destruction as part of SpaceX's

[00:06:44] rapid trial-and-error approach to development. The third test flight back in March came close

[00:06:49] to achieving its goals, with the Starship reaching orbit and flying halfway around the world,

[00:06:54] only to be destroyed during atmospheric re-entry over the Indian Ocean. And Starship's also

[00:07:00] important to SpaceX boss Elon Musk. He developed the 121-metre-tall stainless-steel spacecraft

[00:07:06] as a colonial transport system designed to eventually replace the current Falcon 9 and

[00:07:12] Falcon Heavy launch vehicles, as well as the Dragon capsules, with a new reusable spacecraft

[00:07:17] capable of carrying up to 100 people or 150 tonnes of supplies on missions to the Moon, Mars and

[00:07:23] beyond. You see, Musk wants the human race to become a two-planetary species by providing a

[00:07:30] second home on another world, just in case. The Super Heavy booster is the world's most

[00:07:36] powerful rocket, producing some 16.7 million pounds of thrust. That's almost double that of

[00:07:42] the world's second most powerful rocket, NASA's SLS Space Launch System Moon rocket, which are

[00:07:47] used to transport the Orion spacecraft used on the Artemis missions. This is space time.

[00:07:54] Still to come, archaeologists prove astronomy is set in stone, and later in the Science Report,

[00:08:00] a new study has shown that the COVID-19 vaccine currently available in Australia

[00:08:05] is still effective. All that and more still to come on Space Time.

[00:08:25] Back in 2017, scientists with the University of Adelaide were for the first time ever

[00:08:30] able to statistically prove that the earliest standing stone monuments in Britain,

[00:08:34] the Great Circles, were constructed specifically in line with movements of the Sun and Moon

[00:08:40] some 5,000 years ago. The research, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports,

[00:08:46] changed archaeology's understanding of these great ancient monoliths forever.

[00:08:50] The study's authors used innovative two-dimensional and three-dimensional technology

[00:08:55] to construct quantitative tests of the patterns of alignments of the standing stones.

[00:09:00] The project's leader, Gail Higginbottom, said at the time that nobody before this

[00:09:04] had ever statistically determined that a single stone circle structure was constructed with

[00:09:09] astronomical phenomena in mind. See, up until then it was all just supposition.

[00:09:15] The authors examined the oldest great stone circles in Scotland, Calanish on the Isle of

[00:09:20] Lewis and Stenness on the Isle of Orkney, both of which predate Stonehenge's standing

[00:09:25] stones by at least 500 years. Higginbottom and colleagues found a great concentration

[00:09:30] of alignments in the standing stones towards the Sun and Moon at different times of their cycles.

[00:09:36] And 2,000 years later in Scotland, much similar monuments were still being built that had at

[00:09:41] least one of the same astronomical alignments found at the Great Circles. The stones, however,

[00:09:46] were not just connected with the Sun and Moon. The authors found a complex relationship between

[00:09:52] the alignment of the stones, the surrounding landscape and horizon, and the movements of

[00:09:56] the Sun and Moon across that landscape. Higginbottom described the research as finally proving that the

[00:10:03] ancient Britons connected the Earth to the sky with their earliest standing stones,

[00:10:07] and that this practice continued in some way for at least 2,000 years.

[00:10:12] While examining the sites in detail, the authors found at least half of them were surrounded by

[00:10:17] one landscape pattern and the other half by a complete reverse landscape pattern. And these

[00:10:22] chosen surroundings would have influenced the way the Sun and Moon were seen, especially in the

[00:10:27] timing of their rising and setting, like when the Moon appears at its most northerly position on the

[00:10:32] horizon, which only happens every 18.6 years. The authors found that for half the sites,

[00:10:38] the northern horizon is relatively higher and closer than the southern horizon, and the summer

[00:10:43] solstice sun tends to rise out of the highest peak in the north. At the same time, at the other

[00:10:49] half of the sites, the southern horizon is higher and closer than the northern horizon,

[00:10:53] and the winter solstice sun rises out of these highest horizons. Higginbottom says it's clear

[00:10:59] that these people chose to erect these great stones very precisely within the landscape and

[00:11:04] in relation to the astronomy they knew. She says they invested a tremendous amount of effort and

[00:11:10] work to do so, and this tells us about their strong connection with the environment and how

[00:11:15] important it must have been to them for their culture and for their culture's survival.

