1. The Earth is accelerating upward at a constant 9.8 m/s²
This claim was made by The Flat Earth Society (I haven't found a source for this). Flerfs get very angry about this explanation and typically say things like "The Flat Earth Society is controlled opposition". I suppose this means that they think that the FES is trying to deliberately make flat earth look ridiculous, as if it needs help.
A typical criticism of this claim by debunkers is, if this were true, Earth would have long ago exceeded the speed of light, but this is mistaken - length contraction and time dilation would prevent an constantly accelerating body from reaching c.
2. Electromagnetism
This usually involves a large amount of handwaving and word salad, and still fails to explain why electromagnetism both attracts and repels, but gravity only attracts, and why a Faraday cage can block EM but not gravity. But flerfs don't deny gravity because they want flying cars, they deny it because gravity tends to make planetary-sized objects roughly spherical, explains why water isn't flung into space like a spinning wet tennis ball, and why the atmosphere doesn't need a dome to keep it contained. So if EM is why we aren't floating, why wouldn't it also make big masses spherical and keep water and air on them?
3. "Density and Buoyancy"
Flerfs will repeatedly mock gravity, saying that if it was real, it would cause objects to "stick" to Earth, but and post photos of oranges in water, or metal floating in liquid mercury.
They ignore that buoyancy requires gravity. Repeat these experiments in zero-gravity, and buoyancy vanishes. And one doesn't need to go into orbit or even an airplane simulating weightlessness. Just dropping something off a building will suffice. It's probably safer to try that with the two oranges than an anvil and mercury
A flerf on Facebook offered to share a video, "And whoever want a flat earth documentary i will share. We dont share it openly on YouTube is because it get deleted due to the monopoly of nasa as they dont want ppl to know truth."
So I asked, "is it better in some way then the FE videos that are available on YouTube?" and he replied "it made me a flat earther. I used to moke them. Sending you in messenger" - note, he never sent it to me. I neglected to ask him if he used to mock FE videos, make them, or smoke them.
Well that didn't answer my question, so I tried to clarify and asked him for ".. what other FE videos, et al, you previously saw but were not convinced by and what about this one you found more persuasive. His response, "this one you cannot find by search. Its a private link."
So I asked him if it was being unsearchable that made it persuasive, and he said "the facts in make it convincing". When I asked him what facts those were, he said "you should just watch it and you’ll know. I dont wanna give spoilers" which in flerf means "I don't want to defend this steaming load, I just want to increase the view count"
But he posted a screenshot somewhere else in this very long comment thread. This group rejects links in posts, I also couldn't post videos by They Might Be Giants there.
Well let's see how hard it is to find. I typed the title into the YouTube search bar, and there it was, the first result.
So let's get down to it, here's the video if that was too hard to do yourself. And remember, is BIG secret!
It opens with a clip from a Hibbeler productions video, sounds like Eric Dubay/Dubaz droning that "it is flat as far as we can tell" motionless, too. Is this Level or a different Hibblefest? He cherry-picks photos that don't show the curve, ignoring those that do. He also repeats the chestnut about the horizon rising to eye level, only this time it's the eye of the camera. No, that's just where you're looking or pointing the camera.
A different voice says that everything from NASA is fake. They like to harp on NASA, ignoring that we have known the Earth is a sphere for millennia before NASA was founded in 1958. The voice asks that NASA point the Hubble telescope at Earth, ignoring other probes that were designed to do just that, Complains that the 2002 Blue Marble has the same clouds more than once, something NASA does not attempt to hide. This is what flerfs do, this one image is photoshopped, therefore everything is.
This is all standard flerf propaganda, nothing new hear, I'm going to move faster. The crock about "eight inches per mile squared". "Longest bridge in the world" A clip from "Men in Black". Horizon is flat. Experiments (unnamed) show no rotation
You can't see Japan from California because the air is too thick. The endlessly repeated dramatic music is getting to me, enough kettle drums, I'm muting and just going to look at the subtitles from now on.
Bill Nye on watching a boat disappear over the horizon. Claim that this is due to "perspective" "Bringing back" a boat that hasn't gone over the horizon yet.
Flerfs sweem to watch much more Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson than any other sector of the viewing public, and in the next clip, sound-bites from Neil. Flerfs love to quote him saying the Earth is wider at the Equator and then show an image from space, ignoring that the widening is very small. It's 12,756 km at the Equator and 12,725 at the poles, but flerfs have stopped listening by now, because numbers are involved. The clip even quotes Neil saying "slightly". Same derp about "pear shaped".
A flerf saying "we don't know shee-it". Well yeah, they don't. A video of a camera attempting to auto-focus on a planet or star. "How the fuck did you figure out ..." I call this phenomenon "flerfsonal incredulity"
Stars should do "strange motions" but move in circles. Someone ranting about a frozen moon whose name he can't remember.
"Local sun". "Do you really think the sun is going down?" Salt flats
Chicago seen from "across the Great Lakes" (they couldn't be bothered to look at a map and see which one Chicago is on?) ignoring how the bottom is hidden by the curve of the Earth.
Clip from TV news saying it's a mirage, their intelligent response is a big red button labeled "BULLSHIT". Great refutation, as always.
