The Emoluments of Mars

A second look at Mike Bara's rant

2012-01-31T11:46:00.000-08:00

        In a comment appended to the April 5, 2011 entry to this blog, I remarked what fun it was to read Mike Bara's rant entitled The Inmates are Running the Asylum. It really is. In this undated essay, Bara emphatically denies the possibility that the anomalies reported on Apollo 10 orbital image AS10-32-4822 could have been caused by a print of this frame being rephotographed by Hoagland while lying under glass at the National Space Science Data Center. Bara is, however, mistaken. This will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog or, indeed, readers of Mike Bara's literary oeuvre in general.

        That Apollo 10 frame is a Hoagland/Bara favorite. At lower left is the choppy terrain that they call "Los Angeles" because they say they see so many rectilinear features that it reminds them of an aerial photograph of LA. It looks nothing like LA to me. On the upper border of that area, in some versions of the image, is the so-called "paperclip" feature that Hoagland has said is a huge antenna. Over to the right, below the spectacular crater Triesnecker (which Hoagland & Bara misidentify as Manilius) is the smudge they call "The Castle." Again, only in some versions.

        In his online rant, Mike Bara pooh-poohs the claim that reflection off a glass overlay was the source of the so-called anomalies:

This is of course totally wrong and utterly stupid. Hoagland's trip to NSSDC took place on November 14th and 15th, 1994, some six months after he first presented his lunar findings at Ohio State. So, even if there were snapshots taken of pictures at NSSDC... they were certainly not the images presented at Ohio State.

        The Ohio State lecture, three hours and twenty minutes long, took place on 2nd June 1994. It is promoted on the Enterprise Mission web site as a pair of VHS tape cassettes costing $39.95. Fortunately, to review it, I didn't have to fork out $40 or retrieve my VHS cassette player from the local landfill. The Ohio State lecture is available on Youtube, and it's worth a look just to see the 1994 version of Richard Hoagland. As self-important and as prolix as he is now, but with a younger look. And no bolo tie.

        He spends more than 15 minutes showing his audience around AS10-32-4822. He says more than once that several versions of the frame exist. At 02:33:05 in the video he presents a version obtained at NSSDC and compares it with a version from the Houston archive. So it follows that Mike Bara's timeline must be wrong. Moreover, that flare on the NSSDC version is exactly what one might expect from a glass overlay.

        At 02:25:06 Hoagland tells his audience that the version they are looking at was "one of a set of 16 x 20 prints I got from one of my NASA contacts." Reading the Bara-rant, you would assume that he's referring to Ken Johnston. Bara writes "these images did not come from the visit to NSSDC, but from Ken Johnston's personal collection." However, Johnston and Hoagland did not meet until May 2nd 1995, in Seattle (as is made clear in this transcript.)

So far as I'm concerned, the glass overlay allegation still has the status of "plausible rumor." My point is that, in attempting to quash it in such extravagantly nasty terms, Mike Bara has been wholly unsuccessful.

That paperclip

Funnily enough, at Ohio State RCH didn't mention that paperclip that's on some versions of 4822. To me it looks exactly like a curly fiber that might have intruded during, say, amateur scanning such as must have happened in Hoaglandia. But I wonder at what stage Hoagland "discovered" it. Here's his presentation of it:

Now here's the same area from the "official" (Houston) version of the image:

Presto-change-o! Now you see it, now you don't.

Buddy can you spare a dime?

2012-01-22T15:46:00.000-08:00

Times must be hard in Placitas, NM. Robin Falkov (the homeopathist who wrote "Measles does not kill") erupted onto the Hoagland FB page today, pleading for financial support:

Facebook is great, but it would certainly be nice to have some direct support to continue the research. There are limited hours to get things done and cover expenses. For years all the research on Enterprisemission has been published for free. I find it a sad commentary that the more the was given, less was given back by this audience.. Free time is a luxury. You can always support the research of Enterprisemission through Paypal.

May I suggest the following sliding scale of assistance:

           Updating the web site: $50
           Correct prediction: $40
           Correct statement: $20

         That way his income for 2011 would be $20. He scored ZERO web site updates, ZERO correct predictions, and ONE correct statement. He described the MSL landing sequence correctly. He also had the close approach of YU₅₅ right but spoiled it by saying "It'll happen while we're all distracted by Elenin," which was WRONG, as was his further statement that President Obama would be in Hawaii at the time.

        $20 ain't much but perhaps he'll try harder this year now that he's broke. Doing something about that horrible web site would be a good start.

Update on GFAJ-1

2012-01-22T09:35:00.000-08:00

Rosie Redfield, who very quickly challenged the announcement that GFAJ-1* could use arsenic as a substitute for phosphorous in its DNA backbone, has now published her research. The result appears to contradict the original work by Felisa Wolfe-Simon et al., but since it's only a blog-post we'll have to wait for peer-reviewed publication for the next chapter of this highly interesting science "Whosynthedit." As Bob Zimmerman correctly reports, it'll be interesting if Science refuses to publish on the grounds that the world of bloggery got the news first.

This blog had some fun with Richard Hoagland's hilarious failure to comprehend the original announcement in December 2010, under the title Tiny bacterium defeats pseudoscientist. It took my breath away when he said "This marks the first time NASA has grappled with the concept 'What is Life?'" It seems that, to him, the entire history of NASA's Mars mission planning since Viking in 1976 just never happened.

* It actually stands for 'Get Felisa A Job.'

Richard Hoagland's arrow hits the barn

2012-01-20T07:28:00.000-08:00

James Concannon was awake enough to hear last night's Coast to Coast AM news segment, and reports this:

        Richard Hoagland's claims very often amount to shooting an arrow into the side of a barn, then running up and painting a target around it. There cannot be any more blatant example of this than last night's performance.

        George Noory reported AvWeek's story that the US Strategic Command has removed links from a web page tracking the final orbit of Phobos-Grunt, which re-entered at 17:45 UTC last Sunday, exactly as expected. He then introduced Hoagland the "science adviser" with the words "I gotta hand it to you Richard, you've been saying for a long time that this is a strange situation." Hoagland smugly replied "Science is nothing if it's not prediction, George" as if this was another brilliant example of his successful analysis. The unexplained action by StratCom allowed Hoagland to claim that the spacecraft had set off on a secret mission to rendezvous with the asteroid YU₅₅.

        The truth is 180 degrees from a successful prediction. Hoagland never predicted that StratCom would fudge re-entry data. What he predicted, on November 28th, was that Phobos-Grunt would depart on its secret mission the next day, because the numerology of 11/29/11 was favorable. That prediction was entirely wrong.

        On October 21st he said that the rotation period of the asteroid was 19.5 hours. That was wrong. He said it was perfectly spherical. That was wrong too. Richard Hoagland is in no position to claim any success, let alone brilliance, at reporting YU_55.

The inexorable logic of celestial mechanics

        Now look, if by chance there are any Hoagland disciples reading this, I beseech you in the bowels of Christ to think it possible your guru may be wrong (as somebody once said, more or less.)

        In the first place, a spacecraft designed for a sample return from a 22 km moon would be ineffective for examination of a 400m asteroid, and vice versa. Phobos-Grunt could not possibly have been designed for a rendezvous with YU₅₅ without a thousand engineers going "wtf?" or the Russian equivalent.

        In the second place, could you please ask your leader why, if some sinister cabal wished to send a spacecraft to say hello to the asteroid, they would allow a close pass within 325,000 km to elapse without taking action, instead waiting until it was half way to Mars before setting out in pursuit?

        The producers of Coast to Coast, of course, don't think of these things. George Noory wouldn't care about the truth even if he could discern it. But that doesn't excuse the rest of us from the responsibility to respect the laws of physics.

--James Concannon

Yet another unfinished Hoagland project?

2012-01-13T13:19:00.000-08:00

        We have Sacred Mysteries to, er... thank (?) for slapping five and a half hours of Hoagland & Bara onto Youtube in 34 parts, under the generic title Never A Straight Answer. What did Youtube do to deserve such punishment, you may well ask. I don't know the answer. Let's face it, poor old Youtube is subjected to daily indignities—some even worse than this rubbish.

        This turns out to be a really, really bad video of a presentation our two all-too-fallible authors gave in Los Angeles in November 2007, just after Dark Mission almost made it to the NYT best-seller list ("It can only go up from there," Hoagland said very early in the presentation. Wrong again, Hoagland — it crashed out of the extended list the following week.) The audio is never crisp, the lighting is barbaric, and the camera only very rarely captures the Powerpointery, so most of the time we don't know what's being referred to. Actually, those of us who have subjected ourselves to the experience of reading Dark Mission hardly need the visuals, because the whole thing is very much like a summary of the book.

        And indeed, we get treated to all the errors in the book, starting with "NASA is not a civilian agency" (at 02:15 in Part 5) and moving on through Cydonia, the failed Mars missions of the 90s (which James Oberg has expounded upon rather brilliantly,) and the blue blob in the lunar sky which this blog took a fresh look at just last month. But what caught my interest in Part 1 (at 03:00) was a quick insert of two shots from what Hoagland said was a new documentary, hosted by himself and produced by someone he only referred to as "Jay." Hoagland claimed that this documentary would teach us

"...things about Washington, and Lincoln, ...that have never been put on film by anyone in the history of the human species."

Actually, the visuals were pretty good (albeit on video, not film,) showing Hoagland himself at the Lincoln Memorial at dawn, plus a reverse angle looking back toward the Capitol. We didn't hear what RCH was saying, as he walked toward camera with hands in what TV directors call "the fig-leaf position," but it looked promising.

Image credit: sacredmysteries.com

Well, here we are over four years later, and where is this documentary? A search of the catalogs of Sacred Mysteries and Filmbaby comes up empty. Besides, Hoagland has never been shy about promoting anything he has for sale. If it was finished, we'd be hearing about it from him.

So it looks like this is another Hoagland abortion, like the Joshua Tree Conference, Moon With a View, The Bees' Needs, Von Braun's Secret. WHAT IS IT ABOUT HOAGLAND AND HIS ATTENTION SPAN?

Another success for NASA. Another FAIL for Hoagland.

2012-01-05T07:17:00.000-08:00

The twin Grail spacecraft are successfully in lunar orbit, starting their four-month mission to map the Moon's gravity variations.

Richard Hoagland informed the Coast to Coast AM audience of millions that the real purpose of the mission is to locate the Moon's engines. Hoagland is the official SCIENCE ADVISER to that show. Presumably he's paid a consultancy fee.

"Ancient Aliens," where facts never spoil a good story

2011-12-29T09:55:00.000-08:00

The History Channel continues to beat the truth until it cries UNCLE, with Aliens and the Secret Code, Season 3 Ep 13 of Ancient Aliens. This episode (available on Youtube) involved drawing a lot of lines on a lot of maps and globes in an attempt to show that prehistoric man knew stuff he didn't oughta have. Archaeology is a field of study I've had the merest whisper of contact with, but some of the line-making seemed a little expedient to me, and I decided to research one of their straight lines.

Scattered across what is now Denmark and South Sweden, archaeologists have found a series of Wikingerburgen, or Viking ring fortresses. The Ancient Aliens script-writers, Kaylan Eggert and Rich Monahan, wrote this about them:

1] They have identical construction, being a fortified ring enclosing a number of long-houses arranged in a characteristic pattern.

2] The design includes an internal cruciform wall, oriented precisely North-South-East-West.

3] The four main sites Trelleborg, Eskeholm, Fyrkat (which they mis-spell as Frykat) and Aggersborg are in a dead straight line stretching for 218 km across Sjælland, Jutland, and the Kattegat. Here's the line they drew:

Image credit: History Channel

Here's the result of my research with Wikimapia:Trelleborg is the most classic design, showing the main features very well, however the internal walls are not compass-aligned.

Fyrkat is better-aligned and does conform to the general plan:

Aggersborg, the most Northern site, has the look of being unfinished:

So what of the alignment between these widely-separated sites? This is how Google Earth sees it -- pretty damn good.

However, they cheated. They simply OMITTED the Wikingerburgen that didn't fit their story -- namely, Nonnebakken, the other Trelleborg, and Borgeby. Here's the real map of these sites:

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Not content with faking the data to that extent, they actually added a site which is not generally included as a Wikingerburg, and doesn't conform to the pattern -- Eskeholm, in a fjord on the island of Samsø. Here it is:

Fortified ring? Long houses? Cruciform walls? I don't think so...

Bring on the experts

So why, I'm sure you're already asking, is this blog taking an interest in Vikings? Just that one of the "world-class experts" commenting on this piece of flim-flam is none other than Mike Bara, who helpfully speculates "Perhaps they were able to fly" (at 24:35 in the Youtube video.) Yeah, Mike, or perhaps they had a 218 km long piece of string.

Has Mike Bara ever studied Scandinavian archaeology? No. Has Mike Bara been to Trelleborg, Eskeholm, Fyrkat and Aggersborg to study these places on the ground? I very much doubt it, just as I doubted that he's ever been to Aramu Muru in Peru, which he commented on in a previous ep of this anti-science, anti-truth series.

My question to the History Channel would be "What is this unemployed draftsman doing, commenting on subjects he knows nothing about?" They'd probably reply "Well, we were looking for someone who has no respect for the truth. We read Dark Mission and The Choice, and Mike seemed like just the man."

Review of Ken Johnston on Coast to Coast AM, Christmas night

2011-12-26T11:11:00.000-08:00

Ken Johnston (see this blog passim) turned up like an unwanted Christmas present on the night of December 25th, to trot out his well-rehearsed schtick accusing NASA of covering up the artifacts of a lunar civilization, and of summarily dismissing him from the all-volunteer Solar System Ambassador program. This time he added a counter-attack on James Oberg (joint founder of this blog) and a confirmation that yes, he did indeed get a bona fide Ph.D. from the Reform Baptist Theological Seminary. James Oberg has identified this place as a diploma mill, pointing out that the link to Ken's certificate online, http://bp1.blogger.com/_eaaXUONwoEA/R0RdX-3kHiI/AAAAAAAAAFs/IkbgSXOsH7g/s1600-h/Ken%27s_Doctor_of_Metaphysics_Deploma.jpg, rather ostentatiously mis-spells the word "diploma."

Last night, the audio quality of Ken's contributions was so atrocious that I can only assume Tommy Danheiser and Lisa Lyon were comatose beside empty bottles of egg nog and the remains of several turkeys. No sane and conscious radio producer would have allowed that rubbish to continue for more than 10 seconds. However, it was possible to grasp the gist of his accusation, with the help of two images posted on the C2C web site. The first was from the Russian lander Lunik 13.

Evidence of a lunar civilization, or part of the spacecraft? Step forward, please, Friar William of Occam, and bring your razor with you. Ken Johnston, as former Data Control Officer in the Lunar Receiving Lab in Houston, has no special expertise that would allow him to get away with claiming this is alien technology.

Now you see it, now you don't

        The second "incriminating" image was one this blog has commented on before. It's frame AS14-66-9301 from Apollo 14 lunar surface photography, shot by Commander Al Shepard, showing Lunar Module Pilot Ed Mitchell standing on the surface. Up in the sky, a blue flare is plainly seen and Ken Johnston either thinks it's a UFO (a "Blue Ship") or it's something suspended above the lunar surface (he appeared to hedge his bets by espousing both theories.)