[00:11:19] Certainly as far as individual statistical evidence for individual circles as opposed to

[00:11:25] looking at groups of circles, for example, this is the first time that we've actually been able

[00:11:29] to confirm that individual circles have a complex array of orientations regarding different parts of

[00:11:36] the solar and lunar cycles. Part of the reason for that is that when people were looking at

[00:11:41] the stone circles previously, they used to look at just the orientations that they thought hit on

[00:11:47] the sun or the moon, and they ignored those that didn't. So even if they tried to do some kind

[00:11:52] of assessment on it, they weren't approaching it in a very fully sound manner. So now we can

[00:11:58] conclude that we've done that, and we've got excellent results where both the circle of

[00:12:03] Calanish, which is on the west coast and the Isle of Lewis of Scotland, and Orkney,

[00:12:09] and the stone circle there, Stenness, most certainly say 97.7% sure that they are set up

[00:12:17] in regards to astronomical phenomena. And how did you do the research?

[00:12:21] Okay, so we had two approaches. The first one was we had to do a very specific statistical test

[00:12:27] that was developed by my colleague Roger Clay. Well, we're dealing with something that was

[00:12:31] 5,000 years ago when these things were first set up. So obviously the sky was different then,

[00:12:36] you had to account for all that. And also the landscape, although the hills were there,

[00:12:41] nevertheless, the landscape may have appeared different in terms of vegetation and that sort

[00:12:45] of thing. All these sort of things need to be considered as well. So what did you basically do?

[00:12:49] Yes, so first of course we did run our programs to ensure that we knew exactly where the sun and

[00:12:55] the moon were rising and setting at the time that these stones have been shown to be erected,

[00:13:01] as scientific dating has shown for them to be erected. And then on top of that, we looked at

[00:13:06] or examined the possibility of the vegetation cover in the areas. And basically, certainly

[00:13:12] for Western Scotland, it was shown that there was either very, very open, kind of like a scrubland

[00:13:19] equivalent and partial, very, very open basically, particularly on Western Lewes, very, very open,

[00:13:26] and Western Scotland generally. And on Orkney, during that time, it would have been much the

[00:13:31] same. So when there were trees, it was very open or sometimes just open patches in these two

[00:13:37] particular areas. And we've looked at other areas individually. Is it difficult to put a

[00:13:41] date on these things? You can't use carbon dating for stone, I guess. So you're looking at something

[00:13:45] which is buried somewhere near it, I guess, that is carbon or how did you do it? A gentleman by

[00:13:50] the name of Patrick Ashmore did excavation of Calanish and they looked at the different

[00:13:56] times that specific stones were erected or not and other activities around the stone circle. So

[00:14:04] they confirmed certain different kinds of dating you do through burnt material, so for example, wood

[00:14:10] or bone. And both have been found at Stennis and Calanish. That gave scientists a pretty good idea

[00:14:17] of when these things were erected. I guess the fact that we're seeing these sorts of stone circles

[00:14:23] throughout what we now call the British Isles, but also we've seen them in parts of Europe as well.

[00:14:28] Are we looking at, and I know this isn't your specific area of expertise, but are we looking

[00:14:33] at something which was a fairly literally a broad church, I guess, something that was practiced over

[00:14:37] a wide area? Certainly standing stone monuments were placed over a wide area, right from Ireland

[00:14:44] until Eastern Europe and beyond, in fact, India, China, other places right through at slightly

[00:14:51] different times. Standing stone circles though are certainly not as prevalent as perhaps stone

[00:14:58] rows or single standing stones. And stone circles are most prevalent in the British Isles, Western

[00:15:04] Europe, Spain, Portugal, a few in Scandinavia, no firm confirmed circles in Germany but lots of

[00:15:12] standing stones. The circles tend to be part of a burial monument as opposed to a separate standing

[00:15:17] stone circle. But there are great patches through the European continent where people

[00:15:21] chose to continue building their monuments in wood and earth. So there's a very interesting

[00:15:26] division there between the groups of people who adopted the megalithic culture and those who didn't.

