Thursday, June 21, 2012

Does Mike Bara have a copyright problem?

        Let me be the first to bring you the tidings, which you may take as glad or sad, depending on how much you enjoy Mike Bara's writing style and his general lack of interest in the facts of what he writes about. His new book, Ancient Aliens on the Moon, has an ISBN (978-1935487852,) a publication date (15th October,) an Amazon page, and a publisher's blurb. Here is the latter:
 Best-selling author and Secret Space Program researcher Bara brings us this lavishly illustrated volume on alien structures on the Moon. He looks into the history of lunar anomalies and the early NASA programs. He gives us an examination of ruins on the Moon in the Sinus Medii region. Using images from the Surveyor, Lunar Orbiter and Ranger missions. He looks at the Apollo lunar missions to the Moon and the photographic evidence supporting the "transparent dome theory,” plus he looks at further anomalies in the Mare Crisium region, including the hexagonal shape of the Crisium region itself, watch- crystal type glass domes over the craters Cleomedes F and Cleomedes F/a, and an historical image of a giant shard of transparent material that was whitewashed from later versions of the same image. Bara discusses the popular theory that the film "2001 -A Space Odyssey” was used as a training ground for Stanley Kubrick to develop the technology to fake the footage of the landings plus the curious mission of Apollo 17-possibly a technology salvage mission, primarily concerned with investigating an opening into a massive hexagonal ruin near the landing site. Bara details how the astronauts managed to get nearly 30 minutes of "off camera” time to investigate an entrance into the ruin and then later proceeded to a nearby crater to retrieve technological objects. He examines evidence from the Russian Zond series of lunar probes as well as the more current Clementine and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data, including an in-depth study of strange objects in Tycho crater. Plus a look at the current politics of the new race to return to the Moon and what hidden agenda's may be behind it. Finally, Bara looks at the various arguments that the entire Moon is an artificial object. Bara shows how the Moon would have been an ideal place for an alien species involved in genetic experimentation on Earth to have set up a base.
        Two things pop out at me. First, "lavishly illustrated," and second, the "massive hexagonal ruin" near the landing site of Apollo 17. He means the hill known as "South Massif," which was Station 2 of EVA-2, also known as Nansen-Apollo after a ditch at the base of the massif (not to be confused, as one writer on this topic did recently, with the large crater Nansen way up at 80.9°N, 95.3°E.) South Massif is not, of course, a "ruin" but a perfectly normal selenological feature. It is, however, reasonably hexagonal with one side missing due to partial collapse. Nansen-Apollo is the dark spot at about 2 o'clock in the image below, and the landing site was roughly half way between that and the top right corner of the image.

Image credit: NASA

       There's an excellent composite astronaut's eye view of South Massif by Mike Constantine here. It's pretty obvious that for the new book, Mike Bara is mostly re-hashing material from the Lunar Anomalies web site he managed for a while. The original site was hacked long ago by some Chinese medical insurance enterprise. In 2006 Mike started a new blog and intended to transfer the material but soon got bored. The last entry is dated August 2009.

        But Mike is also re-hashing something else.  A major six-part essay by Keith Laney, orbital photography expert and "lunar anomalist," entitled A Hidden Mission for Apollo 17. This material is very clearly copyrighted (2002-11) by Keith Laney Productions™ and bears the additional warning All custom imagery use restricted without permission. All rights reserved. It's none of my business, really, but since the entire thrust of Laney's six-parter is that Nansen-Apollo could be a secret tunnel leading to the interior of the "artifact" known as South Massif, I sure hope Mike Bara gets proper clearance from Keith Laney before he writes that chapter. I might even contact the publisher, Adventures Unlimited Press, to remind them of the requirements of copyright law.

A Few Facts
        Here are some facts about Apollo 17 EVA-2 that you probably won't find in Mike Bara's book, because he doesn't deal in facts. The track to Nansen-Apollo and back is depicted in this composite — and note that Station 4 was the crater Shorty, famous to geologists for orange soil and to fans of Hoagland & Bara for an utterly fraudulent fairy-tale about a robot head.

         Station 2 was originally scheduled as a 50-minute stop. It was extended to 64 minutes because of its geological interest (and for that reason, Cernan & Schmitt were pressed for time at Shorty, making the idea that they could have descended into the crater and retrieved the "robot" self-evidently ridiculous.) The published Lunar Surface Journal covers the entire 64 minutes, from MET 142:43:37 to 143:46:34. Nowhere is there any unexplained gap of 30 minutes or anything like it. The video, cut up into clips of about 3:30, is continuous from 142:46:06 to 143:45:40 when the astronauts got back on the Lunar Rover. The astronauts are not continuously visible—in fact Cernan comments at 143:05:11 that he didn't choose an ideal place to park the rover from that point of view, but the entire time they can be heard doing their sampling activity, placing samples in numbered bags that correspond to samples in the catalog. At 143:13:40 the camera is pointing down into Nansen-Apollo and there's not the slightest evidence of any entrance to anywhere.There is no justification whatsoever for claiming that 30-minute "off-camera" time. It's simply nonsense.