        Well now. The Apollo 14 image library makes it plain, to those willing to accept the documented facts, that this was one frame from the third of three 360° panoramas shot by Al Shepard.

        The first pan encompassed frames AS14-66-9236 through 9252, the second was frames 9271 through 9290, and the third frames 9294 through 9316.

        Blue flares similar to that seen in 9301 are also visible in frames 9286, 9290 and 9295 (the latter is very pronounced.)

        Moreover, I can prove that the "Blue Ship" in 9301 isn't real. Because of overlap, the same portion of the sky appears in the previous frame, 9300. Here's 9301 with the blue flare marked (click to embiggen):

Here's 9300 with the marker in the identical position relative to the ground.

Presto-change-o! Blue flare gone in the second it took Shepard to swivel and click. You can perform the same trick with 9302, actually, but once is enough. So here are the questions that George Knapp ought to have asked (but didn't):

1) Ken, how can you possibly accuse NASA of "covering this evidence up," when the so-called evidence is right there on the NASA History web site?

2) If, as you say, this object is "suspended" then it represents a major hazard in the immediate vicinity of the landing site. Are you telling us that the astronauts knew nothing of it?

3) Why is the object not in frames 9300 and 9302? Why are similar flares in three other frames, showing different parts of the sky?

4) If your credentials as stated to Solar System Ambassadors were correct, why were details of your military service edited when Dark Mission was republished as a second edition? The first edition identified you as a jet fighter pilot with the US Marines, but the second edition merely stated that you "trained in" US Navy planes. (ref. James Oberg's comment to this post.)

Update:
I found another flare. This one's in the very first panorama frame, AS14-66-9236, and it's superimposed on the lunar surface, right by the shadow of the high-gain antenna. Explain that away, Ken!!!

Pay up or else

2011-12-24T08:35:00.000-08:00

As if Richard Hoagland's little corner of Facebookistan weren't entertaining enough this holiday season (see comments on the previous post here,) yesterday we got this priceless piece of pure comedy in response to somebody who asked when Moon With a View Part 7 would be forthcoming:

[W]e get many requests about this. Here is your answer. These articles have been published for free. If you want special attention focused on a particular area of research, you are welcome to fund the length of time necessary to complete the paper. Please write to enterprisemissionmail@yahoo.com if you are interested. If not, please be patient.

         The response was written by Robin Falkov the homeopathist (who also wrote, recently, "Measles does not kill" in defiance of extremely well-established medical knowledge.) However, I think we can safely assume that it has the approval of "The Big Man," as Hoagland once described himself on that very page.

        The Moon With a View series was started back in 2005, as a kind of homage to "my long-time friend, Arthur C. Clarke"(he probably worked in a reference to "my dear friend Carl Sagan" somewhere, too.) It concerns Iapetus, the moon of Saturn, and very predictably Hoagland comes up with a pseudo-argument that Iapetus's extraordinary equatorial ridge is the deliberate construction of a prior civilization. In way more words than necessary, Hoagland tells us that Iapetus, like Phobos, Hartley-2, Tempel-1, Vesta, Elenin, and YU₅₅, is a spaceship. Yet even more words were promised, as Part 7 "coming shortly."

        So Hoagland wants to be paid up front to tie up some loose ends on that web site, of which it has been said "The 1980s called. They want their HTML back." There's plenty to do and I suggest the following scale:

Moon With a View Part 7 : $12
Correcting the math in Von Braun's Secret Part 1: $2
Writing Von Braun's Secret Part3: $4
Writing The Bees' Needs Part 2: $4
Junking the whole site: $200

Phobos-Grunt, from Izvestiya

2011-12-08T09:09:00.001-08:00

James Oberg posts this rather rough translation of an article in Russian from Izvestiya. The translation by "Moskit" appeared on the NASA Spaceflight forum. If I'm doing my phonetics correctly, the author is Viktor Khartov, Lavochkin's General Director and General designer.

Every mission has three parameters: complexity, resources and risks. If we ask someone to send a complicated mission with little risk, it will involve huge resource. If you plan to send a mission to Mars in such a way, you would first test hardware on Earth orbit, then Lunar orbit, then model all aspects of the target mission. With F-G situation was a bit different - we did not fly to other planets for 25 years. There was a huge amount of new hardware without flight history. Practically only fuel tanks from Fregat were previously flown.

Project itself was very complex, with a large number of instruments and many algorithms. Maximum complexity and minimum resources translated to maximum risks.   It was decided the risk is ok to fly F-G. Apparently we stumbled right in the beginning of the flight. F-G flew well for two hours after the launch. It turned itself on, extended elements (solar panels), orientated to Sun and began to receive energy. It turned on all required hardware, and the Chinese satellite. It was all confirmed by telemetry. And then... it flew out of Russian zone of communication. Burn did not happen.   Our communication stations are designed for deep space and could not track fast-moving object in low orbit long enough to complete long link establishment procedures.

   In the beginning we could not target the satellite. It was tracked only by ground means, and position was inaccurate, calculated up to 6 degrees. That's why us, and European stations had to add modified antennas emitting wide beams. As a result we had a few sessions and received some telemetry.   It said that radio module works, link with onboard computer is up. Photos of on-orbit F-G showed that it was not tumbling, meaning Sun orientation module worked correctly.   We do not know when and why burn sequence was aborted. There could be many hypotheses, but fact is only one: F-G is Sun-orientated, onboard computer fulfills its function.   Logic says that when sequence is aborted, F-G will await commands from ground. Apparently it is still in that mode and we will continue attempts to make it alive.   As for the failure, there are many possibilities. For example it could be a programming error that could not be detected during modeling on Earth. Difference between model and real situation could be large enough to "stupify" computer.   It could have also been a hardware problem. Before we lost contact with F-G we enabled power to several modules, and theoretically damage during launch (?) might have caused problems with power supply.   But those are all working versions, official reason should be established by appropriate commission.

As far as we know the rocket worked nominally. However we think that launcher should have been chosen differently, not Zenit, but Proton, which could take F-G directly to required orbit. Then F-G could be turned on and verified module by module, new comms line would be tested, and trajectory corrections made.   Decision about launcher was taken in 90s, and project was based on that.   F-G was a sort of jumping forward (cavalry charge?) over 25 years gap. It was understood that risk was high, but imagine if it were a success! However it is necessary to work step by step, systematically. That's why we should go back to Lunar exploartion.

        I would not get fixated on F-G. We have many projects. This year we launched Electro-L, a new generation sat. Our Fregat boosters have done their job on 8 launches from 3 locations, with one more launch from each location by end of this year.

Update:

"Moskit" provides this translation of an article in an online journal. Author not known.

        670 seconds after launch F-G separated from the rocket. It worked correctly, but afterwards F-G survived only two hours. When station "saw" Sun it should move "head" towards it. This means two onboard Sun detectors worked correctly. One hour later sunny zone ended, and those two detectors stopped working. Shadow lasted for 30 minutes, and unexpectedly F-G came out of it facing away. We did not expect it, F-G should have kept Sun orientation while in the shadow. Detectors saw Sun again, and started rotating F-G once again, but soon link was lost.

        It seems that star detectors, that so many blamed failure on, never got a chance to operate. They should have been turned on 4 minutes after link was lost, but F-G stop giving sings of life earlier. Star detectors found on F-G are reliable, they work on 20 space objects for 10-12 years.
....

        F-G was not ready for the flight. Many saw that, and many told to the management that flight control system made by Lavotchkin was not ready. Specialists simply did not have enough time to complete complex software running the mission.

        People blame youngsters at Lavotchkin, but this is unfair - they did not have a chance to learn. 15 years ago when Mars-96 was launched, it was assembled in -5C (with -20C outside) in Baikonur, in a room with broken windows. These were not conditions... there was not even toilets. Spaceship failed right after launch due to booster malfunction - completely logical final.

        Today we see a birth of Russian space program practically from ashes, with all the growing pains. You should have seen glowing eyes of the young people working on F-G... they only recently began to be paid decently.

        If there will be repressions, all will be lost again.

Is Kerry Cassidy even more wrong than Hoagland & Bara?

2011-12-05T08:53:00.001-08:00

Make you own mind up. KC blogged this last Thursday:

Lastly, with regard to Elenin and YU55: all the Camelot whistleblower info with regard to both these so called asteroids is that they are and were CONTROLLED by someone. That means they are able to change course etc. The entire group of contacts Hoagland was dealing with---with regard to YU55 went black right after it was supposedly crossing our atmosphere. At the same time, Obama and the whole APEC conference was going on in Hawaii... Simultaneously, Hoagland's sources were seeing a SUBSTITUTION in the skies... with a metallic overlay, going along the original NASA trajectory. We were live on Livestream when this was happening. This is what his sources told him they were getting... All info on YU55 went black and then, a substitution appeared. According to Hoagland it wasn't even a good decoy... It was as if, those who are running YU55 wanted the scientists and white hats who were tracking it to KNOW they were being lied to... Where did the real craft go? Did it rendezvous with one of ours? Was there something on board being dropped off? All these are good questions but where are you going to get the answers? Listening to channelers who are as easily programmed as anyone else is not the answer.

Of course Hoagland looks like he's wrong if the people behind the scenes can change the game at any moment! And that goes for a lot of good people right now making bad predictions. Hoagland is following the clues and doing so meticulously and at great personal risk.

A few points:
        1. Elenin was not a "so called asteroid," it was a comet.
2. Neither body changed course.
        3. YU₅₅ never crossed our atmosphere and nobody ever said it would, not even RCH.
        4. President Obama did not get to the APEC conference until 4 days later.
        5. All info on the asteroid did not "go black" after the close approach.
        6. Hoagland is not, and never has been, meticulous.
        7. Hoagland's "great personal risk" is a self-aggrandizing fantasy.

        Hoagland doesn't just look like he's wrong, Kerry, he really is wrong. No "people behind the scenes" changed the latitude of the Port-au-Prince earthquake. It was 18.5°. When Hoagland said it was 19.5° he was simply lying. No "people behind the scenes" changed the propulsion technology of STS-133. It was H₂/O₂. When Hoagland said it was hyperdimensional torsion physics he was simply lying. I could go on.....

        Absolute proof that Kerry Cassidy is immune to logic and truth is contained in her wrap-up:

.... what resonates with your heart and spirit is where the truth is.. .not in superficial details that don't add up or painting a logic trail with a broad brush saying this is black and this is white.

New Age loonies apparently allow themselves the freedom to sense truth with their hearts and spirits. I guess to them the latitude of Port-au-Prince can be whatever "resonates." Too bad they have to live in the real world where latitudes are established facts, where their landlords demand real rent and their children demand real love, not the woo-woo kind that isn't worth second-hand toilet paper.

Fair use quotes from Kerry Cassidy/ Project Camelot Productions

Hoagland Grunt

2011-11-29T06:57:00.001-08:00

        "The symbology is running the show," stated Richard Hoagland during a very brief appearance on Coast to Coast AM on Monday night. Phobos-Grunt, he explained, was not out of control at all. Moscow Mission Control was merely waiting for the numerology to come right. The spacecraft would depart for Mars on Tuesday, 11/29/11—because 29 is just as good as 11, see?

        As we know, Hoagland's notion that space agencies wait for numerology, or for certain stars to achieve certain elevations, is entirely, tragically, irretrievably, mistaken. Of course, the dawn of 11/30/11 saw Phobos-Grunt still stuck in orbit.

        On Monday night, Hoagland also stated that the ESA antenna in Perth was no longer involved in the attempt to contact and/or command P-G. According to space.com Perth made another attempt to contact the spacecraft on Tuesday night. Must be the fault of Hoagland's now utterly discredited "sources."

        If Coast-to-Coast had any respect for its audience it would ban Hoagland for ever. However, it doesn't and it won't. Instead, it will give Hoagland and his sources three full hours to tell lies tonight. This blogpost will resume.....

/////////////=======\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

George Noory is SUCH A WIMP. He let Hoagland so far off the hook that the hook itself straightened out and apologized for ever having been a hook. I didn't expect an actual confrontation, but considering it was just 48 hours since Hoagland had said "The symbology is running the show," surely some powder-puff like "So what happened to that?" would have been appropriate?

But no. It immediately got worse. Hoagland was allowed to give himself a GLOBAL AND NON-EXPIRING FREE PASS, saying:

"I try not to lead people in the wrong direction by saying 'This will happen.' I almost never say something will happen. ... Just because we say something might be possible, or might have happened, we're not married to this idea. We could get new data tomorrow that would toss that idea out... "

Noory either said nothing or grunted his approval. Well, I'm better at prediction than Hoagland and I don't even claim to see the future. On the CoastGab forum last Sunday I offered this spoof preview of last night:

RCH: According to Roscosmos, the Russian/Chinese spacecraft Phobos-Grunt/Yinghuo-1 is now a dead loss, in a slowly decaying Earth orbit. But my sources tell me that we can expect a "convenient resurrection" some time in the next month, after which the spacecraft will be re-targeted to an asteroid -- the asteroid that was the secret destination all along!!! And what asteroid do you think that is, George?

Noory: Umm... I dunno Richard.

RCH: None other than YU55!!!

....and that's pretty much how the first dreary hour went. He even used the word 'resurrection.' Hoagland was highly troubled by the discrepancy between the Mars-departure windows of Phobos-Grunt and Mars Science Lab. "They should be the same," he complained, using that as phony evidence that the Russians never intended to go to Phobos. What he doesn't understand is the difference between MSL's one way journey and P-G's round trip. For the Russians, not only does Mars have to be accessible from Earth at departure, Earth has to be accessible for the sample return. In fact, real space scientists (as opposed to wannabees with scary hair) are saying that if P-G magically came to life today, it could still get there but the sample return would have to wait two years.

A Tragedy of Errors

What followed was a tour of Hoagland's previous mistakes, even reiterating that ridiculous pseudo-statistical "proof that Elenin was artificial" despite the fact that several people have told him his math is a joke (insert swift plug for the Awake & Aware DVD, "because you need to understand the background to this".) Another old favorite was also trotted out of the barn: Those crater chains on small solar-system bodies like Phobos are "weapons fire," from the Great Galactic War 65 million years ago. Oh, how we laughed at that one!!

Then a brand new fantasy: The USAF's X-37B space plane actually rendezvoused with YU55 and took hi-res images, which are due back on Earth in a couple of days. How did he know that? The Air Force Base in Colorado from whence X-37B is controlled was "lit up" on November 9th. Very persuasive -- not.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

But a sizable chunk of the second hour was devoted to the landing site of MSL/Curiosity in Gale crater, shown above in false color. Hoagland approves of this, and he correctly described the somewhat hair-raising landing procedure that's been forced on mission planners by Curiosity's 900 kg heft. He likes it because the central peak is, he told us, a tetrahedron (nonsense) and there are plenty of features that are unmistakable signs of civilization (balderdash.) Too bad it's nowhere near 19.5° latitude.

You could tell he was working toward some Grand Finale, and here it came (after about 5 very uninteresting phone calls): MSL is going to be a huge success. So huge, in fact, that it's going to force disclosure. Yes, folks -- 2012 is THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT!! Now where have I heard that before?.....