[00:15:32] We're actually starting to look into that now. Does it go with trade? Interesting question. I think

[00:15:38] that in very, very early days of when, for example, agriculture was first coming in through Europe,

[00:15:45] I think that that is a possibility. I think it would have been trade but also the movement of

[00:15:50] peoples because sometimes people brought this different and the new, this is called the Neolithic

[00:15:56] sort of agriculture and the new stone age coming through parts of Europe such as Southeastern Europe

[00:16:01] and moving through Central Europe and other times it was trade. So it would be a combination,

[00:16:07] nothing simple I'm afraid, sorry, I'd like to say it was simple but it's not. Seldom is it, unfortunately.

[00:16:11] Yes, exactly. We like to try and keep it simple but then reality overtakes us.

[00:16:18] Yes, there's always caveats in any sort of research. Absolutely, I agree with you fully there.

[00:16:23] What got you interested in this? What got me most interested in it was when I first saw a very tiny,

[00:16:27] tiny article in Scientific American many years ago on the standing stones of Scotland or one

[00:16:33] in particular and my colleague said to me, why don't you do this for your PhD? Maybe you could

[00:16:38] really solve some of the issues. So it all began there and I have been addicted to it ever since,

[00:16:45] moving through from monument to monument and place to place across Scotland and branching out

[00:16:50] now through the British Isles and parts of Europe to see whether or not how much there is a connection

[00:16:55] between the peoples and culturally of those who are using standing stones. There's been a lot of

[00:17:00] work in Australia recently looking at Aboriginal astronomy and the role that the night skies played

[00:17:06] in Aboriginal culture and one thing I've seen by looking at that is that it simply mirrors what's

[00:17:11] happening everywhere else in the world. Is that what you're seeing when you look back at the

[00:17:15] 5,000-year-old culture you're seeing in Stone Age Britain? If you're certainly referring to the idea

[00:17:20] that people were closely wedded to the night sky and the day sky as well, I would say absolutely

[00:17:27] that the sky itself in different ways of course because Indigenous people of Australia often

[00:17:32] looked at the dark spaces in between the bright white lights so to speak and they had their shapes

[00:17:38] and their dream time connected to these identities and they then mirrored what happened to them in

[00:17:44] their dream time on earth as well. And overseas ethnographically you have very similar models but

[00:17:51] with constellations and I think that in ancient times that people were very closely or prehistoric

[00:17:57] times were very, very closely connected to their landscape. They had to be because it was a life

[00:18:02] and death situation and it was their full-time living space. You pay attention to what's going

[00:18:07] on if you're living in it. Is it just for agricultural purposes or is there more to it

[00:18:11] than that? All we really have are the stones, there's no written work associated with this.

[00:18:15] What do you surmise from what you've done? I think there are two very important things going on

[00:18:21] and they're both tightly entwined and that is I think that the standing stones are in places

[00:18:27] that people already knew about but at these places and I'll explain this because it's something that

[00:18:32] we haven't really touched on is that the standing stones in Britain at least are in very specific

[00:18:37] places we've discovered which allow you to view the sun and the moon from very specific perspectives.

[00:18:43] So for instance, you can at half the site see one perspective and loosely speaking and at the other

[00:18:52] half of the sites another perspective and so the first perspective is that when you're standing at

[00:18:57] your stone circle that you will have the northern horizon very high and quite close to you

[00:19:03] relatively. The south will be very distant and low compared to the north. The summer solstice sun

[00:19:09] will rise out of the highest peak in the northeast out of this range or hillock or mountain depending

[00:19:15] on the landscape and set in the high mountain in the northwest. If you turn south, the winter

[00:19:22] solstice sun will rise and set out of little hills or there could be mountains at a great distance

[00:19:27] from the southeast and set into a hill in the southwest and often it will travel over water to

[00:19:33] do so. And so you have all these amazing setups that they've done that can only be viewed at

[00:19:39] these specific locations and what we discovered that we discovered that for scores of sites in

[00:19:44] Western Scotland which are Bronze Age about 1500 BC so that's about three and a half thousand

[00:19:51] years ago and we now know those two great circles we talked about at the beginning have the same

[00:19:56] setup. And so to get back to your question, therefore that they know about these places

[00:20:01] already so I don't think that they're already agricultural because as soon as they built

[00:20:06] standing stones, they already knew about those places before agriculture had come. Agriculture

[00:20:12] was coming into that area around the same time. They were mainly a herders but they did do some

[00:20:17] agriculture but it wasn't as big as it was down south so to speak. Added to that then I think

[00:20:22] that what they've done is actually represent their cosmological understanding of the universe

