The 2024 Legal Defense Fundraiser has ended early due to the Board's decision to settle the suit. Donations will go towards the creation of a legal defense fund. Discussion on the matter can be found at the RationalMedia Foundation noticeboard. Thank you for your generous support.
David Sereda
Style over substance Pseudoscience |
![]() |
Popular pseudosciences |
Random examples |
David B. Sereda is an all-purpose wingnut, fantasist, and con-man. He hasn't gone as far as to announce a new Face on Mars, but he has cashed in on pretty much every other instance of popular woo, from the Shroud of Turin, contact with Pleiadians, and zero-point energy. He enthusiastically endorses Masaru Emoto's crackpot ideas about water, and Leonard Horowitz's equally nutty belief in sound healing and the solfeggio frequencies. His pronouncements on physics and astronomy generally fall into the Not-Even-Wrong category.[note 1]
Past history
- He is a space scientist, ecologist, filmmaker and author focusing on reverse engineered UFO technology. He experienced a daylight sighting of a flying saucer in 1968 in Berkeley, California and continued to have experiences with the ETs through dreams about alien technology.
Thus the official introduction to Sereda when he spoke at the International UFO Congress 2010. His topic was "Reverse Engineered UFO technology, Break-throughs in differentials, crop circles, anti-gravity and more."
There is no evidence to be found that Sereda has ever demonstrated reverse engineered UFO technology, or been a space scientist. He was in business with Bogdan Maglich at one point, at HiEnergy Micro Devices Inc., but he seems confused about what Dr. Maglich actually did. He once said, "I worked with the most brilliant nuclear power plant and nuclear scientists in the history of this country; also in the field of nuclear fusion. I fought for ten years for helium-3 fusion with my boss, Dr. Bogdan Castle Maglich, the inventor at MIT of that process."[1]
Maglich was not the inventor of 3He fusion. His invention, which went nowhere, was the "migmatron" — a self-colliding ion beam fusion reactor.[2] He developed it at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (now known as Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory), not M.I.T.
In another preen-athon on Coast to Coast AM, Sereda claimed that he worked on a hot 3He fusion device that reached a temperature of "ten billion degrees with no heat radiating out of the reactor." If true, that would be approximately 1000× the temperature at the core of the Sun, and everything living within a radius of several kilometres would have promptly ceased to qualify as "living" due to gamma radiation.
Sereda was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada but became a permanent resident of the USA and was raised in Berkeley, California.
From 1979 he became a professional photographer and ecologist, and claims to have planted over 1.3 million trees working as a tree planter in British Columbia.
From 1990-92 he was director of the Tesla Foundation, promoting non-radioactive nuclear energy, solar power and hydrogen fuel technologies.
From 1992-1995, he was President of The Green & Blue Corporation, a California based eco-venture capital company.
His UFO websites, UFOnasa.com and daufo.com, are defunct.
On Coast to Coast AM
Sereda has astounded the mass overnight radio audience on around 30 occasions since 2004, spouting nonsense for an aggregate 40 hours. He has been described in his intros as "Author and ufologist", "Author and researcher", "UFO researcher and author", "Filmmaker and mystic ecologist", "Scientist and filmmaker", "Space scientist, filmmaker and mystic ecologist", and "Ecologist, scientist, and spiritual explorer".
Boyd Bushman video
In October 2014, one of Sereda's video "interviews" with retired aerospace engineer and UFO believer Boyd Bushman went viral and caused a sensation in the tabloid press.[3]
Columbia disaster
Sereda espouses a theory[4] that the Space Shuttle Columbia was shot down by a hostile extraterrestrial intruder, not destroyed by a hole in the left wing as the investigation board concluded. His sole evidence is some purplish squiggles on several time-lapse photographs taken from near San Francisco as Columbia streaked overhead. Sereda says the squiggle is the track of the incoming attacker, but the squiggle is different in each of the five photographs. In each case the squiggle ends at the point where Columbia is, despite the fact that the five photographs were taken over the course of approximately one minute, a time during which the Shuttle would have travelled nearly 300 miles. If the squiggle had truly been an attack, the interecpt point would have fallen progressively behind Columbia.
The photogrpaher, Peter Goldie, did not have a cable shutter release. Camera shake as the shutter release button is pressed is a very common problem in time-lapse photography. If there is a bright object in the frame, a squiggle is usually the result.[5]
Books
- Sereda, David (March 22, 2000). Face to Face With Jesus Christ: Apparitions to a Modern Visionary. Blue Dolphin Publishing, Inc. pp. 256. ISBN 978-1577330325.
- Sereda, David (February 15, 2002). Evidence: The Case for NASA UFOs. Terra Entertainment. pp. 264. ISBN 978-1893792838.
- Sereda, David (2011). Singularity. Self-published eBook (LuLu.com). pp. 159.
Video productions
- Evidence, the Case for NASA UFOs (2001)
- David Sereda, Host & Co-producer
- Henrik Henriksen
- John R. Johnston
- Visitors, the California UFO Wave (2004)
- David Sereda, Producer, Director, Editor
- Dan Aykroyd, Unplugged on UFOs (2004)
- Graviton Entertainment, Production Co.
- Union Station Media, US Distrib.
- Jonathan Dana, Supervising Producer
- David Sereda & John R. Johnston, Producers
- David Sereda, Director
- David Sereda & John R. Johnston, Editors
- UFOs From Here to Andromeda
- UFOtv, Distributor (Cat#U685)
- Scott Hinton & Lisa Johnson, Exec. Producers
- David Sereda & Michael Lee Hill, Producers
- David Sereda, Director
- TRT 102 min
- On Youtube
- The Voice (2007)
- Voice Entertainment, Distributor
- James Law and David Sereda, Producers
- David Sereda, Director
- TRT 3 hours
External links
- Official site Warning: Clickbaity popups, Javascript abuse, and hundreds of tons of pseudoscientific woo awaits
- David Sereda's blog (not kept up to date)
- David Sereda at IMDB
- Outlet for Sereda videos
- Bio on Coast to Coast AM
- Exposing Pseudoastronomy, Podcast Episode 83: David Sereda’s Claims Clip Show, Part 1
- Exposing Pseudoastronomy, Podcast Episode 84: David Sereda’s Claims Clip Show, Part 2
Notes
- ↑ Example: "What happens when you reduce the mass-gravity effect by wave-transforming mass is it eventually becomes translucent, then it turns to light, and then it disappears in these different spectrums of the electromagnetic spectrum that we do not see." (Coast to Coast AM, June 4 2005, Hour 2, starting 19:36)
References
- ↑ Coast to Coast AM, May 8, 2011, Hour 1, starting 38:57
- ↑ Maglić, Bogdan C.; Blewett, John P.; Colleraine, Anthony P.; Harrison, W. Craig, "Fusion Reactions in Self-Colliding Orbits," Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 27, Issue 14, pp. 909-912 (1971).
- ↑ Daily Mail Boyd Bushman talks through photos of aliens and UFOs
- ↑ David Sereda: ET shootdown of Columbia? Project Camelot Portal, 19 November 2020
- ↑ Mystery of the Purple Lightning Zig-Zag Photo James Oberg, 10 January 2008