posted 03-26-2002 04:07 PM            

"Richard J. Boylan Ph.D" wrote:

Subject: The Scoop From Dr. LaViolette
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 18:46:48 -0700

This article from the Washington Free Weekly is thought-provoking. I have long admired Dr. LaViolette, who was the first scientist to publish in the open literature the physics explanation of electrogravitics--how the Air
Force engineers its antigravity vehicles to levitate in the air. That he should quote accurately the ancient Hopi Prophecy about the Blue Star (Kachina) dancing as the End Times come upon us is amazing from a physicist. But it is eerily possible that the Time of Purification will arrive in a way like Dr. LaViolette describes below. I cannot pass up commenting that his life, brilliance, and unorthodox gifted heterodoxical scientific syncretism seem hallmarks of a Star Kid, now grown up.
- Richard Boylan,
Ph.D.
Aug. 11-17,
2000

THE MAN WHO FELL FROM EARTH
Paul LaViolette hears a warning from space.
by Sean Daly
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls: Prepare yourselves for the end of the world.

Just as I am teeing off, and you are demanding a raise, and he is guzzling a Schlitz, and she is running a red light, and they are teetering single-file down an endless broken escalator, that's when it happens:

Boom.

Ka-boom.

Ka-blammo.

For the first time since the end of the ice age, the center of our galaxy—the once reliable, now cranky Milky Way—explodes.

A superwave of cosmic rays sprints toward us, making the 23,000-light-year trek across the cosmos look like a quick jog to the corner 7-Eleven. An electromagnetic pulse triggered by this big bang pile-drives the planet; as a result, tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanoes pummel the globe. Cosmic dust fills the air, dims the sun, smothers the sky. Communication satellites—plus your precious little cell phone—are rendered kaput.

Unless you rape and pillage for a living, you will not be needed at work tomorrow.

For weeks, months, years before the explosion, a blue star—or what the Hopi called Saquasohuh—was shape-shifting day and night in the sky. Astronomers appeared on CNN insisting that the celestial anomaly was nothing more than an exploding supernova. Earth, the astronomers assured, was safe.

But the blue star was not a supernova, of course. The blue star was the starter pistol of the apocalypse.

The thoughts come fast: We should have been more open-minded. We should have questioned our science teachers. We should have demanded protection from NASA. We should have called our parents more.

But, most important, we should have believed the unbelievable: that extraterrestrials had been warning us
about the end of the world since the beginning of time.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we are screwed.

Paul LaViolette has just upped the ante on pickup lines: "Hi, do you have interest in extraterrestrial communication?"

Looking like a slightly sinister version of Babe's Farmer Hoggett, LaViolette is stationed at an exhibition booth at last January's 195th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Atlanta.

But the 52-year-old astronomer/physicist/bachelor—who is Ichabod Crane-thin, with full red lips and jug-handle ears—is not wooing an asteroid-randy companion back to his Alexandria, Va., apartment. What he's doing—kindly, politely, shyly—is reaching out to believers, those envelope-pushing few who will stick around long enough for their fellow scientist to deliver his hair-raising spiel.

A full member of the AAS—whether the AAS likes it or not—LaViolette has just presented a paper stating that certain pulsars—rapidly rotating neutron stars—are actually "beacons fabricated by advanced ET civilizations for the purpose of interstellar communication." Sure, this may sound like so much gobbledygook, but the basic premise, unearthed in LaViolette's new book, The Talk of the Galaxy: An ET Message for Us?, is simple: Aliens, with far more sophisticated technology than our own, are saying, "Hey, how ya doin'? What's goin' on? You might want to keep an eye on that gurgling center of your galaxy"—and they're manipulating a star in our very own Milky Way to do so.

With his mother and father cheering him on, LaViolette was given a scant 10 minutes to deliver his complex speech—a speech fueled not by imaginative guesswork, mind you, but by the crunching of suspiciously nonrandom radio-wave numbers culled from various telescopes—yet he claims history was made nonetheless: This was the first time a noted scientist announced such a discovery at a scientific conference—never mind that it was in front of 60 skeptical people in a cramped Hyatt Regency banquet room.