Back to the repeated clouds in photos of the Earth. And someone saw "sex" in the clouds. And the continents are different sizes! Tens of thousands of satellites, animation that makes them look much larger than they are, just like Manhattan is completely covered in Starbucks, so much so that they have apparently merged.
There are no close-ups of Earth (and I suppose they want to see the whole thing at once, too) or upside-down buildings in Australia.
OK, 18 minutes into an hour and 6 minutes, I give up, this is the same old same old.
I found this meme in two groups yesterday, by the same poster. I didn't check to see if he posted it in more places. Below is my response.
How to tell someone else has learned all their science from YouTube (even though that if they looked, they would also find videos explaining this there, too.
* They can't predict what the effects of Earth's rotation would be but they repeat "1000 MPH" instead of plugging that into the the formula for centripetal acceleration together with the radius of the Earth.
* They refuse not only to believe other's measurements of curvature, but refuse to try to measure it themselves. They will probably use an incorrect formula for how far an observer can see which does not take into account the height of the observer or observee. They may ignore that they cannot see the bottom of the observee. Or claim that a telescope can "bring it back".
* They use "perspective" as an all-purpose answer without knowing what it means.
* They don't understand aviation
* They don't understand how the distance to the Sun was measured. They certainly haven't tried to do it themselves. When asked how far it is, they will either refuse to commit to anything other than "local". They may show photos of crepuscular rays through clouds or ones that they claim show the Sun lower than clouds.
* They dismiss all photos from space are fake, whether from NASA or another source without explanation. They don't understand photography.
* The proofs have gone over their head, instead of asking for help to understand them (which they don't want, because their minds are already made up) they just say "no proof"
And one more:
* They respond with claims that anyone who disagrees with them is "indoctrinated", insults, meme dumps, laugh emojis, or simply don't respond.
Another day, another video by a flerf. This one was sent to me by someone who posts on Facebook under the name Sean Angelo Mchugh. Its name shows up on Facebook as "Nasatan exposed part 1". He also sent me a part 2, which may get its own post, and added "They are my videos so they don’t give opinions rather just raw facts" and went on to say that these facts are "all referenced".
Let's start by seeing if these are his videos. I didn't find any photos of him, just memes on his Facebook profile, but his About page on Facebook says that he works at ARTSTOPSeany and Sean Angelo Mchugh artist and both of those have photos of possibly the same person
The YouTube channel the video is on is called CUBESMASHER and the description on the channel's About page says "Exposing the lies of the luciferian Freemasons". There's no name, but the person speaking in the video is on screen most of the time, and this does seem to be the same person.
But back to Sean the flat-earther. Let's watch his video.
As I write this it's got ten likes and 377 views, so maybe all he wanted from me is more views. He's "absolutely gobsmacked" that anyone would believe NASA, who, he says have been repeatedly proven liars. On the screen is a quote from Albert Pike having something to do with Freemasonry. According to Wikipedia, Pike wrote a book, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in 1871. Flat-earthers and conspiracy theorists of all sorts often display a great deal of paranoia about Freemasons, I don't know why.
Anyway, he's got a quote that drones on for a while, but I think can be summed up in saying that high-ranking Freemasons are supposed to believe that Lucifer is god, but not tell the lower ranks. It's not found in the copy of the book at Project Gutenberg, however. His copy seems to come from Amazing Discoveries which looks like a site of more conspiracy theorists with a section on Prophecy News.
He moves on to Wernher von Braun. There's a photo of von Braun with Walt Disney, another 33rd degree Mason. Is that the only evidence he's bringing of either of them being Freemasons, that they are standing together? The photo is from when they met about Disney films on space exploration. Or is it that von Braun was a Nazi, Nazism is Satanism, Satanism is Freemasonry?
In an aside he says that we "lost the technology" to go back to the Moon. This is a standard flerf misinterpretation, we no longer build the rockets and spacecraft used in the Apollo missions. They think it's suspicious somehow. There's more technology on a phone today, he says - yes, but there's no Saturn V rocket at the bottom of it. He runs the clip of astronaut Don Petit saying "I'd go to the Moon in a nanosecond. The problem is we don't have the technology to do that anymore". As ever, flerfs suddenly trust NASA (remember the title of this video, NASA are liars?) when they say something they like. This is stuff I've seen in endless flerf videos, it's been dealt with. He changes the color and slows down Petit's voice as if that demonstrates anything.
Now he's back to von Braun and Disney, who he says are connected to Aleister Crowley. A quote from Gregory Garett says that Crowley, in addition to those two, was a member of "the NASA Dream Team". This should be good, seeing how Crowley died in 1947 and NASA was founded in 1958. There's a very small photo of the cover of a book in which it seems Garett wrote this, but it's too small to read.
He goes on to talk about Crowley and bands, The Beatles, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin. Loads of them, all satanic. He's done a previous video about that. Is Paul still dead? He doesn't say people are satanists if they aren't, it's all researched.
Oh wait, I figured out what this guy is doing, he's got a blurb about that book that mentions Crowley, but doesn't say he was a member of NASA. Is he saying he is? Or that someone else had some connection to him? I think this and all the other blurbs are part of Google search results.