[00:20:26] and through these standing stones and how they see the sunrises set out of those very special

[00:20:31] setups that they've done. They're showing themselves and it represents the site that

[00:20:36] they understand that the universe works as a cycle and that there is a cycle themselves,

[00:20:41] work as opposition so you've got day and night, the sun rising in the north for example at summer

[00:20:47] solstice, the full moon that can only rise in the south at the summer solstice if it's at its most

[00:20:53] extreme rising and setting point which only occurs every 18.6 years and all these kind of complicated

[00:20:59] things go on. Enough information in fact that they could even if they wanted to predict eclipses if

[00:21:05] they knew about that sort of thing. So there's more to it than just a neolithic. It's a very detailed

[00:21:11] culture isn't it? It is very detailed and very complex and it's also linked to

[00:21:17] the cult of the dead because you will always find the dead associated with standing stones.

[00:21:24] That was my next question, are there burial sites nearby? So I guess you've just answered that.

[00:21:28] Yes and in very very different ways. When they're associated directly with the standing stones

[00:21:34] they're very frequently cremated dead and you get parts of people's bodies placed, cremated bones

[00:21:42] that is, placed in the socket of the standing stone. So they put them in before they put the

[00:21:47] people in or parts of them before they put the standing stone there and then they may also put

[00:21:53] a cremated burial inside a jar and bury that next to the standing stone or it may in fact be next to

[00:22:00] where they bury the cremation in a stone slab coffin underneath the ground and put a nice stone

[00:22:07] stone monument over that, you know array of a can we call it. So the dead are associated in many

[00:22:14] different ways with these standing stones and Stonehenge itself is known to have many many dead

[00:22:19] associated with it. With some standing stones I believe there's also evidence of festivals

[00:22:23] associated with that, animal bones things like that? Oh yes we've got something very similar

[00:22:28] also happened at Stenness. So certainly nearby there may have actually been major festivals

[00:22:34] occurring whether that's in association with the dead or not as well I'm unsure but they've also

[00:22:41] found bones that are associated with specific seasons in relation to areas near Stonehenge

[00:22:48] and they've decided they may well have been the special gathering times that people met together

[00:22:53] for either trade or other kinds of connections between groups across a large area.

[00:22:58] That's Gail Higginbottom from the University of Adelaide and this is Space Time.

[00:23:19] And time now to take a brief look at some of the other stories making news in science this week

[00:23:24] with a science report. A new study has shown that the COVID-19 vaccines currently available

[00:23:29] in Australia are still effective especially against hospitalisation and death but the study

[00:23:35] also points out that their effectiveness has dropped as new variants appear. The report in

[00:23:41] the New England Journal of Medicine compared COVID-19 outcomes in about 1.8 million people

[00:23:47] across the United States about 12% of whom had been boosted with one of the newer vaccines

[00:23:52] targeting the subvariant XBB1.5 which is also the vaccine currently preferred in Australia.

[00:23:58] Comparing with the general population which includes unvaccinated people and people

[00:24:03] vaccinated with earlier versions of the vaccines, researchers calculated that XBB1.5 vaccines were

[00:24:09] 52.2% effective against symptomatic infection after four weeks but that went down to 32.6%

[00:24:17] and 20.4% at 10 and 20 weeks respectively. The authors also found effectiveness against

[00:24:24] hospitalisation at 4 and 10 weeks respectively was 66.8 and 57.1% and effectiveness against death

[00:24:32] was higher but less certain because there were very few deaths. They say that over the course of

[00:24:38] the study effectiveness appeared to reduce somewhat as newer non-XBB1.5 variants began spreading.

[00:24:45] The World Health Organization's official figures suggest that over 7 million people have now been

[00:24:51] killed by the COVID-19 coronavirus since it was first detected among workers at China's

[00:24:56] Wuhan Institute of Virology back in September 2019. But the World Health Organization estimates

[00:25:02] that the true death toll of COVID-19 is likely to be more than 18 million with some 776 million

[00:25:09] confirmed cases globally. After some 128 years of exploration and fossil excavations,

[00:25:17] Flinders University paleontologists have finally uncovered the skull of Australia's giant goose

[00:25:23] Geniunus newtonii. The only previously known skull for this megafauna species reported back in 1913

[00:25:31] was heavily damaged and with very little of the original bone remaining. A report in the journal

[00:25:36] Historical Biology claims the new fossils excavated from the saline dry beds of Lake Kalabona

[00:25:43] in a remote region of inland South Australia have helped scientists reveal what the species really

[00:25:48] looked like. It was a heavily built bird over two meters tall but with tiny wings and massive hind legs.

