Tuesday, January 31, 2012

A second look at Mike Bara's rant

        In a comment appended to the April 5, 2011 entry to this blog, I remarked what fun it was to read Mike Bara's rant entitled The Inmates are Running the Asylum. It really is. In this undated essay, Bara emphatically denies the possibility that the anomalies reported on Apollo 10 orbital image AS10-32-4822 could have been caused by a print of this frame being rephotographed by Hoagland while lying under glass at the National Space Science Data Center. Bara is, however, mistaken. This will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog or, indeed, readers of Mike Bara's literary oeuvre in general.

        That Apollo 10 frame is a Hoagland/Bara favorite. At lower left is the choppy terrain that they call "Los Angeles" because they say they see so many rectilinear features that it reminds them of an aerial photograph of LA. It looks nothing like LA to me. On the upper border of that area, in some versions of the image, is the so-called "paperclip" feature that Hoagland has said is a huge antenna. Over to the right, below the spectacular crater Manilius, is the smudge they call "The Castle." Again, only in some versions.

        In his online rant, Mike Bara pooh-poohs the claim that reflection off a glass overlay was the source of the so-called anomalies:
This is of course totally wrong and utterly stupid. Hoagland's trip to NSSDC took place on November 14th and 15th, 1994, some six months after he first presented his lunar findings at Ohio State. So, even if there were snapshots taken of pictures at NSSDC... they were certainly not the images presented at Ohio State.
        The Ohio State lecture, three hours and twenty minutes long, took place on 2nd June 1994. It is promoted on the Enterprise Mission web site as a pair of VHS tape cassettes costing $39.95. Fortunately, to review it, I didn't have to fork out $40 or retrieve my VHS cassette player from the local landfill. The Ohio State lecture is available on Youtube, and it's worth a look just to see the 1994 version of Richard Hoagland. As self-important and as prolix as he is now, but with a younger look. And no bolo tie.

        He spends more than 15 minutes showing his audience around AS10-32-4822. He says more than once that several versions of the frame exist. At 02:33:05 in the video he presents a version obtained at NSSDC and compares it with a version from the Houston archive. So it follows that Mike Bara's timeline must be wrong. Moreover, that flare on the NSSDC version is exactly what one might expect from a glass or plastic overlay.

        At 02:25:06 Hoagland tells his audience that the version they are looking at was "one of a set of 16 x 20 prints I got from one of my NASA contacts." Reading the Bara-rant, you would assume that he's referring to Ken Johnston. Bara writes "these images did not come from the visit to NSSDC, but from Ken Johnston's personal collection." However, Johnston and Hoagland did not meet until May 2nd 1995, in Seattle (as is made clear in this transcript.)

        So far as I'm concerned, the glass overlay allegation still has the status of "plausible rumor." My point is that, in attempting to quash it in such extravagantly nasty terms, Mike Bara has been wholly unsuccessful.

That paperclip

        Funnily enough, at Ohio State RCH didn't mention that paperclip that's on some versions of 4822. To me it looks exactly like a curly fiber that might have intruded during, say, amateur scanning such as must have happened in Hoaglandia. But I wonder at what stage Hoagland "discovered" it. Here's his presentation of it:


Now here's the same area from the "official" (Houston) version of the image:


Presto-change-o! Now you see it, now you don't.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

One day, when I have a few spare hours, I shall have to look up all the photos used in Dark Mission, and compare what appears in the book, with the actual, official NASA/JPL photographs on their web sites. The "vanishing paperclip" is an interesting photo; same as the photos of the "robot head" which looks noticeably different on the book cover than it does in the NASA archives.

I'm sure RCH has been "very selective" (to say the least!) with what he has been able to use in Dark Mission - at very least, they are all extremely interesting and highly intriguing photographs, if you concur with RCH's reasons for their inclusion...

Chris Lopes said...

Anon,
The "Data's Head" (Hoagland's name for it) looks different because it is different. Expat has an post here somewhere about just how much Hoagland had to manipulate the image to get it to look like that, but you can guess it was a lot. When asked about how he got the image he got, Hoagland's (through his stooge like co-author Bara) answer was "do your own homework". It's almost as if they have something to hide.

expat said...

This post is my analysis of the notorious 'Data's Head' fraud. Chris is correct about the response I got from Bara. On asking again, I got "You don't know anything about how images are processed."

jourget said...

It goes beyond irresponsible processing, as well. On a number of occasions he's selectively chosen images to enhance. The unmodified version of the Apollo 14 "Mitchell under glass" photo (AS14-66-9301) has a simple blue flare on it, that looks to a rational person like some sort of reflection on the camera's optics. This still one of RCH's favorite images to trot out, the blue flare ostensibly being the small visible portion of a giant glass structure.

