Ken Johnston and truth

        Ken Johnston, the former Brown & Root employee who worked under contract in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, put out a press release six days ago. The occasion was so minor that I forgive myself for not having noticed it at the time. The release merely noted that Ken generously donated a copy of his self-published triple-book Ken's Moon (plus an additional multi-media package) to the Roswell UFO Research Center. Well, bully for Ken.

        This 650-word text was written, not by Johnston himself but by Karen Christine Patrick — Ken's editor and co-host of an internet radio show specializing in ufology and exopolitics. It's pretty clear that KCP is not God's gift to the technical writing profession — we see "The the three-book series includes...", "Ken's archives has been of interest...", "world reknowned" [sic in all cases, it goes without writing], plus other minor solecisms.

Painting over the stars
        But as in previous announcements and pronouncements by Johnston, truthiness is in short supply here. Consider this key passage:

"Most researchers today only have access to the current database of images that are in electronic format. Researchers have noted, there are significant differences between images in Ken’s archives and what is available to the public. Johnston is an eyewitness to NASA personnel scrubbing out details of photos and painting over the stars in the sky."

        I don't myself know of any significant differences between Ken's photo prints and the NASA electronic archive. Where the differences arise is between the "official" archive and the electronic scans of Ken's prints. But the comparison is between, on the one hand, a professionally scanned image from an original negative or internegative done in a clean room — and on the other hand, a photoprint stored in a ring binder for 23 years, then pulled out and scanned on a consumer-grade scanner. In the case of scans done by Richard Hoagland for his book Dark Mission,  the scanner glass is quite clearly contaminated. Compare, for example, the official version of AS10-32-4820 with Hoagland's scan:

Sparkle
        Quite apart from the scratches — emphasized by Hoagland's manipulation of the image brightness — there's something in there that surely can only be a human hair.

        As for "painting over the stars in the sky," that cannot possibly be the truth because the astronauts' chest-mounted cameras could not have been set to expose both dim stars and very bright lunar terrain in the same shot. It seems certain that what Johnston witnessed was strippers eliminating sparkle in the totally black lunar sky that might have been misinterpreted as stars.

Blobberies
        Appended to the release is a collection of a couple of dozen scans which are presumably there to convince us that Johnston really has something worth looking at. In fact, they convince me that the archivist, Bret Colin Sheppard (he actually calls himself an anomalist) lacks rigor to the point of despair. We see some of the usual fuzzy things declared to be "a lunar base", "a parabolic dish array"^{note 1}, "an effigy or statue"^{note 2}, "a sculpture", and so on. We are not told who carried out these scans or under what conditions of cleanliness. In not one single case did the industrious Mr. Sheppard find time to consult the library of ultra-high definition images returned by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to see what these blobberies really are (if anything at all.) The resolution of the LRO images would be typically 300 times that of the Apollo collection, and considering that LRO has been giving us these free gifts for seven years now, there really is no excuse for this slop.

        Think I'm making too much fuss about a mere press release that nobody noticed? Wrong. Notwithstanding its grammatical shortcomings, The Roswell Daily Record picked it up, and to my horror (and that of James Oberg) it found its way into AP, datelined 7th June. For whatever reason, AP decided to add its own bit of untruthiness in the tail-end paragraph: "Johnston was later fired from NASA." Given that Johnston never worked for NASA, it's hard to see how he could have been fired. His status as hero within the NASA-hating contingent is based on this falsehood, but the true story is that he was dropped from the all-volunteer Solar System Ambassador program after his loyalty was questioned and his self-reported career résumé was found to contain important prevarications.

        Oberg added a comment to the online AP story, including these words: "If you're going to promote a claim that NASA has been lying to the world for half a century about what Apollo found on the moon, please research your sources more thoroughly." Amen to that, and see Oberg's comments below.

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[1] The so-called "parabolic dish array" is seen in AS15-88-11967. The Johnston version differs only in tiny detail from the official version. It's a collection of small craters behind the rightmost fiducial in row 3. Sheppard presents an over-zoomed detail which is far more likely to be dust or a reflection than anything real. The bright dots appear to be beyond the limiting resolution of the scan.

[2] The"effigy" also appears in the "official" version of AS12-49-7224. It's just a large rock. The scan provided by anomalist Sheppard is notably dirty, including another hair or fiber.

Also note Johnston's own comment about this particular image, noted in this blogpost.