Nicholas Kollerstrom

Nicholas Kollerstrom (born 13 December 1946) is an English writer. Formerly an honorary research fellow at University College London# (UCL) and BBC lunar gardening correspondent, he is the author of several books, including Gardening and Planting by the Moon (an annual series beginning in 1980), Newton's Forgotten Lunar Theory (2000), Crop Circles (2002), and Terror on the Tube (2009). He has also written entries for the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers.
Kollerstrom has been involved in a variety of issues as a political activist. In 1986 he co-founded the Belgrano Action Group after the sinking of the ARA General Belgrano by the Royal Navy during the Falklands War, and in 2007 argued that the 7 July 2005 London bombings had not been carried out by the men accused of them. UCL withdrew his fellowship in 2008 after he posted material about the Auschwitz concentration camp on websites known for Holocaust denial.

Kollerstrom attended Corpus Christi College, Cambridge from 1965, obtaining his BA in natural sciences in 1968 (promoted to MA in 1973), with a focus on the history and philosophy of science. He worked as a physics teacher before becoming a graduate student in science and technology at University College London (UCL).

Interested in the effect of the sun, moon and planets on plant growth, he served as the BBC's lunar gardening correspondent, and in 1980 his Gardening and Planting by the Moon was published, the first of an annual series. He was awarded his PhD in 1995 for a thesis entitled The Achievement of Newton's "Theory of the Moon's Motion" of 1702. UCL also awarded him an honorary research fellowship.

In 1999 Kollerstrom received a grant from the Royal Astronomical Society to work on the classification of correspondence related to the discovery of Neptune, and in 2004 concluded in an article in Scientific American that the British had wrongly taken credit for it. His book Newton's Forgotten Lunar Theory: His Contribution to the Quest for Longitude was published in 2000. In 2003 he wrote in BMC Psychiatry about the effect of the moon on human behaviour.

Overview

Kollerstrom has been active in political campaigns in the UK since the 1980s. In 1985 he co-founded the London Nuclear Warfare Tribunal, which sought to question the legality of nuclear weapons. The following year he became a founding member of the Belgrano Action Group, set up in protest at the sinking of the Argentine ship the ARA General Belgrano by the British Navy during the 1982 Falklands War. The group held an informal public inquiry in November 1986 at Hampstead Town Hall, addressed by Tam Dalyell and Clive Ponting, among others. In 1989, Kollerstrom stood as a Green Party candidate for East Guildford in the Surrey County Council election.

In the 2000s he became involved with the 911 truth movement and opposition to the Iraq War. As a member of the Institute for Law and Peace, he co-founded the Legal Inquiry Steering Group in 2002, a citizens' tribunal that challenged the war's legality. In 2006, he appeared in a video by David Shayler, in which he argued that the men accused of the 7 July 2005 London bombings had not carried out the attack. During his research into the bombing, Kollerstrom said that the train to London the bombers were at first said to have travelled on that morning had been cancelled, which led the government to correct the official account. His book on the subject, Terror on the Tube: Behind the Veil of 7/7, An Investigation, was published in 2009, and he was interviewed that year for the BBC series The Conspiracy Files.

Holocaust denial controversy

Kollerstrom began writing material in 2007 for Holocaust-denial publishers. UCL removed Kollerstrom's honorary fellowship in April 2008 after articles of his appeared on such websites. In 2007, on the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) website, Kollerstrom wrote that one million, not six million, Jews had died in the Holocaust, and that gas chambers had operated in Auschwitz only for the purpose of disinfection. In March 2008 he wrote in Smith's report, a newsletter published by CODOH's co-founder Bradley Smith, that Auschwitz had had art classes, a well-stocked library for inmates, and an elegant swimming pool where inmates would sunbathe at weekends while watching water polo.

Responding to the loss of his fellowship, Kollerstrom said he had no interest in the Nazi movement, had always belonged to groups like the Green Party, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Respect Party, and had been accused of a "thought-crime." Historian of science Noel Swerdlow suggested in Isis in 2010 that, because Kollerstrom had written entries for the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers on John Couch Adams, John Flamsteed and Isaac Newton, the publishers should withdraw the book and replace those entries.

Kollerstrom's book Breaking the Spell: The Holocaust: Myth & Reality (2014) was published by Germar Rudolf's Holocaust-denial imprint in Sussex, Castle Hill Publishers, with a foreword by James H. Fetzer, co-founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.

Books

Articles