[00:25:57] An Iranian politician claims the Islamic Republic has now developed its first nuclear weapons.

[00:26:04] Lawmaker Ahmed Bakhshieh Adestani has told the Iranian bank news outlet Ruyadah24 that the

[00:26:10] Islamic Revolutionary Guards are keeping the development of the Iranian nuclear bomb a secret

[00:26:15] for the moment. Adestani, who was re-elected to Iran's quasi-parliament in March, claimed that

[00:26:20] Tehran needed atomic bombs in order to match the United States and Israel. Iran has broken its

[00:26:27] 2015 non-nuclear proliferation treaty on many occasions and has repeatedly prevented UN Atomic

[00:26:33] Energy Agency weapons inspectors from accessing suspected atomic weapon sites. United States

[00:26:39] President Joe Biden hasn't commented on the announcement. Back in 2015, the Obama administration

[00:26:46] handed Tehran $150 billion which had been frozen by sanctions imposed to impede Iran's nuclear

[00:26:52] program. And then last year, Biden freed $16 billion for Tehran, including $10 billion frozen

[00:26:59] in Iraq and a further $6 billion which had been frozen in Qatar. The Heritage Foundation's Center

[00:27:05] for National Defense says it was that funding which released money that likely contributed to

[00:27:09] Tehran's support for the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists who invaded Israel on October 7 last

[00:27:16] year, triggering the current crisis in Gaza. During the heart of the Cold War, the CIA ran

[00:27:23] tests on people supposedly with paranormal abilities in an effort to try and gain an

[00:27:28] advantage over the Soviet Union, who were carrying out similar tests. The CIA's so-called

[00:27:34] Stargate project sounds more like an episode of Get Smart, testing ideas like remote viewing in

[00:27:40] which a spy seeing a secret enemy site would use extrasensory perception or ESP to try and pass on

[00:27:46] that information simply through thought to fellow agents, without the need of shoe phones, cameras,

[00:27:52] radios or other electronic communication devices. Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptic says it was

[00:27:58] one of many crazy ideas the spy agencies were looking at. To me, you know, I think it's perfectly

[00:28:03] justified. If you're in the CIA, your responsibility would be to use any tool you can get to try and

[00:28:09] gain an advantage in the spy world, in the military world. So naturally, you'd try anything and

[00:28:15] everything and you got a lot of money so you can throw the money at these things to see if they

[00:28:19] actually work. So when people say, oh look, the CIA invested psychic powers, you say yes, they

[00:28:24] also investigated dolphins with minds attached to them and all sorts of different things and

[00:28:29] they try anything. So yes, they looked at psychics as they would. They used LSD, they tried basically

[00:28:36] everything to see what would work and if it didn't work, they dismissed it and moved on to the next.

[00:28:40] They stopped doing it and they did this exactly with the psychics. So I mean, it was Stargate

[00:28:44] project, it was called, it was using people from, at some stages anyway, using people from Stanford

[00:28:49] Research Institute, SRI, which was separated from Stanford University, used to be associated with

[00:28:55] it until they were doing things with the military and then Stanford said no, we don't want you to

[00:28:59] be part of us. You can often be a private thing and a couple of researchers there in particular

[00:29:03] who was Harold Putoff and Russell Targ, that's the famous skeptic, Sam's Randy, cruelly referred to

[00:29:08] with the Laurel and Hardy of parapsychology. They were doing things on various, I think they did

[00:29:13] it on urengo tests, especially for remote viewing which is seeing things from a distance, which

[00:29:18] would be pretty useful in a military sense if you can see what the other side is doing over the

[00:29:23] hill. So they're researching these things for a long time as part of the field of parapsychology,

[00:29:28] which is investigation of paranormal, especially psychic powers. They're going on since the

[00:29:32] development of the British Psychic Association, Psychic Society in the 1800s who have this as

[00:29:37] their aim to investigate scientifically, these sort of things and there's very little has come out of

[00:29:42] it that's reliable. Very little might be an overstatement that has reliably come out of

[00:29:46] these investigations done by different laboratories in different places in the world

[00:29:50] and some of them were shown to be their research projects were shown to be unfound for the numbers

[00:29:56] that people use, by the procedures they use. Some of them definitely involved dodgy research

[00:30:00] subjects, some of them involve dodgy researchers but most of the people involved would have been

[00:30:04] sincere and really thought they're onto something. This particular Stargate project was done in

[00:30:08] California, CIA funding it. Later on, an organization called the DIA which is the

[00:30:14] Defense Intelligence Agency, it's basically like the defense version of CIA and they're

[00:30:18] investigating it but after a while, they just gave up. They just dropped it. Their data was

[00:30:22] investigated by different people, a couple in particular that's referred to in the article.