Unfortunately for LaViolette, there aren't too many folks—fellow scientists or otherwise—willing to gather round the fortuneteller after his cerebrum-blowing presentation and find out about the killer—and I do mean killer—twist.

Back at his exhibition booth, the abbreviated dialogues—captured on a videotape—go something like this:
"Hi, do you have interest in extraterrestrial communication?"
"Extraterrestrial communication?"
"Yes, actual reception of radio signals?"
"Uhhh..."

But LaViolette rarely gives in to the silence. Whenever someone so much as glances his way, he flashes an unsure smile and spills the goods—"pulsar sky positions," "nonrandom distribution," "clump termination points"—hoping for a flicker in the eye, a knowing nod, a please-just-once breakthrough. He even tries discussing his design for the Flash Gordon-esque "particle-beam communicator," a cool-looking zap-gun that would transmit messages back to the extraterrestrials.

Nevertheless, only a scant few conference attendees are willing to entertain such mind-expanding thoughts. LaViolette might as well be building mashed-potato mountains on the display table.

Let's be honest: There are hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of Chicken Littles spooking cybersurfers and hogging late-night radio with ramblings about beam-me-up abductions and shipboard rectal probes. But LaViolette isn't one of them. And among scientists, he wasn't always the weird dude with the even weirder ideas. Not so long ago, LaViolette was considered—by peers, professors, professionals—one of the brightest up-and-coming minds in the scientific community.

While a researcher at Harvard in the early '70s, LaViolette designed revolutionary air-sampling equipment to measure the effectiveness of dust masks worn by coal miners. From there—his brain ever-churning—he developed cost-effective technology—irrigation pumps, desalinization systems—for use by Third World countries. And in his spare time, in 1975, he advised the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy on matters relating to solid-waste recycling.

Then, in 1976, LaViolette was courted by noted Hungarian scholar Ervin Laszlo to serve as a consultant on solar energy and appropriate technology for the scientific think tank Club of Rome's annual report, Goals for Mankind. Quickly, LaViolette went from understudy to star: The United Nations was soon underwriting his study of the feasibility of building a solar power plant in the U.S. at a cost cheaper than that of an equivalent-sized nuclear plant.

For a short, sweet time, LaViolette made headlines in newspapers and magazines around the world. He was heralded as a hero.

"I found him to be a very creative guy," says Professor George Lendaris, LaViolette's dissertation adviser at Portland State University in the late '70s and early '80s. LaViolette's solar-energy fixation had just started to morph into a theory that there had recently been a "massive energy outflow from the sun." "I figured he was either a genius or a kook," Lendaris adds. "And I'm willing to bet on his being a genius."

But maybe Paul LaViolette is what happens when there are just too many ideas for one man to process—always have been, waves of them, crashing in his skull, jarring him awake, ever since he was old enough to stare into the sky and wonder: He turns to tackling questions that might not have answers, questions that most humans would never dare ask.

LaViolette's recent trilogy of books—Beyond the Big Bang (1995), Earth Under Fire (1997), and this year's The Talk of the Galaxy—challenge just about every tenet of astronomy, physics, and creation taught in school. (That whole big-bang theory? Yeah, nice try.) LaViolette's tomes are shocking not for their outrageous claims of aliens and apocalypses, but for the calm and scholarly manner in which those claims are presented and defended. (He also has a far-out
Web site—etheric.com—that is a veritable labyrinth of predictions and theories.)

LaViolette's raison d'être—around which most of his current theories, including the one about cosmic telegrams from extraterrestrials, revolve—is the galactic-core-explosion theory. Whereas many astronomers believe—even if they're not exactly sure why—galactic cores explode every 10 million to 100 million years, LaViolette hypothesizes that such an event actually occurs every 13,000 to 26,000 years, the most recent superwave having raised hell on Earth at the end of the last ice age—when almost all life was erased from the planet.

