One Half Of

Bill Napier, one half of Clube and Napier, is on the Tusk – see http://cosmictusk.com/open-letter-napier-joe-rogan-podcast/ … with a letter he wrote as a result of a podcast between Graham Hancock and Randall Carson on one side and two mainstream scientists on the other side, Marc Defant and Michael Shermer. The Tusk has the podcast in full – in a video to view. One of the mainstream scientists is a vulcanologist but he appears to have little knowledge of comets and astronomy literature to which Napier takes both mainstream scientists to task, saying the Hancock and Carson have a better grasp of comet activity than they do (in spite of Hancock being a journalist rather than a scientist). Napier took exception to the ignorance displayed by Defant and Shermer, who appear to have picked up ideas on the behaviour of comets that are not true. He virtually accuses them of ignorance in contrast to Hancock who had a handle on the astronomy involved. Napier then goes on to explain that Fred Whipple was the pioneer, two hundred years ago, of Taurid/Encke studies, and all the cometary astronomers of that generation (Whipple, Sekamina, Kresak, Stohl etc) realised the Taurid complex was debris from an exceptional comet. Recent large scale surveys of the meteor sky (radar and visual) have confirmed and quantified the work of these early pioneers. These images yield direct documented evidence for the hierarchical disintegration of an erstwhile exceptionally large comet in a short period, low inclination, earth crossing orbit. The celestial mechanics calculations of Steel and Asher provide the timescale – the comet was around and disintegrating 'at least' 20,000 years ago – may be much longer. The British School have a substantial literature and the subject over two centuries. However, the above is also distilled from a much wider group of contemporary astronomers in the Americas, Russia, Europe, and elsewhere. Marc and Michael, he says, have been misled by unreferenced nonsense from a few people with no expertise or track record in cometary dynamics, and ignorant of its extensive long running literature.