Cosmology Views

Legacy of the LIGO Lunacy

Lunacy is the appropriate word for LIGO because nearly all LIGO false detections were surface waves from lunar events. Only a few were associated with a perihelion.

As of today, March 30, 2020 (almost April 1, many are fooled by LIGO), LIGO has been reporting gravitational wave (GW) detections for about 4 1/2 years, since September 2015.

LIGO observing run O3 began in April1, 2019.

LIGO had detections for almost a full year in O3, except gaps for maintenance and COVID-19 which caused observations to stop on March 19.

Now is a good time for a review of LIGO.

Wikipedia maintains the main public list of GW detections.

The LIGO GraceDB site provides a public list of detections (DURING O3) as soon as reported, even before all analysis is completed. Some of the graceDB events do not make it to the Wikipedia list which has the assigned probabilities for each claimed merger (of a pair of fictitious black holes or neutron stars).

I maintain a personal reference combining these 2 lists to follow all that LIGO provides. I found it interesting to follow the LIGO claims with such silly details wondering when the charade would end.

The lists are compared to lunar and solar events. There is no concidence. LIGO detects these events; there are no gravitational waves.
NSF was informed of this conflict with a terrestrial source for every LIGO GW. The response in January 2020: LIGO has top-tier scientists.

Since beginning in 2015, LIGO reported 90 GW detections. 66 of those were assigned merger probabilities. Of the 90, 55 were within only 2 days of an earth tide event (61%), or 71 were within 3 days (79%).
Only 4 detections were triggered by an infrequent annual perihelion; the rest were lunar events.
There were 38 earth tide events triggering these 90 detections. LIGO often reports more than 1 astrophysical GW for the 1 real terrestrial wave (even seen in a sample below).
An earth tide is the wave in Earth's crust caused by Earth's rotation when the Moon or Sun is overhead, with the effect increased during a full moon(FM), new moon (NM), perigee(PG), or perihelion (PH).

Here are the first 15 detections, with the LIGO event and its terrestrial source (numbers are yymmdd):

GW150914, PG150914
GW151012, NM151012
GW151226, FM151225
GW170104, PH170104
GW170608, FM170609
GW170729, PG170802
GW170809, FM170807
GW140814, PG170818
GW170817, PG170818
GW171818, PG170818
GW171823, NM170821
S190405ar, NM190405
S190408an, NM190405
S190412m, PG190416
S190421ar, FM190419

Note their consistent proximity.

After LIGO increased its sensitivity in April 2019, more events were reported per earth tide, sometimes even more than 1 GW per day.

The very first detection was on the day of a perigee.
That first event remains one of the strongest signals recorded.

Its timing is important; LIGO turned on the system that day expecting the GW detections from distant mergers would be infrequent but one was detected immediately. No one suspected this surprise actually revealed an essential error in the entire endeavor.

After almost 2 years with no confirmation of claims, the Nobel prize winning event GW170817 was reported, when Fermi detected a very rare gamma ray burst first, so then LIGO created an event to match the Fermi event location and manually edited the figures for this crucial claimed confirmation.
Ignoring the deception for their Nobel Prize winning claim (the GRB impossibly preceded the GW), there has never been an independent verification of any LIGO detection claim.

If anyone wishes some LIGO statistics:
The 90 GW have these deviations from the date of the peak of an earth tide wave in the crust.
0 day deviation had 10 GW, 1d =23, 2d =22, 3d =16, 4d =8, 5d =3, 6d = 3, 7d =4, 8d = 1.

As shown above: PG170818 had GW deviations at both 4, 1, and 0.
NM190405 had GW deviations at both 0 and 3.

In the history, FM had 32 GW, NM had 27, PG had 25, PH had 4, and the unique alignment of Moon and Jupiter on April 23, 2019 had 2 GW: S190425z and S190426c where both were assigned specific merger probabilities.

These two are worthy of attention for their descriptions and timing.

From Wikipedia list of GW events:

S190425z notes:

Confirmed to be a binary neutron star merger.
It was found in 2020 that a Gamma-ray burst was detected (GRB 190425) half a second after the gravitational wave event, lasting for 6 seconds and bearing remarkable similarities to GRB170817. The burst wasn't initially noted because the source was occulted by Earth when the Fermi telescope attempted follow-up.

