Antonio Iovane, a self-funded experimenter based in Cagnano Varano, Italy, posted a paper to the viXra preprint server (2105.0001, version 2, dated February 2022) arguing that some of the instrument anomalies recorded during solar eclipses were real but were not gravitational. His claim is that pendulums, a gravimeter and a torsion balance at sites hundreds of kilometres apart all twitched on a shared clock, with disturbances that begin and end on multiples of 2.5 minutes past midnight UT. A natural cause would not keep such a timetable, he says. He concludes that the instruments were picking up distant, deliberately controlled, high-power radio transmissions timed to the eclipses. The work is self-funded and appears as a viXra preprint, with no journal publication reported. Its acknowledgements thank a referee for criticisms that prompted a re-examination of the data, but the paper does not name a journal. Its title presents the eclipse readings as a spurious version of the Allais effect, and it bears on the wider dispute summarised in Allais Effect.
How Iovane got involved
The paper says Iovane was recruited in July 1999 into NASA's worldwide observing campaign for the eclipse of 11 August 1999. It names Marigliano (his site) and Trieste as campaign locations listed on a NASA web page of October 1999. That campaign's results were never published as a whole (see Allais Effect Claims vs. Evidence: Positive Reports, Negative Results and the Unpublished NASA Study). Iovane's 1999 and 2003 pendulum results are also described as unpublished until this paper.
The instruments at Marigliano
Both of Iovane's pendulums hung in the same heavily built reinforced-concrete building at Marigliano in the Campanian plain, with the bob about 1 m below ground level.
- Pendulum #1 (eclipse of 11 August 1999). A 5.5 m, undamped pendulum with a brass bob of about 4.6 kg on a 0.9 mm stainless-steel wire. A video camera under the bob recorded concentric circles drawn on its base. At Marigliano the eclipse reached 78.3% coverage, with the Sun 64 degrees up.
- Pendulum #2 (eclipse of 31 May 2003). A 2 m pendulum with a period of about 2.8 s and a bob of roughly 1 kg, hung from two parallel wires and damped in oil. An optical fibre through the bob made a 50-micron light spot, which a microscope-lensed camera tracked to a resolution reported as better than 0.5 microradians. The eclipse began before local sunrise, and the Sun was 4 degrees below the horizon at maximum.
What was measured
The 2003 test. Before the eclipse, a 50-day control run (10 January to 28 February 2002) showed that the building tilted by a few microradians each day in step with outdoor temperature. The paper reports a correlation of 0.93 between the two using daily averages. Iovane put the eclipse night (22:00 to 06:00 UT) through the same processing as 49 matching control nights: remove a smooth curve, then measure the scatter. The eclipse night's scatter was 1.07 microradians, which he puts at about five times the worst control night and calls a 5-sigma departure. The disturbance showed up in the East-West direction only. It took the form of near-instantaneous tilts of a few microradians, each followed later by a slower, oscillating return. He lists eight pulse edges, from 22:37:30 to 05:07:30 UT, and notes that every one falls on a 2.5-minute mark. Some fell outside the eclipse window and before sunrise, which he uses to rule out any local effect of the shadow.
The 1999 test. On the eclipse day, pendulum #1 traced small elliptical swings of about 4.7 s whose orientation kept jumping. Control days in late August and early September 1999 were much calmer. In mid-August, before he saw any other data, Iovane noted six time windows: five in which the long axis of the swing changed azimuth sharply, and a sixth (12:10 to 12:20) in which the amplitude grew markedly. A LaCoste & Romberg Model D gravimeter run by I. Marson and F. Palmieri at the University of Trieste, about 500 km away, was later found to show falling edges at 08:37:30, 09:45:00, 10:20:00, 11:37:30 and 12:12:30. These fall inside five of his six windows; he says the second note later proved inaccurate. The gravimeter edges also sat on 2.5-minute marks and were mostly 35 minutes apart. The Trieste team had not published its record because of thermal drift. Going back through the video, Iovane found brief vertical jerks of the bob, lasting 1 to 7 seconds, near some of these edges. He treats them as the cause of the azimuth jumps.
Other teams' records
Iovane revisits three other teams' reports, though not all in the same way:
- Kuusela's team (University of Turku), Manavgat, Turkey, 29 March 2006. The team had published a filtered trace, but Iovane works from the uncorrected horizontal-gravimeter data, which Kuusela sent him privately in December 2020 with permission to publish. Iovane identifies a 35-minute East-West pulse from 14:25:00 to 15:00:00 UT. The deflection set in abruptly and subsided gradually and unevenly, and it appeared at only one of the team's three Turkish sites.
- Pugach, Kiev, 11 September 2007. An abrupt deflection of a torsion-balance beam at 16:10 UT, read off a published figure.
- Aplin and Harrison, Reading, UK, 11 August 1999. This is only a loose association. Iovane extracts no timing edges from their record; he simply connects their reported 35-minute atmospheric gravity waves with the 35-minute spacing in the Trieste trace, and suggests radio heating of the ionosphere might have produced the waves.
The proposed mechanism
Iovane's conclusion is that the signals were man-made, came from outside the observing sites and were electromagnetic. He calls this "undisputable". He suggests that radio energy induced currents and magnetic fields in the instruments. In pendulum #2, he argues, the two suspension wires and the brass bars formed a closed conducting loop facing East-West. A reinforced pillar about a metre to the east would have carried induced currents in phase with it, so that, on his account, the column and the loop tugged on each other and the bob shifted eastward. He cites a private message in which the gravimeter's manufacturer said such instruments can respond to magnetic fields. He speculates that eclipses suit radio experiments because the Moon's shadow leaves a dark patch in the ionosphere. As an example of transmissions switched on 2.5-minute boundaries, he cites a 2005 paper on artificial optical emissions at HAARP, but he offers it only as an illustration of that kind of schedule, not as evidence of a link to his own readings. He also says the signals' power, frequency, modulation and antenna beaming are unknown to him.
What the paper does and does not establish
The timing pattern is the paper's central evidence, and Iovane chose the pulse edges he tested himself. The paper offers no test of how often edges would land on 2.5-minute marks by chance. That matters because these marks come every 150 seconds, and the times were read from recorded timestamps and published figures. No transmitter is identified, and the paper reports no measurement of any radio-frequency field at any site. The induction story, with the pendulum's wire loop and the reinforced pillar responding together, is untested speculation. Even if the timing match holds up, the paper does not show that radio signals caused the disturbances. Iovane himself says his amplitudes are of little use, because the instruments were not calibrated for this kind of input. The paper also takes a different line from earlier explanations. Yang and Van Flandern proposed a gravitational cause rooted in ordinary physics, the pull of a patch of cooled, denser upper air, a model weighed in Duif's 2004 Review: Can Ordinary Physics Explain the Eclipse Pendulum and Gravimeter Anomalies?. Iovane instead accepts that the anomalies were real and denies that they were gravitational. He goes further, suggesting that ionospheric or geomagnetic disturbances during eclipses may have misled earlier experimenters in general, and that his work calls into question "at least part of the circulating literature on this subject". He does not test or single out any particular earlier report, Allais's included. The paper credits Maurice Allais with first reporting pendulum anomalies during a solar eclipse, in 1954, and says the 1999 pendulum behaviour was reminiscent of his reported observations.
Source notes & attribution
- https://vixra.org/pdf/2105.0001v2.pdf