Take the V8, add a bit of Tabasco, some grain alcohol, and a stick of celery. Then you won't care what the dog smells like.

Since mythical creatures terrify you, what about Nessie?

Re Norad 45

I have personally have never seen Nessie. Many Scientists have tried to debunk the idea of a mythical creature in Loch Ness. One group decided to perform a complete sonar scan of the whole length of the Loch to completely disprove the existence of Nessie. Apparently they failed as many anomalies from the sonar scan began to appear. Of course the sonar anomalies did not prove the existence of Nessie but the whole principle of the performing the sonar scan to disprove the existence of Nessie could not be validated either. Case closed, I'm afraid not.

As for mythical creatures the


Sasquatch is real enough. Some may say it is simply a man in an ape suit but after looking at the video many many times all I can conclude is that the fakery is many many times more sophisticated than even the moon landing video clips and photographs.

We must also remember that although the world is in reality an urban environment for mankind there are still great tracts of land on the planet which are classified as wilderness. New species of animals are constantly being discovered and recorded.
An example a prehistoric fish called the Coelacanth. This goes to show that animals which appear in the fossil record are still around today. Yet when observations of "mythical animals" are made by even well known highly experienced climbers and scientists they are quickly dismissed as suffering from hallucinations. Please research Prof John Norman Collie background, this is not a man whose word is taken likely.
Also if the experience I have described were hallucinations then the hallucinations are all remarkably similar to other climbers and walkers documented experiences in the area of Cairngorms and surrounding mountain areas. Prior to the experience described I personally had not heard of the 'Grey man of Ben Macdui' until I saw a television documentary a few years later. The other disturbing thing about the encounter was that it was not the footsteps circling my position which woke me up, it was the sound of distant musical 'Chimes' or 'Bells'.




The View from Broad Cairn to Cairn Bannoch. I was down in the gully below the Cairn Bannoch in the Centre Right of the Picture. The Cairngorms including Ben Macdui 17 miles away can be seen in the background

Also prior to nightfall I did observe someone on the peak of Cairn Bannoch (this would be about 3/4 of mile away) for about 45 minutes before sunset. What I found strange about this individual was that the individual was not moving around the peak but was motionless and just standing. I got the feeling that this individual was observing myself. I dismissed this individual as another climber. I'm not so sure now it was a another climber.

I am not wishful believer in all things 'Mystical', which is now apparently the vogue with new age urban dwellers. I fully understand the principles of scientific and engineering reasoning.

Ya forgot the dash of Worcestershire sauce

Yup, unfortunately I had already called this one, and he was coming straight at me with purpose, so while I still had enough room and the corner of the house to get between me and the skunk, I beelined it for the front door.

Normally I just stand and watch nature go on by. Sometimes it just don't work out that way, and I don't give curious critters the benefit of the doubt. If that bear wants my marshmallows, he can have em, long as I can go the other direction.

Maybe fear's too strong a word. How about have a healthy respect for it, like you would an oncoming bus. Funny how most cityfolk will know to stay within the lines to avoid getting whomped by the Greyhound, but blunder straight forward unaware of the big pile of steaming ______ they just stepped past.

Do ya think Jeremiah Johnson was scared of that big griz the old man lured into the cabin?

That is precisely the problem with using the example of the Coelacanth to argue for the possible existance of the Sasquatch: the Sasquatch appears nowhere in the fossil record whereas the Coelacanth is well documented. To be sure, there were large primates such as Gigantopithecus, but none of them were bipedal. I don't dismiss sightings of such creatures as hallucinations. To me they seem more along the lines of wishful thinking. Kind of like flying saucers.



I may regret asking this, but are you suggesting that the moon landings were faked?

Re Norad Mythical Beasties.



I have made a study of the Apollo Program and I can say with a high degree of certainty that that the chances of a successful outcome of placing a man on the moon and then returning to earth successfully are very very low indeed. I will not comment on the films and pictures purporting to show US astronauts on the Moon as references about the authenticity to these are already common knowledge with regard to the numerous anomalies.

Many of the scientific papers describing the Apollo program can be viewed at the following links

Apollo Guidance Computer
Apollo General and Miscellaneous Articles

The major scientific and engineering problems of putting a man on the moon do not lie with rockets or space vehicles themselves (although other qualifications to this statement also have to included but I will not go into these to simplify the case against the moon landings). The main problem for the Apollo project was the design and the control of the flight dynamics of the rocketry and space vehicles themselves together with the Navigational component.