Unfortunately, the later frames of Magazine 66 were taken after Antares had left the moon, and another, almost identical blue flare shows up in a shot showing just the CSM and the black of space. From that perspective, any glass structure would be above the orbital altitude of the two spacecraft, and you'd be wondering why the hell they didn't crash into it. It'd be more hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic.

expat said...

See this blog post for more on Frame AS14-66-9301, which Ken Johnston has described as a "ship"

jourget said...

Ah! Sorry, expat. Didn't mean to step on your toes.

expat said...

Not at all, your information is of value. AS14-66-9345 is an excellent example of what you wrote.

Chris Lopes said...

Hoagland's crimes against imagery go beyond the misinterpretation and "enhancing" of photos. One of his own followers caught him actually fabricating (using a duplicate of a frame that he changed slightly to look like a different frame) a frame or two in his famous "tetrahedral shield" video. When asked which frames he used, he gave the usual "do your own homework" answer. Up until that point, I had thought he wasn't capable of producing actual fakes. I was wrong.

strahlungsamt said...

There's one question has been bothering me for a while, namely: how important is a Brookings report anyway? Especially one from 1959? What if things have changed a bit since then?

I mean, Hoagland reports it like it's an addendum to the US Constitution. I see it closer to a 2 for 1 deal from Pizza Hut in importance but that's just me.

I personally don't want to see the entire world rioting because NASA found a few micro-organisms in Martian soil. I know it would make Occupy Wall Street look like a prayer meeting but come on.

expat said...

My working assumption is that only a handful of historians within NASA have even heard of Brookings, and even they don't value it more than a rat's ass.

The working planetary scientists, as Steven Squyres has said in so many words, would make sure any confirmed discovery of ET got noticed widely. It'd be so good for the budget.

Chris Lopes said...

I always thought of Brookings as just another bureaucratic CYA document meant to show "why yes, we did consider that particular aspect of space flight". I doubt the people who wrote the report actually expected anyone to read it, let alone use it as evidence of a dark conspiracy. Of course, if you were going to engage in such a conspiracy, it would be kind of silly to have evidence of it's beginning in writing and publicly available.

Anonymous said...

As much as I can't stand the BS Richard pumps out and the sanctimonious way he does it, I have always maintained my opinion that RCH is not simply making up stories to sell books or get famous by being a "good actor" in his delivery of "out there ideas"; but rather he *truly* believes everything he says, beyond question, and is so wrapped inside his delusions he sees nothing else.

However...

If RCH is using faked / photoshopped / "edited" or "enhanced" or "cleaned up" images (some generic terms to the average reader who has no imaging expertise for what could be very specific forging methods), then this for me is a huge reason to evaluate my opinion.

I can at least understand RCH being wrapped up in his own delusions for the things he says, however when you need to start "adjusting" photos in any way to prove your theories, that is by far the biggest red flag - especially as photos are really his only physical "proof" for the things he advocates (eg. Elenin tetrahedral shield visible, but only after frames have been put over each other).

I'm not an imaging expert, so whilst I can follow RCH's logic of why photos need to be "enhanced" (to use a loose term) to "better highlight" his point (rather than be edited to the extreme to MAKE the point), you have to wonder why "enhancing" is required if the "evidence is so evident" as RCH constantly says. It's exactly what all of RCH's disciples should be asking, but of course, that's not what sheep do...

Anyway, as much as I'd love to write a TON about RCH and photo "tweaking", I think Expat's work says it better than me - but I'd like to say a thanks and well done to Expat for taking the time to put the work in behind the scenes in order to even have that "robot head" post. I doubt we'll ever get a response from RCH better than "do your own homework"...

nyceddie said...

You say "Over to the right, below the spectacular crater Triesnecker (which Hoagland & Bara misidentify as Manilius)". If I may be so bold but it looks like you may have made an error for that is Manilius crater. Triesnecker is on another location. Here is the URL for a Lunar Orbiter photo that shows Manilius at above center with Rima Hyginus at the lower left corner: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunar_orbiter/images/aimg/iv_097_h2.jpg You can recognize Rima Hyginus in Hoagland's photo.

Here is a Lunar Orbiter showing Triesnecker crater and you can see that it is nowhere Hoagland's
"castle" is located: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunar_orbiter/images/aimg/iv_097_h2.jpg

expat said...

Thanks for posting, nyceddie. You gave the same URL for both Triesnecker and Manilius. This is what you should have cited for Triesnecker:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunar_orbiter/images/aimg/iv_102_h1.jpg

Hoagland & Bara's image, AS10-32-4822, was from Hasselblad Magazine S. Here's the official catalog:

http://history.nasa.gov/ap10fj/as10-image-library.htm#mags

nyceddie said...

My bad, Expat: "Thanks for posting, nyceddie. You gave the same URL for both Triesnecker and Manilius. This is what you should have cited for Triesnecker:" I did have both separate URLs but I had to modify my response and double-copied. Thanks for the correction.