Review of 'Ancient Aliens on the Red Planet'

        At 09:20 in the commercial-free version of this latest History Channel travesty (S6E16), we see a region of Mars clearly labeled CYDONIA, and to make things perfectly clear, a flashing target over the spot. The narration is:

"The Cydonia region of Mars. July 20th, 1976. (CUT to animation of spacecraft approaching) An alien spacecraft, sent from Earth, touches down on the Red Planet. After a ten-month journey, Viking 1 has reached its destination." (CUT to historical footage at JPL, Gentry Lee and Gerry Soffen celebrating the success of Viking 1)

        I blinked, and re-ran the sequence to be quite sure. Then my face hit the desk (OK, metaphorically.) OMG, THEY THINK VIKING 1 LANDED AT CYDONIA!!!

source: Google Mars

FACT: Cydonia is at 40.74N, 9.46W. Viking 1 landed at Chryse Planitia, 22.46N, 47.96W.

        This appalling error takes Ancient Aliens to new depths of ignorance and mendacity. Jason Colavito has also reviewed it on his blog, and he makes a far better job of reviewing the monstrous errors in history and mythology than I possibly could, so please read it.

        In the Twitterscape, Mike Bara complained for the second time in a week that he'd been deprived of due credit:

        That may be how he remembers it now, but if you read Mike Bara's own account of the Enterprise Mission analysis of the Pathfinder images, written at the time, it's pretty plain that it was Guiseppe Pezzella who first pointed out the so-called sphinx.

        Bara's first complaint was over Richard Hoover being invited to the Open Minds International UFO Congress to talk about the controversial discovery of microbiology in a Martian meteorite -- work that Bara claims was his. Does Mike have an electron microscope in his kitchen, I wonder? He sniped at Maureen Elsberry, the congress organiser, and I loved Maureen's reply. "Mike, get over yourself."

        It's certainly true that a casual viewer would have got the idea that John Brandenberg came up with the "sphinx on Mars" fairy story. An elaborate sequence with Giorgio Tsoukalos and some models floated the preposterous idea that the "Twin Peaks" visible from the Mars Pathfinder landing site are a close analogy of the pyramids of Giza. The fact is that the Twin Peaks are nothing like pyramids and the mound Hoagland & Bara (and Brandenberg) have called the sphinx is not like a sphinx at all. And it faces North, not due East as Bara wrote in his nasty book.^{note 1} Here are high-res stereo pairs of Twin Peaks, the "sphinx," and other dark blocky outcrops showing that there's nothing special about the sphinxy rock.

photo credit: History Channel

        Predictably enough, Bara trotted out further fairy stories including several that this blog has discredited in fairly recent memory. The Viking Labeled Release experiment (and it was nice to see Dr. Gil Levín tell the story himself here), and the canard that Gerry Soffen lied about the second image of the so-called Face at Owen Mesa (see also this post.)

        Richard Hoagland, inventor of the Face at Cydonia (and much other balderdash besides) was conspicuous by his absence. Mike Bara said -- again, in Twitterstan -- that he'd  turned down the offer to appear on this show. I bet what really happened was that he said he'd love to be on the show but he'd want to  be credited as co-producer and he'd want first-class travel for him and his companion. His arrogance is such that he even talks himself out of opportunities to put his ego (and his disregard for truth) on parade.

=================================

[1] Brandenberg speculated that, even if the Twin Peaks don't look like pyramids now, maybe they did when they were built, and millions of years of erosion has reduced them to the pitiful state we see now. The same thing has been claimed for the 'Face', too, and it's what is known in logic as argumentum ad excremetum torii. It's basically taking a desperate hope, unsupported by anything, and dressing it up to look like evidence. He also trotted out his theory about Xenon 129/132 ratios, "proving" that there was a nuclear war on Mars once. Stuart Robbins disposed of that one a year ago.

Mike Bara gets it wrong at Conscious Life

        Appearing on the Ancient Aliens panel at the recent Conscious Life Expo in Los Angeles, Mike Bara spent most of his allotted time simply plugging his horrible books and his laughable TV shows.