        By all means buy Mike's book. You can pre-order it from Amazon right now. Just remember that, when you read about an "entrance" to the "ruin," you're reading just one more ignorant fantasy from the mind of a man who has no expertise in any relevant discipline. And very likely one more instance of the flagrant copyvio that Hoagland & Bara are notorious for.

33 comments:

Jiminy Oddbird said...

Is the image you posted above in this thread, the same one you wonder if Bara has a copyright problem with?

Jiminy Oddbird said...

Any first and foremost, practical motivation for being on the Moon, is in order to hold the high ground, above one's enemies on Earth.

I don't know if Hoagland, Bara, and any of you guys here, have any effect on the voting tax payers that could possibly make a difference to the DOD or not?

As the Orbs are inter-dimensional, I doubt if they have a physical base on the Moon, themselves.

expat said...

No, I embedded the public domain version from NASA. If you follow the link to Keith Laney's essay you'll find Keith's own enhancements that he considers copyright.

jourget said...

I'm wondering if the contents of Mike's book are further confirmation of the falling out between Hoagland and Bara. On April 2, 2012, while discussing his new book on Coast, Hoagland commented:

"The one I did with Bara was basically my stuff, Mike just did some very nice writing and some interstitial glue but it was my research."

Expat, you've commented on RCH throwing Bara under the bus, and this seems to be further confirmation. If indeed Dark Mission was all Hoagland's stuff, then Bara's taking a pretty ballsy step into Hoagland territory if he's claiming that this stuff, so much of which was touched on in the earlier book, is his work. Man, if any of these conclusions were verifiable in the slightest, I'd be upset at the stealing of my research, too. It'd be amusing if Mike got hit by three lawsuits from different directions.

Jiminy Oddbird said...

http://keithlaney.net/Ahiddenmission/as17-m-1218crop.jpg

Jiminy Oddbird said...

Pattycakes, are you saying that Bara presents Laney's doctored images in his book, and gives attribution to Laney, or how do you know that the pictures are Laney's?

expat said...

Yes, that's one that Laney claims copyright on. I'm by no means sure that he could successfully defend that claim, given that it's only an "enhancement" of a public domain image. And Bara could very well use it and claim that the enhancement was his own.

expat said...

Misti I don't know what will be in the book, obviously. If he gives appropriate attribution to the Nansen-Apollo story that may or may not satisfy Keith Laney. Laney gets annoyed by copyvio:

http://keithlaney.net/SMF/index.php?topic=13217.0

Jiminy Oddbird said...

Oh, now I see that Laney has an ongoing grievance with the Dickster.

Why hasn't he sued him yet, I wonder?

Biological_Unit said...

A person born during Apollo 17 will turn 40 in December.

Chris Lopes said...

jourget,
The description of the book sure sounds like spinoff of Dark Mission. I can see the rift between them getting bigger if that's what it is and it makes money. The irony of the situation is staggering.

Jiminy Oddbird said...

Seems to me that Laney is the Mars Revealer, who takes Hoagland's images, doctors them further, then claims that he did it first.

FlightSuit said...

Expat, since you mentioned The Lunar Shard, that reminds me of a question I've been meaning to ask somebody in the skeptic community:

Assuming The Shard is not, in fact, a miles-high artificial tower (I know, I know, that's a hard thing to assume), then what the heck is it?

Could it be some kind of out-gassing phenomenon? Is there some mechanism by which such an image could have appeared on the film as a result of some kind of lens anomaly?

expat said...

The Shard appears on a frame (LO-III-84-M) from the Lunar Orbiter 3 mission, launched 1967. The LO photographic system, adapted from the U2 spy plane system, was a wet film development process, scanned by a crude photomultiplier. Blobs, smears and splatters from the development process are literally everywhere in the Lunar Orbiter 3 photo library.

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunarorbiter/mission/?3

In my view the shard is just that -- a film processing fault. Believers have always countered that it throws a shadow, and at the correct angle given the known position of the Sun. I don't find that terribly convincing, personally.

Here's that frame, clearly showing other processing faults in the sky:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunarorbiter/frame/?3084

To me, the most important debunk is that far better photography of that region of the Moon is now available for study, and the shard is nowhere to be found.

strahlungsamt said...

I heard somewhere (on this site) that Hoagie took those pictures in the Air and Space Museum and they were behind glass. The shard is in fact the reflection of the lights on the ceiling.

Of course the guards (who are in cahoots with the Egyptian gods) caught him and told him to leave, hence the poor quality.
It's all stunning confirmation of a big conspiracy really.

Hoagie denies the light reflection part of course.

expat said...

Not the A&SM but the NSSDC (National Space Science Data Center.) It's covered in this bloggery:

http://dorkmission.blogspot.com/2012/01/second-look-at-mike-baras-rant.html

FlightSuit said...

