Robbins falsifies Hoagland/Bara

        The tottering edifice which is the distortions and lies of Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara has been systematically demolished over the seven years of this blog's lifetime.

         First, Von Braun's Secret was falsified because of fatal mathematical errors.

        Then, the Table of Coincidence fell off its legs because 19 of 42 data points were invalid per Hoagland & Bara's own published rules. With it went the whole daft idea of NASA's worship of Egyptian Gods.

        Next was the Accutron "measurement" of the torsion field. Quite apart from the inadequacy of the protocol and the lack of key data, Hoagland accidentally revealed in Glendale that the baseline readings showed as much activity as his claimed data spikes.

Comes now Dr Stuart Robbins, with a blog and a professional-standard video that takes apart another key part of the edifice, stone by stone.

        The topic is what Hoagland (originally with co-author Errol Torun) called The Message of Cydonia. The theory -- to over-dignify what amounts to a whole lot of flim-flam -- rests on these two composite diagrams of the Cydonia area of Mars. Mike Bara recycled them, without specific attribution, in his inaccurate book Ancient Aliens on Mars.

credit: Hoagland & Torun

The authors

credit: Hoagland & Torun

        In the first, 19 angles have been created by connecting 16 marsographical features in a pseudo-random way. The authors then make the claim that nine ratios of these angles equate to simple arithmetical expressions such as √3, e/π etc. The accuracy claimed is three significant figures.

        In the second, something similar is done with the pseudo-pyramid Hoagland calls "D&M." Robbins' suspicion was immediately aroused when he noted that the list of angles and ratios in the two composites is identical. It suggests work that is so sloppy as to self-falsify.

Watch the video
For those who can't do that, here are a few bullet points:

• No two pairs of edges of the D&M actually converge at the same apex
• 9 angles are considered significant in the D&M, but in fact 35 angles are inherent
• The angles are in any case projections onto a horizontal plane. In 3-D reality they would all be different
• 595 angle ratios can be derived from the geometry
• 94 arithmetical expressions would qualify per the authors' implicit rules
• Only one of the nine ratios is accurate to the claimed tolerance of 0.1%
• Generating 16,000 random pentagonal shapes similar to the D&M, and using computer analysis, Robbins creates a null hypothesis and shows that Hoagland's nine equations are no less probable
• Re-checking the larger Cydonia map, Robbins could confirm Hoagland's data in only seven of the 19 angles, within 1% tolerance

        Neither Hoagland nor Bara has yet commented on this piece of work, and it's unlikely they ever will. In the first 36 hours the Youtube vid got 1000 hits, and the word is spreading among we lovers of the truth. I'm pleased to play a small part in that.