        He did, however, jump in when somebody in the audience asked about the mysterious right-angle feature on the Moon. This was first noticed by a vlogger called wowforreeel, then reported by HuffPo. It's the same one Stuart Robbins asked me about when he interviewed me for his 100th podcast. Here's the image wowforreeel noticed:

        Now here's the crater as seen by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's narrow angle camera. The sun angle is almost the opposite of what it was for the Google Moon image.

 Here it is with brightness reduced and contrast boosted a bit.

          It's at 22.6900°N, 142.6134°E and here's a permalink to the LRO map.

In his remarks, Mike Bara got just about everything wrong as usual. It starts at 12:55 on this video.

"Yeah, it's interesting. They're pixel artifacts I think at this point. They're digital artifacts from the way Google Moon compresses everything. But it's really interesting because if you look at that crater, that crater actually has -- if you look at high-resolution pictures of it -- it actually has, like, a chevron type shape. To me it's a chevron shape, right? It has that embedded in it and that's really unusual because the reality is, every crater on the Moon should be circular. How do you get that? Oh they have all these complex theories about the underlying bedrock -- you know, cooled in a certain way, but it just doesn't... it looks a little weird. It looks like there's some weird stuff going on there, and you've gotta understand... this is the back side, where I found some really interesting stuff, and also the fact is is that what they... They have limited resources on all these orbiters. So if they're taking really high resolution images of the area -- which they did of that particular area -- Google Earth doesn't give you them, it compresses it a little bit. They were interested in something there. That's why they took the picture. I mean there's this thing... I had a big dispute with people last year, it was in Ancient Aliens on the Moon, I called it the Daedalus Ziggurat. [It] looks like a ziggurat, near the crater Daedalus on the back side of the Moon. And -- you know -- they tried to photograph it with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It's funny 'cos the guys were saying I'm full of it... I'm full of shit is what they were saying. You know, they're like "Well yeah we tried to take a picture of this area" well they missed it. Either they missed it or they didn't show us that part of the photograph, but they tried to take a picture of it, so that tells you there's something interesting there, otherwise they wouldn't be wasting the orbiter resources on it."

How doth Mike Bara err? Let me count the ways.

* The artifact is from mosaicing (also called stitching,) not compression. Update: That may not be as wrong as I thought when I first wrote it. A credible theory by Mick West (see comments below) ascribes this phenom to a badly-applied sharpening algorithm.

* The crater is not chevron-shaped.

* There is nothing "weird" about it.

* No, every crater on the Moon does not have to be circular. Craters are elongated  if the angle of impact is small. Lunar terrain sometimes shifts because of volcanism. Check out this baby.

* The reference to "Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter" was a slip of the tongue, OK, no biggie.

* The problem with the so-called ziggurat is not that LRO tried to image it but missed, but that it doesn't exist. Here's the image it would have appeared on if it was there. Mike Bara's arrogance does not allow him to admit that he's wrong, so he retreats to an untenable position.

* Bara has still not explained why the "ziggurat" is not seen on the Japanese image from Selene (Kaguya).

* It is totally untrue that somebody must have had a special interest in that area "otherwise they wouldn't be wasting the orbiter resources on it." LRO is engaged in mapping the entire Moon. As long as it's in orbit, no additional resources are needed to capture images. That applies equally to the "ziggurat" and the "mystery right-angle" (which by the way is 96° not 90.) Huge swaths of boring, featureless, lunar real estate have been photographed at a resolution of 0.5 metres/pixel.

Viking biology (repeat from 2008)

        Mike Bara garbage-tweets this week about Viking biology. He was responding to this from Maureen Elsberry:

Retired #NASA Astrobiologist Will Present Evidence of Extraterrestrial Life at #UFO Conference

 Mike posted:

Already found on Mars in 1976. Dr. Gil Levin.

        As far back as April 2008 this blog set the record straight on Gil Levín and the meaning of his biology experiment. I'm repeating it below, with a few now-dead links removed.

{{cue the harp arpeggios}}

        Hoagland & Bara appear to be confused about Viking biology. For those interested, here is a digest of the actual facts:

        Both the Viking spacecraft landers had identical biology experiments. Each spacecraft carried three separate experiments designed to test for biology in Martian topsoil. The experiments were developed independently by three different Principal Investigators (PIs). The experiments were:

Gas Exchange (GEX) PI Vance Oyama, NASA Ames
Labeled Release (LR) PI Gilbert Levín, Biospherics, Inc.
Pyrolytic Release (PR) PI Norman Horowitz, CalTech

        In addition, a Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer (PI Klaus Biemann, MIT) supported the main biology package by testing for organic molecules.

