I just went back there to look for his comments on Louis Frank. NASA verified Frank's data on minicomet impacts in the upper atmosphere, but Plait still rejected it. Now he says that he accepts it, and has a page talking about the 1997 NASA study. The date at the top of the page (boldface) is 1997. In small print at the bottom is "This page last modified Tuesday, 21-Dec-2004". Plait was still rejecting the conclusion the last time I'd checked his site, and there's no way I'd ever heard of the site in 1997. My first visit there was via a site which blew apart the "Moon landings were hoaxed" hoax.
I hadn't heard of Louis Frank until, hmm, 1999 or 2000. In October 2001, Phil Plait wrote:
Louis Frank is as wrong as wrong can be. I have seen his claims, read papers, and years ago decided his claims are utterly incorrect... The bottom line is that we should see them, lots of them, all the time. We can't. So, unless they are magic (like Nancy Lieder's Planet X), they don't exist.Notice the damning by association? That's a hallmark of pseudoscience, regardless of the number of dots and letters behind one's name. He prefaces the above with:
My Bitesize essays about Frank were written early on, when I first heard of his claims. I should really re-write them, or append them.He has rewritten them. And yet, when one goes to the very page he mentions, the date is "Week of June 2, 1997". And we find no link back to his forum message from 2001, where he'd decided "years ago" (presumably at least four years earlier, when the NASA study was made) that Louis Frank "is as wrong as wrong can be."
To hijack some George Bernard Shaw bon mot, "skepticism might be a wonderful thing if anyone would ever try it."
The Big Splash:
A Scientific Discovery That Revolutionizes the Way We View the Origin of Life,
the Water We Drink, the Death of the Dinosaurs, the Creation of the Oceans,
the Nature of the Cosmos, and the Very Future of the Earth Itself
by Louis A. Frank
with Patrick Huyghe
Sigwarth and I analyzed over 10,000 images and learned a good deal about the black spots in the process. Our interpretation of the events continued to involve meteor impacts into Earth's upper atmosphere.By counting the spots in our images we were able to estimate the rate at which these objects appeared. This was the simplest measurement to do. We saw ten holes per minute on the daylight side of Earth. So we doubled that figure to obtain the rate of these objects over the entire face of Earth. There had to be about twenty such objects entering the atmosphere every minute. That was an alarming number of objects.