In 1981 and 1982, LaViolette examined ice taken from an ice cap at Camp Century, Greenland, and, according to his Earth Under Fire, "discovered that ice samples dating from the last ice age contain much higher concentrations of cosmic dust than present-day snow and ice, indicating that cosmic dust must have been entering the Earth's atmosphere at a much faster rate at that early time." (Also, in 1987, he became the first American to directly receive ice-core samples from the Soviet Union's Vostok station in Antarctica.)

By analyzing the levels of dust and integrating complex dating methods, LaViolette confirmed his own worst fears: Something had happened. Something horrible, something overdue to happen again soon. Very soon.

Despite having the evidence of cosmic dust legitimized by the U.S. Geological Survey, LaViolette kept hush-hush about his discovery. People, he figured, just weren't ready to hear about the end of the world.

Most of us still aren't, of course. LaViolette, however, is a patient man—usually: "Sometimes when I'm
frustrated, I say, 'I just hope the superwave arrives pretty soon to teach these people a lesson!' Of course, it's something you'd rather not have happen right now...but you know, when I'm frustrated..."

With the exception of a few friends and his ever-close family, LaViolette is a man alone in the cosmos. When asked if LaViolette's presentation to the AAS was indeed the first time a scientist has announced the pulsars-as-ET-beacons discovery at a major scientific shindig, AAS spokesperson Stephen Maran says, "I think that statement is probably correct, but I don't know of any pulsar experts who are convinced by LaViolette's paper. People wondered how someone could come to such conclusions...which were not received favorably. We don't endorse any of these statements. We just think it's newsworthy, and we provide the forum."

Such is the existence of LaViolette, a man whose life's work can be justified only by a cosmic haymaker to our planet.

Needless to say, it's a tough gig.

When LaViolette was 16, he learned geometry and trigonometry...in Greek.
(OK, so the young American had no choice—his parents moved the family to Greece in the '60s—but given that most of us fail to learn geometry and trigonometry in English, it's an impressive feat.)

***

LaViolette is not the type of guy who laughs at rings-around-Uranus gags. He does, however, smile
often—although you get the feeling that his interpretation of the punch line is just a little different from yours.

***

LaViolette lives alone in a nondescript Alexandria apartment complex that is currently being painted;
when he enters the building, the downstairs neighbor's dog always barks at him. His pad is a tidy two-bedroom, one-bath. There is a well-read copy of Infinite Energy magazine on the coffee table, an out-of-tune guitar behind the futon. (He hasn't played in years.) There's also na copy of Dating for Dummies tucked almost out of view on a low bookshelf.

***

LaViolette earned a B.A. in physics from Johns Hopkins University (1969), an M.B.A. in organizational administration from the University of Chicago (1973), and a Ph.D. in systems science from Portland State (1983). It was during his junior year at Hopkins that he experienced the first of many epiphanies—or "mindshifts," as he calls them—about his place, our place, in the universe ("I was a romantic in those days—in the larger sense, not just with women").

Whereas most third-year (or any year, for that matter) college students spend most of their time knee-deep in cheap beer and Buffalo wings, LaViolette chose to party hearty in the recesses of his own skull. So says the astronomer in the preface to Beyond the Big Bang:

It began one night in the spring of 1968 when a series of insights began flooding into my mind, concepts at once simple yet of considerable advancement. The ideas themselves were as amazing as the manner in which they were coming to me, as if sensed from some other level. Superimposed on the background of music I had been listening to...came notions of flux, balance, and dynamic equilibrium. I was shown these principles harmonizing together, forming the very essence of existence. Like an attentive pupil, I absorbed them.

LaViolette was the first to develop a unified field theory based on a subquantum kinetics methodology, in which "all material subatomic particles and energy quanta [are] wave-like concentration patterns that self-organize in the continuously transforming ether whose kinetics are specified by five reaction-diffusion equations."
***
When I liken the galactic-core explosion to the events in killer-asteroid flicks such as Deep Impact and Armageddon, LaViolette shakes his head: "You see, that's something I'm against: blowing up asteroids and comets in space. That creates a cloud of dust, and the dust could have worse long-term effects than the asteroid—of course, it depends on how big the asteroid was. There are other ways of doing it. One way, for example, is to plant rockets on the asteroid and give them a thrust to the side so they miss us. You don't blow it up; you push it."

