Saturday, July 20, 2013

Mike Bara celebrates the 44th anniversary of Apollo 11 with his usual inaccuracy

        Mike Bara often uses his twitter account to "relate" to celebrities. Brown-nosing icons of the extreme right like Ann Coulter, Greta Van Susteren and Donald Trump is a favorite. So is insulting any (US-style) football players who beat his idols the Seattle Seahawks. Today he's been telling people that the late Helen Thomas was notably anti-jewish (a grain of truth there, although she did apologize for saying "The Jews should get the hell out of Palestine."note 1)

        But the "tweet-of-the-day" was reserved for none other than Buzz Aldrin, who posted:

"44 years ago today Neil took this photo of me at Tranquility Base on the moon. We all miss you Neil."


photo credit: NASA

        Our Mike doesn't much like Buzz. He can't get over the fact that Buzz is a mason, who took a miniature masonic flag to the Moon as part of his personal kit. Why that should spook Bara out is anyone's guess, but apparently it does.

        Buzz also took a miniature communion kit to the Moon, and performed a personal ceremony of thanksgiving at MET 105:25:38, 2h 40m after landing. This evidently upset Mike Bara too, because he made several errors when alluding to it. On Ancient Aliens: The NASA Connection he said wrongly that the ceremony was 33 minutes (that magic number, geddit?) after landing, as the constellation Orion was exactly on the horizon (it wasn't.) He also said that Neil Armstrong took part in the ceremony, which is not true either. Then he said the Catholic mass "has it's origins" in Egyptian ritualnote 2. It does not. Its origin is, of course, the last supper of Christ.note 3

        In the first edition of Dark Mission, he wrote that the star Sirius was at the magic elevation of 19.5° as the ceremony took place. In the second edition, he referred to the communion ceremony as "infamous" (page 11) and revised the star alignment to Regulus at MINUS 19.5°. How Aldrin could have sighted Regulus below the horizon to get his timing right is not stated.

        Anyway, Mike is obviously still stewing over this, because today he took disrespect to new heights by tweeting to Buzz Aldrin:

"Did you wear the Masonic apron during the "Communion" ceremony before the EVA?"
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[1] If she'd said "The Israelis should get the hell out of Palestine," I'd say many people would agree with that, whether they would stand up to be counted or not. And in that case she would not have needed to add the much more offensive "...and go back where they came from."

[2] Egyptian ritual is a Hoagland/Bara meme, especially in relation to Moon landings, because Dr. Farouk El Baz was the most influential member of the landing site selection committee, and El Baz is Egyptian by birth. Bara said on Ancient Aliens that El Baz picked the dates and times of the landings in addition to the sites, which is totally untrue. So many errors!

[3] But see the second comment below.

8 comments:

Chris said...

Bara's a big man behind his keyboard, not so brave when he's in person. The truth is he hasn't got the brains or the guts to be a tiny fraction of what Aldrin and Armstrong are.

Get back to finishing your junk book, Mike, and stay away from your superiors on Twitter.

Anonymous said...

Expat wrote: "Then he [Bara] said the Catholic mass has it's origins in Egyptian ritual. It does not."

This doesn't look like a correct statement in an overall fine post for two reasons:

1. it's not as much Bara or Hoagland but a host of other well known researchers and authors who have highlighted similarities between Christianity and the way older Isis/Osiris resurrection myth *). Hoagland & Bara do refer to some of these external sources at times.

2. from a more scholarly point of view one cannot make any definite statement about what the origins of the Catholic mass exactly might be but one can certainly not claim at this point in time that "it is not" based on Egyptian myth. To write it's based on "the last supper of Christ" only introduces the question: what are the origins of the story about the last supper of Christ?

*) for example Diodorus Siculus relates of a betrayal of Osiris at a banquet and then being cut in many pieces and buried.

D.

expat said...

Thank you, anon. You may have a point, and I've added a note drawing attention to it.

Unknown said...

Aldrin was Presbyterian, not Catholic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzz_Aldrin
(See last paragraph of "NASA Career")

Unknown said...

What's funny is, I'm sure professors Hoagland and Bara wish they'd gone the Bart Siebrel way and just claimed the Moon landings were faked.

More profitable and a slightly more believable (if still wrong) theory.

"Capricorn One" was a lot more entertaining than "Mission to Mars".

Chris Lopes said...

Hoagie couldn't go the "They faked the Moon landings" route, as his pseudo-science career is based solely on the fact that he sat several chairs down from Uncle Walter during Project Apollo.

expat said...

Actually, he was one of four consultants, along with..

Lindy Davis, who probably isn't the same Lindy Davis who's a professional criminal...
Charles Friedlander, an expert on mental health , now in jail on charges of pedophilia...
G Harry Stine, a model rocket enthusiast and SciFi writer

Chris Lopes said...

Stine is the only one I've heard of. It doesn't sound like CBS wanted to invest much on advisors.