Now he's talking about Jack Parsons, who was kicked out of Jet Propulsion Labs in 1944 due to following Crowley. And Parsons died in 1952, six years before NASA was founded. Another blurb from an also unnamed book by Gary Cartwright mentions, without context, Albert Einstein, Werher von Braun, Lyndon Johnson, Fidel Castro, Karl Marx, and Mao Zedong. I'm pretty sure that neither Castro, Marx, or Mao worked for NASA. I don't think he has any idea what he's even trying to insinuate here.
Now the blurb from the Parsons book is talking about "satanic-influenced mind-control experiment, supposedly run by the federal government" and then continues listing the names starting with Einstein. Now he's reading a quote about "not understanding oneness is satanic" and then there's an ellipses meaning text has been skipped over, and von Braun's name. He doesn't like evolution either and found another blurb mention evolution and von Braun. But all these blurbs say is that the same book discusses Crowley and NASA, or evolution and von Braun.
"They're laughing at you guys" - actually he's right here, he's hilarious.
NASA, he claims comes from a word "nasatan". Once again there's a small blurb from some book, but not an entire quote, so I have no idea what this word is or even in what language. And NASA means "to deceive" in Hebrew (no, it does not, he didn't prepare, but I already blogged about it). And the red part of the NASA logo looks like a snake's tongue. What research skilz! Repeating something every other flerf says.
Now he discusses "how many astronauts are masons" And it's another of those book blurbs. Which lists eight. Googling how many people have been in space, one finds numbers in the 500's or 600's. But it's worse, Lewis and Clark were masons! A photo of masonic emblems is I suppose intended to be scary as he reads a few more astronauts' names. Most of the Apollo astronauts were masons (no evidence of this presented).
There's an Orange Lodge where he lives, and the word orange, when you "put it through a numerical calculator" (he means some sort of Gematria) has a value of 33. It's the only color in the world that does that! And there are 33 degrees of Scottish Rite Masonry! And one third of the angels fell from heaven with Lucifer! Jesus died at age 33!
Buzz Aldrin took a Masonic flat to the Moon! And brought it back. Except he didn't go! Norman, coordinate!
Most famous people were masons. Area 51 - voice trails off. The (unnamed) head of NASA was "knocking around with Aleister Crowley". All famous songs are satanic. Masons are charitable because Satan gives them lots of money! He's getting bored. But he's still droning on. Freemasons freemasons freemasons. Charles Darwin was one. He wrote that people evolved from rock. His grandfather was, too. And half-wrote a book for him, all he had to do was go to the Galapagos Islands and look at some finches.
He doesn't watch TV, but he hears there's a series about Leonardo (da Vinchi) who was another one and "just propped up as this genius". And another Google search blurb says he was a freemason.
Now that we've established that all astronauts are masons (by finding partial quotes from books that say that some were, without seeing their evidence) And that masons are luciferians (with a quote from a paranoid website), if you disagree, please argue with him in the comments (all I see is one "really enjoy this" more comments from Craig McNeil from the FTFE channel on YouTube trying to set up a debate with him). He can keep going all day and there's another half hour of this.
French people are all masons. It all comes from there. And Scotland. The Jesuits are behind it. Please do not forget this.
Now he's going to show some clips where NASA admits they cannot leave low Earth orbit. But first, he's sorry that took so long. But he's going to repeat some of it again, after which it's going to become interesting. But not quite yet, he's going to compliment you for a while for watching this far. And tell you again that NASA lies, quod erat assertum. And rant a bit against theoretical physics, which means it isn't real.
Maybe we're getting near those clips, there's a diagram that correctly shows you that Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is indeed low. What a surprise! It shows the height of Yuri Gagarin's, Alan Shepard's and John Glenn's flights and the International Space Station (ISS) and Hubble Space Telescope. And the Moon is much further away (right again). So it looks like he's going to show some clips saying we currently have no spaceships for leaving LEO, therefore we never did, and never went to the Moon. But he's not going to tell us where to find these videos. Well no need, I'm sure everything on YouTube is as reliable as every book from which Google search can provide excerpts.
Well the first, from flat earth channel ODD TV, says, in that annoying slow playback that NASA has admitted that we can't go beyond LEO. Someone on the ISS says "right now we can only fly in earth orbit" (slow replay). Again, that doesn't mean we weren't able to during Apollo. This goes on for a while. It's just one repeated lie.
And the Buzz Aldrin cherry-pick. Aldrin was asked why we didn't go back to the Moon, and he's clearly explaining that we did go, but haven't been back. It's a longer excerpt than usual, so there are some new cherry-picks. He says that before Apollo, we hadn't sent people to the Moon. This is replayed in slow motion to give the impression that he's saying we never sent people to the Moon. Until today I had never watched this steaming pile of shit, but that is no longer true. Aldrin goes on to correctly describe how earlier Apollo missions first went around the Moon, and then practiced landing (Apollo 10 descended from lunar orbit but did not go all the way to the surface before returning to orbit). For no discernable reason "practice everything but landing" is repeated in slo-mo. And then Apollo 11 made an attempt (repeated in slo-mo) to land. And we did.
Maybe repeat that in slo-mo? Instead, a picutre of Aldrin making the "OK" sign over his eye. I think that this is supposed to be something masonic but he spares us that.
So if they haven't been to the Moon ... This is another standard flerf tactic, assume the result you want, and then make up reasons why "they" are lying about it. Oh, the "hide God" nonsense. Aldrin took Communion on the Moon. The read from Genesis on Apollo 8. If they're trying to hide God, they're really doing a terrible job of it.
