INCEDE(1997)

Following are my comments on Dr. Geller's article. I would not have done this if some of his remarks are not untrue. Points 1, 14 and 15 may have something to do with Prof. Varotsos' personality and style of life with which Dr. Geller may not be familiar. Also, Dr. Geller may be not aware of some recent works (e.g., Varotsos et al., 1996a,b, c; 1997) of the VAN group, on which ignorance he is not to be blamed.

(1) It is very false. Prof. Varotsos is one of those scientists who do not speak to mass media unless under unavoidable circumstances. I suspect this propensity may be due, at least partly, to his mentor, aristocratic Prof. Alexopoulos. Yet, mass media chase him all the time as the matter of earthquake prediction attracts keen public attention. VAN's main source of research fund for the last several years comes from EC (European Community), through a strictly competitive process. For the last ten years, they received any funds from OASP, the main Greek funding agency for seismology.

(2) Charles Richter's statement (1977) clearly has nothing to do with VAN.

(3) That this is remote from reality should be clear from my portion. For example, I know of no case where they claimed ﾒsuccessﾓ when epicenter was off 200 km !

(4) During this period, i.e. 8 and half years, VAN issued 94 predictions ? I count 67
predictions. In any case, simple calculation shows that you need to issue at least 1,000 predictions to achieve, by chance, epicentral accuracy of 100 km in an area of 600x600 km. Dr. Gellerﾕs statistical argument has been shown to be incorrect (Varotsos et al., 1996c).

(5) Dr. Geller should know that at that time, all predictions were sent between VAN people and all their copies were sent to the Greek authorities simultaneously. So this charge is rootless.

(6) Two telegrams were exactly the same one. Among many copies of prediction telegrams distributed to participants at an international meeting, originally faint date stamp on one prediction had faded away in poor photo-copying. They even did not notice this until careful Dr. Geller pointed out.

(7) There are physical models. Some published and some in press ( e.g., Varotsos et al., 1996a;1997).

(8) This is true so far. But it is also true that adequate geophysical measurements have not been conducted in the concerned regions. It is also possible that the electric signals are much more sensitive precursors than other geophysical precursors at distances from epicenter.

(9) There are good reasons for this. 1) Co-seismic signals are of high frequency so that they get strongly attenuated with distance. 2) VAN's measurement system is designed, by using high-cut filter circuitry, to see only DC signals to avoid noise.

(10) Yes, it requires high degree of electrical heterogeneity in the crust. High but a fault of 1-10Ωm resistivity in 103 Ωm crust (Varotsos et al.1997), which is normally accepted. Required heterogeneity is expected to be not so easily to detect at depth by the resolving power of usual geophysical methods. But, some serious efforts, by VAN and some international groups, are being underway. One of the reasons why critics require extreme heterogeneity is their their calculation is three orders of magnitude wrong due to ignorance of the end effect of the conducting fault.

(11) Gruszow et al. (1996) was a highly questionable paper. That all the conclusions in this paper, except that even they observed the same signals, are mostly in error has been clearly shown by Varotsos et al. (1996a,b). Despite their hard effort, they could not locate any possible artificial source.

(12) To my best knowledge, they never adjusted parameters retrospectively. Changes in allowable ranges in parameters were made as new facts emerged. Kagan and Jackson (1996) said that the VAN method is still too vague to allow rigorous testing. May be so as the mother Nature, in my view, is not as simple as games of cards which lend to easy statistical analysis.

(13) True. Many supporters are not seismologists. The VAN method has little to do with seismology in narrow sense but with physics. As Dr. Geller says expertise isn't always transferable from one field (seismology) to another (physics).

(14) Same as 1. He is literally forced to speak to mass media when he does. I have witnessed this many times. During the last 2 and half years, Prof. Varotsos on TV only two times.

(15) As far as I know, it was only once that he reluctantly admitted to obstinate journalists that the Government did not take a full counter-measure despite his prediction (1995 Kozani-Grevena EQ), but even in that case, he did not claim that lives were needlessly lost and so on.

(16) We also speak to media when asked, because people have right to know what we believe we know. All-out publicity campaign, however, is an extreme exaggeration and far from reality.

(17) Same as 1.