Alan Butler: Moon Built by Time-Traveling Humans, Washington Monument Signals Mithras Worship11/8/2013 I thought about holding this for Sunday, but I think it is important to get a debunking of this nonsense into the public record. Alan Butler, that faithful friend of Scott Wolter who once tried to sue me for reviewing one his books, has taken on a new persona. According to his Facebook page, he is now “Alan Butler, Time Messenger,” and he aims to tell us that time travelers built the moon and invented the conspiracy guarded by the Freemasons. Butler and Scott Wolter, with whom he is working on the Freemason part of his new ideas, assert that the Washington Monument was deliberately positioned in downtown D.C. by Freemasons to produce two remarkable effects. First, it is designed to have its shadow reach the U.S. Capitol on September 17—Constitution Day—to celebrate the Constitution. It is also designed to repeat the feat on March 25, to celebrate Mithras and Attis, the secret gods of their hidden star-goddess cult. The Washington Monument is 1.4 miles from the Capitol and stands 555 ft. tall. On September 17, its shadow points at the Capitol. But get this: On Inauguration Day, its shadow points directly at the White House! Butler and Wolter don’t note this and don’t claim it as part of their theory, even though the alignment is uncanny. Would you like to know a few more facts?
The Inauguration Day alignment proves that such things can and are the product of occasional coincidence. (A sun dial points in some direction at some point every day.) I don’t know whether it was intentional, but it would seem that July 4 would have been a more appropriate date to try to immortalize in stone, especially since it is literally there for all to see. But cults do love to put all their secrets in plain sight, according to conspiracy theorists. Even if it were intentionally aimed for September 17, there is no proof that doing so intentionally targeted March 25, which was the old Julian date for the spring equinox and thus not a particularly esoteric day, anyway. Butler’s other claims about ancient religion are utterly ignorant. He speaks of a god worshiped in secret; “His name was Attis and he has much in common with Mithras, a Roman counterpart of the Greek Atiss [sic] and like Attis and Sol Invictus, a god with Solar associations. It stands to reason that the solar phenomenon seen from the Capitol on March 25th, like the September 17th event was 'programmed' into the Washington Monument from the start.” Mithras is not a Roman counterpart of Attis. Attis is the dying consort of Cybele (Magna Mater) and was worshipped in Rome alongside Mithras, who has nothing to do with the mother goddess. Nor is Attis a sun god, nor either cognate with Sol Invictus. Attis was not celebrated on March 25 in ancient times (rather on March 22 and 27), but long after Christianity, after 300 CE, he is folded into the Hilaria on March 25 as a sort of pagan competitor to Christ. Oh, by the way: Alan Butler has also embraced the ancient astronaut theory, writing that he has come to suspect that aliens or some other “intelligence” left hidden messages on the earth before the existence of humanity. Well, technically, he believes humans time travel back 4.6 billion years, but…details. He has declared the moon to be an artificial creation meant as a signal to us to look for math codes everywhere: “The Earth and Moon together and separately [sic] represent a mathematical ratio that any technological species would understand but a ratio that would never exist in nature by pure chance.” (Quote from this page: he has many websites.) And what is that? “If the size of the Earth and the Moon are added together, and then represented as a square, the size of the Earth fits perfectly in that square!” I can’t begin to tell you how dumb this is, not least because it assumes the earth is a sphere when it is an oblate spheroid and then because he assumes we would choose to represent it and the moon as flat discs, and then literally square the circle. Butler concludes by daring skeptics to prove him wrong because he says he is so good at math he must be right. OK, sure. Butler asserts that the area left over inside the square once the circle is inscribed is 27.322% of the circle, which equals the 27.322 days the moon takes to orbit the earth. (Remember: This required the builders of the moon to calculate how fast it would move away from earth, as it is still doing, to be in the right position during our era.) When I run the numbers, based on Butler’s claim of a regular circle inscribed in a regular square, using 3.14159265359 as an approximation for pi, I get 27.324. I guess it depends on how many decimal places you carry pi. So, I worked backward from Butler’s numbers and did algebra (using a simple equation, which I am happy to share if anyone really cares) to determine his approximation of pi. It’s 3.1416. Anything more accurate, and the numbers stop working; in fact, the more accurate the approximation, the worse the correlation. Of course percentages are literally per 100 and so are only significant in a base 10 counting system. Worse, Butler’s numbers aren’t right either. The moon’s radius (and thus its diameter) is 27.231% of the earth, though this is based only on the mean radius. Butler fails to note that, not being perfect spheres, the radii (and thus diameters) of both bodies vary depending on where you do the measurements. Either way, it still is not 27.322. So, in short, Alan Butler, friend and colleague of Scott Wolter, has added to the Masonic-Holy Bloodline-goddess worship conspiracy a further layer in which the conspiracy’s aim is to send humans back in time to build the moon to, paradoxically, establish the secret guarded by the conspiracy. Seriously: Time travel to make an artificial moon based on bad math. Is there anything too ridiculous to make money off of?