***All I have to do is ask one simple question—"Why do you assume that extraterrestrials are benevolent?"—and LaViolette takes off on a tangent that would have made Richard Dreyfuss' Close Encounters of the Third Kind character weep with joy. LaViolette's vision of alien life on alien lands is utopian, of course. Those distant lands in galaxies far, far away turn out to be places where a man as freethinking as LaViolette could finally be accepted, loved, and revered.

"[By manipulating pulsars, extraterrestrials] are referring to an event [the galactic-core explosion] that could decimate our civilization," he says. "So that's nice of them to be pointing that out to us. If they weren't wanting to be nice to us, they just would have kept quiet....

"There's no expectation that [aliens] would look like us," he continues. "They wouldn't have power lines; they would be generating power indoors with little gadgets....They would probably use air transport and develop the ability to control gravity and fly.

"Culturally, they would be operating at a very high level. They would not be dealing at the level of basic needs anymore. Theirs would be a civilization of self-actualization: Whatever you did for your work, it's what you enjoy doing—it's not something you have to do to earn money. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you enjoyed it....

"I even see the possibility of these civilizations communicating telepathically and being able to share feelings directly, without words. You can imagine going to a play and the actors are picked for their ability to project thought to the audience, to express the subtlest emotions. I picture this: I'm at the theater, and the audience is moved by this performance of emotion, all silent.

"You become more open to the idea of [extraterrestrials] when you realize there is intelligence out there communicating with us. You see some of these [pulsar] alignments and you realize there's a message there; there's a whole galaxy-wide network of civilizations not only communicating but traveling in space. They use these beacons not just to communicate with us but for navigational purposes as well. Pulsars are ideal for that. We would probably use them if we were navigating."

If LaViolette's vision sounds like something out of Contact, well, that's about right. Currently, he's the only astronomer who is able to discern nonrandom pulsar patterns in the cosmic static—a state of affairs that he blames on the stubbornly unbending minds of the scientific establishment.
Yet LaViolette—who, it should be noted, has never witnessed a flying saucer in the sky—has little time for UFO extremists.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"After I made my discovery [about the galactic-core explosion]," LaViolette says, "I had a dream in
which I met with people: I don't know if they were extraterrestrials or advanced spiritual beings. In this dream, I was given a medal; they were awarding me for making this discovery. On their level, this was a major event: Terrestrials had finally found proof of this cosmic event so important that it has decimated the civilization before....They were very wise. You just had extreme respect for them. They were extremely mature beings—old souls. I don't know if they were real or not, but when you're doing work like I do, where you're operating outside of the envelope, you need something to keep you going."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"A lot of astronomers don't get into theoretical aspects," he continues. "They don't look at the big picture. They're more accountant types....Meeting people in the exhibition hall [at the AAS conference in Atlanta], I asked them if they were into ET communication. Half said they weren't. This shocked me. People in astronomy and physics end up falling in love with the discipline. It's hard for people to look at things different. You must be brave to criticize existing ideas."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In 1980, while hiking up Greece's Mount Athos, on a peninsula that is the home to 14 monasteries, LaViolette had a spiritual awakening—and by far his greatest mindshift. It happened right before he almost fell off a cliff.

He had just started his run for a Ph.D. at Portland State, studying general systems theory and subquantum kinetics—some far-out stuff, certainly, but nothing like what was brewing in the recesses of his brain. He had also just begun thinking about the galactic core. His then-girlfriend had introduced him to a woman interested in the Tarot. At first resistant to such hocus-pocus, LaViolette soon found himself sucked into a portal of understanding, much as he had been as a junior at Hopkins. He then took a night class on the zodiac—and immediately saw parallels between his world, of astrophysics, and the strange world of astrology. The cogs of his brain popped and clicked—mindshifting and mindshifting again—until LaViolette came to an admittedly fantastic conclusion: The zodiacal constellations were not randomly situated, but deliberately aligned. Talk about your "Aha!" experiences.