But not everyone is in on the scam. The people making the parts are really doing that. Only the 33rd degree folks know this is cartoons for adults. Disney animators don't know, either (what they don't recognize their own work on TV?)
35 minutes in, he starts part three, where he's going to make the usual flerf lie that there are no real photos from space. And, this is another standard flerf tactic, ask why there isn't evidence, in this case a real-time video from launch to high enough orbit to show the whole globe. Which of course he would also reject as false.
And he then wants to zoom in on Australia and see people upside down. Has no idea what cameras are able to see at what distance. Maybe he'd also like NASA to read the license plate on his car and tell him where he left it.
NASA admits there are no real photos from space, says they have to be photoshopped. As "evidence" he shows yet another unsourced video about the 2002 "Blue Marble 2.0" image which is indeed a composite. And the video explains why this one image had to be photoshopped. But if something is called 2.0, there was probably a 1.0, and in this case that's the 1972 Blue Marble. And then there's the 1968 Earthrise, both of which were taken on film, using a camera.
He then takes a photo of a salt lamp, masks out all but a circle, and claims it looks like a planet.
But what about satellites? In September 2021 there were 4,550 satellites. Well, a screenshot is evidence, right? But he did by some chance land on something not made up by a fellow wongle, here. And he posts this.
Here's a map of Starbucks locations in Manhattan. Is much of the island covered completely with Starbucks? No, if the coffee shops were to scale, they would be hard to spot, on an island that is 13 miles wide at most. Same goes for satellites around a 7,917.5 mile planet.
Why don't they crash into one another, he asks? Why don't all those Starbucks merge into one giant one, with an exceedingly long line to get your coffee, but enough tables for everyone in the Tri-State area?
And 99% of the internet travels between continents via underwater cable. But did anyone tell him that all those satellites are for satellite internet? (What Is a Straw Man Argument?)
Satellites are not in space, they're on high altitude balloons. But I thought we could get into LEO? And then he says that some are in LEO, but only for the military (as usual, no evidence, not even a screenshot). And now, after saying there are some in space, he says there aren't any. There are no real pictures of satellites on the internet (he's lying). All satellite dishes point to the east (proof - one photo). Well it could be to the west, too. But never up.
NASA's livestream (I suppose from the ISS) is both made in a studio, but also never shows satellites. Well then why can't they bring a model of a satellite into the studio? And he lost the video, but he says he saw a hand adjust a lens from outside the ISS, and since he's presented no evidence up to now, why should he suddenly start? And there are bees in space (bits of debris, that don't look like bees at all). The internet has pulled all this down, well isn't that convenient? You won't find these videos (but somehow his video of these supposed bees is still there). There are bubbles in space (Eric Dubay lie #163). Astronauts are on harnesses, which he talks about while not showing you. Things disappear (because videos are shortened or frames get dropped)
Rockets don't go straight up, they are going into the ocean (no). The Red Hot Chili Peppers sung that the Moon landings were faked in a Hollywood studio (the actual lyric is “Space may be the final frontier but it’s made in a Hollywood basement” which isn't terrible from memory but can't he look shit up before lying about it?) And they're Satanists. And why are they telling you what you think is the truth? Because "it's part of their decree to tell the people what they're actually doing" (huh?)
Conclusion: this is all the usual flerf lies, misunderstandings, cherry-picking, and paranoia. He's discovered not one thing himself, every bit of this has been posted by other flerfs, some of which got enough views to make money, unlike him. And he thinks he's done research.
It's a standard flat-earth claim that rainbows are semicircles because the dome that they think is above the flat Earth is a hemisphere. In fact, rainbows are circular, but the bottom is only seen at high altitudes. See How to see a full circle rainbow, from which this photo is taken.
But I found someone on Facebook who seemed to be making an additional claim that double rainbows are the result of "The sun and the moon and the stars are set in the second firmament. What you see is the reflection\projection of them" and when I asked where he got it from, he posted this image of Hebrew quote. Only a bit more back and forth did he ask if I understand Hebrew (fortunately I do)
I was too busy to read it then, he identified it as coming from Bereshit Rabbah, I only replied that it is not a physics textbook. Tonight, I posted a longer response, which I'm slightly changing here because Blogger has more formatting options than Facebook. for example you can only have one image per post or comment and hyperlinks are harder to enter.
Only an עם הארץ (ignoramus) quotes a source without a מראה מקום (precise reference, how this is done varies depending on the source, in Midrash Rabba, of which Bereshit Rabbah is one, it's generally by chapter and paragraph). I don't know why you post images of text instead of text. Just in case you think it makes it hard to find the source that way, it doesn't, all I had to do was right-click, search in Google Lens, select some text, and found it Bereshit Rabbah 6:6 Of if you prefer your text vocalized, here
So let's see what it says. I'm working from the second copy and not comparing to see if there are variant readings, Sefaria doesn't have English translation for this yet, so I'm doing it myself.