Update:

On C2C-AM 13th January 2012, in the News-snippets segment, Hoagland told us that Nazis in space had probably caused the failure of Phobos-Grunt.

Politics of the Branch Hoaglandian cult

2011-11-23T09:12:00.001-08:00

Are the Branch Hoaglandians right-wing by self-selection? It looks that way, from a few recent comments in Facebookistan. Somebody added this comment to a thread about the symbolic war crimes tribunal of George Bush and Tony Blair:

When are they going to have a War Crimes Tribunal for Hillarious Clinton, Obama and all their cronies?

Somebody else suggested it might be a good idea to send Nancy Pelosi off on an asteroid. Robin Falkov, the homeopathy doc, drew attention to a 60 Minutes segment on congressional corruption, also involving Pelosi. On the other hand, she's obviously rather taken with the OWS movimiento, so who knows?

I can't recall The Big Man (as Richard Hoagland once described himself) ever expressing flagrantly Republican views, but there's absolutely no doubt about his former co-author, university drop-out Mike Bara. As I blogged at the time, back in July 2010 there was a minor news story about the release by the University of Arizona HiRISE team of a new high-definition false color image of the so-called Face at Cydonia. Mike blogged about it on 3rd August, and out of all the science commentaries he could have chosen, he elected to focus on a piece in foxnews.com.

Usually, these linds[sic] of articles pop-up when NASA is about to release something new and interesting about Mars. It serves as a warning to anyone in science and academia not to start asking too many uncomfortable questions because they will be subsequently ridiculed.

So, the real issue here is; what’s coming up about Mars that NASA is worried about? We’ll see.

I waited 24 days before commenting, on the blog:

Do you truly, sincerely, believe that if NASA wished to issue a warning to the science community Fox News would be the medium of choice? I think that would take some explaining, since real scientists probably don’t even know that Fox News exists, let alone regularly consult its web outlet.

It’s now been a month since the release of that image. Nothing has “come up about Mars” that might worry anyone, least of all NASA. This is fatal to your thesis.

Mike riposted as follows:

As if I needed any more proof that you are a complete blithering idiot, the fact that you are obviously a democrat confirms it. Enjoy November.

That "blithering idiot" insult is getting a little over-used, I think. Roughly translated it means "someone who doesn't worship Richard Hoagland." But anyway, how the hell did he deduce that I'm a democrat? Was it my guess that planetary scientists don't get their science news from foxnews.com—is that what gave the game away? (Actually, it's far, far worse—I'm further left than anyone Mike Bara has ever met.)

Keep the gubbmint small!

I suppose it does make a certain sense, if you think about it, that people who believe that JPL scientists airbrush out little green men before releasing planetary images, also believe that Nancy Pelosi is a criminal. "Keep government out of our lives" is, after all, a slogan of the right. It's only we lefties who think that if society were unregulated the weak and disadvantaged elements would be totally shafted by the fat cats. Even worse than they are right now, I mean.

You don't have to look far on Keith Laney's Hidden Mission Forum—another internet enclave of Face-believers—to find anti-gubbmint thoughts (usually expressed in the grammar and spelling of ghetto teenagers.) So I think we can look forward to more loony politics from the disciples, as the American election season accelerates and there are fewer comets and asteroids around to accuse of being spaceships (although today's loony space headline, I notice, is PHOBOS GRUNT SABOTAGED: MISSION WAS DESTINED FOR YU₅₅ ALL ALONG. The disciples are lapping it up.)

More false claims by Hoagland

2011-11-17T08:51:00.001-08:00

At the conclusion of last night's Coast-to-Coast AM news segment, featuring "science adviser" Richard Hoagland, George Noory said "Richard C. Hoagland predicted this 30 years ago ... and he was right."

He was referring to this announcement about Europa, the icy-smooth moon of Jupiter. Earlier, on Faceboodle, Hoagland himself had said the same:

I will be on "Coast" tonight ... discussing NASA's latest announcement re "the apparent existence of LAKES, just under the surface ice of Europa, Jupiter's second major moon" -- and how this new data could impact the search for life in the much larger, still unconfirmed, "global oceans of Europa."

Thirty-two years ago, I scientifically predicted the existence of such a "global ocean" under the ice fields of Europa, and examined the possibilities for advanced biology.

This is far from being the first time Hoagland has boasted that he predicted, in a long, long article in Star and Sky Magazine in January 1980, not only the sub-surface oceans but also the possibility that they might harbor alien life-forms. He's mentioned it countless times on C2C and written about it on his amazingly retro web site.

So what's the truth? The truth is that George Noory was dead wrong. Hoagland did not predict what was announced yesterday in Nature online by Britney Schmidt, Wes Patterson, Don Blankenship, and Paul Schenk. Hoagland himself, in his FB post, managed not to be exactly wrong by means of very careful choice of language, but he was certainly, and intentionally, misleading.

Oceans and lakes

In fact, Schmidt et al's new model is not about the oceans Hoagland described in 1980. Technically, he was correct in writing that the ocean is "still unconfirmed," although it would be hard to find a planetary astronomer to dissent from this widely-accepted idea. The recent controversy has been over the thickness of the surface ice on Europa. A kilometer or so, or 30 km?¹ The answer matters a lot for exobiology, because under the thick-ice model it's hard to see how nutrients and energy could circulate. The new idea posits thick ice, but lakes inside the ice crust. And it's in those lakes, not the main ocean below, that the scientists now suggest life is a possibility.

Image Credit: Britney Schmidt/Dead Pixel FX/University of Texas at Austin

So Hoagland was adrift in writing about the search for life in the oceans.

What did he actually write back in 1980? Well, this, for example:

Primeval Jupiter, with a magnetic field significantly weaker than at present ... would have interacted with Europa in a manner highly reminiscent of the present Io situation: an intense several-million-ampere current, under high voltage, set up between both Europan poles and the conductive Jovian "photosphere" below. The result staggers the imagination.

Beyond heating the atmosphere above the poles this massive current would have led inexorably to a set of side effects unparalleled on Earth -- like brilliant night and day aurorae constantly aflame across the polar skies, potential discharge processes between the upper atmosphere and the surface of Europa, massive "superbolts" of lightning, even in clear air. And one more thing: An inescapable set of organic synthesis reactions between the major and minor constituents within this atmosphere!²

The million-amp current is a fiction. It doesn't exist, and it doesn't need to exist for biogenesis to have credibility. Sufficient energy to keep the ocean liquid is provided by tidal heating.

Hoagland recognized that fact when it came to the heart of the matter—his actual prediction of the global ocean and the possible life it might contain:

There, in the tidal calculations, was the provocative potential that beneath a thin, outer shell of ice, the bulk of Europa's planetary ocean was still ocean. It may not have frozen solid as Jupiter grew dim. The ever-present tidal forces from that immense planetary object, even at the distance of Europa, are capable of adding energy to the massive, frozen crust -- energy which, disspiated in the crust, maintain the bulk of that satellite-wide sea as liquid water!

If true, the continued existence of the solar system's deepest planetary ocean ... presents us with a staggering set of possibilities, including the independent evolution beyond those pre-organic chemicals and acids into the object of our centuries-long quest: the solar system's second world with life.³

Fine. Yes, he predicted it. What he didn't do, and still doesn't, and did not do last night on the radio, is to credit the numerous planetary scientists who had predicted it well before January 1980. The literature on Europa includes a paper by John S. Lewis from 1971⁴ making the same suggestion, and one by Cassen, Peale and Reynolds actually entitled "Is There Liquid Water on Europa?" from September 1979⁵. Hoagland's critics have pointed to the latter paper, which used closely similar language to the Star and Sky article, as a highly likely direct source. Hoagland acknowledged Cassen, Peale and Reynolds in his piece but made it seem as though only he, Richard C. Hoagland, had had the insight to interpret their work as meaning probable oceans and possible biology. That was not true.

As we know, Richard Hoagland, not actually being the scientist he claims to be, very seldom answers his critics. He prefers to ignore them and hope his know-it-all manner will get him by. Specifically on the question of precedence on Europa's ocean, the critics have included Gary Posner and Ralph Greenberg, and Hoagland has made an exception, answering that he never claimed to have been the first to make the prediction. Another critic, Phil Plait, has investigated that proposition and found it to be false.

In light of Hoagland's recent prevarications about Deepwater Horizon, Phobos, Vesta, Elenin, and YU55 (see numerous postings on this blog passim) nobody could honestly be surprised that this is another case of Hoagland preening in utter disregard for the truth.

========================================

Update:

Last night (17th November) Hoagland removed all doubt that he is still making false claims, posting in Facelandia:

[M]y late friend, Arthur C. Clark, graciously acknowledged in "2010" that the initial idea for "life in Europa's oceans"--

Came from ME. :)

Arthur C. Clarke (note correct spelling) was mistaken, as Ralph Greenberg noted ten years ago:

OnJune 19th and 20th, 1979, the conference "Life in the Universe" took place at NASA's Ames Research Center. Benton Clark gave a lecture [titled] Sulfur: Fountainhead of Life in the Universe...

Clark then explained how sulfur could play the role of oxygen, and that deep-sea volcanic emissions could potentially provide all the necessary ingredients for a self-sustained ecosystem. In the final part of his lecture, Clark raised the possibility that life might exist in undersurface oceans on the icy satellites in our Solar System, including Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto in particular.

There's more at the Greenberg and Plait links above.

========================================

1.Billings, Sandra E.; and Kattenhorn, Simon A. (2005). "The great thickness debate: Ice shell thickness models for Europa and comparisons with estimates based on flexure at ridges". Icarus 177 (2): 397–412. Bibcode 2005Icar..177..397B. doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2005.03.013

2. Star and Sky Magazine, January 1980, p.23

3. Star and Sky Magazine, January 1980, p.28

4. "Satellites of the Outer Planets: Their Physical and Chemical Nature." Icarus, vol.15, 1971.

5. Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 6, September 1979

In admiration of Gabrielle Giffords

2011-11-16T15:56:00.001-08:00

          Who could possibly not admire Congresswoman Giffords? Vivacious, dedicated, quick-witted, obviously intelligent, not afraid to let the public see some of the ups and downs of what recovering from a bullet to the brain looks like. She has life lessons for us all.

          I'm no neurologist, but it seems very possible to me that this shining personality will one day achieve more miracles in life and in politics. The only thing that's definite is that she will not be Vice-President of the USA next year. You'd have to be mad to think that.

          So what is this small rumination doing in a blog that exists to monitor pseudo-science? Only that Richard Hoagland predicted, on Coast-to-Coast AM back in April, that Gabrielle Giffords would be President Obama's choice as running mate in 2012.

          As I say, you'd have to be mad.

11:11 11/11/11: The Final Hoagland Fail

2011-11-12T07:12:00.001-08:00

Nothing happened.

One candle on Mike Bara's "I never said that!" cake

2011-11-10T08:03:00.001-08:00

          It's a year since Mike Bara was on Coast to Coast AM plugging his nauseatingly inaccurate book The Choice. That's when I called in to challenge his woefully wrong orbital mechanics. Mike point-blank refused to answer, calling me crazy and saying several times "I never said that" despite the fact that I was reading word-for-word from his book. George Noory, an official endorser of the book, protected Bara and cut me off.

          The blog Exposing PseudoAstronomy decided to mark this anniversary by recording a podcast with me, including the original call-in and my further comments. It runs around 42 min.

          ExPA honored my request to remain pseudonymous, although I did summarize my background (which, oddly enough, ran parallel to Richard Hoagland's for a few years before he stopped working and I didn't.) I'm not keen to fully reveal my identity because this blog is not about me, and it's not even about Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara personally. It's about the accuracy of what they publish and what they say in public lectures.

          Mike has called his critics "blithering idiot" (Phil Plait), "crazy" (me), "douche-bag," "idiot," and "moron." I don't believe I've ever used any insulting epithets to describe either of them. I guess I've mocked Mike Bara's life-style, because it's irresistible, but other than that I've tried to keep this blog to the content of what they say, not who they are.

          Personally, I don't think it's acceptable for an author to go on a radio show knowing that he is expected to field phone calls, and then refuse to answer a reasoned, non-hysterical, criticism from a caller. Neither do I think it's acceptable for the host of the show to endorse the book and then support the author's refusal. See what you think.

The asteroid and the pseudo-scientist: Massive, Epic, FAIL

2011-11-09T11:04:00.000-08:00

Richard Hoagland's cult followers constantly praise him for "thinking outside the box." Sometimes they compare him to famous lateral thinkers of history such as Nikola Tesla, without quite understanding that a) Tesla was a trained physicist and authentic genius, and b) Tesla was not a habitual liar.

Hoagland's thinking on asteroid 2005 YU₅₅ was so far out of the box that it lost sight of not only the box but the table the box usually stands on, the house the table is in, and the city the house is in. Is it possible to be more wrong about anything than Hoagland was about YU₅₅? I don't see how. This was an almighty, world class clanger that will resound for quite a while.

Recap

Back in June, at the problem-plagued Camelot teleconference (as this blog commented,) Hoagland introduced us to Elenin and YU₅₅. He got the dates of perihelion and closest approach to Earth almost correct but, inexplicably, told us that the asteroid would do its close pass "while we're all distracted by Elenin." A simple glance at the JPL animation of Elenin showed that, by the time YU₅₅ came by, Elenin would be outbound approaching the orbit of Mars, and not much of a distraction. He also noted that the FEMA national all-media alert exercise would take place on November 9th. Very true, but its connection to asteroids is non-existent.

During July, August and September he droned on for hours and hours about Elenin (see this blog here here here here and here. My goodness, I drone on almost as much as he does.) Not until October 21st did he turn his attention to YU₅₅. Here's an excerpt from Coast to Coast AM that night:

It's an object called YU₅₅.It's supposedly an asteroid—we've got Arecibo radar images which show that it's a weird asteroid. It's only about 400 feet across. That sounds small, but it's really huge for something like this. It's coming within 200,000 miles—85% of the distance to the Moon—on the night of November 8th and 9th. And it will safely pass by, we're told. However, there's something really weird. For one thing, it's spherical. It should not be spherical, George. These things should be splinters that are bashed and battered by four and a half billion years of meteorite strikes. This thing is almost as spherical as a beach ball. And—sitting down?—it's rotating once every 19.5 hours.

Some of that information was correct. However, it is not spherical. Its rotation period is 18 hours. He lied.

It's a spaceship -- of course!

He was obviously developing a theory that YU₅₅ was another intelligently-guided spaceship—the latest member of his fanciful set of astronomical objects. Phobos, Tempel-1, Hartley-2, Vesta, Elenin.

On November 5th he was on Internet radio with Francis Walsh, developing this theory, and he posted this to Facebollock the following day:

As promised on last night's radio interview with Francis Walsh, here (below) is the best Arecibo radar image I have been able to locate of YU55's LAST "fly-by" of Earth, in April, 2010 ... at ~1.5 MILLION miles ....The astonishing degree of "sphericity" (for a ~1300-foot-natural object) exhibited, the remarkable surface detail visible even in this low-resolution radar image, and low optical AND radar relfectivity of YU55 ... in addition to all the "numerical anomalies" associated with its currently PUBLISHED orbit -- all indicate that YU55 is NOT a "normal asteroid."

