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(meteorobs) Perseids storms predicted for 2029 (and other wild stuff)

During the past hour, the well-known (fringe) astronomer Tom van Flandern
has given a most impressive, provocative and well received talk here at
the 200th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in which he
reiterated some of his ususual views of how the solar system works,
declared victory for his group's Leonids storm predictions over all
other groups, and made some definitive statements about upcoming
meteor storms. While I'm sorting my toughts, here's a summary of his
views and further predictions "hot of the presses". Van Flandern believes


1. that comets are asteroids that are orbited by meteoroids (and
that the classical 'dirty snowball' model is totally wrong),

2. that those meteoroids escape the asteroids' gravity through the
L1 and L2 Lagrangian points (so there is no ejection process
involved in creating the famous dust trails whatsoever),

3. that one can predict the maximum ZHR value to expected when the
Earth encounters such a trail without *any* knowledge of past
storms, just from the above-mentioned model alone,

4. that this approach has predicted the max. ZHR values of all
Leonid storms and outbursts since 1999 with far higher precision
than all attempts based on historical observations,

5. that the predictions of the max. ZHR values get even better
(i.e. to within a few percent) of the observations when one
assumes that the 'official' IMO values are too small by 30 to
40% because too many bad observers are always added in,
leading to an average value too low,

6. that in 2002 there will be a storm with a ZHR of 3500 at
4:10 UTC and another one with a ZHR of 2600 at 10:46 UTC on
November 19 (these are the 'reduced' values, if I remember
correctly),

7. that the best place in the world to observe the Leonids
of 2002 is in the Allegheny Mountains in North Carolina, USA,

8. that one can beat the full Moon by having it hidden behind
a mountain, which will keep the air near the observer free
from scattered moonlight and increases the number of stars
visible by a factor of 2 (as shown in experiments he did), and

9. that the Perseids will experience new strong outbursts
from 2004 onwards and will reach storm level from 2029
onwards.

That's not what one tends to hear at your typical astrophysics
conference, and there was apparenty not one solar system
professional in the audience (the specific session was on space
debris; www.aas.org/publications/baas/v34n2/aas200/S660.htm)
and thus no opposition voiced the bizarre comet model that
seems to underlie this work. How essential it is, though,
was not clear - apparently the dust trail modelling works
best when the meteoroids leave the comet mit zero velocity,
a feature that can be incorporated into the 'classical'
dustr trail theory by Asher & McNaught as well (and has been,
according to van Flandern).

So much for the time being - tomorrow, by the way, van
Flandern will give another talk on "artificial structures
on Mars" (www.aas.org/publications/baas/v34n2/aas200/190.htm) ...

Daniel Fischer, reporting from Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
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