1	The Allais eclipse effect – an outstanding and gross anomaly right at the heart of contemporary science!
2	There is excellent reason to believe that peculiar dynamic effects occur during total solar eclipses: the observations by Maurice Allais in Paris in 1954 and 1959 the experiment of Jeverdan, Rusu, and Antonescu in Romania in 1961 the observations by Saxl and Allen of Harvard in 1970 Three independent observations should be enough to convince anyone that something is going on!
3	Maurice Allais at the time of his experiments
4	In the 1950s, Allais worked in three related fields of physics: He invented a “paraconical” pendulum and observed the precession of its azimuth during a number of marathon observational runs; He repeated some of the long-term optical sighting experiments of Esclangon (1926); He re-analyzed the interferometric observations of C. Dayton Miller from the 1920s. These researches all showed anomalous effects (And, over the same period, Allais also wrote two groundbreaking books on economic theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1988)
5	Professor Allais is still going strong, and he still insists upon the importance of his physics results!
6	A plan of the suspension of Allais’s paraconical pendulum
7	A photograph of the paraconical pendulum suspension
8	Overall view of the paraconical pendulum setup
9	Allais’s pendulum support
10	Allais’s measurement circle
11	An observer taking readings with the Allais paraconical pendulum
12	General characteristics of the movement of Allais’s paraconical pendulum
13	An example of the periodic behavior of the paraconical pendulum over 6 days
14	But then something unexpected happened….
15	30 June1954 – the first Allais eclipse
16	What a total solar eclipse looks like
17	Behavior of the pendulum around the solar eclipse
18	At the beginning of the eclipse the plane of swing of the paraconical pendulum executed a sudden swerve, and later it returned to its original orientation
19	Animation of the Eclipse Effect
20	1959 – The second Allais eclipse
21	The Jeverdan-Rusu-Antonescu Eclipse Effect…. …was first observed during a total solar eclipse in Bucharest, Romania in 1961 Jeverdan et al. were at the time completely unaware of Allais’s work. During the eclipse, the period of a sophisticated Foucault pendulum (about 25 meters in length) shortened markedly. We consider that the Allais effect and the JRA effect are probably two aspects of one underlying phenomenon.
22	The Saxl and Allen experiments From the 1950s through to 1970, Saxl and Allen operated a large torsion pendulum at Harvard, repeatedly measuring the period over extended experimental series taking many days. Not only did they detect periodic deviations similar to those found by Allais, but during the solar eclipse of 1970 they detected a pronounced increase of the period. They also observed a weak spike during a lunar eclipse. (A torsion pendulum operates independently of Earth’s gravitation; the effects are produced only by the torsion of the support wire and the rotational inertia of the bob)
23	“The usual way of dealing with discordant data, often well disguised, is to reject those which do not agree, after which the remainder will be found to agree very well” — Paul Merrill
24	The NASA debacle of 1999 On the occasion of the spectacular solar eclipse of 11 August 1999 which passed over Europe, a group at NASA made a serious effort to organize coordinated observations with Foucault pendulums. "The initial interpretation of the record points to three possibilities," says Dr. David Noever of NASA/Marshall, "A systematic error, a local effect, or the unexplored. To eliminate the first two possibilities, we and several other observers will use different kinds of measuring instruments in a distributed global network of observing stations."
25	No proper effort was made to find out what Maurice Allais and other prior researchers had actually done in the past, so inevitably the many experiments lacked clear focus. In any case, the entire effort collapsed some months after the eclipse, before the data was analyzed, when Noever and some associates quit their jobs at NASA and founded a dotcom company. It is rumored that Noever took all the files with him when he left…
26	At the moment Professor Olenici of Suceava observatory in Romania is the only person in the world working with a paraconical pendulum
27	Olenici’s pendulum is similar to Allais’s, but he uses a dish-shaped support surface
28	Starting the timer
29	The computer counts the time for 200 oscillations of the pendulum – very accurately.
30	So what do I think about it?
31	One supposes that these strange effects are basically due to the observer’s proximity to the line joining the centers of the Sun and the Moon. Therefore, during a solar eclipse, perhaps Allais-JRA-SA effects appear at the anti-eclipse point, just as at the eclipse point.