In what sphere are the Sun and Moon located? In the second רקיע (the Hebrew word translated as "firmament" or "expanse" or just "sky". As it is written (Gen 1:17) "And God set them in the expanse of the sky ..." (Rashi, explains this to mean the expanse above the sky)
I'm going to paraphrase to attempt to make it a bit clearer, a similar derivation is made from (Nechemia 9:6) "... You (God) made the heavens and the heavens above the heavens, and all their hosts ..." and again, reading this as that there are at least two layers of heavens and the "hosts", e.g. the stars, are in the second one.
And from the Earth to the expanse is a journey of 500 years, and the thickness of the expanse is another 500 years, and from one expanse to the next is one more 500 years. None of the commentaries at Sefaria explain this distance, but I read it as, the distance it would take to walk (or perhaps ride) in 500 years,
How far is that? Well there's a unit of distance in Jewish law called a parsa (unrelated to parsec), whose name comes from the Persian parasang. Herodotus (source in link about parasang) said that an army could travel five parasangs per day and it's believed to be between 3 and 3.5 miles. In Jewish law it's 8,000 cubits (about 2-2/3 miles) and an average person can travel that far in 72 minutes. Well maybe an army moves slower than a pedestrian, or stops more often.
So let's say our traveler walks for 720*8 minutes or 9.6 hours a day, using 3 miles per parasang, that's 21.36 miles. Let's give our traveler a lunch break and round that to 20 miles. Note that I'm assuming that the 500 year journey is made of days' journeys and not how far a person could travel if they never stop. So 20 * 365 * 500 is 3.650,000 miles. And we need to triple it to get to the second expanse.
That's a bit of a problem for FE's "local" Sun and Moon. In reality, the Moon is an average of an average of 238,855 miles away and for the Sun it's 93 million.
Well back to the Midrash, on the first day of Tekufat Tammuz, the summer solstice, nothing has a shadow, as it is written (Psalm 19:7) and nothing is hidden from His Sun. This is true at noon on either Equinox and is dangerously close to how Eratosthenes measured the size of the globe.
And the sphere of the Sun has a sheath, as it is written (Psalm 19:5, four verses after the one on Werner von Braun's tombstone) "... He placed in them (the heavens) a tent for the Sun". And a channel of water is before it, when it goes forth, the Holy One blessed be He reduces its strength with water so that it does not burn the world, but in the future He will remove it from its sheath and burn the wicked as it is written (Malachai 3:19) "... and He will burn them, on the coming day".
I once saw, in a program of short Israeli animations, a Claymation where a rabbi was explaining this verse from a podium, adding a commentary that this will not hurt the righteous, and then the camera pans to the audience, who are all melting.
There is then a debate about the nature of Hell, is it only what will happen on that day, is it a place that already exists, or does fire emerge from the corpses of the wicked and burn them (rather than an external source)
The passage ends saying that had God placed the sun in the first heaven, no one would be able to withstand the heat of the day.
The same guy also provided another image, this time from a commentary, the Or Hachaim. This time it almost gives a reference, Verse 20.
Well I didn't need Google Lens for this one, it was obviously on Gen 1:20 (but only because that's the first chapter in the Bible, it's either laziness, or an attempt to make it hard to verify, to not put the full reference when quoting something), and this time Sefaria has translated it into English, so I'll just post the relevant parts of their translation.
It's about the creation of "birds that fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky" and this commentary explains that the odd wording "expanse of the sky" by referring to the previously discussed midrash. What's even the point? If you take Midrash literally (which according to Maimonides makes you a fool), how does it contribute that a commentary quoted the Midrash? Either you already believed it, or you didn't, but how does source 2 quoting source 1 help?
I asked him if his own private Torah study convinced him of FE, or he was taught it in a religious framework (yeshiva, shul, etc.) he ignored my question and just kept sending me more religious sources. Eventually he sent me a list of flat-earth videos in Hebrew, but it's still not clear if this is in answer to that question or he just did a search for "flat earth" in Hebrew on YouTube. I may watch and discuss them later. Meanwhile I'm just adding them to a private playlist (Flerf rabbis) and translating the titles.
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6QMHif7LlE The Flat Earth - a photo of Mount Hermon from the Dead Sea, nothing is = hidden = no curvature, no sphere by Rabbi Chen Shaulov part 2 (this one is from Shaulov's own channel)
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kaZv64ueXQ And what is the connection between Jesus, Martin Luther, René Descartes, Copernicus and flat earth? (this is by Rabbi Dov Berkovits)
In #4 and #5, the rabbi is referred to as "the gaon". In Modern Hebrew, this word means "genius" and comes from a Biblical root meaning "pride". Classically, it was used to refer to the heads of the two major yeshivas in Babylonia in the post-Talmudic period, Wikipedia says between 589–1040, and more recently was used to refer to a small number of exceptional figures such as The Vilna Gaon. More recently just about any rabbi can be called "gaon" and the title has been rendered meaningless.
And then there's this image that he posted.
At the bottom of the image are the words "Daat - Emet". And a search for the text, finds that it comes from a website by that name. Unfortunately for him, going to the homepage reveals that this is "the movement for liberation from religion". Oops.
MEMRI is, depending on who you ask, "publishes and distributes free English-language translations of Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, and Turkish media reports" or "aims to portray the Arab and Muslim world in a negative light through the production and dissemination of incomplete or inaccurate translations and by selectively translating views of extremists while deemphasizing or ignoring mainstream opinions" (both quotes from Wikipedia)
But that's not what this post is about. I decided to look for rabbis who deny the moon landing . So I did some searching. I came across a blog from 2012 (referring to an earlier one from 2009) that said "the Satmar Rebbe believed the moon landing must have been faked". So I looked for sources, and there, in the comments, was someone who asked for sources. Oops, that was me.