Thanks, Expat!

Hoagland would have been so proud of me just a few short years ago, when I was a believer. I was really good at parroting his whole spiel about how, "given everything we know about Lunar topography, erosion, and meteor bombardment, this structure should not be there."

Paraphrasing, of course. It's scary how good I was at doing that, using all kinds of sciency sounding terms to make the argument sound more plausible.

Trekker said...

Expat,
I’ve just been taking a look at the article by Keith Laney that you link to. I’m puzzled about this Nansen-Apollo feature. In Laney’s ‘enhancement’, (if you can call it that), it definitely looks like an entrance to a tunnel, and Bara is obviously running with that idea.

However, it would be in his interest to focus on the LRO images of that area, rather than blurry, decades-old images. Nansen, as a feature, completely disappears in the sharp resolution of the LRO images – there’s nothing at all remotely resembling an entrance in that area. The only thing there is a change in the angle of the slope of South Massif, casting it into shadow. Take a look at the ACT-REACT Quick Map and zoom into the area. Nansen is at approx coordinates 20.11732 30.52200.

I find it hard to believe Bara hasn’t taken a good look at the LRO data before basing a whole book on blurry old images!

expat said...

Trekker, you're right -- the terrain does look flatter in ACT-REACT, although I think the marker for Nansen-Apollo is off. It surely should be at the exact base of the massif.

It's not at all hard to believe Mike Bara would write the chapter without a thorough look at LRO data. The man has absolutely no respect for the truth. He writes what he thinks will sell.

Trekker said...

Expat,

Well, I took a good look round the regular (non-collapsed) part of the massif just to make sure I wasn't missing anything....I still couldn't find anything resembling an 'entrance' in the approximate two o'clock position. Can you take a look at the LRO yourself and post what you think might be better coordinates for the feature?

expat said...

Trekker: I can't improve on your coords. I think you got it, it just doesn't look the same now.

Trekker said...

Expat, that's what puzzled me too.

The Apollo photo of 'Nansen' on Laney's site, which looks like a cave entrance with an overhang, bears no resemblance to the same area in the LRO images. Do you think Laney may have done some 'enhancing' of his own, or is it actually a photo of a completely different location?

Jiminy Oddbird said...

You guys can't be serious? Keith laney is even a bigger loony than Dick Hoagy!

http://keithlaney.net/SMF/index.php?PHPSESSID=11ff073116b45d08c84909f2785da282&action=dlattach;attach=184;type=avatar

Kieth Laney is the Mars Revealer!

http://www.myspace.com/themartianrevelation

expat said...

Trekker, I wouldn't dare to accuse KL of photo-cheating. Sun angle may have a lot to do with it.

Trekker said...

Maybe, but I can't find anything that looks like a small cave entrance with an overhang.

And I must admit, I know nothing about Keith Laney. I assumed he was in the same category as Hoagland, or I wouldn't have suggested he had enhanced an image!

Jiminy Oddbird said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jiminy Oddbird said...

Pattycakes, even though you wouldn't dare accuse Laney, you sure as hell don't hesitate to accuse Hoagland. How objective is that?

No photograph is even admissible as evidence in a court of law, without an eye witness who can personally testify that the image actually depicts what the witness saw with their own eyes. The standards for scientific evidence are much more stringent than that of for a court of law.

How do you figure that Laney ought to be any exception to these rules? NASA either, for that matter.

Biological_Unit said...

swArd is trolling up trouble again.

Geo said...

Thanks for the heads-up on the new book! I can't wait to rip it to shreds like the ridiculous Dark Mission. It's interesting to note that on the old Lunar Anomalies blog, Bara parrots back a lot of early Hoaglandisms including the much-loved favourite 'arcology.' It's clear Bara was an acolyte of Hoagland, hence his inclusion in Dark Mission, but it seems he's taken up the mantle on this fabulously absurd 'miles-high glass domes' twaddle.

I can only imagine that Hoagland is utterly incandescent with rage over this, considering he's promised the anxiously-awaiting world a Dark Mission II with the same enthusiasm he promised in delivering the seventh part of his Iapetus tale that never happened (seven years and counting!)

It's also worth mentioning, if you don't already know it (and likely you do) that Keith Laney was also in the Hoagland camp long ago and occasionally provided some of the special image-enhancing 'algorithms' Hoagland is always going on about.

Jiminy Oddbird said...

Is the Mars Revealer pissed because he got stiffed? He phonied up all the art work and Hoagland never paid him?

Biological_Unit said...

http://martianrevelationradioshow.blogspot.ca/

Geo said...

Thanks for the link, Biological Unit. I haven't laughed that hard at such a cringe-worthy opening 'theme' in ages. I may have to change my pants.

Binaryspellbook said...

Mike Bara. Liar, charlaran, arsehole. Take your pick. Any of the above "accolades" fit.