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.