(This time he at least got the size of the damned thing right.) I have no idea what he meant by "numerical anomalies"and I doubt that he did either. But it apparently gave him an idea. "Let's see, how can I get more attention to myself and put the bejeesus up my faithful followers? Earth impact? No, maybe that's a bit much. Lunar impact? Yes, that'll do. We need to invent a course change." Back to FB:

YU55 CAN'T jump "sideways" by ~50,000 miles. :)This YU55 "course change" we're discussing ... happened back on September 11th ... when YU55 and Elenin were BOTH closest to the sun, on the SAME (crucial) day--~16 milliion miles apart, in direct alignment with the sun!The odds of that alone are over 48 MILLION to one ... AGAINST that being a simple "coincidence!!So, if the new trajectory (in our calculkations) is going to take YU55 as "close" as ~50,000 miles, it's STILL a TOTALLY safe trajectory ... in terms of an Earth impact. ... if this is going to happen (an impact ...), it will be with the MOON!--Creating the MOST amazing fireworks display the human race has EVER SEEN ... in modern history. :)So -- ENJOY!

.....and he followed up by advising the faithful to stock up on food, water and cash. No word on his own bulk purchase of kool-aid. He added this:

And, in another strange "coincidence," the President of the united States -- and half the leaders of the Western Hemisphere --just "happen" to be beginning an "Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference" in Oahu, Hawaii ,on this SAME date--November 9th!!

Totally untrue. The Economic Leaders Meeting won't happen until the weekend. Piling lie upon lie, he told the faithful that President Obama would be using the FEMA all-media alert exercise to address the nation.

Radio Days

I think we may safely surmise that during the first week of November Hoagland was beating the phone lines to every Coast to Coast AM producer he could think of, begging to be put on the air to get a wider audience for this balderdash. Showing highly uncharacteristic wisdom, they demurred, booking instead the planetary astronomer and asteroid specialist Daniel Durda for the night before closest approach. However, they allowed Hoagland into the news segment to talk briefly about lunar tourism.

Eyes must have been rolling in their sockets in the C2C studio as Hoagland said "Yes, but there's a breaking story I'd like to switch to..." and proceeded to tell the listening millions the biggest lie so far. He said that "two separate sources, one in Washington and the other in the intelligence community," had slipped him the news that an Atlas-Centaur was on the launch pad at Vandenburgh AFB, ready for a YU₅₅ intercept mission. Misquoting Hillaire Belloc:

Hoagland told such dreadful lies
They made one gasp and stretch one's eyes

It was the lie of a desperate man—desperate for attention and ready to spin any cock-and-bull story to get it. Totally, totally, untrue. Of course.

If he thought he might be invited on C2C to give a blow-by-blow commentary as the asteroid passed, last night, he was disappointed again. He had to settle for Project Camelot livestream, chronically out of focus and clearly frustrated by Kerry Cassidy's sophomoric interview technique. "Anonymous" has provided a short summary of the content, as a comment to the previous post on this blog. Thanks a lot, anon. I couldn't stand it for more than five minutes so I didn't hear the full horrible story. I see signs that some of the faithful are not quite as faithful as they were on Monday.

The Final Outcome

The asteroid didn't hit the Moon.
There was no intercept mission.
The FEMA alert exercise lasted all of 3 sec.
The President was not in Hawaii and did not address the nation.
The lie is different every time he opens his mouth.

The wisdom of Youtube commenters

2011-11-04T15:59:00.000-07:00

Youtube comments are not noted for their wisdom. Quite the opposite, in fact. But one of the many current Hoagland videos attracted this comment a few days ago:

Has anything Richard Hoagland predicted ever come true?

As far as I know, the answer is NO. Here's a partial checklist:

NASA will never resolve the Shuttle ECO fuel sensor problem using conventional engineering (Web page, December 9, 2007) WRONG
STS-125 will be canceled (C2C-AM, March 16, 2009) WRONG
Ares 1-X will never reach the launch pad (C2C-AM, October 16, 2009) WRONG
The EPSC conference in Rome in September will announce that Phobos is artificial (C2C and Facebook ad nauseam throughout the summer of 2010) WRONG
President Obama will make a Kennedy-style national commitment to a Mars mission (C2C-AM, May 26, 2010) WRONG
The failure of an ammonia pump on ISS will spell the end of the program (C2C-AM, August 15, 2010) WRONG
STS-133 will be powered by "torsion physics, etc. etc." (C2C-AM, December 2, 2010) WRONG
President Obama will be [insert verb indicating non-survival] at Ground Zero (FB, May 4, 2011) WRONG
YU₅₅ will do its close pass "while everyone's attention is distracted by Elenin" (Project Camelot pseudo-conference June 24, 2011) RIDICULOUS
Vesta will be clearly shown to be artificial when better resolution images are taken (FB, many times in July 2011) WRONG
Comet Elenin will deliver a message to humanity and entrain "something wonderful" (ad nauseam through several conferences, DVDs, and FB bulletins) WRONG

The forthcoming close pass of asteroid YU₅₅ has sent him into paroxysms of prediction. The fact that YU₅₅ and Elenin reached perihelion at approximately the same time has allowed him to speculate that, "in our calculations" (FB, November 3) YU₅₅ has changed course enough that it will impact the Moon. Considering that no information on the asteroid's trajectory has been available since perihelion, WHAT CALCULATIONS CAN HE POSSIBLY BE TALKING ABOUT??

Also, having (quite rightly) mocked the doom-sayers over Elenin as merchants of "fear porn," he does seem to be peddling something very similar himself now. Today he posted as follows:

Get prepared!

Extra food and water (think "preparing for a hurricane" ...), candles, medicines, etc.. etc. -- bought NOW -- will save a lot of aggrevation[sic] later ... IF this Event unfolds as the numbers say it will next Wednesday morning, before dawn .... :)

And,--a timely visit to an ATM now -- to withdraw some extra cash -- is also a VERY good thing to actually do.

"As the numbers say it will." WHAT FUCKING NUMBERS????

Update: Goldstone produced a new ephemeris yesterday, 6th November. So there are "the numbers," and they offer no support to Hoagland at all.

I'll be blogging more on this after YU₅₅ has not hit the Moon.

The forbidden number has been spoken!

2011-10-27T15:17:00.000-07:00

            In one of his recent mendacious presentations, Richard Hoagland insisted that the rotation period of asteroid 2005 YU₅₅ is 19.5 hours despite the fact that the JPL Small-Body database clearly indicates that it's 18.

            YU₅₅ is due to pass between us and the orbit of the Moon on November 8th. Hoagland stated that he had "a source at JPL" who told him that the rotation period was really 19.5 hours but they didn't want to state that publicly. He said something to the effect that, of course, JPL couldn't give voice to the magic hyperdimensional number.

            I wonder, therefore, how he reconciles that with the fact that the JPL database was not in the least shy about noting that Elenin's magnitude when first observed was — GASP! — 19.5. Or that its arrival at closest approach to Earth was 19:50, which everyone except RCH and the True Believers knows is really 19.83.

            Here's how thoroughly un-rigorous he is. When somebody asked him, on FaceBOO, why he was content to use UTC for the Elenin/Earth close approach but insisted that the Sri Lankan time zone was the appropriate bench mark for perihelion, he replied:

Have you ever heard the expression "consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds"?

The mere fact that he claims to have a JPL "source" tells you that he's lying again. I don't believe anyone at JPL has answered a message from Hoagland since the days when messages were attached to the legs of pigeons. Even Mike Bara, in his blog 5th May 2008, acknowledged that JPL was enemy territory.

This blog already chuckled over Hoagland's statement, during the Project Camelot videoconference disaster in June, that YU₅₅ will do its Lunar veronica WHILE EVERYONE'S ATTENTION IS DIVERTED TO ELENIN. I now doubt that many people will even remember what Elenin was by November 8th, let alone be diverted by it. The words damp squib come to mind when thinking about Elenin already. How appropriate for Guy Fawkes Day.

Elenin checklists

2011-10-22T08:03:00.001-07:00

For once Richard Hoagland has a certain amount of right on his side. To those who've been taunting him with "Boo, Elenin's passed us and the world didn't come to an end, there weren't even any fireworks!" he's been retorting that he never made prophecies of doom. On the contrary, he's been publicly mocking doom prophecies as "fear porn." And that is in fact perfectly true. However, his disclaimer went a little too far on FaceBOO late yesterday...

"I NEVER said "something" was going to happen!
My analysis has been TOTALLY about what the "numbers" tell us ... about what Elenin IS!"

        That's a definite lie. Many, many times he has said and written, quoting Arthur C. Clarke, "Something wonderful is coming." So here's my something-wonderful Elenin checklist:

Nothing at perihelion, 10th Sept.

Nothing at closest approach to Earth, 16th Oct.

Nothing on 20th Oct., when Hoagland proclaimed Elenin was at 90° to the Earth/Sun radius. Unless you count Linsday Lohan failing to turn up for community service. Funny how that young lady keeps popping up in connection with Hoagland's failures.

Nothing on 21st Oct., Hoagland's bullshit day just to give him a better chance of being right.

        As for "the numbers," this blog has already shown that they are completely spurious and without useful meaning. Stuart Robbins of Exposing PseudoAstronomy agrees.

The 99%
        Please, don't talk to me about the assassination of Ghaddafi, Richter scale 7 earthquakes in Tonga or announcements of the ending of a war (however much I may personally delight in the latter.) By definition, any event brought on by an astronomical phenomenon must be global in scope.

        That brings me to Hoagland's other Elenin hobby-horse, "consciousness raising." I don't really know what he means by that, but I assume it's close in meaning to "increased awareness." Here he is on FaceBOO again:

"You know VERY well I'm talking about "Occupy Wall Street" -- which BEGAN in New York City, Sunday, September 17, 2001, and has now -- in four SHORT weeks -- has spread to over 2000 CITIES around the world ... to say nothing of the countless "town, villages and hamlets" inbetween ....

EXACTLY when Elenin was 19.5 degrees to the Earth/sun line ...." (to be continued)

I hate to insert another checklist, but...

Anything going on in South America?
Anything going on in Russia?
Anything going on in China?
Anything going on in Mongolia?
Anything going on in Indonesia or Malaysia?

That's a mighty large piece of the planet, there.

No, Richard Hoagland's motives are all too plain when you look at how that last quote continued...

"....The signficance[sic] of which, in the model, you would KNOW--

IF you "bothered" to actually SEE the "Awake and Aware" presentation ... and knew WHAT I have been saying about Elenin!

        Only $10, folks, put your money right here... ka-CHINGGGGG!!

        And this, I sincerely hope, will be the last time I write the word Elenin. Now it's on to YU₅₅, which Hoagland lied about on C2C-AM last night (no, Richard, it's not rotating once every 19.5 hours.)

        He's a craven, money-grubbing liar.

NOVA plays it straight

2011-10-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

        The PBS science series NOVA had a good go at exobiology last night, with a two-hour special. I hope Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara were watching—they certainly would have learned a few things....

        Mike would have learned that solar system formation from a proto-planetary disk is not just the favorite model, but finding strong fresh support from study of the Orion nebula. Nobody who matters believes in the solar fission model he prefers.

        Hoagland would have been interested in some very fine artwork showing that the asteroid 25143 Itokawa is a loose accretion of material that's as much as 40% void. He might recall saying emphatically, when discussing Phobos, that "you can't have a natural object that's 30% hollow."

        They both would have learned that, although a Van Flandern-style massive impact on Mars is indeed possible, even likely, such events were not at all uncommon in the early solar system, and that all four of the rocky planets almost certainly experienced the same catastrophic fender-benders.

        Hoagland would have been disappointed that nobody credited him with being the first to publish the possibility of life under the surface of Europa, one of his oft-repeated claims. That's because the claim is a lie. Maybe he'd also have been chastened to discover that the volcanoes of Io are not in any way grouped at 19.5° latitude, as he has falsely claimed.

        I guess they'd both have been disappointed that nobody mentioned cities in the rings of Saturn, monument-building civilizations on Mars, or robot heads on the Moon. My God, these people didn't even mention 19.5 once. Clearly a cover-up by TPTB.

        FINDING LIFE BEYOND EARTH: Are We Alone? was Written, Produced and Directed by Oliver Twinch, Darlow Smithson Productions, London.

Review of Hoagland on Coast to Coast AM, 16 Oct: "The Magnitude is the Message"

2011-10-17T09:05:00.000-07:00

Rob Simone, last-minute host summoned from the bullpen to fill for George Knapp, definitely had the right idea. Just before the first break, at 13:30, he said this:

"When we come back we're going to find out if the inventors of this time capsule figured out a way to make it 19.5 magnitude, to fulfill the hyperdimensional model."

        It was the right idea because he was obviously groping for a way to expose Hoagland's totally invalid ex post facto reasoning. It is perfectly true that the first-observed apparent magnitude of Elenin was 19.5. Hoagland sees that figure pop out at him, and that's good enough for him. "We're off to the races," as he put it during a previous radio show. It simply doesn't occur to him that there is no conceivable way that an ancient civilization, sending this "time capsule" on its way 13,000 years ago, could have contrived for it to have that magnitude when first observed. They would have had no idea what our telescopes would be capable of in the year 2010, no idea how we would measure magnitude, nor whether anyone would happen to be looking in the right place in the sky at the precise moment that the magnitude had that value.

        Unfortuntely, Rob Simone didn't follow up after the break. He went off on another tack, asking whether anything was actually left of Elenin after the CME zapped it in September (Good question.) Neither did he pick up another spectacular example of post facto, much later in the show. Hoagland announced, as he also did during the Awake and Aware drivel-athon, that "Occupy Wall Street" had its beginnings on September 17th, when Elenin's position was 19.5° from the Earth-Sun radius (he didn't say how he measured that.) Then he added, "exactly in accordance with the model." But that's completely unacceptable rhetoric because the so-called model never made any such prediction.

Excuse me, I believe I was talking...
        The True Believers, the Branch Hoaglandians, are up in arms on Facebook today because they think Rob Simone dissed their idol. "He talked over Richard and never answered Richard's question," was a typical complaint. The truth is the exact converse. Hoagland interrupted Simone's questions at 20:30 and 26:30, talking over him loudly as he did with Robert Zubrin in May 2010. It's his way of dealing with anyone who isn't going to worship his theories.

        I heard the show as it went on the air, and I reviewed it again on Youtube in the not-so-cold light of day. To my ears, Hoagland came off like a raving, crazy, loony who's been hearing voices in his head and is trying to explain what they're saying because he's sure the message will save the world from destruction. Much of his material last night really did have the messianic touch to it.

        So what about this "time capsule" Hoagland claims Elenin actually is? It's never going to come any closer to us than it did yesterday, and there was no sign of a message. Hoagland, typically, hedged his bets on that. Here he was on FB early yesterday:

I think Elenin will NOT create any "space spectaculars"; that's not how "consciousness raising" works ....

