Robert Morningstar ignores the evidence

James Concannon writes:

        The "civilian intelligence analyst" Robert Morningstar announced on FB yesterday that he was about to be interviewed by Michael Vara on Late Night in the Midlands, and he posted a link to the images he was planning to refer to during the show (the topic was to be "The Secret Space Program"). My face hit my palm when I saw the fucking "Big Ben on the Moon" image that several of us have already well debunked. I wrote that he must be crazy, and reminded him of this image, showing frame AS17-M-2366 compared to AS17-M-2367, the next in sequence.

image credit: NASA

        2366 shows "Big Ben," which AM* has consistently claimed is a tower on the Moon, and 2367 shows that the top part of the "tower" is now 1000 km or so out in space. It's quite obviously scanner contamination, and again I thank 'Trekker' for drawing my attention to it.

        Well, blow me down with a feather, the intelligence analyst simply ignored what was staring him in the face.

37:55 Vara: It looks like the leaning tower.
AM*: Indeed, it does. And there's a reason for that. You know, I have the privilege of being tracked by trolls from NASA and JPL, who really like to jump on my case and mock it -- you know, as a result of some of the pranks they pull on me in trying to debunk my work, they've led me to a treasure-trove of secret NASA archives -- very high-resolution stuff -- and when I was working on one problem that they brought up, they led me to this magazine from Apollo 17. And I started to see anomalies in the lunar skyline. And I started tracking what I thought were UFOs, and as I followed one UFO around the Moon from one picture to the next, I came around the bend and there was a whole slew of them -- what I call a constellation of space stations. But as I continued I was shocked to find that photograph. And instantly I said to myself  "That looks like the Empire State building or Big Ben. I think that looks like Big Ben on the Moon." Now these debunkers, they claim that that's dust on the film, or an anomaly in the emulsion. Again, I'm just showing you a picture that was taken by Apollo 17 -- a picture that's been in the archives for 42 years and I just happen to be the one that found it and recognized it, so I show it to you. And what do you think that looks like?  I told you what I think it looks like, so I named it that. I named it "Big Ben on the Moon."

        The rest of the show went off into all kinds of fantasies that had nothing to do with secret space programs. Anybody interested can track down the podcast here. I have no idea who these "trolls from NASA and JPL" are.

And now for something not very different...
        I was also hammering away at AM* about another one of his photo-misinterpretations. This one.

image credit: NASA

        It's frame AS10-28-3988 from Apollo 10, and it shows a piece of mylar insulation that tore loose when the Lunar Module undocked. The mylar is about half a metre long, and about 20 m away. The intelligence analyst says it's a space station, and its major dimension is 166 miles. His reasoning (such as it is) is explained here.

        I wondered how far away a 166-mile object would need to be to appear as shown, so I worked it out.

DATA:
Claimed dimension: 166 miles
Focal length of the camera lens: 80mm
Width of the film frame: 70mm
Fraction object height/frame height: 0.086

CALCULATION:
Field of view: 2 × arc tan (0.5 × film width/focal length)
= 2 × arc tan 0.4375
= 47.26°
So angle subtended by the object is 4.06°
Distance to the claimed space station: 166/tan 4.06°
tan 4.06° = 0.071
∴ distance = 166/0.071 = 2,338  miles

I posted all that to Morning*'s page.

Update:
On 28 May he responded:

"Thank you for thy miscalculations.... I will check the figures again, and send your homework to a world renown expert in optics and photo analysis to be graded. But remember, it's you, not me, who claims the distance to be 2,338 miles away. That's impossible since at that distance a 166 mile high object would look like a speck. And what we see in the 3 close-ups (& at least 3 other long distance photos in the Apollo photos) is not a "speck." Neither is it credible to believe that the object is a 1.5 foot piece of mylar. Stick the 1.5 foot piece of Mylar claim made by NASA into the same equation and see if you come up with 1.5 feet of anything. Thanks ... smile emoticon "Ta Ta, James" It's always a pleasure. -> M*"

        Using the same data, distance to a 1.5ft piece of mylar is 21ft. I also pointed out that a 166-mile object 2,338 miles away would look eight times as big as the Moon from Earth. Not a speck.