posted 01-05-2007 08:10 AM               

In short, last year Phil Chien was fired as a reporter because he made up quotes and sources. He invented people that he quoted in several articles.

If he did this for his articles, how do we know that he did not do this for his book?

posted 01-05-2007 09:45 AM               

If he did screw up as a reporter, then what would make me think that it's not true for everybody else (okay, that's being slightly paranoid)?

posted 01-05-2007 10:09 AM               

There is enough of a public record to support what Dwayne and others found about fake reviews (just search the groups such as sci.space.history).

A few years ago, I served as Chien's editor for a now offline website. While I never witnessed him making up any alter-egos, some of his other actions/claims while he was working for us were at best dubious.

posted 01-05-2007 03:16 PM               

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Originally posted by cspg:
I wouldn't rely on Amazon reviews to form a definitive opinion (some people write "reviews" on items they haven't read or seen...).

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Wired News has removed three articles from its website after an internal investigation failed to confirm the authenticity of a source used in the stories.

"Tribal Curse Haunts Launch Pad" (June 27, 2006), "NASA Boosts Heart-Monitoring Tech" (July 7, 2006) and "Don't Flush It -- Breathe It" (July 14, 2006), all by Philip Chien, relied in part on quotes and citations from Robert Ash, described in the first two stories as a "space historian" and in the last as an "aeronautical engineer and amateur space historian."

In a phone conversation with Wired News editors, Chien had identified Ash as a professor of aeronautical engineering at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Reached by phone this week, Ash said he is not a space historian and has never participated in interviews with Chien. Ash is an aeronautical engineering professor at the university and has been involved in numerous NASA projects.

Chien is a freelance space reporter who has worked for online, print and television news outlets, and recently authored a book on the Columbia space shuttle disaster. He's written seven stories for Wired News, two of them in 2004, the other five in the past few weeks.

posted 01-05-2007 03:48 PM               

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Originally posted by cspg:
The guy deserves to have a place to respond.

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I don't want to go into this subject too deeply here, because I'm not in the business of casting aspersions without direct information myself (even when I think they're totally accurate), but I'll give a little bit of background.

I'll start out by saying that I barely know the guy (more below), but I know people who know him much better and have told me many stories, many of which are quite amusing. Let's just say that it's not like the things he did at Wired were completely out of character--people who knew about other things he has done consider this stuff unsurprising.

I have personally met Chien only once, over a decade ago at a shuttle launch, where he was rather stand-offish toward me when I first approached him and said that I had read an article that he had recently written for a magazine. I think I then traded no more than two e-mails with him over the next five years or so (and I do mean two e-mails, no more).

I had a few personal opinions of him based upon his articles. One was that although he might be an expert on current shuttle operations, he was weak on the subject of military space programs when he occasionally wrote about them. My other personal opinion of him was that he appeared to cut corners in some of his articles--he occasionally would state a fact or claim that information did not exist when I suspected that he had merely not attempted to gather the information himself. I should add a third personal opinion, which was that he tended to over-inflate the importance of his work. I will confess that on a few occasions I actually did some research and wrote some articles because I thought he had done some sloppy work. In other words, Chien prompted me to write a few articles.

Two examples:

In an article in the mid-1990s he claimed that no photos had ever been released of the DoD payload on shuttle mission STS-51J. This prompted me to wonder if he had ever even tried to obtain such photos. So I submitted a FOIA request for photos from the mission and as a result I obtained the first declassified photos of a classified payload deployment from the shuttle, the DSCS III satellites on STS-51J. I published these in Spaceflight.

In 1998, the NRO released a videotape of a classified communications satellite and a radar satellite both under construction. Chien took the videotape and got screencaps of the satellites and then wrote an article where he claimed that he had "exclusive photos." Well, I had the same videotape and I thought that this seemed like an exaggeration. So I sent a FOIA request to the NRO and I obtained some quality prints of the satellites. The versions I obtained were much better quality than what he had grabbed from the video.

Anyway, in both of those instances I detected a pattern that he later exhibited in the incidents that got him in trouble: he cut corners in his research (i.e. rather than do the work, he was lazy), and he also bragged about his own importance.

In the Wired articles and also with promoting his book, Chien invented sources. In several cases he invented sources to provide quotes for his articles instead of doing the work and getting real quotes from real people. In the case of the book, he invented sources to praise his book. See the similarities?

posted 01-05-2007 04:03 PM               

Shortly after Chien's shuttle book was published, I noticed several posts on the Internet praising the book. The people doing this were totally unfamiliar to me and I Googled around a little bit and discovered that they had not posted before. Based upon this limited information, I concluded that this was Chien flacking his own book under a pseudonym. Not a hanging offense, but a little shifty, if you ask me. In addition to the ones that have been named, I've discovered at least one other pseudonym that Chien used, on the FPSpace mailing list. There he posted as a woman who had nothing but praise for her "good friend Phil Chien." The pattern was the same: somebody who had never posted before suddenly started making posts about this great book written by Chien. It was blatantly obvious that he was doing this. But like I said, it's not a hanging offense (except that some publications strictly forbid their employees from doing this).