The "student" has to REACH for truth and insight ... by, like, figuring out the OVERWHELMING "hyperdimensional message" of Elenin's simple appearance ... as it INVISIBLY complete's[sic] its "Hyperdimensional Mission ...."

        Overwhelming, eh Richard? Pardon my laughter.

        Any attempt to pin him down will certainly fail, and I give Rob Simone credit for even trying. The one concrete statement Hoagland has made, to my knowledge, on the "message of Elenin," is that the message is 19.5.

        In other words, the magnitude is the message. How unbelievably lame.

Update:Hoagland posted this at 16:30 PDT Oct. 17th:

George Noory may have me back on this week, to "make up" for the overt "rudeness" of his guest-host last night.

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to NOT have him on, as payback for his rudeness?

Mike Bara, historian, explains the Space Race

2011-10-13T08:31:00.000-07:00

        Ancient Aliens returned to the History Channel for a second season last night, featuring the error-prone Mike Bara, this time promoted as a historian. Perhaps they should rename the channel the "Wild Conjecture Channel" while the series is running.

        Mike luuuuurves being on the show because it hands him the greatest of all pick-up lines in the lounges of Las Vegas. Last season he was an anthropologist, giving us the benefit of his expertise on the Doorway of Aramu Muru in Peru. I wondered at the time whether Mike had ever actually been to Aramu Muru, or even to Peru. Now I'm wondering if he's ever been to anywhere in South America at all. Maybe. I'd ask him, but he never answers my e.

        Anyway, here he is explaining the Space Race, from an ep that hasn't aired yet:

"The whole Space Race almost seems like a joke ... the fact is there wasn't an American rocket program versus a Russian rocket program. We had a German rocket program. We didn't have an American rocket program."

        Well, there's a grain of truth in there to be sure, although it might come as a surprise to the American engineers at Convair and Glenn Martin who designed and built the Atlas and Titan ICBMs respectively (both of which also served to launch astronauts to Earth orbit in the pre-Saturn era.)

        But really, what on Earth persuaded the producers that Mike had expertise on rocketry? Didn't they know what a total cock-up he made of the Explorer 1 orbit in chapter 12 of The Choice? ("I won't bore you with the details, but that simply cannot happen." Oh yes it can, Mike, as long as you measure the orbit from the center of the Earth.... D'oh!!!)

        The production values of Ancient Aliens are actually pretty good. It looks like National Geographic. They do have some strange talking heads, though --George Noory on anti-gravity???? Then again, count the number of times the narrator says "Could it be....," "Is it possible...," or "What if..." and you'll understand that we aren't dealing in facts.

        No wonder Mike Bara fits so comfortably. He doesn't deal in facts much either.

And so modest, too....
        On Facebook Mike posted "Just watched myself on TV. What a stud." At least this time he didn't remind us what kind of car he drives.

Review of "Awake & Aware": Hoagland gets an F in math yet again

2011-10-10T08:42:00.000-07:00

        It isn't easy to talk for 3 h 20 m, but Richard Hoagland managed the feat at the Project Camelot Awake & Aware conference on Sept. 24th. He definitely has a talent for public speaking—too bad that what he speaketh is such unmitigated balderdash.

        The entire first hour was an amended version of the presentation at Leeds, using ex post facto reasoning to derive a completely spurious figure for the "odds against Comet Elenin being a natural object." This blog has already commented on the fallacy in that whole exposition. This version did away with the mistaken perihelion data and substituted something even more mistaken—another 19.5° angle.

        The new one was the angle between the direct line from Earth to Elenin at closest approach and the tangent to Earth's orbit. He asserts that the angle is 19.5° without saying how he measured it. He got his Grade F in math by then saying that the odds of that happening were 1 in 360/19.5 = 18.5. That calculation is, very simply, wrong. An error. A boo-boo. By that reasoning, the smaller the angle, the greater the odds against its occurrence. It is axiomatic that all possible angles should be equally likely.

        Speaking of "all possible angles," what if the angle were zero? Then Hoagland would find himself in a divide-by-zero error and his math would collapse like a house of cards. There's another problem, as if those weren't enough. That angle can in no circumstances be greater than 90°, so what is the figure 360 doing in the calculation in the first place?

        He made precisely the same error in relation to Elenin's orbital inclination—another component of his utterly ridiculous "1 in 264 billion" pseudo-calcuation.

A random comet
        He went on to completely misrepresent an objection posted to his Facebookery by Neville Parchemin. By Hoagland's report at A&A, Neville had protested that "you could do the same calculation with any number, there's nothing special about 19.5." That, however, is not what Neville wrote. Instead, he wrote that you could do the same calculation with any comet. Here he is, verbatim, from Facebook 10th September:

"RCH: Your exposition on the improbability of comet Elenin's parameters (C2C-AM, 08/29, hour 4) shows the exact converse of what you say it does. It demonstrates -- in so far as it has any validity at all -- that Elenin is no different from any other visiting comet.

Consider this:
ALL COMETS have first-observed magnitudes.
ALL COMETS reach perihelion on some specific date.
ALL COMETS arrive on some anniversary of some human event.
ALL COMETS reach closest approach to Earth at some specific time.
ALL COMETS have some orbital inclination.

It matters not what the actual figures are -- you could subject the parameters of any comet to the same pseudo-statistical analysis and come up with the same result. Odds in the tens of billions against that particular set of parameters occurring.

You have scored what in the game of soccer they call an "own goal."

Hoagland responded by going off into a total irrelevancy involving the fine structure constant, and threatening to ban Parchemin if he didn't toe the party line. Parchemin posted the next morning, as follows:

"RCH: Good morning. Yesterday you asked me to present a pseudo-statistical analysis of a different comet, following your methods as presented in Leeds and on C2C-AM for Elenin. The idea was to support my contention that any comet would have very adverse cumulative probability when several factors were combined. You also called me "dumb," which I took as a pretty good sign that you were running out of rational responses.

I now introduce you to Comet Lulin, "The Green Comet"

Discovered: Jul 11 2007
First-observed magnitude: 18.9
Probability of that magnitude (per your scale): 1 in 452

Perihelion: Jan 10 2009 (182 million km)
Probability of that date: 1 in 365

Anniversary: 89th of the Treaty of Versailles, ending WW1

Closest approach to Earth: Feb 24 2009 03:43 UTC (0.41 AU)
Probability of that time: 1 in 1440

Orbital inclination: 178.37°
Probability of that inclination: Following your method 360/178.37 = 2, although that is a totally invalid calculation.

CUMULATIVE PROBABILITY following your method: 452 x 365 x 89 x 1440 x 2 = 1 in 42 billion

Q.E.D."

        Guess what? Hoagland's response was to ban Neville Parchemin from the page.

"NASA is terrified"
        He actually said that, about 01:25 into his marathon speech. I was waiting for some shred of justification for the remark, or some explanation of how he knew this, but none came.

        What came instead was Hoagland out-Hoaglanding himself in sheer absurdity.

        He Powerpointed to the image of Elenin captured by the solar observatory STEREO-B on 2nd August. Very cute, with Orion in the background. Elenin is the bluish blob just left of Alnitak.

        But "cute" isn't what Hoagland thought when he saw this. Instead he wandered off into his well-known fantasy that NASA worships Orion. This, he declared, proves that the entire STEREO mission was designed to set up this alignment, making the photograph possible. Yes, the spacecraft, launched on 26th October 2006, secretly had this as its prime mission. Stereoscopic imagery of the Sun was merely a cover. Never mind that Elenin wasn't actually discovered until December last year.

        You're going to say I made this up, I know. Nobody could possibly be that mis-informed. Well, no, sorry. I ran the passage twice to be sure. He really said that. There were no cutaways of the audience, so I can't report how many people left at that point, shaking their heads muttering "well, he's bonkers."

Familiar territory
        The remaining hour and a half was devoted to a random selection of Powerpointery resurrected from previous conferences. The fantasy that the A in the Apollo mission patch stands for the Egyptian God Asar. The fallacy that Ken Johnston was Head of the Apollo photo archive and provided Hoagland & Bara with original photography from the Moon. The Accutron "experiments," which this blog has covered. President Obama's second swearing-in ceremony—another one of my favorites. Poppycock, balderdash, codswallop.

        Finally, lest readers be appalled that I spent $10 on this rubbish in order to review it, let me hasten to say that a back-door version exists, or did exist at the time. Quite possibly the A&A people have closed that door by now. Kudos to Chris Lopes for finding the way in.

Update: Looks like the back door has closed.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Kozyrev (1908-83)

2011-10-03T08:48:00.000-07:00

Today, one of the Hoagland cult on FB asked:

"[W]hy are there more Sun spots on the nothern[sic] hemisphere of the Sun than the Southern at this time?"

Of course, Richard Hoagland loves playing the part of the learned professor teaching his eager young students, even though he himself is devoid of a science education and has shown himself on many occasions to be essentially ignorant in any branch of science.

Be that as it may, he played the role as follows:

"Because, HD/torsion Physics is NOT equal in both hemipsheres[sic] of rotating planets/stars -- as Kozyrev demonstrated ~70 years ago, with his hemispherical experiments on Earth. :)

GREAT question .... :)"

        Hoagland quoting Kozyrev makes me giggle. A lot. Why? Because although poor old Kozyrev, in the Gulag from 1936-46 during what would otherwise have been the peak of his career, believed in torsion fields, he had a view of them that was totally in conflict with that of Hoagland & Bara.

        Those two rebarbative ignoramuses Hoagland & Bara loudly and frequently tell us that torsion energy is preferentially manifest in a rotating sphere at latitudes 19.5° north and south, and that torsion energy is entirely independent of electromagnetic fields. Kozyrev said that torsion energy increases with latitude, is most pronounced at the poles, and, yes, is stronger in the northern hemisphere of planet Earth than the southern.

        He reasoned that torsion fields follow magnetic fields, which are more concentrated at the poles. The north-south asymmetry he ascribed to greater oblateness of the northern hemisphere, leading to an extremely subtle increase in the gravitational field. Thus he linked torsion not only to electromagnetism but to gravity—a scandalous heresy in the Church of Hoagland/Bara. He should really be at least excommunicated and probably subjected to some posthumous Auto-da-Fé, if that is possible.

        Please note: KOZYREV HAD NOTHING WHATEVER TO SAY ABOUT ASYMMETRY OF THE SUN.

        More notes: The notion that Earth is more oblate in the northern hemisphere has been disproved by satellite measurement.

        Kozyrev maintained that the white areas at the poles of Mars were clouds, not surface ice.

        He performed a series of laboratory experiments that seemed to show changes in mass due to rotation, or effects of moving masses on nearby pendulums. These have all been discredited.

        So I guess we should welcome endorsement of Kozyrev. Boosting that victim of Stalin is, for Hoagland, self-disproving.

Further reading: Divine Cosmos, Chapter 1.

Mike Bara, physicist, explains the fast neutrinos

2011-09-23T10:54:00.000-07:00

Mike Bara read today's news about faster-than-C neutrinos and immediately tweeted "Dark Mission and The Choice have never been so relevant".

(Well, that's what he intended, but due to the 140-char limit he was cut off after "...have never...")

Oh yeah Mike? Like when (p.31) you wrote "astrology is a perfectly valid and defensible science"?

Like when you wrote (p.32) that centrifugal force pulls us toward the center of the Earth?

Like when you wrote (p.34) that the great difference between the closest and farthest Earth-Mars approaches is due to the eccentricity of Mars' orbit?

I could go on in the same vein for quite a while. Until Mike grasps some glimmer of understanding of physics he'd be well advised to stick to writing about pets, the subject of his next book.

Probabilities and nincompoops

2011-09-09T08:32:00.000-07:00

        Well, now we know why that fellow Mark Ward, attender at the Leeds Conference, exclaimed "Get this... the chances of the comet's data being naturally occuring coincidences is 44 billion to one!" He was citing Richard Hoagland's presentation on Comet Elenin, of course.

        While I was on my Spanish beach, on August 29th, Hoagland went through the pseudo-arithmetic that allowed him to make that claim, on Coast to Coast AM (hour 4.) He did it by cascading the probabilities of a given apparent magnitude, a given date of perihelion, a given anniversary, a given time of closest approach to Earth, and a given orbital inclination. Here are his figures. (CAUTION: Reading this may cause severe nausea and heart palpitation in anyone familiar with mathematics and/or statistical analysis. Proceed at your own risk.)

STEP 1: Apparent magnitude
        The first recorded magnitude, by Leonid Elenin himself, was 19.5. Oh, what a gift for the "theory" of hyperdimensional physics—even though, of course, an astronomical magnitude is totally irrelevant to an angle measured in degrees.

        Hoagland asks "WHAT ARE THE ODDS of a comet having this particular magnitude?" He answers himself "The brightest comet ever recorded had a magnitude of -17. The dimmest was +28.2. That's a range of 45.2. So the odds are 1 in 45.2."

STEP 2: Date of perihelion
        Hoagland still insists that the date is September 11th even though it's the 10th everywhere except Japan and Australia. He says the odds of that date occurring are 1 in 365.

STEP 3: Anniversary
        Even though he has the wrong date, he still insists that the attacks on 9/11/01 are important. He says that fact that this is not JUST ANY anniversary, but the tenth, allows him to factor in odds of 1 in 10.

STEP 4: Time of closest approach to Earth
        The time is 19:50 UTC on October 16th. Hoagland confuses the time of 19:50 with the decimal 19.5, but let that pass. He asks WHAT ARE THE ODDS of that particular time occurring and, multiplying 24 x 60, he arrives at 1 in 1440.

FINAL STEP: Orbital inclination
        Elenin's inclination is 1.84°. Hoagland figures the odds of that occurring are 360/1.84 or 1 in 195. (and of course he can't resist pointing out the magic 195 again.)

The odds are...
        Hoagland multiplies 45.2 x 365 x 10 x 1440 x 195 and arrives at 45,000,000,000. Stunning. Or not.

What's wrong with this picture?
        I feel sure many readers of this bloggery are ahead of me, and WAY ahead of Hoagland. Let's see what would happen if the figures were different. How about if the magnitude were 14.6, the date of perihelion were 3rd July, the anniversary were the 20th, the time of closest approach were 07:21 and the inclination were 2.02°?

Let's see... tap-tap-tap-tap... Oh, tens of billions.

        How about if the magnitude were -2.0, the date of perihelion were 10th June, the anniversary were the 21st, the time of closest approach were 21:21 and the inclination were 11.7°? Wow, tens of billions again.

        Hoagland has fallen slap bang into the ex post facto fallacy that so many other untrained and ignorant people have fallen into before him. This is like throwing snake eyes in a casino and claiming that your throw is unique in human history. It's true that you only have one chance in 36 of throwing that result, but the odds of the other 20 possible results are also long. WHATEVER you throw has a low probability—until you throw it, then the probability is 100%. Likewise, the parameters of Elenin have to have some values, and multiplying them out as though they were unique is going to yield nothing useful.

        Every single time someone throws a pair of dice, a long shot is pulled off, in other words. Using Hoagland's own perverse ideas, every single time a comet comes through, an event whose odds are 40 billion to one against also happens.

        Are you listening, Mark Ward? IT'S RUBBISH, MARK. HE'S A NINCOMPOOP AND YOU WASTED YOUR MONEY.

