This article from Mumbai Mirror talks about how a NASA scientist created a petition to stop a particular presentation at a prestigious conference in India back in January.
It seems odd that someone would be so against a single idea that he would publicly denounce it. Until, that is, you learn that they are proposing that ancient planes in India could fly in all horizontal directions (including backwards) and through outer-space to other planets.
They did end up presenting, but this is still an interesting argument, because on one hand it's almost definitely bogus.
(** Science-y rant; not necessary to read** I mean, if a plane can fly through space, it wouldn't even need to be a plane anymore. It would just need to be a capsule that could get in and out of the atmosphere. Because if any vehicle has the capability to travel from planet to planet within reasonable time frame [which they said it could do], that speed would produce so much air resistance within the atmosphere that A. it would be far more efficient to go 60 miles up first [which, to a vehicle that would regularly travel hundreds of millions of miles {~370,000,000 to Jupiter} within the solar system, or 5X10^15 miles {1/100 the way across just this galaxy} if outside of the solar system, would be too trivial not to be worth it], and B. it would be quicker because that same speed would probably destroy the vessel (so they would need to slow down), or at the very least with the same amount of energy, outside of the atmosphere, there wouldn't be any air to slow it down, so it would go faster. And certainly, if a freshman in college can realize this within half an hour, a race of super-intelligent people who could actually make this thing would realize these things, too. PLUS, going that quickly in-atmo would be very loud, and people all over the planet (which is where the team making this proposal said this thing went) would have taken note of extraordinarily loud thunder on clear days. So, it wouldn't have been very smart to travel "continent-to-continent" in-atmo. Alright, now you're thinking "but what if it had some ability to avoid wind resistance, perhaps like a bubble in space-time that surrounded the craft?" Well, yes, that's a reasonable thing to assume of a theoretical craft that can travel planet to planet, and then it could also travel through the atmosphere just like they said. However, then I'm pretty sure the main point of their presentation would be "ancient space ship from india", as it certainly would not be an aeroplane, because aeroplanes by definition rely on the air to fly in the first place. Not to mention that fact that spaceships are waaaaay more interesting than planes. **end science-y rant**)
And as Dr. Ram Prasad Gandhiraman argues, if we allow things like this to be presented as science, it could hurt the reputation of the scientific community.
But then on the other hand, can someone really just look at something, say "that's outrageous!" and have it be dismissed completely? Who gets to be the one who can decide? Or should science treat every proposal equally and only once a theory is proved to be false though a standard process, should it be dismissed?
I think it may have done more harm to just outright say they could not present their ideas. this would give the impression that science is biased. This way they could be dismissed once they gave their full proposal, and could be shown to not have any grounds for their assertions. This gives the impression that still any idea has a chance to be proven by the scientific community. It just needs merit.
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