23 Comments
Graham
11/8/2013 01:54:52 pm
The ExposingPseudo astronomy did a brief segment on Alan Butlers work with Christopher Knight on their scenario.
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Thane
11/9/2013 01:08:17 am
ah, the 1970's! What a decade!
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BigMike
11/8/2013 07:18:00 pm
I had no idea that the Doctor was a Freemason... although i probably shouldn't be surprised.... It is the Doctor after all. Imagine the parties the Doctor and the Freemason could hold in the belly of the Tardis... You know, come to think of it, I bet all those clues the masons leave around are actually coded invites for the Doctor to stop by so they can have another party.
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Thane
11/9/2013 12:58:23 am
I wouldn't be surprised if The Doctor was also a member of the naughty Hellfire Club like Benjamin Franklin.
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Thane
11/9/2013 12:52:10 am
I am aware of the past attacks and conspiracy beliefs about Freemasons in the 18th and 19th century but what do you think is the impetus for this new round?
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Scott David Hamilton
11/9/2013 02:38:19 am
A little pet peeve of mine here: When you describe Butler as an "erstwhile" friend of Wolper, do you actually mean they're former friends? Because that's what "erstwhile" means. I'm pretty sure they're still friends, unless there's a really interesting story I haven't read.
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11/9/2013 02:44:08 am
No, it's just a mistake. I typed the wrong word. I'll fix it.
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11/9/2013 02:47:23 am
It's fixed. That's what I get for writing late in evening. I get tired and make mistakes.
Paul Cargile
11/9/2013 05:07:25 am
Hmm . . . so Butler isn't aware that the Moon has been drifting away from the Earth since its creation, and thus it orbital period has been growing.
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The Other J.
11/9/2013 09:37:50 am
Does Butler get into the same eclipse nonsense that Jim Marrs does, claiming that the moon was put in place where it is by some other intelligence in order to create eclipses as a signal to us ignorant minions?
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11/9/2013 09:40:38 am
Honestly, I didn't read his entire moon theory after the mathematical "proofs." He has so much crap on so many websites, it's hard to get a handle on how much spaghetti he throws at the wall.
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Richard "Dick" Neimeyer
11/10/2013 10:25:30 am
In fairness "on September 17, 1787, a majority of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention approved the documents over which they had labored since May." referenced from http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/constitution-day/ratification.html
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11/10/2013 10:41:18 am
It's not beyond possibility that it was done on purpose, but does that make it a Freemason conspiracy? It's not like the U.S. government considered it a secret day. That said, what does it mean to "point" to the Capitol? It's a big building, altered significantly since 1848. Is it dead center? How could it be dead center if the building and the monument are not perpendicular? Wouldn't similar alignments occur for several days before and after, or at other times of the day? Also: Does the shadow actually reach the Capitol? A shadow of 1.4 miles seems a bit long.
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Jodi
11/10/2013 05:05:52 pm
If they could create a moon from scratch, why not just go all the way and assume they created the Earth or even the entire solar system?
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Richard "Dick" Neimeyer
11/11/2013 06:30:11 am
Well that would explain the "cosmic coincidences" of the moon and sun being the same apparent size and the rings of Saturn coinciding with the age of humankind during the long history of the solar system. It was all a designed plan.
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Only Me
11/11/2013 07:16:34 am
Then we could take the next logical conclusion...they used a "Genesis Device" type of technology (ala Star Trek: TMP) to create life on Earth, where there was none!
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Brian McLaughlin
11/17/2013 05:14:41 am
Everyone knows that mice created the earth as an experiment. That's why the answer is 42!
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Richard "Dick" Neimeyer
11/11/2013 07:32:37 am
...then destroy such life that existed before detonating device on said world in favor of the new matrix.
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How do we explain all these conspiracy/alien/sci-fi theories that not only refuse to die, but proliferate like rabbits on Viagra? By the oldest explanation there is: Follow the money. There's a pot of media gold to be found at the end of all these rainbows. Sometimes, when the bills need to be paid at the end of the month, I wish I were disingenuous enough to cash in on the popularity of this creative and inventive approach to science, but my conscience will just not permit it.
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redfood
11/18/2013 02:47:25 am
You are looking at the facts all wrong!
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Jim Kinney
12/6/2013 04:39:43 am
Time-travelling conspiracies with the moon? I don't know if it is still on Netflix (that's where I watched it), but you should check out the movie Lunopolis (came out in 2009). I thought it was an entertaining flick... but if you believed it? Much less entertaining.
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mick mack
1/27/2015 09:08:51 am
where's that good christian rev Phil to protect his belief system ?
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Steve
12/9/2015 03:00:58 am
A friend linked me to Butler's Who Built the Moon site. I read it. It was fantastic. I googled his name and your site came up. Never would have expected that.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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