Results: At both landing sites the results were essentially identical. GEX and PR were unequivocally negative. LR initially showed strongly positive results, with the control (a sterilized sample) showing negative as expected. Subsequent nutrient injections, however, showed no response. The GCMS detected no organic molecules.

Interpretation: Responsibility for interpreting this enigma fell on the Head of Viking Biology, Harold Klein, with support from Viking Chief Scientist Gerry Soffen. Both were NASA employees. Their call was thumbs down for Martian biology. From a scientific point of view, looking at the overall picture, an absolutely correct call -- but the LR results begged for an explanation. The hypothesis that was developed involved a chemical, not biological, reaction involving superoxides in the soil.

        Dr Levín has been protesting this interpretation for more than 40 years. His main point is that the LR experiment detected life as pre-defined by agreed criteria during mission design. He has developed quite persuasive explanations for why the two other experiments and the GCMS gave negative results.

        Hoagland & Bara seem aware that this is a controversy but they get it wrong. They maintain that there was a deliberate campaign within NASA to conceal Levín's data. That allegation is categorically untrue. Consider these points:

* The enigmatic results were extensively discussed with the media at the time by Klein and Soffen. 
* No attempt whatsoever has ever been made to suppress publication by Dr Levín of his own interpretation. Mike Bara himself posted on the darkmission blog links to six of Levín's publications on the question.
* The complete LR data set, including the PI's notebook, is available to anyone on a NASA-sponsored web site.

        Other comments by Hoagland & Bara suggest that they also think the consensus view is wrong — in other words, that they think Levín's experiment alone proves the existence of life on Mars. It's a contentious and highly technical issue, and considering that neither of them has any training in biology whatsoever, their views will certainly be ignored by anybody who matters.

Mike Bara wrong on pareidolia

From Mike Bara's blog, 17th October 2013:

"According to the debunker crowd, pareidolia is a supposed human tendency to recognize facial patterns where none actually exist. This mythical, made-up tendency has no basis in fact, has never been written up or published in any scientific or medical journal, and has failed to meet even the most basic standards of a true medical or psychological disorder."

"It is nothing but  a phony, pseudo-scientific term invented in 1994 by a UFO debunker named Steven Goldstein in the June 22nd, 1994 edition of Skeptical Inquirer magazine."

Result of a search of the literature by the Google Ngram Viewer:

More detail here. I wonder why Mike Bara is looking for citations that treat pareidolia as a disorder. On the contrary, it's a normal and adaptive skill. Not a bug but a feature, Mike. Get it?

Fourth anniversary of Hoagland's barefaced lie

        It's been four years since the devastating mag 7 Port-au-Prince earthquake. It caused 150,000 deaths and destroyed 250,000 houses. The coordinates of the epicenter were 18°30'N, 72°38'W.

        A further, much more minor, casualty was the truth. Four years ago tonight, Richard Hoagland went on Coast to Coast AM and said the epicenter was at 19.5°N, thus dishonestly giving support to his crackpot idea that the 19.5° latitude is a major source of energy from "higher dimensions," whatever that means.

       Here's a link to my bloggery from four years ago, explaining the difference between geodetic and geocentric latitudes -- and also explaining that the latitude of Port-au-Prince is not 19.5° in either convention.  I have written to Hoagland suggesting that this might be a good moment to issue a retraction, if he has the guts to do so.

        His e-mail address is enterprisemission2001@yahoo.com.

First lunar panorama from Chang'e-3

        The Chang'e-3 lunar lander touched down in Mare Imbrium (at 19.5°W  longitude, remember?) on 14th December.

        This week CNSA released enough imagery for photostitch enthusiasts to create a panorama.

image credit: CNSA/Chinanews/Universe Today

        A rather lovely interactive 360° rendering by Andrew Bodrov is here.

        Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara must have spat coffee all over their computer screens when they saw this, the poor dears. Not only are there no glass towers, condos, or satellite dishes in sight, but -- DAMMIT!!! -- the wily Chinese have toed the NASA party line and depicted the lunar surface as dull brownish gray.