Using ancient celestial and astrological symbolism, as well as his background in astrophysics, LaViolette reasoned that the arrow of Sagittarius' archer and the tail of Scorpio's scorpion were intersecting over our
galaxy's core. He couldn't believe what he was seeing—it was a message, and a nasty one at that—and he knew that if he told other people about his discovery, they'd book him some nap time in the nearest rubber room.

So, with a major mindshift firing up his gray matter, LaViolette traveled to Greece both to clear his head and to conduct a few side studies, all the while unsure where his new discovery would take him.

"On my way to one of Mount Athos' monasteries," he says, "I came to this place where I got off the path. I mean, it looked like a path, but the rainwater had created it. The real path was obvious; you just went straight. So I started going down and down this wrong path...."

Because the mountainside was getting steeper and steeper, LaViolette took off his knapsack and threw it ahead of him. He kept doing so—throw bag, grab bag, throw bag, grab bag—until "the bag started rolling and disappeared over a ledge...and I heard this long silence...and then finally, 'Bam!' At this point, I started having doubts.

"Finally, I came to this ledge," he continues. "On the left, it was all rocks, just ready for a roc slide; on the right was sheared rock with mossy cover. If I jumped on the moss, what if I slipped? At that point, I didn't know what to do. The sun kept going down, and I started crying for help and heard somebody coming. But they were afraid, 'cause they thought I was going to try and get them.

"My tendency is to go forward; I don't like going back. I think a lot of people are like that. But finally, I had to go back up to the trail. I wasn't even sure if I'd make it. I was struggling, and pulling on vines, going up this almost vertical face....I finally made it back up, and I realized what had happened: I'd taken the wrong path.

"Quickly, fast as I could go—I didn't have anything with me; as the monks say, leave your material possessions—I got to the monastery just as they were closing the door. They gave me food and a place to sleep. That night, they had the worst rainstorm. Imagine me on that ledge! I was actually thinking of spending the night on that ledge! A whole waterfall would have been right there; I could have gotten washed off.

"The symbolism for me was that this was a test. If I didn't pass the test, I wasn't allowed to go on with my work."

And go on he did, leaping over hurdles both scientific and personal. He left behind the world-wowing solar-energy studies that had made him a star to prove to himself—and someday the world—that the galactic core is getting ready to crack open a can of cosmic whupass.

But he waited 20-some years to write his books and clear his mind.

"[Back then,] I realized that people wouldn't understand the significance of pulsars without realizing the message they were conveying. People weren't in the mind-set of accepting a view where the core of the galaxy affects the Earth. And I had to first write that up. That was the most important thing, anyway; I saw [the galactic-core explosion as] more important than announcing the message of extraterrestrial communication. That was an urgent matter....Before I left this planet, I wanted to get that part written up. And I knew that if I announced the extraterrestrial findings, there would be an emotional reaction against that. Because there's a tendency to make fun of that, and I would not have any hope of getting my papersn published.

"It's hard enough to get a new idea published...let alone saying, 'I got this idea because I saw this coincidence of pulsars marking certain remnants or arrows in the sky left by some ancient civilization.' That doesn't help you get your papers published. So I kept quiet about all that, throughout the '80s, up until the mid-'90s. It's strategy, like war-playing...guerrilla warfare. You're not part of the establishment, but you're trying to change the establishment. You know what you have is correct. You see it with a clear mind."

At 52 years old, LaViolette has completed a great scientific journey—cosmic rays, cosmic dust, polar ice cores, artificial pulsar alignments, and, ultimately, aliens. He says there's one more book to add to the series, but he's not giving out details. Rumor has it, however, that the fourth book will be about space travel—and will once again make history.

(By the way, when LaViolette did get his knapsack back, almost a full year later—the monks had retrieved it for him—only one of his belongings was missing: his hair dryer.)

This is how LaViolette describes the end of the world:

"The first warning will be the blue star..."

This is our last interview together. I want to know how it all ends.

"When the galactic core is exploding and shooting out the cosmic rays, you would see the blue light. That's the center of the galaxy, and the blue light is more from the cosmic rays. [Normally], there's so much dust between us and the center of the galaxy that you don't really see light from the center...."