The blogger replied with two links. One is to a site hashkafah.com which was active at the time but has since gone offline, I wish there were archives somewhere, I may have been involved in the discussion, there, too. Another is to imamother.com, where an anonymous poster wrote in 2007 "'Science' tells us that men have walked on the moon. The Torah tells us that above the earth is the Yesod of Aish and that anything that passes through it would burn up." and someone responded (at the bottom of page four) "Is the one about not having landed on the moon from the Satmar Rebbe? As far as I know, he's the only one to have said that."
Yesod means element and aish means fire, she's referring to the classical Four Elements and probably to Hilchot Yesodei Hatorah 3:10 or some later source based on it, which puts the "sphere of fire" below "the sphere of the Moon" Also the thread at Imamother goes on for quite a while. mostly about other aspects of science, not the moon landing. Also it was later discovered that two of the posters, TammyTammy and Sue DaNym were the same person, arguing with herself. Because reasons?
But I haven't found a source for that claim or its attribution to the Satmarer or anyone else.
Josh, the blogger at Parshablog, referred to a different blog, about a different rabbi (Yaakov Kamenetzky) watching the Moon landing, and a commenter there wrote "Perhaps R’ Yaakov Kamenetzky Zt”l should have prayed to Hashem for extra guidance and sided with RaMbaM? Then he might have sensed that the "Chazon" - television broadcast, images, etc.,- was more than likely "faked" - part of Alma de Shikra" (the world of lies) and linked to a Moon landing conspiracy site that isn't working anymore (or at least not this second)
And there's this, from the Not the Godol Hador Archive (the blogger was later revealed to be Gideon Slifkin, brother of Nathan Slifkin, which is relevant because the blog entry begins by mentioning Nathan) "Reliable sources in Israel tell me that one of the kannaim, part of the group behind the Slifkin ban and intent on delegitimizing the Kamenetzky family (which is what the drive behind the Slifkin ban was actually all about), has been showing people a Foxtel documentary proving that astronauts never landed on the moon and it was all faked by NASA!"
I also once found and downloaded a copy of a "kuntres" (pamplet) about the Moon landing in Hebrew, but that was several computers ago. I probably still have a copy on a backup, but don't know where.
"Kids, this-piece-of-paper's-got-666-words-17-sentences-23-words-we-wanna-know-details-of-the-derp-time-of-the-derp-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say-pertaining-to-and-about-the-derp-I-want-to-know-youtube-guru's-name-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say", and talked for ninety-three-million minutes and nobody understood a meme that he posted, but we had fun creating spam events and eating the crayons on the bench there, and I filled out the mudflood with the four part harmonics, and wrote it down there, just like it was, and everything was fine and I put down the pencil, and I turned over the piece of paper, and there, there on the other side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on the other side, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated, read the following words:
Another video sent to me by a flat-earther. I'm writing this as I watch it. Text in quotes will be from the video, possibly paraphrases. The rest will be my responses
"We don't know who built the pyramids" - It was the Egyptians.
"Stones cut with laser precision" - a unit of measurement might be more helpful but let's just say that's a figure of speech, stones can be smoothed without modern technology.
"Stones weight as much as 80 tons from over 500 miles away" - heavy things can be moved without modern tech, too. It takes a lot of people.
"There must have been a good reason to go to all this trouble" - probably, but I have a feeling a great leap of illogic is coming to explain that.
"We now know it was certainly not a tomb" - we do? Or is the video merely asserting that?
"Tesla believed they served a higher purpose" - OK, he was a smart guy, but he also fell in love with z pigeon. Hopefully just another figure of speech. "considering that Tesla is directly responsible for 80% of the technology we use today" - drawing shows a radio, light bulb, something marked AC which is probably a generator or motor, x-ray, laser, cellphone, tower with a some unspecified thing on top, and car. Tesla did claim to have invented a death ray, which is what comes up when I google to see what he had to do with lasers, but details are scarce, there's no way to know if it involved lasers, which as far as we know were invented in 1960, 18 years after his death. Or did the death-ray use x-rays, discovered by W.C. Röntgen in 1895. Tesla described a communication device that would fit in a vest pocket in 1926, but did he build one? Radio? Many people were working on radio at the time Or even earlier, Tesla filed for a patent on wireless telegraphy in 1897 but Heinrich Hertz first produced and detected radio waves in 1886 and Marconi submitted his patent application in 1896.
"Perhaps we should view his theories with a more open mind" - OK, but even really smart people's claims need to be tested. There's a story about Richard Feynman visiting a research facility where they were testing one of his predictions, at a cost of thirty seven million dollars. "What, you don't trust me?" he asked. But this was his humor, Feynman knew it needed to be tested.
"Suspend your disbelief" - no, I think I'll go on fact-checking.