The main engineering task of the Apollo project was the implementation of a viable navigational and flight dynamics control system. Many people in America do not understand this. All they saw was a Saturn V booster and Apollo assembly lift off.
The designers at the beginning of the project were highly involved in the successful design of the Polaris missile which used a simple dedicated digital controller to control the simple ballistic trajectory of the missile. Again this approach was similar to the Gemini and Redstone rockets. The overall requirements for the Apollo system were many orders of magnitude more demanding. Again it was decided to go for a digital computer control solution. The main problem was the 1960's technology and lack of established computer software design principles for advanced embedded digital sampled control systems. The integrated circuit had just been proposed by British engineers and samples were becoming available for very simple 2 NOR gate RTL logic. Integrating even a working reliable computer using these ICs was a major technological problem. The reliability problems of the main digital controller eventually caused the deaths of 3 astronauts on the launch pad in 1967 because certain design changes made to the Apollo AGC computer were not passed onto the designers of the pure oxygen life support system. The pure oxygen life support system was utterly essential to the whole design of the Apollo assembly - as replacing this life support system would have required major structural modifications to the space vehicle assemblies the overall mass of the CSM and LEM would have to be substantially increased. This would have led to a complete redesign to the first and second stage Saturn V boosters. This was not an option. At this point the Apollo project was at the point of total failure. Yet within 2 years we were seeing men land on the moon.

This leads me onto the other issues, the size and complexity of the project and the project management. The whole Apollo assembly consisted over 5 million individual engineered parts in which 5 main contractors were employed for each main sub assembly. This whole assembly apparently worked 1st time and worked completely reliably using the untested machine code developed for the Apollo AGC control software. This idea has a very low order of probability. To counter this reliability argument an example - another major engineering project of the time was the British French Concorde. Concorde had only 250,000 engineered parts at yet it took 10 years of development work before it was given a safety certificate which would allow 120 passengers sipping Champagne to fly faster and higher than any US fighter at the time or since.

Major engineering difficulties were also encountered in the navigational systems and flight control systems. The navigational systems were directly coupled to the flight dynamics of the space vehicles i.e the Command Service Module CSM and Lunar Excursion Module LEM. The method of navigation made use of star navigation reference angles in order to obtain a positional fix and directional vector. A three axis gimble gyroscope (a four axis gyroscope would have eliminated the problem of gimble lock – an ever present danger which would have caused the spacecraft to lose all spatial references and therefore all navigational and spacecraft flight dynamic control) was used as the 3-axis reference for the Apollo digital controller. The spacecraft flight dynamics were modeled using a simple 2nd order Laplace Transform control system and yet a very slow sampling digital controller was used (the Apollo AGC computer was used as the intelligent controller). As the flight dynamics were using a very slow sampled system (the computing speed was would have been about the same as a Commodore PET) the z-transform should have been used. This would have led to some serious questions about the whole stability of the flight control system for the spacecraft and the decision to use a 3 axis gimble gyroscope with its inherent problem of gimble lock. Also 3-axis dynamic control of the spacecraft would have been impossible to predict because even in the design stage the modeling the of sloshing movement of internal rocket fuel was abandoned (although this was attempted using an analogue computer). It was probably abandoned because the sloshing movements of the rocket fuel were highly non-linear. Modeling non-linear systems would have been beyond the ability of the control systems engineer of the time due to the fact that digital computer modeling of non linear systems was not widely understood even though they may have been the elite at MIT. There are even problems predicting the Centre of Gravity for the spacecraft. C of G issues were a major headache, predicted values for the C of G were never realized through empirical testing.

Anyway getting back to the problem at hand - the navigation. An analogy would be useful – trying to navigate using the stars. The Apollo navigation would have been like trying to obtain a fix with a sextant on a boat rolling and bobbing around on the sea in a force ten gale (remember this is just a 2 axis problem not 3) with the boat traveling at 25,000 miles per hour and having no horizon (artificial or not) and then trying to get a fix within a few miles of when the star observation was made. The fix would have to be within a few miles as this would mean being burnt up or bouncing of the earth’s atmosphere into space never to be seen again.

I will not even go into the additional problems faced by the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module.

I believe the project was essentially abandoned in 1967 two years before the statement 'this is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind' was made, although major contributions to the design of digital computers and digital control theory were advanced.

Hope you did not regret asking!!

And yet these problems, which seem so insurmountable to you, were surmounted by not only the US but eventually also the Soviet Union and the European Space Agency. Or are you suggesting that the various unmanned missions, to the moon and elsewhere, were all faked? After all, they would have experienced the same "navigational problems" faced by the manned missions.

Comparing the Apollo project to the Concorde project is laughable. The Apollo program was driven by what was seen at the time as military necessity. NASA had access to resources that the builders of the Concorde could only dream about. And comparing the Concorde to a "US fighter" is apples and oranges. If you are going to do that, try comparing it to the SR-71 Blackbird. That's real performance.


This statement caught my interest:



Just out of curiosity, what "anomalies" are you referring to in the above statement? (I know, I know, but I just can't help myself...)

Come on Norad. You know what he is talking about. The photos of the astronauts that show the reflection of the grassy knoll in their sun visors.

Oh sorry. Wrong thread.

That was a very technical-sounding discussion, but you lack a certain basic understanding of how the Apollo spacecraft navigated.

For instance, in space, you cannot get a 3D position fix from the stars. You can only get your orientation.

You discuss the shortfalls of the Apollo navigation computer, but fail to realize that the “Apollo Primary Guidance, Navigation and Control System (PGNCS)” was not actually the primary means of navigation. The data gathered from the earth-based tracking network and processed by earth-based computers was much more accurate than the onboard system.

And so on…

But thanks for prompting me to look into it more. I had some questions about how space navigation was done but never looked into it before.