"As days and weeks go on, you begin to see more stuff around the blue star. It would start to back-light cosmic dust clouds in the sky....Right at the first instant, there would be an electromagnetic pulse wave; it could give a large radiation dose—whether it would be lethal or not, that would depend on the size of the outburst....

"About a year ago, gamma-ray bursts knocked out some satellites for a while. That really was a wake-up call for people. Before that, they were sort of oblivious to the idea that things out there tens of thousands of light-years [away] could affect our planet. I had been a lone voice back in 1983 saying, 'Look, you gotta watch out for the galactic center, 'cause it can affect the planet.' [Scientists] had been putting sort of a paper bag around the galactic center, saying that everything stays in there. That gives them a safe feeling that there's nothing to worry about, but that doesn't correspond to reality. Now, suddenly, they get these gamma-ray bursts that knock out satellites. Now they realize we aren't immune. One of the bursts they detected...was in a galaxy outside ours. It was so strong that if it had come from the core of our own galaxy, it would have sterilized life on that side of the planet facing the burst. Maybe even trees wouldn't have been able to survive."

Anyway: "The [cosmic energy from a galactic-core explosion] could be more significant in terms of society rather than biological levels. It could knock out all the satellite communication systems. It could create a surge in the power lines, which would create blackouts over the planet. Communication systems could be suspended, like radio and TV. It could present a hazard if you were touching a metal object....

"If the galactic core erupts, and it goes a hundred thousand times more intense, and suddenly you get a whole blast of these things coming toward us, then we have to be worried. When we look out there, we don't see this thing happening. [The galactic core is] perking along....The passive state of the galaxy lasts most of its period....[But when it] jumps into this very luminous state where the core is erupting, we're really going to get showered with this stuff....

"Along with the electromagnetic pulse could be a gravitational wave, and that could cause seismic disturbances [in the Earth's core]. Volcanic eruption could be triggered. It could also affect the polar-axis alignment. If there is a jerk to the axis, sudden displacement to the crust of the Earth could set off a tidal wave in the oceans....

"The real climatic stuff happens when the cosmic dust comes in. That's the worst part. Once that comes in, and starts being swallowed by the sun, it would form a cocoon around the sun. The sun would have a hazy look to it as more and more dust accumulates. It would actually become red, almost like a sunset....

"And then you're going to get all kinds of climatic effects from that. There was 100 times more wind activity during the ice age. But if you had a spectrum change in the sun, this would explain that kind of activity. As the months went by, and more and more lower-energy cosmic rays were arriving, the wind force would get greater and greater and push more of this stuff in. It would blot out the stars. It would affect the moon, too.

"Cloudlike forms could come between the Earth and the sun and form grotesque images. Halloween is a Druid tradition in remembrance of a cataclysmic happening long ago. So you can picture a lot of the forms flying in the air. It would be a creepy scene...endless days.

"Unless there's some warning, of course. They're watching the center now every day. It's something they weren't doing 15 years ago. Now the radio telescopes schedule time every day to observe the center of the galaxy. That's what the Starburst Foundation was recommending back in 1984...at least daily observation of the galactic center....

"It would be nice if we had some warning. But even if there was a week of increasing [galactic] activity, do you know how slow the scientific community moves? They have to sit and discuss this stuff and debate, and some people will say this isn't anything to worry about, that it might be a supernova close by. You should have the system already in place to know exactly what to do when that happens. Sort of like we have seismographs on certain volcanoes that we know erupt. If [the galactic core] starts to give readings, we shouldn't be philosophizing and debating. We gotta take action."

And when LaViolette says "action," he means an "energy shield"—and not just around the planet, but the entire solar system. He's a little fuzzy, however, on just who will build and pay for the thing—but these are mere details.

Aliens. Pulsars. Explosions. Scorpio. It's easy to dismiss LaViolette as a victim of his own overworked mind.

But come on, just for a second, while you're alone, sometime in the dead of night, say it out loud:

What if he's right?
http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/bluecosmic.htm