Tesla is quoted as talking about non-physical phenomena" but did he mean some sort of handwaving "energy" or things like radio and energy transmission that don't use physical media? The very next thing in the video is a 1905 patent application of his for transmitting electrical energy through the natural medium. His design was called an "electromagnetic pyramid" A voice, not the narrator's says that he thinks it was shaped like a pyramid because of his interest in the ancient ones. Or was it a good way to build a sturdy structure, just like the originals? The speaker appears but is not named. Oh, my bad, it was underneath closed-captioning, he's Jack Cary, a former Naval Intelligence Officer.
He goes on to say that while pyramids "exhibit fractal energy" efficiently, citation needed, also what is "fractal energy", other than something that sounds science-y? "But what he discovered was it was the location of the pyramids that created the power" and he built his two pyramids "according to the laws of where the Pyramids at Giza were constructed" - laws? Will we hear what those laws are? "it had to do with the elliptical orbit of the earth" - remember how this was sent to me by a flat-earther? But anyway, aside from these were special places somehow, no details of those laws.
"Tesla's device disappeared after his mysterious death in 1943" - a newspaper clipping on the screen helpfully lists his age at the time - 85. We do remember that humans are mortal, right? But the devices didn't disappear then, they were torn down earlier.
By the way, here's a photo of Wardenclyffe Tower, from 1904. Doesn't look that much like an Egyptian Pyramid much, does it? It was torn down for scrap in 1917 to cover his debts. The same year this photo was taken, the same thing happened to his other location, in Colorado Springs although the scrap was only sold off two years later.
A new voice, "According to Nikola Tesla 369 is a key to the universe". His name is Billy Carson, a researcher (into what?). "Tesla became so obsessed with this 369 that he would drive around a building three times before going inside" - this was probably easier when construction was less dense, as you can see from the illustration above, the tower arose from a detached building.. "He cleaned his plates with 18 napkins" - this is OCD, not science, or even numerology. I have heard of people who are scared of the number two, and if they need an even number of something, will buy one more. "lived in hotel rooms only with the number divisible by three" - this is attributing some sort of significance to a meaningless measurement, the hotel could just as easily used a different numbering system, or letters of the alphabet.
Skipping more examples of his obsession with three, Carson claims he was "trying to make us understand that we did not create mathematics, we discovered them". A quote of Tesla saying that might be useful to help us decide if this is what Tesla was doing, or what Carson thinks he was, if it exists it's not here.
Back to the first narrator "Could it be possible that ancient humans created monuments like the great pyramids to remind us of these truths?" Or did they already know enough math, sufficient for collecting taxes and constructing labor-intensive structures?
New speaker, Graham Hancock, author, Fingerprints of the Gods. Sumerian texts talk of "seven antediluvian sages". antediluvian means "before the flood", the biblical story of Noah's flood is similar to the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh but the sages seem to be from other ancient inscriptions. They're depicted in fish costumes, holding bags, and similar bags turn up in other ancient carvings.
Back to unnamed narrator, "could the sages have reemerged after the flood to teach the knowledge of the universe?" and "Egyptian depictions of gods are not holding a bag but an ankh" "Could these carrying devices be transmitting the same kind of energy?" Well there's a leap of logic that could use some evidence.
New speaker, Anton Parks, author, Eden and Researcher of Ancient Civilizations who believes "the great Pyramid was built by Isis .. to reincarnate Osiris into Horus. It is quite complicated". I can't tell if he believes the pyramid was built by humans, in light of their beliefs about Egyptian Gods, or that Isis et. al. really existed and she personally built the pyramids. But wouldn't the latter mean that there weren't ancient humans with advanced knowledge, there were creatures of a different sort who had it (or perhaps were just had those abilities)?
A lot of Egyptian and Sumerian mythology follows, which I'm going to skip until it gets to some point. OK, Isis lives underground, nd there are underground passages in Giza, where the pyramids are. He superimposes modern knowledge and claims that Isis used Osiris's genetic codeto reincarnate him. "The Great Pyramid allowed Isis to find Osiris's soul again". There's a big citation needed, unless he's only talking mythology and the video maker is the one taking it as history. "She would have put Osiris's genetic code in the pyramid" - nope I he's speaking literally.
Back to first narrator, "there is evidence that below the [pyramid] something existed there that was much older". Robert Schoch, Ph.D, professor of natural science at Boston University says the site was "a a sacred mound"
Back to first narrator, who asserts that the resurrection story is connected to how the pyramid is "connected with the afterlife" - yeah, kings were buried in them, but they didn't come back to life and leave, their corpses were removed, either by grave robbers or archeologists who put them in museums (I'm not saying that there's not an element of grave robbing involved in that, too).
I've lost track of who is speaking, "the pyramid is an attempt to create a three-dimensional model of the afterlife realm" But (original narrator) "could there be another hidden message?" - wait, what's the first message, "Resurrections performed here, inquire about rates?"
Andrew Collins, author, From the Ashes of Angels talks about geometry, "music of the spheres" and this has to do with "the perfect fourth which has a ration of 4:3 and the perfect fifth, 3:2" - do we get to the the minor falls, the major lifts, and the baffled king? I tried to find a video from the Tel Aviv show in 2009, there were a lot of cellphone videos, but none were very good, so here's one from London, I think from the same year.
OK, so where we're going here is numerical pareidolia, if a musical ratio is 4:3, and something else has the same ratio, they must be connected. Original narrator says "if the Great Pyriamid is indeed a construction to harmonize creation" (but is it? and what would it mean to harmonize creation?) "wherein lies the code to such a great power?" (how many watts?)