        When Mike Bara put up that disastrous video on Youtube showing how the red stripe on 'Data's Head' was made, he said this:

"...the actual real colors of the Moon are significantly brighter, significantly more contrasty, significantly more interesting than NASA would have you believe."

He showed us what he meant:

image credit: NASA, corrupted by Mike Bara

        That was also included as artwork in his horrible book Ancient Aliens on the Moon. The giveaways are the wheelguards on the Lunar Rover. They're nothing like that bright scarlet in reality.

        So what are Hoagland & Bara going to say now? Anything other than "Sorry, we were wrong," judging on past performance. It'll either be "CNSA is in cahoots with NASA to lie about lunar colors" or "Just because that one particular place is colorless, doesn't mean the whole Moon is."

What fools.

Open letter to Adrienne Loska, 2014

Happy New Year, Adrienne!!

        Let's see -- are you still Mike Bara's manager? He hasn't mentioned you for a while, so it's possible he fired you for not getting him on George Noory's misinformation radio show often enough. It's even more likely that you, being a woman of some intelligence, decided you couldn't continue representing a man who is wrong about practically every scientific fact he writes, and uses the C word to denigrate female critics. But I'll assume you're still "on board" -- or if not, that you can pass these brief comments to your hapless successor.

Another work of unintended fiction?
        As your client sets fingertips to keyboard, creating Ancient Aliens on Mars #2, I think it's your duty to remind him of a few facts.

1. The planetary positions aphelion/perihelion are completely independent of conjunction/opposition. The former describe the farthest/nearest approaches to the Sun, and the latter describe the position relative to the Sun as seen from Earth. Mars could, for example, be at aphelion and conjunction, but it could equally well be at aphelion and opposition. They have nothing to do with each other, Adrienne. Your client's elementary errors, seen on pp. 42/43 of AAoM #1, make it plain that he doesn't understand this.

2. It is true that there is a very great difference between the closest and furthest approaches of Mars and Earth. However, this is not a measure of the eccentricity of the orbit of Mars. The eccentricity is a rather modest 0.09 -- even if it were zero, there would still be a great difference between the closest and furthest approaches. Again, your client shows a lack of understanding of very simple orbital geometry.

3. Your client esteems the late Tom Van Flandern, almost to the point of hero-worship. Van Flandern was a highly imaginitive astronomer and there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that. But your client surely owes Van Flandern the courtesy of actually reading what he wrote^{note 1} about the theory of solar fission. He wrote that proto-planets are flung off the Sun in pairs. That's an essential part of the idea. Therefore, for your client to write^{note 2} that the discovery of a single exoplanet (of the star GJ 504) "fits the solar fission theory perfectly" is incorrect. It's like watching the Moon rise and remarking that this phenomenon supports the theory that there are really two moons. Sure, Adrienne, a second Moon could be along later, but until it appears, two-moon theorists are best advised to keep their cake-holes shut.

4. Speaking of the solar fission hypothesis, your client strays into the realm of fiction when he attempts to falsify the alternative hypothesis, accretion from a circumstellar disk. By the way, Adrienne, perhaps you know that accretion is accepted by 100% of the planetary astronomy community, and has actually been observed in the Orion nebula. Anyway, your client wrote on p.61 of AAoM#1, "The accretion model ... requires the planets to have highly eccentric (elliptical) orbits during their proto-planet phase." That's simply not true.

5. Please tell your client to stop saying and writing that "NASA suppressed the positive results of the Viking biology experiment." Again, simply not true. The results he says were suppressed have been available on a NASA-sponsored web site all this time.

6. Please give your client a refresher course in digital photography. Spend extra time on the part where gray levels are discussed. Make sure he understands that not all the 256 gray levels in a monochrome image need have values greater than zero for the image to be a faithful representation of the scene. Hopefully that will stop him from making an utter ass of himself as he did on p.177 of AAoM#1 by complaining that the 1998 MGS image of Owen Mesa "contained only about 50% of the data it should have" because 214 gray levels had a value of zero. It was an ultra-low contrast scene, that's all.