Vacation

2011-08-22T12:44:00.000-07:00

This blog is on a Spanish beach until mid-September.

Acronyms of the day: NASA, ALSEP, RTG & RCH

2011-08-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

        Say what you like about the science in the Apollo Program (and, let's face it, who doesn't?) but at least they tried. Dave Scott, CDR of Apollo 15, actually made his fingernails bleed with the effort of drilling a deep enough hole for the heat probe.

        The majority of the time of EVA-1 (Apollos 12-17 -- there really was no science on 11) was devoted to setting out an array of science instruments near the landing point. The instruments included seismometers, atmosphere and solar wind analysis, and a gravimeter, as well as the more famous laser retro-reflectors that are still being used today (albeit degraded by dust.) The kit and caboodle was known collectively as the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package—ALSEP. Electrical power that most of the instruments required was provided by a Pu₂₃₈-loaded Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator—RTG.

        Right out of the box, the RTG provided nearly 80 watts of power, but its oomph fell off quite steeply over time. The figure below is from page 4-47 of the official ALSEP Termination Report. It shows that after 63 lunations—five years— the Apollo 17 RTG had faded to 61% output and three instruments had already ceased to function. The Apollo 12 ALSEP, planted three years earlier, had declined to just 20 watts. Its design life was only a year (ref. p.2-16 of the same report.)

        In late 1977 the decision was taken to stop monitoring the telemetry. To turn ALSEP off, basically, except for passive experiments like the reflectors. Scientists Frank Press and Gary Latham protested, but were overruled. Not only was the ultimate life of the RTGs obviously in its terminal phase, but the room in Houston used for ALSEP data reception was badly needed for Skylab Ops. The cost of running the operation may also have been a consideration.

Turning off the Moon
        On 30th September 1977 ALSEP was switched off. It so happens that I was personally present on that occasion, covering it for television. The engineers invited Frank Press to poke the button that would complete the power-down sequence. He looked for a moment as if he'd refuse, but he finally steeled himself, stabbed at the button and turned away with a look of disgust.

A Pseudoscientist speaks
        Imagine my surprise, therefore, when on 6th October 2009—a full 32 years later!—I heard Richard Hoagland say on Coast to Coast AM that ALSEP seismometers would record the forthcoming impact of the LCROSS Centaur rocket. The notion that ALSEP was turned off in 1977 was, he announced, "another NASA lie."

        Editors at wikipedia noticed this too, and made a point of it on Hoagland's page. Yesterday the topic of lunar science came up in Facebooklandia, and Neville Parchemin asked Hoagland whether he had personally seen any ALSEP data since 1977. Hoagland replied quickly:

No, I said "in all likelihood [based on NASA's proven OTHER lies -- as documented in "Dark Mission"...] the ALSEP network -- especially the critical seismometers -- was NOT actually shut down on that highly publicised date in 1977"; if that is, indeed, the case, then why would there be ANY evidence in "the public domain" to contradict the official NASA statement re ALSEP's "budget termination" ...?

Incidentally, that Wikipedia entry has been TOTALLY edited (and re-edited) by NASA -- many times -- thus, it is full of outright lies about me ... AND my work. :)

        It's safe to decode that first part as "Actually I don't have any evidence whatsoever to support that ignorant and malicious allegation."

More paranoia
        As for the second part, the edit history of that wikipage is available for anyone to inspect, and it shows no official action by NASA at all. One editor works at NASA Goddard but specifically states that his wiki-activities are not wiki-official.

Out of power
        Bet you didn't think it could get any more ridiculous, didya? Well, stand by. Parchemin followed up by asking specifically what were the chances of the RTGs providing any useful power after the elapse of 40-odd years. Here's what RCH said about RTGs:

I looked into this (briefly), back in 2009, as LCROSS was approaching its impact with the Moon; I was wondering if "a still working ALSEP seismic network" could, secretly, provide unique data from the coming LCROSS impact (as well as the planned impacts of the two Japenese and Chinese lunar orbiting probes ...).

The case, in 2009 (if I remember the numbers correctly) was "marginal."But, of course, that's NOT counting on the capabilities of the "secret space program" to quietly REFUEL those ALSEP SNAP power systems, or even to emplace an entire new generation of sesimic (and other) sensors on the moon ... in the decades SINCE Apollo ....

SO MUCH is being hidden re the REAL space program, it's almost impossible to have a rational discussion on these points -- as Mike Bara and I point out repeatedly, with evidence, in "Dark Mission."

If you read that travesty of a book, Dark Mission, you'll discover that what he calls evidence is what most of us would call idle and paranoid conjecture. As for the RTG power being described as "marginal" 35 years after its design life had expired, that's just poppycock as usual.

"Whatever happens, I'm right" --Richard Hoagland, pseudoscientist

2011-08-16T08:32:00.000-07:00

In Facebookistan, Hoagland is already positioning himself for Elenin being a dud squib when the closest approach rolls around (16th October, 19:51 UTC.) Responding to a challenge from Aaron Harris, he wrote:

You're[sic] "position" on our mathematical calculations re the "artificiality" of Elenin are as intellectually pretentious as they are demonstrably ignorant of the fundamental process of the scientific method itself.

Sorry, but that's the way it is.

The most basic rule of the scientific process states:

"There are NO 'special places' in the Universe."

Translation:

The Laws of Physics work as well "a million light years from the Earth" ... as ON the Earth itself.

:

It is by using those ... UNIVERSAL LAWS of "gravitation" and "planetary motion" ... that we have PROVEN that the basic trajectory of Elenin has been, overwhelmingly--

ARTIFICIALLY CREATED!

Whether Elenin does ANYTHING on that artrificial trajectory ... beyond sailing through the inner solar system and returning to interstellar space ... is totally irrelevant to these fundamental questions:

Is Elenin an artificially DIRECTED object?

And--

Is there "intelligent life" somewhere beyond the Eearth ... which has SENT Elenin to us ... for some specific Reason?

Clearly, based on our analysis of its orbit alone ... the answer to BOTH questions is "yes!"

"What" Elenin may (or may NOT) "do" ON that artficial orbit, is a totally separate (and currently unknown) question ....
:
I really hope there are "fireworks" coming in September or October around Elenin ....

To be brutally honest (and selfish), if there are, it will make my life MUCH easier. :)

But, if there aren't ... that still WON'T change ONE IOTA the demonstrable, scientific FACT now that Elenin's orbit is,

irrevocably--

ARTIFICIAL!

Regradless[sic] of anyone's "opinion" ... including, Elenin's. :)

Stay tuned. :)

        That last swipe was in reference to somebody else reminding him that Leonid Elenin himself, a qualified mathematician and astronomer with access to professional instruments, has characterized the idea that the comet is artificial as "trash."

        I guess he's learned a bit since last year. In 2010 he spent the whole summer shrieking that the EPSC conference in Rome would prove him right about Phobos. Of course, it didn't—so now he's saying "Maybe nothing will happen in October, but I'll still be right."

        The key to this nonsense, of course, is that expression "based on our analysis of its orbit." Hoagland has not presented any such analysis except to the punters in Leeds who sat through four hours of his drivel. Neither, for that matter, has he produced any shred of evidence for his other current claim: the artificiality of Vesta.

        Not to worry—a "paper" on both topics will appear on the enterprisemission web site in two weeks. Probably accompanied by Part II of "The Bees' Needs," Part III of "Von Braun's Secret," and Part VII of "Moon With a View." Oh, plus a MAJOR PAPER on the Gulf Oil Spill, promised more than a year ago.

Rampant paranoia
        Hoagland, in the same thread, left us in no doubt of a) his own rampant paranoia, and b) his capacity for bare-faced lying to suit his case:

There were (and still are0 a few other scientists like us ... Dr. Thomas Van Flandern ... Dr. Bruce DePalma ... Dr. Gene Malloff .. who were ALSO "independently funded" in their research, and therefore could speak the truth.

And, to a man -- they have ALL been murdered.

As "they" tried also to do to ME ... twelve years ago.

        Now for the facts:

        Tom Van Flandern was employed by the United States Naval Observatory, not noted for its independence. He died of cancer. NOTE: In "Dark Mission," Hoagland accuses Van Flandern of treachery because he missed an opportunity to worship his (Hoagland's) theories.

        Bruce DePalma was undoubtedly an independent thinker. He died in New Zealand of alcoholism.

        Eugene Mallove (please note the correct spelling) was, like Hoagland himself, a science journalist and commentator rather than a scientist as such. UNLIKE Hoagland, he actually had some university education. He was murdered in 2004.

        In April 1999 Hoagland had a heart attack while campaigning for something-or-other in Miami. Not unusual for a 54-year old man, one might think.

        I hope you noticed that expression "scientists like us." Hoagland must be simultaneously channeling Albert Einstein and Henry VIII.

Wanted: Statistician. Must be willing to contemplate Hoagland-style nonsense

2011-08-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

I will definitely NOT be buying a DVD of Richard Hoagland's FOUR HOUR speech at the Leeds Exopolitics Conference yesterday. FOUR HOURS???? Merciful heavens, was anybody left in the audience when the marathon ended??

Somebody called Mark Ward evidently stuck it out, and was very, very impressed. He reported to Facebooklandia:

BRILLIANT SPEAKER! Get this... the chances of the comet's data being naturally occuring coincidences is 44 billion to one! Worth every penny of my money.......and then some.

        I can only suppose that the 44,000,000,000 to 1 number was arrived at by reckoning the chances of perihelion being on 9/11/11 AND closest approach to Earth being 19.5 UTC AND the period being 33,000 years. Let's leave aside that all three "facts" are wrong.

        I'm not a statistician, but isn't this the CLASSIC fallacy of post hoc reasoning? I mean, suppose you choose any three different parameters at random, wouldn't the chances be the same?

        And more generally, isn't the probability of any event happening at any specific time rather remote, UNTIL IT HAPPENS, then the probability becomes 100%?

        Answers, please. But don't bother telling the Branch Hoaglandian cult members. They are deaf to anything that does not fall directly from The Master's lips.

Who are you going to believe, Branch Hoaglandians?

2011-08-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

A: Three highly-trained scientists, who have been intimately involved in the Dawn mission throughout the Vesta encounter?

OR

B: A pseudo-scientist without any training in astronomy, geology, or geochemistry, who has not been anywhere near JPL for years, and who has a record of ridiculously false interpretation of planetary images (Phobos, Tempel 1, Mercury)?

Group A were at a JPL press conference today, showing further imagery of Vesta. A few points:

o Vesta is surprisingly dimorphic: Heavily cratered in the northern hemisphere, relatively smooth in the south.

o The very pronounced equatorial grooves may have been produced by a massive south-polar impact, strong enough to have caused compression of the entire body, followed by relaxation.

o Landslides on the walls of deep craters are surprising — not only because of the very small gravitational field but because of light/dark streaking which is currently unexplained. Likewise some scattered dark spots outside craters.

o A preliminary look by the VIR shows very variable chemistry over the surface, which will be available for further study as the spacecraft drops into lower orbit.

Group B (Hoagland, as ever was) has been proclaiming ever since the first images of Vesta that there are "unmistakable" ruins of cities all over the surface. He says he sees straight lines, 90° angles, and grid patterns all of which can only be the work of a city-building civilization. Conspicuously absent from his FB ravings on the subject have been images to support that claim. Apparently he's saving those for the fee-paying customers at the Leeds Exopolitics Conference.

In an internet radio show with Howard Hughes late last week, Hoagland slam-hyped his own appearance at the Leeds meeting, promising...

o This is going to change EVERYTHING
o These images are MIND-BOGGLING
o This will CHANGE OUR LIVES FOR EVER
o I'm going to present A REVOLUTION
o Disclosure IS UNDER WAY

Well, we'll see about that, won't we?

Hoagland also claimed several times that the JPL press conference had been re-scheduled from 14:00 to 12:00 EDT because the artificial features on Vesta would be announced, and they wanted to be sure of getting the lead on the evening's TV network news.

Well, we'll see about that too, won't we?

Update 1: Hoagland has now commented, on FB.

Calling Vesta a "planet" and ... "a world" ... MAY make the Evening News ....

Stay tuned.

They're STILL in "drip ... drip ... drip" mode. :)

The geometric/artificial features on Vesta that we KNOW are there (which wewre not shown or commented on AT ALL ...) are NOT going away; time and time again Russell (the chief scientist) said-- "We need to wait for the HIGH-resolution images ...."

Translation:

"We can't AGREE [on the Team] what the hell these things are! So, we need MUCH BETTER images ... before we're going to say ANYTHING in public!"

They were OBVIOUSLY "buying time" .... And, DELIBERATELY "burying" this Vesta data under the "debt-ceiling news."

As I said a couple days ago .... :)

This is classic Hoagland-twist. If they say what he predicted, it's "SEE I WAS RIGHT, NYAA NYAAA." If they don't it's "They were OBVIOUSLY buying time and DELIBERATELY burying Vesta data. JUST LIKE I SAID NYAAA NYAAA"

Except, that's NOT what he said. If this makes the network news before 1st commercial break I'll eat my scale model of Phobos.

Update 2:
Well, my papier-mâché Phobos is safe. Not a whisper of this on network news, as far as I can tell. As usual, Hoagland was wrong, wrong, wrong.

This is such a shame. There's plenty of real science interest in what Dawn is doing. Richard Hoagland, because of his eloquence, has the attention of thousands of inquisitive young minds. Instead of leading them to the real story, he's teaching them that everyone in NASA is a liar, and a press conference can mean whatever you want it to mean "if you know what to look for."

"Facts, schmacts" -- R.C. Hoagland

2011-07-25T08:59:00.000-07:00

Early today Richard Hoagland gave us all a clue to his thinking, posting this on FB:

It's a serious problem with a LOT of folks (some of whom even post here ...) :)

They think that "facts" are of prime importance in solving problems. As you already know, Eintein[sic] believed -- with EXCELLENT reason --that "imagination" was Humanity's only REAL salvation--

As a spur to finding out NEW facts!

Without which, we are simply robots "going through the motions" .... :)

Hoagland's invention of "science without facts" would be impressive if it had been productive. As it goes, though, in 39 years he's produced two books both of which are riddled with errors and false assumptions, one really dreadful web site (which has now lain fallow and unloved for more than a year,) and about ten conference presentations, similarly error-strewn.

Hoagland gets it wrong five ways

2011-07-21T10:28:00.000-07:00

        Another two hours of Coast to Coast's so-called science adviser last night, and he managed to cram in more falsehoods than facts.

        He insisted, as he has been doing to his faithful disciples in Facebookistan for many days, that he sees geometric forms on the latest image of Vesta sent back by the Dawn ion-propelled space explorer. It does not seem to concern the faithful that he has yet to show one single example of what he's pretending to see. At one point he wrote on FB about seeing 90° angles, but backed off when he was reminded that angles are not what they seem on a photograph of a sphere.

Fact: There is not the slightest evidence of any such geometry.

        He remarked that perhaps this photo-sequence (only in its very early stages now) represents "NASA being honest at last," noting that NASA has never before released space images in .tiff format.