[00:30:27] One was a psychologist and statistician from University of California. Another one was a

[00:30:33] psychologist and a noted skeptic named Ray Hyman who I've interviewed. I've spoken to him about

[00:30:38] this. The other person was Jessica Oots but who was in favor of parapsychology. She found it

[00:30:42] promising. Ray Hyman was yet to be convinced and naturally enough, when they looked at all

[00:30:46] those statistical information that came out of the Stargate project, they had different views

[00:30:50] but I've seen reports about it, I've seen investigations of it and it was full of

[00:30:55] poor practice like the people who were assessing the results. Someone would sit down in a lab and

[00:31:00] someone else, a researcher would go out to a location to say a big tower or something or

[00:31:05] a building or a bit of water or something and think about it and the person in the lab would

[00:31:08] try and sort of gauge their thoughts and be able to draw out the building or whatever that they

[00:31:13] were near and therefore, they would come back and compare what the reality was to what the

[00:31:17] drawings were and sometimes they were close, other times they weren't. The person judging it

[00:31:22] might have been a bit lenient saying, well that looks like that etc. A box looks like a bridge

[00:31:27] because there's a bit of a box down the bottom of the bridge or something like that, whatever

[00:31:30] reason. Some of them did look close, some of them you're bound to get some hits, they're not great

[00:31:33] hits and some of them look totally unlike what they were. So then you get practice of the people

[00:31:37] only choosing the ones that were close and ignoring the ones that were obvious misses. The judges

[00:31:41] were people who are often the same person judging all of them which they shouldn't have. They should

[00:31:45] have been independent people judging them and they weren't always. People who didn't know which

[00:31:49] drawing was supposed to be with which real location, you could mix them up and say okay,

[00:31:54] you tell me which one is which, which one matches up. An independent person found it a lot less

[00:31:58] accurate than a researcher who was judging it. So throughout this history of this Stargate

[00:32:03] Project and other parapsychology investigations of psychics etc, it's a bit of a history of core

[00:32:10] practice fraudulent practice either on the part of the researcher or the researchee. It's a sad

[00:32:15] actually because there was most people getting into it were very sincere about it and they thought

[00:32:19] they had gotten on with something but obviously the CIA and the DIA after a while thought,

[00:32:23] no, there's nothing here that's useful whether there's nothing there at all,

[00:32:27] certainly nothing useful and they just dropped it. So the history of parapsychology is an

[00:32:31] interesting history going on for now more than a hundred years and we've published long articles

[00:32:36] actually looking at parapsychology and people taking it apart and looking at what the cases

[00:32:40] are and it hasn't been very convincing except to the people who are parapsychologists.

[00:32:45] In many ways, we've really got to thank the CIA for this sort of stuff because

[00:32:49] they showed us how unscientific paranormal studies are.

[00:32:54] And a lot of the stuff they've revealed, they've actually given up,

[00:32:57] so here it is, here's the stuff we got. You find something there. So yes,

[00:33:00] they know they did the job they should be doing which is throwing money at anything

[00:33:04] which is a bit, you've got that much money to throw around, no wonder you're spinning,

[00:33:07] your budget is huge but they should look at various activities and see if there's anything

[00:33:11] worthwhile looking at and in this particular case, Stargate Project, they didn't. Not to say that

[00:33:15] Targon put off both, been promoting it ever since, making a living off it and Stanford Research

[00:33:20] Institute is still going. What it's doing now in psychic things, I don't know but

[00:33:24] it's still out there and Uri Giller always claims that this was the laboratory that proved his

[00:33:30] skills. It wasn't, it didn't prove his psychic skills anyway, he proved his very convincing

[00:33:34] and charming skills. It's not the same thing. That's Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptics.

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