In Brief: "To the Stars" Tells Investors about Alien Metals; Plus: Hindu Scientists Make Absurd Claims about Stem Cells and Dinosaurs in the Vedas

​Having spent four hours over the last few days reviewing Ancient Aliens and offering an extra bonus post to review Project Blue Book, today I have to keep my posting short in order to make time for some other work. I have two quick hits to share, the first surrounding To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science and its claims to be testing exotic metals from outer space. The second is about Hindu nationalists’ efforts to revise the history of science to place primacy in the hands of Vedic Indians thousands of years ago.

Let’s start with the recent posting of a transcript of a conference call that To the Stars officials held with investors last month. In the call, Steve Justice explained that the company has “limited” resources for scientific investigation, and he then explained the only actually relevant facts, which were, as expected, disappointing. He references here the so-called Project A.D.A.M. launched last year with splashy YouTube videos heralding the company’s efforts to analyze alleged UFO wreckage:

We have also accomplished standup of the A.D.A.M. Research Project to analyze and advance our understanding of the collected exotic materials. Two of the specific tests we are performing on the materials are x-ray fluorescence where we look for unusual element presence and unusual alloys or combination of metals. This is as well as isotope testing where we are looking for unusual versions of element atomic structures that indicate terrestrial or non-terrestrial origins. While the x-ray fluorescence test is relatively quick-turn, the isotope testing is really expensive and time-consuming. It requires really sophisticated equipment and test procedures. 
 
As part of the analysis effort, we issued a materials analysis sub-contract. We have data collection and analysis both internal to To the Stars Academy and at an independent laboratory.

​Justice added that the company is only at “the very first steps” of data collection, and that the process is taking much longer than they imagined, especially given the lack of money they have to pay for testing. He further noted that releasing the raw data could be “misleading”—a strong hint that they are finally starting to realize that the “alien” aspects might well have earthly explanations.
 
As you can see, they had no actual results to report, contrary to Hal Puthoff’s excited statements last summer about finding “metamaterials” from extraterrestrial sources. According to Justice, what was once billed as space alien metamaterials or metal from crashed UFOs is now merely “exotic” and largely untested. The subcontract, incidentally, went to Hal Puthoff, a To the Stars executive, as we know from Puthoff himself, who bragged about receiving the contract from To the Stars on behalf of his other company, which has been “testing” supposedly “alien” metals for years now without finding any conclusive evidence.
 
The fact that To the Stars needs to conduct these tests—and doesn’t have results to share—strongly indicates that the U.S. government did not test alien metals and had no data on the subject to share, even if Robert Bigelow independently worked with Puthoff to test his own set of supposed alien metals. If the government had any data, Luis Elizondo, formerly of the Pentagon and now of To the Stars, would have known and would have been able to tell To the Stars what to look for and how to get the right results, and from which metals.
 
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a different set of quasi-scientific claims have created a stir in the media. The BBC declared it news that the annual Indian Science Congress heard reports that ancient Indians invented airplanes and stem cell research thousands of years ago. These claims are familiar to readers of this blog since they have been a frequent refrain since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took power and began promoting a Hindu nationalist agenda that included extreme claims about ancient Indian science.
 
More interesting, perhaps, is the claim at the same conference from Panjab University geologist Ashu Khosla that the Hindu god Brahma was the first and greatest scientist and that he was the first to discover the existence of dinosaurs and to record their history in the Vedas some 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. The claim emerged because of lingering resentment that a British man was the first to identify a dinosaur in India, in the early 1800s.
 
Khosla’s evidence was less than convincing, arguing that the British discovered dinosaurs by reading the Vedas and stole their name from Sanskrit, since the Greek terms dino- (terrible) and sauros (lizard) etymologize to the Sanskrit words for “witch” and “Rakshasa,” a mythological monster created by Brahma. This smacks of the outdated eighteenth-century idea of Sanskrit as the primeval language, a claim overtaken by the discovery of the Indo-European language family and the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. Khosla claimed that all of history and science can be found in the Vedas, which I guess means that he wasted a lot of time becoming a geologist since geology is really just the story of the gods shooting space lasers at the Earth.
 
When pressed for proof, Kholsa offered only religion, admitting that there is no scientific backing for his claims:

Since [the] Vedas were not written on paper, but on leaves, we might not have a scientific evidence, but dinosaurs were certainly mentioned in [the] Vedas by Lord Brahma. People will even dismiss the existence of Lord Brahma and question if he even wrote [the] Vedas. There is no scientific proof, but [the] Vedas are the biggest proof in itself. Even when I go [in]to [the] field for excavation of dinosaur fossils, I pray to Lord Brahma to help me. Even [the] Wright Brothers took the idea of [the] aeroplane from [the] Pushpak Vimaan that was used by Ravana in [the] Ramayana.

​The Wright Brothers did not. That’s just another Hindu nationalist claim seeking to glorify India by assigning non-Indian events and discoveries to a primeval Indian source.