Fact: .tiffs of the entire JSC photo archive have been available for at least a decade. Images from the HiRISE telescope orbiting Mars are available in .jp2 format which is equivalent.

        Moving on to the tiny long-period comet C/2010 X1, known as Elenin after its discoverer, Hoagland insisted again that "the numbers" prove Elenin has a special message for us.

        He reiterated that Elenin's perihelion will occur on the very significant date of September 11th. He allowed that "there's some controversy" since if you're in Greenwich it will be September 10th, but he emphasized that it will be the 11th in India and Sri Lanka, the country in which Arthur C. Clarke wrote Rendezvous with Rama.

Fact: The time is given in the official JPL database as 2011-Sep-10.71930992. This means "Sept. 10 plus .71930992 of a day." 24 x .71930992 = 17.2632 so it's 17h plus .2632 of an hour UTC (same as GMT.) .2632 x 60 = 16 so the official time is 17.16. September 10th, NOT ONLY IN GREENWICH but anywhere in Europe, Africa, the Middle East or the Americas.

The time in Sri Lanka will be 22.46. Still September 10th. What Arthur Clarke wrote and where is totally irrelevant. Astronomers use UTC.

        Hoagland dug himself deeper by proclaiming triumphantly that Elenin's closest approach to Earth will be at the hyperdimensionally magic hour of 19.5, and this time he didn't insist on shifting the time zone to somewhere his favorite author wrote something vaguely relevant 50 years ago. UTC suited his daft theory just fine.

Fact: The time is 19:51 UTC (see "close-approach data" at the foot of the JPL database page.) 19:51 in decimal would be 19.85.

        It all added up, he said breathlessly, to the obvious fact that Elenin has a message that will save the world. We should listen on radio (he didn't say what frequency) for this message from 13,000 years ago.

Fact: Unmitigated poppycock.

It had to be said

2011-07-13T12:36:00.000-07:00

James Concannon in Facebook:

I'm frankly amazed that there are so many people with this mind-set that NASA/JPL/MSSS/Univ Ariz routinely withhold images and/or doctor them if they are "too interesting."

I blame Richard Hoagland. He has such a gift for persuasive speaking and he has tragically misapplied that gift in the service of his own personal anti-NASA paranoia. He could have been a wonderful teacher if only he had not decided that controversy sells books and videos.

This is my answer to those who say he's a harmless entertainer. The harm lies in the distortions of the truth that we now know he infects young minds with.

Don Davis added:

The sad thing is an unknown percentage of young people use the web for research instead of going to libraries like they should. The web's content is seriously diluted in quality by whackos with agendas, and can best be filtered by people who have already learned about the subjects using primarily off line sources like journals and books.

Many are misled by charlatans posturing as authorities and will either have to unlearn the conspiracy nonsense or remain marginalized with little prospects of contributing to our body of knowledge.

Cometary flim-flam

2011-07-03T09:54:00.000-07:00

REVIEW OF PROJECT CAMELOT ELENIN VIDEOCONFERENCE 24TH JUNE

        On Coast-to-Coast AM, 30 June/1 July, Richard Hoagland announced that comet Elenin is "under intelligent control—and I wouldn't say that if I didn't have the numbers to back it up."

        Elenin, properly known as C/2010 X1, was discovered in December 2010 by the Russian mathematician/astronomer Leonid Elenin. Its diameter is about 4km and (notwithstanding certain hysterical New Age loonies) it is NOT Nibiru, NOT a brown dwarf, and NOT a collision threat to our planet.

        So does Hoagland have the numbers to back up his extraordinary claim? Since he stopped updating his ridiculous web site about 18 months ago, and his contributions to his Facebook page are mainly confined to paranoid accusations about anyone who questions him, you have to pay to find out about those numbers.

        So the first number you have to come up with is $33—the cost of a password to the Project Camelot Elenin Videoconference, held on 24th June. Hoagland was one of 6 participants, and held the stage for about 25 minutes, showing various stages of the excellent animation of Elenin's pass through the inner solar system provided by JPL. Since he developed a series of key moments, and got most of the facts wrong, let's take it stage by stage:

Hoagland's version:
        There's dispute about whether Elenin's orbit is hyperbolic or elliptical (in other words, whether it's a one-time visitor or a long-period comet.) JPL says it's hyperbolic. Elenin himself says its period is 13,000 years, HALF THE PERIOD OF THE EARTH'S PRECESSION, THUS CONNECTING IT WITH THE MAYAN LONG-COUNT CALENDAR and the 2012 transformation, etc. etc. These conflicting views are "political."

The real facts:
        There may have been conflicting ideas when he spoke on June 24th, but now that more observations have been made, the consensus is that Elenin's orbit is hyperbolic as it approaches perihelion, but will become elliptical with a period of 11,750 years. The Earth's precession is not 26,000 years but 25,800 years. Half of that is 12,900.

        The "dispute" about the orbit, if it ever existed, was technical, not political.

Hoagland's version:
        Elenin will first cross Earth's orbit on August 2nd, and be close to the solar observation spacecraft STEREO B.

The real facts:
        Aug 2nd may be correct for that event. Aug 3rd is more likely. Small point.

Hoagland's version:
        Elenin's closest approach to the Sun (0.482 AU) will occur on the HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT DATE of September 11th.

The real facts:
        The figure 0.482 AU is correct but this event will occur on Sept 10th, not 11th. In any case, 9/11 has significance for the USA and perhaps for Saudi Arabia. The rest of the world does not especially mark it. Hoagland's analysis is ridiculously americocentric.

Hoagland's version:
        On November 8th/9th, a small asteroid designated 2005 YU₅₅ will pass within the Moon's orbit, about 325,000 km from Earth. Nov 9th is also the date of the national FEMA public-alert exercise involving all broadcast media. So, WHILE EVERYONE'S ATTENTION IS DIVERTED TO ELENIN, is some catastrophe planned by SOMEONE?

The real facts:
        This analysis is even more flagrantly americocentric. The rest of the world won't give a rat's ass about the FEMA exercise. As for EVERYONE'S ATTENTION DIVERTED, by Nov 9th Elenin will be headed rapidly away from Earth, by then approaching the orbit of Mars. A close pass by 2005 YU₅₅ is likely to get much more attention—although if you read the wikipedia page you'll see that it's no longer on the Sentry risk table.

Hoagland's version:
        On the highly significant date 11/11/11, Elenin will be in exact alignment with Earth, Mercury and Venus. This is too coincidental not to have been contrived by an intelligence.

The real facts:
        If you run the JPL animation forward, the alignment does seem to occur. But how exact is exact? And how significant is a date that's written in an invented notation? Ask any astronomer—planetary alignments happen all the time.

Don't answer that!
        Speaking of astronomers, somebody asked on Facebook why there were no astronomers on the videoconference panel. To which Hoagland replied "What do you think I am?" I could have sworn I heard laughter, but that must have been in my imagination

The Usual Poppycock
        So the "science adviser" of C2C has once more made a sensational, attention-seeking statement that's about as far from being scientific as can be imagined. And once more, the producers of the show couldn't care less. As long as it keeps people buying gold bars and emergency food.

        And finally, if regular readers of this blog are aghast that I would pay $33 to obtain this dubious information, FEAR NOT!! A pirate version is now online.

Mike Bara has a wet dream too

2011-06-11T08:15:00.000-07:00

        So, OK—maybe there was a little doubt that Hoagland endorsed George Noory's "oceans and oceans" howler, but Mike Bara leaves us in no doubt about his failure to comprehend the melt inclusion study. It's in gray and white, in his blog for this week:

"[T]he Moon contains as much water as the Earth"

...and a little later...

"The Moon’s internal composition is exactly the same as Earth’s"

        ...both of which statements might be described as balderdash, poppycock, or codswallop, take your pick.

        Bara extends his already laughable misunderstanding to the utterly hilarious point of claiming that this study supports Tom Van Flandern's solar fission hypothesis, according to which the Sun formed first then flung the planets off into orbit, as opposed to the story which is confirmed by thousands of observations—a shrinking and fragmenting proto-planetary disk, most of which slowly accreted into planets.

        IF what Mike wrote were true—that "the Moon contains as much water as the Earth"—it would indeed be a stunner, but not because it would support solar fission. It would be unexplainable because all the water should have boiled away during the WHAM-O that broke the proto-moon out of the Pacific basin.

        Of course, it is emphatically NOT the case that there are subterranean oceans on the Moon. May I explain one more time for the benefit of the slower members of the class (that's you, Hoagland & Bara):

MICROSCOPIC INCLUSIONS IN LUNAR MAGMA CONTAIN WATER THAT WAS SEALED IN, AND PREVENTED FROM EVAPORATING DURING THE BIG WHAMMY. THE WATER CONCENTRATION IS LIKE THAT IN EARTH'S UPPER MANTLE -- 1000 TIMES LESS THAN TYPICAL POTTING SOIL.

SEE THAT WORD MICROSCOPIC?? IT MEANS THAT ALTHOUGH THE CONCENTRATION CAN BE MEASURED (WITH GREAT DIFFICULTY, I MIGHT ADD) WE STILL HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE TOTAL QUANTITY OF WATER IS. The LARGEST of these inclusions is 30 microns across—about half the thickness of a human hair.

        Writing that the Moon’s internal composition is exactly the same as Earth’s is like taking a sample of the Sahara Desert from a cup of mint tea on a café table in Timbuktu.

        Minor point — Bara writes that 615 to 1,410 ppm is "about 100 times higher than previous studies of lunar magma had suggested." It's actually more like ten or twenty times.

Double strike
        I have nothing against Tom Van Flandern. He had an inventive mind, and at least (unlike Hoagland & Bara) his eccentric ideas had some connection to actual observation. He also had a Ph.D. in astronomy, whereas Hoagland & Bara are entirely untrained in the subject. However, as attentive readers of this blog already know, the other piece of astronomy news that turned up last month was a severe setback to Van Flandern's picture of the evolution of Mars by massive bombardment.

        Bara ends his blog scoring as follows: Van Flandern 1, Mainstream NASA types 0. The true score is Van Flandern 0, Modern science 2. Hoagland & Bara aren't even in the game.

Hoagland's wet dream

2011-05-26T12:17:00.000-07:00

Richard Hoagland was invited for the first hour of Coast to Coast AM last night, primarily to mark the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's "I believe this nation should commit itself..." speech to Congress. Surprise, surprise, he was half right about Kennedy. JFK really was rather keen on a joint US/USSR Moon program. The other half—that he was assassinated for that reason—is the usual rubbish, for reasons this blog has already explained.

In the second half-hour, however, he was ignoring the truth as usual, mis-reporting two recent findings in planetary science. His versions of these stories were SO wrong that one wonders if he was paying any attention to his sources at all.

Beachfront property on the Moon?
To quote the C2C program summary verbatim, he said this:

"the moon has as much water inside it as the Earth has in its oceans."

        Yes, he did, he really did. So, let's see: Volume of the oceans is about 1.3 x 10⁹ km³. That means the planet is 1 part in about 850 water. Volume of the Moon is 2.2 x 10¹⁰ km³. If what Hoagland said were really true, old devil Moon would be 1 part in 17 water. Those Apollo astronauts would have needed waders, not lunar boots, to get around.

        So what was the real story on lunar water? It was a Science Express article by Erik H. Hauri et al. titled "High Pre-Eruptive Water Contents Preserved in Lunar Melt Inclusions." The discovery was microscopic melt inclusions in some Apollo 17 samples which originated from volcanic eruptions, and so came from deep down. The proportion of water was from 615 to 1410 ppm (cf. lunar volcanic glasses <= 50 ppm.) This is comparable with upper mantle rocks on Earth, and the point is that these inclusions are tightly sealed so that water would not escape even at volcanic temperatures (and, perhaps more to the point, the kind of temperature that would be generated by the impact theory of the Moon's origin.) Note the word microscopic in the above explanation. It does not mean that waves are crashing on beaches in the Sea of Tranquility. Hoagland is utterly, totally, spectacularly, WRONG.

Mars as an embryo
        The second story he got wrong was a report in the May 26th Nature by Nicolas Dauphas at the University of Chicago and Ali Pourmand at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science, "Hf–W–Th evidence for rapid growth of Mars and its status as a planetary embryo." This was a highly sophisticated isotope ratio analysis of martian meteorites, showing that Mars probably accreted from proto-planetary dust in as little as two to four million years, as compared with 50 to 100 million for the other terrestrial planets. That would explain its small size, and would class it as a so-called embryo planet (I'm more used to the term planetismal.) Science Daily has a good summary here.

        Hoagland somehow managed to force this news to confirm one of his hobby-horse theories, borrowed from Tom Van Flandern (with acknowledgement)—that Mars was once the moon of Planet X. It goes without saying that absolutely nothing in the work of Dauphas and Pourmand supports this or even so much as mentions it in passing.

        Two more colossal boo-boos by Coast to Coast. And they don't give a shit, of course.

Update:
        Hoagland turned up on C2C again last night, 15th June, and clarified his wet dream — somewhat. He said Moon and Earth have the same amount of water but "pound for pound. That's what got some people confused." Maybe he was thinking of his former co-author as one of the confused.

        He went on to say that he estimated the total quantity as "about the size of a lake like the Caspian Sea." Well, I don't know where he got that from, but we have to applaud the steady climb-down from "as much as all the oceans" to "the Caribbean Sea" to "the Caspian." He still thinks it's all accessible to future lunar colonists, though, and that's still WRONG WRONG WRONG.

He’s just a sad, broken man who has lost his way

2011-05-20T08:38:00.000-07:00

That phrase from Mike Bara's blog this week was the first thing that jumped out at me, and I thought "Tut-tut, Mike, that's no way to talk about your former co-author." Then I realized that for the second time he was matching wits with Prof Stephen Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA, Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, author of six popular books and Einstein-knows-how-many research papers.

The contrast between the erudite cosmologist and the drop-out from Seattle Pacific Uni is certainly striking. But our Mike is far from intimidated. In his 2010 piece he wrote:

In my new book The Choice, I directly confront the arrogance which Hawking so perfectly displays in “The Grand Design,” and I utterly destroy the foundations upon which his declarations are built.

This week, he was equally arrogant, if not more so:

In my new book The Choice, I put scientific materialism to shame. There is no randomness in the Universe. There is substantive proof that the “laws of physics” which Hawking puts so much faith into, simply don’t exist. There is overwhelming proof of a new, little understood theory of physics, Hyperdimensional physics, which can explain everything without having to move the goalposts even once. But that theory and the evidence supporting it MUST be denied by the scientific materialists, because once you introduce the idea of a higher level of existence, the 4th dimension, you must also acknowledge something far more threatening to the scientific materialists; God.

Overwhelming proof, eh Mike? Well, let's take a look at chapter 3 of The Choice and see how overwhelming this proof really is. Mike explains:

The name comes from the simple idea that everything we see and experience in this universe as energy actually originates from somewhere else—from outside our observable 3D realm.
::
[I]f you take a sphere—like ... a planet—and you rotate it, then you will pull energy from the higher state of the planet (the hyper-sphere) and that energy will preferentially upwell from inside the planet according to the geometry of a tetrahedron encased in a sphere, and appear at or around 19.5 degrees.

