The bottom-up disappearance test — properly scaled
His proposed setup (p.127): flashlight 2.5" above calm water, camera 0.5" above water, 410 feet apart.
The problem
At those heights, curvature isn't in play yet at 410 feet. Using the standard horizon-distance formula (d = √(2Rh), R = 3,959 mi): a 0.5" camera has a horizon-limited sightline of about 1,320 ft; a 2.5" light source, about 2,951 ft. Combined, the light should stay visible out to roughly 4,271 feet (~0.81 miles) before curvature could geometrically block it — over 10x his stated baseline. Cross-checked independently: the curvature bulge at 410 ft is only about 0.05 inches, smaller than either stated height. Neither model predicts disappearance at 410 ft, so a result at that distance can't discriminate between them.
This is structurally the same test Samuel Rowbotham ran in 1838 on the Old Bedford River, the founding demonstration of "zetetic astronomy" and the direct ancestor of the water/hydrostatics claims elsewhere in the book: telescope held 8 inches above the water, watching a boat flag 3 feet above the water, over 6 miles. He reported the flag stayed visible the whole way; curvature predicted an ~11-foot drop below his line of sight.
In 1870, Alfred Russel Wallace corrected the experiment and settled a public wager against flat-earth proponent John Hampden. He changed exactly two things: raised the sightline to 13 feet above the water (near-surface sightlines over water are dominated by atmospheric refraction — warm air over water bends light unpredictably at low grazing angles, varying with temperature and humidity), and added a third marker at the midpoint so the curvature bulge showed up directly. With those two fixes, the curvature appeared cleanly and Wallace won the bet.
Miller's flashlight/camera setup — both near-water, both very low — reproduces Rowbotham's original, contested methodology, not Wallace's corrected one.
Rescaled protocol
Run the same setup at four distances (500ft, 1,500ft, 3,000ft, 5,000ft), holding heights fixed, and elevate both the light and the camera well above the water (a few feet, à la Wallace) rather than inches, to control for near-surface refraction. Add a fixed reference marker at the midpoint.
Full-moon "no highlight" claim, at his desk
Setup: a rough, matte-textured sphere (a golf ball, a stucco-coated craft ball, a scored orange) lit by a single point source (desk lamp or flashlight) across the room. Photograph once from an angle offset from the lamp, then again with the camera positioned right next to the lamp (near-zero phase angle — mimicking full-moon geometry).
Moon-tilt illusion, with a lamp and a ball on a string
Setup: a lamp as the "Sun," a small ball hung as the "Moon" at several different angles/heights relative to a fixed horizon reference (a table edge or a taped line). Photograph the terminator (light/shadow boundary) line at each position.
"Local light source" cloud-brightness claim — one setting change
Setup: redo the same above-the-clouds photo sequence, but lock the camera to manual exposure/ISO/shutter (every phone has a "Pro" mode) instead of letting auto-exposure metering adjust between shots.
Jupiter's moon-shadow "misalignment," as a blind prediction test
Setup: rather than critiquing someone else's stacked photo after the fact, pull a published shadow-transit prediction (Sky & Telescope and similar sources publish exact times and geometry in advance) for an upcoming date, and independently observe it with a modest telescope.
This is the strongest version of the test because it's a genuine advance prediction — it can't be explained away retroactively either way.
Cost: a modest telescope, or borrowed time on oneKampf's Law, properly instrumented
Setup: buy or rent an actual vacuum gauge (~$30–50) and report the real pressure achieved in torr or mbar, not just "vacuum on/off." Run the far-wall trial with the wall backed in absorptive material (foam, cloth) to reduce exhaust bounce-back, at the best achievable vacuum.
Even at a genuinely good vacuum, a nearby wall gives the vehicle's own ejected exhaust gas somewhere close to bounce and recirculate back against it — a real, distance-dependent secondary push that has nothing to do with ambient chamber pressure. This is a documented phenomenon in real propulsion testing, called facility effects: electric-propulsion test labs specifically size their vacuum chambers and add beam dumps/baffling to avoid exactly this contaminating thrust measurements (see the AIP Physics of Plasmas review, "A review of the impact of ground test-related facility effects on gridded ion thruster operation and performance," 2024).
That means "closer wall → faster/bigger reaction" (the book's own p.80 finding) doesn't discriminate between the two hypotheses — both predict that pattern, for different reasons. The decisive question isn't whether wall-distance-dependence disappears; it's whether the vehicle moves at all in the condition built to minimize recirculation.
Wall-distance comparison is still worth running as a secondary check — near-wall results should decay toward the far-wall baseline as distance increases, consistent with a shrinking recirculation effect rather than a fundamentally different mechanism.
Cost: ~$30–50 vacuum gauge + foam/cloth backingKampf's Law — the sharper claim: timing, not magnitude
This is a more specific and more directly testable claim than "gas needs a substrate," and it's what he actually pointed to in the Action Labs footage: an apparent delay between gas first leaving the nozzle and the vehicle visibly starting to move — a delay that lines up with the gas cloud reaching the wall. Confirmed by direct rewatch of the source footage: the syringe's substantial motion is timed with wall contact, but this is not the initial movement — there's an earlier, smaller motion too, consistent with a two-stage pattern rather than motion strictly gated on wall contact.
The observation Miller points to as support — the syringe's suspension filament stays approximately vertical even after gas has visibly left the nozzle — has a mundane kinematic explanation, not evidence of delayed causation: an impulsive force changes velocity instantly, but displacement (what a filament's angle actually shows) is the time-integral of velocity. For a small syringe puff, the resulting displacement in the first tens of milliseconds can be a fraction of a millimeter — well below what's visible on normal-speed video. A vertical-looking filament right after gas exits is consistent with real, immediate, but very small momentum transfer, not with "nothing happened yet."
Primary design — instrumented, not just visual
Miller is committed to the horizontal-tube/syringe geometry, which is fine — the fix is proper force instrumentation on the same rig, not a redesign. Mount a small in-line load cell (strain gauge or piezo, ~$20–100, the same class of part used in hobby-rocketry thrust stands) directly between the syringe and its support, replacing the hanging filament — this gives a direct, continuous force-vs-time curve at the source, independent of anything downrange. Make the target wall an actual pressure-sensitive plate, giving a second force-vs-time trace of exactly when and how hard the gas cloud arrives. Run both simultaneously across a few wall distances.
Bonus quantitative check: total impulse (area under the source force curve) should match the momentum predicted from the known ejected gas mass and exit velocity — a real first-principles number to test against, not just a shape or timing comparison.
Cheaper fallback — video only
Without load cells: high-framerate video (240fps, standard on most phones), tracking the filament's angle frame-by-frame rather than the syringe body's raw position — a pendulum string is a sensitive lever for tiny horizontal displacement, resolving sub-degree tilts from sub-millimeter motion well before it's visible at normal viewing speed. Timestamp gas-exit onset, first-detectable filament deflection, and gas-wall contact, across several wall distances including one far enough that gas transit time is a full second or more.
Primary cost: two load cells, ~$40–200 total. Fallback cost: a phone with slow-motion video (already owned) + free motion-tracking softwareWater-curvature "skinny warehouse" test, scaled to what's accessible
Setup: a laser level plus a calm canal or long pool. At 100–200 meters the predicted curvature drop is under a millimeter — likely below what basic gear can resolve, which is itself informative (it explains why casual short-range observation never "sees" the curve, with no flat-earth explanation required). Scaling to a genuine mile-plus baseline with a surveying-grade level brings the predicted ~8 inches per mile² within easily measurable range.