Robert Bauvel, author, The Orion Mystery, "it has a very slight concavity on each side making it eight sided .. produces a bizarre geometry .. when we analyze it it produces numbers: that shouldn't be there", examples are the universal constant (maybe I misheard and it should be plural, and it means constants like the Gravitational Constant (sorry again, flat-earthers), or maybe he meant the Fine Structure Constant phi (connected to the Golden Ratio), Euler's number. "Could this geometry produce a message?" - or could it just be cherry picking, if you get to play with what units you measure things in and perform random operations, you can get rather close to any number you want.
"The Great Pyramid is [close to] latitude 30" and it seems "the latitude choice was derived from astronomy". It's unexplained how some lensing effect made them think it was exactly 30 so I can't check if that was true, 30 is "one third of the way between the equator and the North Pole" and this "speaks to our planet" - but does the planet speak back?
And there's a tiny deviation from facing true north, "thee sixtieths of a degree, almost eerie" and once again it is "speaking to the Earth" - what's it saying, "Oops?"
But there's more, if you multiply the size of the pyramid by 43,200, it "give you the dimensions of this planet". Sorry again, flat-earthers.
"So in all those centuries and millennia when our ancestors went through the dark ages and didn't even know that they were living on a planet let alone the dimensions of the planet, all the ever had to do was go accurately measure the Great Pyramid, multiply those numbers by 43,200 and the have the dimensions of our planet" This is nonsense, but it's still fun that a flat-earther sent this to me. Did he even watch it or did he just read the title?
"Egyptologists are aware of this but they say it's a total coincidence, no significance to it whatsoever" Well it is, but his reason for multiplying by 43,200 is that the number comes from "a key motion of the Earth" - more bad news for flat-earthers, the precession of the Earth's axis, and he now talks about another thing flat-earthers don't like, how the pole star changes.
Now he talks about the "constellation that houses the Sun on the spring equinox" which is currently Pisces, and that's why early Christians used a fish as a symbol, the Age of Pisces having just started at the time. So the Zodiac moves one degree every 72 years and multiply 72 by 600 (why?) to get 43,200. Wasn't that obvious? Osiris was killed by Seth and 72 conspirators, that's the number of syllables in the Rig Veda and it's in Norse Mythology, "it can't be an accident".
Back to Tesla, lots of multiples of 3.if you play games. This isn't terribly exciting, if you randomly pick whole numbers, look at the first N numbers or any N numbers starting anywhere, one third of them will be divisible by three.
But there's even more! Angkor Wat is exactly 72 lines of latitude east of Giza.
Back to Robert Bauvel, who says that in the future we will speak in mathematics. More bad news for flat-earthers!
In the next video, the Great Sphinx, which Robert Schoch says is from at least 10,000 BCE. Sorry to you too, biblical literalists.
A flat-earther posted this video, by someone who only identifies himself as Agent S. It's only five minutes long, so let's take a look.
The title mentions "NASA Scientist" - will we get to hear from this scientist? Well, it opens with an image of Wikipedia's entry on Van Allen Radiation belt. He didn't include a link to this or anything else, because he doesn't want you to read the article. If you did, you might notice section 7, implications for space travel, that discusses how the Apollo missions did travel through the belts.
But if you look at the text right after the title, right there in his image, this "nearly impenetrable barrier" stops "the fastest, most energetic electrons", not spaceships or astronauts. Oops!
Well he moves on to discussing Orion missions to Mars, and a scientist (the one from his title?) says something he doesn't understand. He shows an unsourced video, with an unnamed person (that scientist from the title? ETA: his name is Kelly Smith, see photo at bottom, from another video. But I don't see any identification, perhaps this is a spokesperson.) speaking "We are headed 3,600 miles above Earth. Fifteen times higher from the planet than the International Space Station. As we get further away from Earth, we';ll pass through the Van Allen belts". And a screenshot from this other video shows the words "high radiation", he stops it to make sure you saw it
Resuming (and rewinding a bit), the NASA speaker says "It will pass through the Van Allen belts, an area of dangerous radiation. Radiation like this can harm the guidance systems, onboard computers, or other electronics on it". He pauses the video again, because he wants us to really pay attention. Resuming again, "Naturally we have to pass through this danger zone twice, once up and once back. But Orion has protection. Shielding will be put to the test as the vehicle cuts through the waves of radiation. Sensors aboard will record radiation levels for scientists to study. We must solve these challenges before we send people through this region of space".
"Whoa whoa whoa whoa wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute" he interjects. Kudos to scriptwriter. He replays it twice and repeats it himself. But didn't we already do that with Apollo 11 and enumerates each mission? Yes, but evidentially he didn't read the Wikipedia entry with which he opened his video - "The astronauts had low exposure in the Van Allen belts due to the short period of time spent flying through them," with two footnotes. Oops again.
Well why do we need to redesign shielding for a new spacecraft? For one thing, even if nothing else had changed, we still would want to test it. But transistors have gotten a lot smaller since the 1960's and 1970's which while on the one hand makes computers more powerful, increases their sensitivity to radiation. And if we can further reduce exposure of astronauts to radiation, that would be good, too.
In another video, cherry-picking from the same clip, I found a frame identifying the scientist.