Keeping aliens covered, apparently
        That'll do for now, Adrienne. What did you think of the pilot of Uncovering Aliens? I thought your client did a fairly good job of following the SCRIPT that was faked to simulate a documentary show, and didn't obviously giggle when confronted with a TOTALLY FAKED "town meeting." I do kind-of wish that a show called Uncovering Aliens had uncovered an alien or two. Perhaps next time.

Regards, expat

P.S. Adrienne, I'd copy this to you personally, as a courtesy, but I know you have me on auto-reply with this message:

"Unfortunately, Mike has informed me that you are too stupid to converse with, and in fact that the entire Universe is dumber for having you in it. Please take a moment to thin the heard and improve the quality of the gene pool by removing yourself from it."

er... it's "herd," not "heard" Adrienne dear.

=================
[1] http://metaresearch.org/solar%20system/origins/original-solar-system.asp
[2] http://mikebara.blogspot.com/2013/08/new-image-of-extrasolar-planet-confirms.html

Ken Johnston short-listed for the suicide mission to Mars

        Well, Ken Johnston^{note 1} got his letter, improving his chances for a kami-kaze mission to Mars from 1 in 200,000 to 1 in 1058. Next cut will be to 100ish, then to 40. Finally, 10 crews of 4 will be launched at 2-year intervals, starting 2024. Each crew will be, as they would say in the porn business, MMFF. That's the plan, anyway.

View Ken's video-application. Ralph is his real given name.

        Naturally, this was a good enough story to devote an hour of Coast-to-Coast AM time to, last night. George Noory wondered what Ken's wife thought about it. "She signed me up for it," quipped Ken. Then came the obvious question -- aren't you a bit old for this? (Ken is now 71).

        "Oh no," said Ken. "I'll still be in my seventies, and John Glenn went into orbit at 77." Unfortunately, he was working with the wrong launch year. Actually, even if he's chosen as one of the first crew he'd be 81. More likely, he'd be well into the eighties.

Hoagland confuses the issue
        Enter Richard Hoagland, Ken Johnston's biggest booster, to make encouraging noises and trot out falsehoods, as usual. The first thing he got crashingly wrong was to say "No way will this be a one-way mission." He explained that, once the occupation of Mars begins, "the political log-jam will be broken" and many nations will immediately start work on round-trip man-rated rocketry to bring those guys back. Oh, and also -- since Hoagland will be Hoagland -- bring back the technology of the ancient Martian civilization. You know -- the one that left a Nike sneaker and a model plane lying around in Gale crater.

        This is to massively underestimate the difficulty of a round-trip Mars mission. The key problem is getting a four-person crew (and the payload of abandoned sneakers) out of Martian gravity and on the way home. To get the Apollo crews off the Moon, one pissy little hypergolic rocket engine was all it took. But launching from Mars, with a full third of Earth-style gravity trying to hold you back, would require a powerful multi-stage rocket and all the associated launch facilities -- a mini Cape Canaveral.

        Wernher Von Braun did the math back in 1956, and figured it could be done with 400 launches, assembling two super-giant rockets in orbit. General Dynamics did a study in 1962, assuming eight Saturn V (or equivalent) launches. Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct project hypothetically reduces the requirements to two Ares launches, based on a massively enhanced Space Shuttle stack and a very long turnaround time while fuel is manufactured from Mars water. Even if the Mars Direct plan is really workable -- by no means a sure thing -- does Richard Hoagland seriously believe that it could be put into effect in time to rescue Ken Johnston? Would the math still work if the mass of four additional bodies (plus all the sneakers) was added for the return launch?

Gravity Gradient
        The second thing Hoagland got wrong was the assumed need for artificial gravity during the transit, lasting at least 200 days. Ken said the Mars-1 people were working on a tether system. Conceptually, this would assume two tethered spacecraft rotating about their common center of gravity at an angular rate calculated to create a decent fraction of 1g radially. Hoagland dismissed that as a problem, stating "They already did that on Gemini in the 1960s."

        Well, they did and they didn't. The Gemini 11 "passive stabilization" experiment was, indeed, a trial of that exact idea -- but it didn't really work. The tether didn't stay taut and the most that was achieved was a measly 0.00015 g.

 image credit: NASA

        This blog officially wishes Ken Johnston bon voyage. But it also wishes Richard Hoagland would STFU. He just can't get anything right.

========================

[1] This is who Ken Johnston is.