The burden is on FET to prove itself.
No. The burden is on you to read through the material and challenge it. Your pictures have not challenged the theory since you did not look at the ship through a telescope. You are seeing exactly what Samuel Birley Rowbotham and Thomas Winship saw.
I have seen no "restoration" of ships hulls. None is visible in my photos. So did Rowbotham see restoration or not? If not, is he relying completely on his own rewrite of the laws of perspective to draw the conclusion that restoration 'would' be possible, if only he had a 300-500x telescope?? If he did see the restoration, then what he saw was the superior mirage affect, and he has convenitently ignored the fact that his view of the ships did not actually show the lower hull "restored", but only the upper hull reflected onto the water making it appear as if the hull was restored. Measurement of the height of the reflection "fold" point to the deck would show that the full view of the hull has not been exposed.
What Rowbotham has failed to do, likewise I myself have failed to do but I have nothing to proove, is conduct varied repeated experiments in the same and other locations at different times of the day to build up an exhaustive data set.
As you say, my experiment and Rowbothams are analogous. Except I have photos to show what was actually seen, but Rowbothams we have to rely on his judgement and description about what he saw. He didn't even bother sketching his view onto paper.
There are accounts of looking at half-sunken ships through telescopes and seeing them restored. This proves that the ships are not really hiding behind a "hill of water." Until you can contradict those accounts they remain stand fully in tact.
His accounts are worthless. They are third party accounts without any details beyond generics; no mention of specific weather conditions, no mention of the kind or power of trelescope used.
The telescopes he is talking about are without doubt, within the range of a medium power zoom lens or medium power binoculars of todays technology. We know superior mirages can appear to restore hulls, even in some extreme circumstances enough refracted light will make the ship appear to hover above the horizon.
It is easy to discount this as a mirage however since 1. ships don't hover above the surface of the water, no matter how flat the earth is 2. even though sometimes the mirage ship is ON the horizon, there are many instances where superior mirages are not occuring and in these cases
no amount of magnification power will restore the hulls.
Tom, I have a telescope, it has a camera attachment, and I fully intend to use it to replicate my photoseries here. I also live near a bay, and will photograph the far shore thrugh the telescope, and you will see no happy children playing in the water, or indeed no beach at all. You will see the mountains on the far shore appearing to rise magically outof the water, because their bases will be obscured by the horizon.