(excerpt end)

S190426c notes:

Initially marked with 49% chance of being binary neutron star merger, 13% neutron star-black hole merger, 24% mass gap merger.
Later marked with a 52% chance of NS-BH, 22% mass gap, 13% BNS, and 14% terrestrial, before being revised to the current solution.

(excerpt end)

my comment:

The 'current solution' is 24.4% BNS (NS-NS),  6.4% NS-BH, 11.7% Mass Gap, 57.5% terrestrial.

Personally I find this practice of assigning exact probabilities (which change over time during repeated analysis) to a cause for a wave in earth's crust rather silly. LIGO lacks confidence to claim certainty but the lack of cetainty on most suggests a lack of credibility on all the rest.
It is truly an absolute joke when knowing these probabilities were assigned to a wave in the crust as the Earth rotated below a changing celestial alignment of Moon, Jupiter, and Sun.
Note this time span:

S190412m was triggered by PG190416 so the Moon was at its closest during this span.
 the FM190419  triggered S190421ar just before these 2 GW (with excerpts of notes) which followed soon after as Jupiter was moving behind the moon which was nearly opposite the Sun from Earth.

LIGO claimed several GW events from distant 'astrophysical' mergers offering many details of the pair, while our closer than usual Moon was transitioning through alignments with Sun, Jupiter, and the rotating Earth in a celestial dance.

This sequence of 3 lunar events resulted in 4 GW in this span of 15 days.

S190412m, PG190416
S190421ar, FM190419
S190425z, MJ190423
S190426c, MJ190423

One could expect authentic GW to be random.

It is important to point out these lunar tidal  events affect Earth's crust for more than just one day. Since the crust is rigid I expect a number of strain devices could detect the Moon overhead affecting the surface for several days. 

If LIGO were forced to explain how they detected a GW on the same day as a perigee, someone would have to measure and compare the crust reaction to a GW against the earth tide from the Moon or Sun. This will never happen though it should have been done before LIGO was awarded a Nobel Prize.


LIGO's design magnifies any disturbance many times; LIGO is proud of this sensitivity.
I suggest if LIGO can really identify a 'chirp' with any full moon or new moon passing overhead, that ringing is from the LIGO design not from the earth tide wave. LIGO software claims it found the chirp but since nothing in LIGO has been verified the LIGO descriptions are meaningless.
System verification requires real GW events so a complete system validation through many scenarios is actually impossible. LIGO descriptions of a GW are pure fantasy because no one has demanded proof.

From Wikipedia: "These can detect a change in the 4 km mirror spacing of less than a ten-thousandth the charge diameter of a proton."

LIGO was constructed with the simple assumption only a gravitational wave could disturb multiple detectors at nearly the same time.
LIGO simply forgot(!!)  the Earth rotates below the Moon every day of the year and roughly every 2 weeks the Moon and Sun align.
An earth tide wave conforms  to the simple assumption for the LIGO target. The LIGO must find a template in the signal provided and LIGO's history of declaring GW for an earth tide confirms the design.

Since LIGO in O3 has often reported 2 GW on the same day and since these are actually earth tide waves with a daily count rarely more than 1, clearly the LIGO software is defective but there is no incentive to fix it and no valid tests when there are no real GW to verify different scenarios.

LIGO continues to claim GW detections each month, near every earth tide event, with never a confirmation.

So much effort and expense has been wasted.  All LIGO equipment and data are worthless, for an exercise seeking a theoretical wave.
LIGO created software to describe these terrestrial waves by fabricating scenarios of mergers even devising the clever 'chirp' to make their media encounters friendly. No one seriously questions this boondoggle.

My prediction for LIGO's legacy:

Someday, someone will hear a fable, with disbelief though told it it is based on real events with no exaggeration, about a complicated system having an international collaboration, but having no accountability, while claiming detections of events each described as very distant in location and time, and claiming a theoretical wave impossible to detect directly was the cause of each detection, providing no evidence for the claims, failing to realize a real wave was being detected by this super-sensitive system, by neglecting to notice the Moon in the sky (though visible day or night), but even attaining both a Nobel Prize in Physics and a Physics Breakthrough award for their claims, thereby amazing those who were taught proper science requires evidence.


Modern science, including physics and cosmology, is heading for a credibility problem. EUT already knows this but LIGO reinforces that destination.

This lunacy of LIGO should have been stopped long ago.