James McCanney

James McCanney is an astronomy crank and a conspiracy theorist. He's chiefly known for his "electric comets" claims, or, as he dubs it, "The Plasma Discharge Comet Model", but he's also a fair example of crank magnetism and appears to believe in all kind of fringe ideas. In addition to pseudoscience, his website flogs survivalist supplies.

The fault in our stars
Pseudoastronomy
Adding epicycles
Epicyclists
v - t - e

The radio show Coast to Coast AM styles McCanney "Professor," and drops the name Cornell in association with him. However, his academic qualification is M.S. in nuclear and solid-state physics and he has not taught at Cornell University since the 1980s.[1]

Ideas

The solar capacitor. The Sun is negatively charged, and the solar wind is positively charged — the two systems forming a giant capacitor. This is wrong. The solar wind is neutral.[2]

There is no ice in comets. Twelve comets have now been visited by spacecraft. All have been found to contain very substantial quantities of water ice.[3]

Comets are negatively charged. Ergo, they grow by attracting positively-charged cosmic dust. This IS WRONG. Comets reduce in mass over their lifetimes.[4]

Venus was a comet, and is tidally locked with Earth as the Moon is. The synodic period of Venus is 583.92 days. Its rotational period is 224.701 Earth days.[5] Therefore it cannot be locked to Earth.[6]

The Apollo Moon landings didn't happen. No human could have survived transition through the Van Allen radiation belts. They could and they did. Evidence includes the Laser Ranging Retro-Reflectors left on the Moon,[7] the Moon rocks, and the images of the landing sites returned from the narrow angle cameras of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. [8]

WING generator

McCanney holds a patent on a distributed energy generator that uses wind power and can also extract water from the armosphere.[9]

In 2018, the JMCC WING generator was a finalist in the Water Abundance X-Prize. On Coast to Coast AM 26 May 2020, McCanney said that his device was the final winner. However, according to the X-Prize organization, The Skysource/Skywater Alliance was the winner.[10] The WING generator received a second-place consolation prize of $150,000.[11]

Quotes
“”If you realize that comets are not dirty snowballs, they’re a discharge of the electrical conditions in the solar system, the first question out of everybody’s mouth would be, ‘well, can we use this for power?’ and the answer is ‘Yes!’ So what does that do to the people in control of the world? We’re talking about the bankers, the people in charge; they control the world through energy: oil, nuclear power, and coal. Those are the big ones. … These are very controlling forces, and if you took that away, one of their biggest tools to control the public would go away.
—on Coast to Coast AM, 4 November 2010
“”Planet X is real, and it’s going to come to us with a bunch of comets, and people murmuring about Planet X being out there is NASA preparing us for it.
—on Coast to Coast AM, 16 February 2011
gollark: It's because of those trendy "atomic CSS" things.
gollark: `add` randomly picks a function from all available traits and executes it.
gollark: That's valid. I went over this.
gollark: Just steal comptime functions from Nim.
gollark: Yes.

See also

Books
  • McCanney, James (2003). Planet-X, Comets and Earth Changes. J.M. McCanney Science Press. ISBN 978-0972218603.
  • McCanney, James (2003). Atlantis to Tesla: The Kolbrin Connection. J.M. McCanney Science Press. ISBN 978-0972218641.
  • McCanney, James (2004). Principia Meteorlogia: The Physics of Sun Earth Weather. J.M. McCanney Science Press. pp. 288. ISBN 978-0972218658.
  • McCanney, James (2007). Calculate Primes: Direct Propagation Of The Prime Numbers. J.M. McCanney Science Press. ISBN 978-0972218665.
  • McCanney, James (2007). Surviving Planet-X Passage. J.M. McCanney Science Press. pp. 60. ISBN 978-0972218634.
  • McCanney, James (2010). The Diamond Principle. J.M. McCanney Science Press. pp. 159. ISBN 978-0982852002.

See also

References
  1. McCanney's curriculum vitae
  2. James McCanney's Nonsense: the Solar Wind from Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy
  3. VIRTIS detects water and carbon dioxide in comet’s coma — ESA Rosetta blog
  4. Halley loses 54,000 kg/second
  5. Wikipedia on Venus
  6. However, the Venus/Earth system does have the interesting property that Venus shows us almost exactly the same face when at closest approach. McCanney probably once heard that fact and misinterpreted it.
  7. Lunar Retroreflectors, UCSD Physics Dept.
  8. Apollo 11 landing site from LRO NAC
  9. WING generator eBook
  10. Grand Prize Winner in $1.75M Water Abundance X-Prize announced at X-Prize Visioneering 2018
  11. Wikipedia article
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