Thanks for that, Josan. I read through the unabridged version and really enjoyed it.
I had a bunch of questions, though! For example, there's a point where he describes the spectral types of the Epsilon Boötis system:
... The distance given for the star in most reference books was too low, and at the true distance of 203 light-years, Epsilon B really was an A2 star and the orange giant Epsilon A had been an AO ...
An orange star is spectral type K. Was this a transcription error or did Lunan muck it up? Although even if he did, that doesn't prove anything ... brilliant old professors make simple mistakes all the time ... it's only insecure pedants who seize upon them as an opportunity to demean.
But getting to the long-delayed radio echoes (LDEs) themselves (from which Lunan apparently translated stats about Epsilon Boötis)
how did he do that translation? What was the nature of the LDEs that allowed them to be taken to refer to that system? All I know about LDEs is that they are apparently secondary echos from terrestrial signals that were first discovered in the 1920s and have variable delays. Lunan must have only been working from the delays themselves, not the content of the transmission, since that was terrestrial. Which echoes did he pick and why? How did he interpret the delays and why?
That subject alone could fill a bunch of articles.
Also, it was my understanding that Lunan, like Bracewell before him, had abandoned the business with Boötis. Yet there's no discussion here of that. Did Lunan retract these ideas? Were they only put out there as wild notions for discussion in the first place, but badly misinterpreted by his colleagues and UFO enthusiasts? From this article, I come away with the idea that Lunan honestly believes we were once contacted by extraterrestrials, yet he doesn't think such contact occurs today. Does that include LDEs?
I also enjoyed the references to belief: Lunan says, "Like my belief in extraterrestrial and non-belief in UFO’s as spaceships, that’s an intellectual belief, not a matter of faith." I wrestle with such terminology myself a lot. The words "believe in", taken together, have such a dogmatic, theocratic weight to them that it undermines philosophical discussions about scientific matters. "Do you believe in evolution? AHA! You have faith in something, why not God?" These are characteristic of weaknesses in language, not necessarily weaknesses in the philosophy of one using it.
Anyway, a very good couple of articles. I'd long forgotten about Lunan and his ... exotic ... notions about Epsilon Boötis. Thanks for the re-visit!