32	And we should likewise consider the “eclipse point” and “anti-eclipse point” during a lunar eclipse; indeed, Saxl & Allen reported an effect during a lunar eclipse, so perhaps the Sun-Moon line plays a role similar to its role during a solar eclipse…
33	But how about the case of a solar zenith or a solar nadir? Perhaps similar effects appear if the observer is on the line joining the centers of the Sun and the Earth. This means that the observer should be in the tropical zone – but, amazingly, no delicate pendulum experiments have ever been performed in the tropical zone…
34	Or, how about a lunar zenith or a lunar nadir? Perhaps similar effects appear if the observer is on the line joining the centers of the Moon and the Earth. This means that that the observer should be at a latitude less than about 30º – and no delicate pendulum experiments have ever been performed in such a zone either!
35	We must work in cylindrical coordinates referred to the eclipse axis
36	The central eclipse case
37	An example of the central case: Northern India – 21 June 2020
38	The tropical tangential case
39	A tropical tangential example: Colombia – 8 April 2005
40	The polar tangential case
41	A polar tangential example: Spitzbergen on 1 August 2008
42	Previous experimenters seem always to have sat at home and waited for a convenient eclipse… Allais did not set out to make pendulum observations during an eclipse - the 30 June 1954 eclipse fortuitously passed near Paris, and his observation was serendipitous; Jeverdan planned to take his observations during the 1961 eclipse that was scheduled to pass near his laboratory in Bucharest; Saxl and Allen took advantage of the solar eclipse that passed near Harvard in 1970.
43	Our proactive policy: Go to the eclipse; don’t expect the eclipse to come to you!
44	What we have built…
45	Our English-style paraconical pendulum suspension is symmetrical
46	The entire pendulum is suspended upon a ultra-high precision steel ball which rolls upon a very accurate plane – just as Allais’s pendulum was
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48	The pendulum swinging
49	A close-up view
50	We think that our design for a paraconical pendulum is improved over Prof. Allais’s in several respects – which is not surprising, because it is the Mk. II…his was the first!
51	So where are we going to do it?
52	The lunar anti-eclipse of 28 October 2004
53	On 8 April 2005 we will perform pendulum experiments at two points in Colombia : exactly upon the eclipse line in Anterito, and a little to the side of the eclipse line in Bogota
54	The eclipse track through Colombia
55	The next two solar eclipses would be very suitable for central-type observations, but the best experimental location would be Kisangani in the Congo, which is very demanding!
56	The solar eclipse of 22 September 2006
57	"There are no total solar..." There are no total solar eclipses during 2007. Pendulum experiments for the solar eclipse of 1 August 2008 will be best performed in Spitzbergen (Svalbard), which is about the most northerly location hosting any reasonable outpost of civilization. But in 2009 there are two magnificent eclipses….
58	The solar eclipse of 26 January 2009 passes through the South Indian Ocean, quite near to the island of Rodriguez. This is a nearly ideal example of the central case. Rodriguez is not hard to get to; it’s part of Mauritius.
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60	Appeal #1: We urgently need to make contact with someone in Anchorage, Alaska During the partial solar eclipse of 14 October 2004 –less than six months from now – the Sun-Moon line will pass horizontally 200 km above Anchorage.
61	Appeal #2: We need to make contact with an academic group in Hawaii – specifically, on the Big Island At the maximum eclipse instants of two consecutive solar eclipses – of 3 October 2005 and 29 March 2006 – the anti-eclipse point will be very near the island of Hawaii.
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63	Time and tide wait for no man… and neither do eclipses!