Then last summer Chien wrote the Wired.com article about SLC-6 at Vandenberg that got him fired. Now I happen to know quite a bit about SLC-6 and the bogus "tribal curse" that Chien wrote about. When I read that article on the web, I quickly suspected that what Chien had primarily done was rip-off an article written by Roger Guillemette for Florida Today's Space Online website back in the 1990s (no longer accessible, unfortunately). Okay, that's not a hanging offense either, because lots of people use other writers as source material. But I really suspected that Chien had not done any additional research on his article.

The other thing that piqued my interest was when he quoted "space historian Robert Ash." Now I'm a space historian (although I currently get paid for what is usually called policy analysis, even though my job title is much more vague). I write space history. I have gotten paid to write space history. I have even had a government job with "historian" printed on my business card. I deliver papers at space history conferences and I regularly converse with other space historians. And I had never heard of anybody named "Robert Ash." I figured that this guy was not _really_ a space historian. My guess was that he was a retired Air Force guy who claimed that he was writing a book about Vandenberg or something and so Chien simply called him a "space historian" even though he has no formal historian credentials. (After all, it's not like we space historians have membership cards or anything.) I did not suspect that Chien had made up the guy and made up the quotes. But once again, I thought that he was being lazy, or sloppy, or slightly dishonest. So I'll admit that while I know many other people were not surprised when Chien got caught for making up sources, I was a little surprised.

posted 01-06-2007 01:58 AM               

So basically we're dealing with a questionable "journalist" (or whatever), questionable amazon reviews (okay, not I never paid any attention to or based my opinion on those anyway) and maybe worst of all, a questionable publishing company (or at least a subsidiary of that company, Copernicus/Springer-Praxis). I can only hope that Chien didn't screw up his book as he has apparently done with his articles and that someone qualified did a thorough review of his manuscript before it went to press. It would be interesting to hear from the publisher.

posted 01-07-2007 07:24 AM               

I found the book fairly interesting. I especially like the section on Kalpana Chawla and her first mission. He doesn't let her off lightly for her mistakes on her mission and I was glad to see that.

What I didn't like about the book is that nothing is referenced; however, you can purchase a CD from his website which gives you that information. Or I believe it does.

posted 01-07-2007 09:51 PM               

While I don't have the background or qualifications to thoroughly vet the work, I can say that I did find the book of considerable value, and it did contain many photographs I hadn't seen elsewhere.

The companion CD-ROM (which you have to order separately, which was kind of a pain; I wished it had been included as the Apogee books do, but then again I ain't in the publishing business, so I don't know how the business works) was also useful, and in some ways is a little more handy than the book because it has a good bit of multimedia in it, including some color versions of photos included in the book.

Other than that, I can say only that I've been following this thread with interest. I'm not going to throw out my copy by any means (it's still too useful), but I guess I won't be looking at it quite the same way again. It's a book I'm glad I have, but I doubt I'd have wanted to pay list for it now that these questions have been raised.

posted 01-08-2007 09:06 AM               

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Originally posted by jrkeller:
This whole incident reminds me of those people who sell moon hoax/UFO/The Face on Mars. They write there own reviews on amazon and other places and of course change extra for the information.

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It has all the trappings of his fake reviews: somebody who has never posted anything before suddenly showing up and singing the praises of Chien's book.

posted 01-08-2007 03:17 PM               

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Originally posted by KSCartist:
When things were going well for him-he was very stand-offish. It was only when he shot himself in the foot and was no longer a journalist in good standing at KSC did he reach out. (to sell his book-obviously)

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posted 01-08-2007 03:32 PM               

Though I'm not clear on the connection, in the course of researching/writing his book, Chien sought photographs from the Flag Day ceremony held at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York. It was a NASA event but apparently NASA did not have a photographer present (or Chien was unaware or unable to find photos from NASA). He contacted the AMNH for assistance obtaining the images he needed.

When my colleague (who at the time was with the museum) replied to Chien's request with a query as to why he needed the photos and how they would be used, what credit would be given to the museum, etc., he became belligerent, nearly demanding that the photos be released to him. He acted as if he was entitled to the images, even though they were not public domain. His attitude was such a surprise that the person handling his request contacted me to learn if anyone had encountered Chien and his strange behavior before.

posted 02-26-2007 01:44 PM               

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Originally posted by ASCAN1984:
Almost smug as in 'I knew the crew and you didn't.'

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