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. He has an awful podcast, where he drones on and on and on about his kookbooks. The podcast occasionally appears on shortwave radio.Thursdays at 2300 UTC, 6.115 MHz, via WWCR in Nashville, Tennessee, as of August 2022, per the WWCR Program Guide, 26 August 2022.
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.McCanney's curriculum vitae
==Ideas==
The solar capacitor. The Sun is negatively charged, and the solar wind is positively charged — the two systems form a giant capacitor. This is wrong. The solar wind is neutral.James McCanney's Nonsense: the Solar Wind from Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy
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.VIRTIS detects water and carbon dioxide in comet’s coma — ESA Rosetta blog
Comets are negatively charged. Ergo, they grow by attracting positively-charged cosmic dust. THIS IS WRONG. Comets reduce in mass over their lifetimes.Halley loses 54,000 kg/second
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. Therefore, it cannot be locked to Earth.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.
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,Lunar Retroreflectors, UCSD Physics Dept. the Moon rocks, and the images of the landing sites returned from the narrow angle cameras of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Apollo 11 landing site from LRO NAC
==WING generator==
McCanney holds a patent on a distributed energy generator that uses wind power and can also extract water from the armosphere.WING generator eBook
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.Planet X & Technology Innovation / Para-Anthropology & Ghosts. Coast to Coast AM, 26 May 2020. However, according to the X-Prize organization, The Skysource/Skywater Alliance was the winner.Grand Prize Winner in $1.75M Water Abundance X-Prize announced at X-Prize Visioneering 2018 The WING generator received a second-place consolation prize of $150,000.
==Quotes==
==See also==
*Moon landing hoax
==Books==
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==See also==
*Moon landing hoax
==External links==
*jmccanneyscience.com, his official website (contrary to the name, you won't find much science on it)
*McCanney's guest page on the Coast to Coast AM website, listing all his appearances on the program (as of March 2014, more than 50)
*James McCanney's Nonsense, the pages on McCanney at Phil Plait's old Bad Astronomy website
*Episode 120 - James McCanney's Views on Comets, Part 1, the first of a two part series on McCanney's claims at the Exposing PseudoAstronomy podcast.
*Episode 121 - James McCanney's Views on Comets, Part 2, second of a two part series on McCanney's claims at the Exposing PseudoAstronomy podcast.
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Pseudoscience
Category:Living people