        So far no proof, just a rather strange assertion. His "proof" is on page 47, as he notes that this 19.5° energy is demonstrated by Neptune's Great Dark Spot, Jupiter's Great Red Spot, the erupting volcanoes of Jupiter's moon Io (he doesn't specify how many of the 400 volcanoes of Io,) Olympus Mons on Mars, and the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii.

        What do these features have in common? None of them are actually at 19.5° latitude (with the possible exception of a few Io volcanoes.) If he'd written Mauna Loa instead of Mauna Kea, he'd have got one right. That's not overwhelming proof. It's not even a little bit of proof. It doesn't explain everything. It doesn't even explain one thing properly.

        As for "utterly destroying" the foundations of physics, this blog has pointed out here, here and here that physics has utterly defeated Mike. He just doesn't understand.

Mike finds God, and someone else special
        Mike seems to have caught religion, the way other people catch flu. According to what he said during this podcast, his epiphany arrived along with the seductive dedicatee of The Choice, Alyssa Reid Leblanc. He hastened to assure us that it wasn't THAT KIND of epiphany, but there's photographic evidence that he hugged Alyssa a lot at one time. Sadly, Alyssa's Facebook profile reveals that The Choice is not among her favorite books.

        Curiously enough, it isn't on Stephen Hawking's list, either.

Update:
        Mike launched yet another attack on modern physics on May 20th (one day before The Rapture.) I posted a comment which is certain never to be seen on the Bara-blog:
=============================
"....their limited, three dimensional way of thinking."

Funnily enough, superstring theory gets almost as much ridicule as you and Hoagland do, because it posits 11 dimensions. Four dimensional physics is so common that it's probably taught in high school these days (I wouldn't know, personally.)

But the physicists of the world are sure to take note that they're being chastised by someone who believes:

- Annular eclipses occur when the Moon is unusually close to Earth
- Earth and Mars would remain at the same distance if the orbit of Mars were circular
- Satellite orbit discrepancy is measured by altitude above Earth, not the semi-major axis

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometers and Hyperdimensional Physics

2011-05-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

        Space Shuttle Endeavour gave us a beautiful sight yesterday, as it launched into cloud bank to begin its 16-day mission to ISS.

Photo: Trey Ratcliff, by permission
        Richard Hoagland, despite having no special knowledge of the event or any relevant information to share, was invited on Coast to Coast AM to update us.

        In default of relevant information, he decided to give us, instead, some irrelevant information:

"The really cool thing about this mission, which is what makes real what I said a couple of missions ago about a transition between Newtonian science and hyperdimensional physics—the main payload on this flight, 134, is the AMS—the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which is going to be attached to the Station permanently, and will be looking up into space as the Station whirls around the Earth every 90 minutes. And it is filled with all kinds of exquisite gadgetry—magnets, detectors, and all that—and they're actually expecting, George, they may actually find some fundamental new particles or aspects of the universe which would bring the day when hyperdimensional physics is public a little bit closer."

        AMS-02 is a particle physics experiment. The primary instrument is a cosmic ray detector, and over time its investigators, led by Samuel Ting of MIT, may gather information about dark matter, anti-matter, and the origin of the universe. Nothing whatsoever to do with hyperdimensional physics.

        I hope Dr Ting wasn't listening to C2C last night. If he was he'd have bust a blood vessel on hearing that the instrument he spent 16 years developing was destined to help an uneducated pseudo-scientist prove a wholly ficticious point.

Transition my ass
        Hoagland has a remarkably selective memory, as we know. He regularly "forgets" his unsuccessful predictions (there are no successful ones, actually) and omits to credit the work of others even when such work is copyright. What he actually said, on 2nd December 2010, was that from STS-133 on the Shuttle itself would be powered by torsion energy. In that, it goes without saying, he was WRONG AGAIN. Last night's mini-performance was very much worse than useless, in that the so-called science adviser imparted information that was not only unscientific but totally misleading. Shame on George Noory and Lisa Lyon. Their contempt for their audience gets worse and worse.

An experimental protocol

2011-05-10T12:26:00.000-07:00

James Concannon contributes today's bloggery:

Not long ago, Richard Hoagland proposed carrying out another "experiment" with his Accutron equipment, testing whether the planetary alignment due later this year induces a measurable "torsion field," as he claimed happened during the Venus transit of 8th June 2004 (and at other occasions too, but the Venus transit is the only one he's ever attempted to document.) He asked for suggestions on how to improve his experimental protocol, which had been criticized (by me, inter alia.)

His experimental setup can be seen here. A Microset™ precision timer and its ancillary software are used to monitor fluctuations in the frequency of the tuning fork inside a precision wristwatch. The claimed Venus transit result can be seen here.

The problems I see with this claim are as follows:

- He made no specific prediction
- There was no baseline and no control
- The first frequency peak at 07:03:53 went off-scale
- Many other peaks are seen later than 07:21:00, the end of the experimental period. Two of these are also off-scale and they are not explained.
- He tells us nothing about the equipment: How old the watch is, where the Microset was purchased, what laptop computer he used, etc.

Therefore I suggest the following experimental protocol for future tests:

- Purchase two brand new Accutron watches.
- Break the hands off them, since there are known issues with frequency variation according to position of the hands[1].
- Keep both watches rigidly fixed during test runs, since there are known issues with frequency variation according to position of the whole watch [same ref].
- Establish a baseline recording of at least one hour for each watch, with the watches in such a situation as does NOT expose them to the hypothesized "torsion field." This baseline can be taken many weeks or months before the test runs.
- Make a specific prediction. I don't think it is necessary to predict the actual frequency variation quantitatively. It would be enough, for example, to state "I think the tuning fork frequency will increase when exposed to the torsion field because the field will decrease the mass of the fork, and frequency is inversely proportional to the square root of the density of the fork material." Frequency excursions measured during test runs must be greater than any excursions seen during baseline runs to be valid.
- If possible, use one watch as a control, shielding it from the hypothesized field. This may mean sending it to the other side of the planet during the test run.
- Ensure that neither the experimental watch or the control watch is close to any abnormal electromagnetic field.
- Ensure that the ambient temperature is the same at the experimental site and the control site.
- Each test run should last 30 minutes, with the experimental watch and the control watch running and permanent records being taken at one-minute intervals.
- Stop any test which causes the frequency trace to go off-scale, and restart the test with sensitivity adjusted.
- Perform at least five test runs.
- Document all experimental hardware.

Under these conditions, clearly aberrant frequency excursions in four of the five test runs would be acceptable evidence in support of the hypothesis.

=============================
[1] http://www.bmumford.com/mset/tech/accutron/index.html
=============================
On Facebook, Hoagland drew attention to the difficulty of designing a protocol, writing that "we're in the same position as Van Allen before Explorer," by which I take him to mean that he expects to discover the torsion field as opposed to measuring it. However, that cannot be so—the Russian experimental work he so often refers to already did that. What seems to utterly escape him is that that work is thoroughly discredited.

Correction: President Obama has not been assassinated

2011-05-05T10:59:00.000-07:00

THE MANAGEMENT OF THIS BLOG VERY MUCH REGRETS that due to an error, an incorrect story appeared in early editions today. The story was set in type to be ready in case of an assassination, but was not authorized to run. An unfortunate error by a pressman caused the story to be printed in some editions.

In addition, we now concede that the quotes from Ms. Poor and Prof. Papu were inventions. The reporter responsible has been placed on leave pending an investigation.

=======================

Assassination: A fail for a president but a decisive win for a pseudo-scientist

        The tragic assassination of President Obama earlier today, while laying a wreath at Ground Zero, was good news for one person. That person would be self-taught "scientist" and entertainer Richard Hoagland, who brilliantly predicted this exact event yesterday on his Facebook page. Hoagland has a history of using tragic events to draw attention to himself, as when he posted on a web site that the Apollo 1 fire was a deliberate act.

        Although his record of success in prediction is close to zero, he appears to have aced this one. He could not be reached for comment as he was too busy basking in the admiration of his many fans.

        Georgina Poor, host of the overnight radio show These Books Are Trash, was woken to hear the news. She said "Never bet against Hoagland. I know many people see him as an uneducated and self-advertising buffoon, but I always knew he'd get one right eventually." The distinguished physicist Michel Papu said "Personally I always thought Hoagland was an insane cretin. Not so much an idiot savant as an idiot ignorant. I guess now I'll have to look again at some of his ridiculous theories."

        So, as a nation mourns, the 16,000 adherents of a Facebook page can click on that icon that says "I LIKE IT!!!"

=======================
NOTE: The above text is purely satirical.

Dustified!

2011-05-04T08:24:00.001-07:00

        Dr Judy Wood delivered her performance on Coast to Coast AM last night, eagerly awaited by the Branch Hoaglandians because it was her work that Richard Hoagland ripped off for his recent conference presentation.

        Dr Wood spent some time educating the audience about the importance of real forensic evidence as opposed to speculation, then almost immediately broke her own rules by making an ENORMOUS leap of conjecture. The twin towers were dustified, she announced, by a directed energy weapon. When George Noory asked her where she thought the actual weapon itself was situated, she dismissed that as unimportant.

        I really have neither the time or the skill to analyze Wood's data—in any case, others have already done that quite well. I thought, however, I might provide an additional data point by estimating the total mass of drywall in the North Tower. As anyone with any construction experience can tell you, sheetrock dustifies very nicely, often when you wish it wouldn't. It's just loose chalk between sheets of paper, really. Was the dust cloud that drifted over Lower Manhattan mostly gypsum? Let's see....

The North Tower was 1,368 ft tall, cross-section 208 x 208 ft. If you imagine the entire building clad in drywall, the area would be:

1368 x 208 x 4 = 1,138,176 sq ft
assuming drywall mass 1.6 lb/sq ft, total wall mass is almost 1000 tons (US).

As for ceilings, from the total ceiling area of 208 x 208 = 43,264 sq ft we need to subtract 80 x 138 = 11,040 sq ft for the elevator well.

So ceiling area = 32,224 x 110 floors = 3,544,640 sq ft or 2,836 tons.

Now, I make no pretense that this is in any way an accurate measure. It's just a little better than pulling a random figure out of my ass. It's "in the ballpark," as the sports fans say. I'm just saying that around 1000 tons of drywall would have dustified immediately as the tower collapsed, and over 500,000 cubic feet of air would have been pumped out of each floor as it pancaked, helping to form the white dust cloud. It's a lot harder to estimate how much of the 2,836 tons of ceiling would also have crumbled, but very likely some of it.

Judy Wood appears to think that the cloud contained most of the structural steel, too. Put me down as a sceptic on that.

Review of Mike Bara on Coast to Coast AM, 25/26 April

2011-04-26T07:59:00.000-07:00

        C2C gave Mike the dog watch last night—midnight-2am Pacific, 3-5 Eastern. It seemed particularly cruel to use the physicist Michio Kaku as opener—it was like "Here's this distinguished professor from CCNY, joint originator of string theory, rational but bold thinker, Ph.D. from Berkeley. AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT... Mike Bara."

        Mike is thoroughly confused about personal consciousness vs. collective will. To be sure, there is some evidence that intense application of mass human will can achieve surprising results—some of it from the C2C radio show itself—but Bara, while obviously very aware of this, also writes "We have, each of us, enough energy to make this world into anything we wish it to be." [The Choice, p.217.]

The Backster Effect
        He trotted out that same idea last night. YOU CAN PERSONALLY CHOOSE what the coming apocalypse means, he assured his audience. Did he provide any evidence to support the idea, or say how he comes by such knowledge? Well, no and no. He spoke of two "experiments" which we must assume he thinks are relevant. One was his former co-author's foolery with an Accutron watch, which apparently showed periodic anomalies. The other was Cleve Backster's "terrified plant" trick of 1968. What do these two hobby activities have in common? They were both done without controls, and are therefore trash science.

                Late into hour 2, Mike removed all possible doubt that he knows nothing about psychology by assuring us that "everything has consciousness." I waited for some follow-up that would show he was speaking metaphorically, but I got the converse of that. No, he really means everything. Tables, chairs, granite.... George Noory's comment was "Oh yes."

        If the contrast between Kaku and Bara was striking, another contrast also comes to mind—that between Bara and another very recent guest on C2C, Maurice Cotterell. He's the nutcase who said that we can oh-so-easily get all the energy we could ever want by simply lining up little containers of the elements in order. Start with hydrogen, helium, lithium.... keep going until you have 120, the last one presumably containing the purely theoretical element unbinilium.

        Cotterell's theories are entirely wrong but kind of hilarious. Bara's are entirely wrong and kind of boring.

Ceci n'est pas une blogpost

2011-04-21T18:19:00.001-07:00

Last night on Coast-to-Coast AM, Richard Hoagland made reference to me specifically as one of his principal critics. Although this would ordinarily be a fine topic (or excuse) for a blogpost, if I responded we would very quickly descend into the topic of patent law. I think we may all agree that would be BORING. So I'll spare you, chers lecteurs.

You can listen, if you must, here (04-20-11, hour 3, at 25:15). Take delight in Hoagland's many errors, as when he states that the launch of STS-134 was deliberately postponed to clash with the Royal Wedding (at 8:47pm London time?????)

Mike Bara and the JFK timeline

2011-04-21T15:48:00.000-07:00

On his blog, Mike Bara just posted a piece about the recently declassified memo from JFK to the CIA Director, John McCone, on the subject of "unknowns"—assumed to refer to UFOs. The memo was the subject of a prominent article in the London Daily Mail, among other media.

Bara repeated what he had said during a brief spot on Coast to Coast AM, and on this he is perfectly correct (in content if not exactly in grammar):

The Daily Mail as well as other news sources citing this story have unfortunately mischaracterized the content of the memos. They have been presented it as if Kennedy was asking about UFO’s – or “unknowns” as he called them—and implying that alone may have gotten him killed. In fact, it’s clear from the memos that Kennedy already was well briefed on the “unknowns,” at least enough to know that there were “high threat cases” which needed to be included in the information sharing with the Soviets.

It's in extending that idea to a motive for assassination that he let his imagination run away. He continues:

What we have argued, and which now seems validated, is that it was the putting into motion of his plan to share not only our technology, but what would be discovered on the Moon that got him killed. If the Moon actually held the secrets of a long dead and highly advanced civilization, then protecting those secrets from a nation that most perceived to be our arch enemy would have been justification enough to kill Kennedy 10 days later in Dallas.

        So, let's see... this plot was hatched and Lee Harvey Oswald was recruited and trained in 10 days?

        Slight problem, here... Oswald started work at the Book Depository on 16th October, nearly a month earlier. Oops...

        Of course, there's also the problem that there's no such thing as "the secrets of a long dead and highly advanced civilization" on the Moon. But nobody's going to convince Mike or his former co-author of that. It's their cash cow.

NASA's Egyptian God-worship examined, Part IV -- or, 3+5 = 7

2011-04-20T09:18:00.000-07:00

        Yesterday, in a near-unbelievable display of mathematical incompetence, Richard Hoagland demonstrated the difficulty he encounters when faced with a complex equation such as x=3+5. The full dialog is here (thanks once again, Christopher) but the gist of it is that Hoagland wanted to force the time of the launch of STS-134 to fit his fantasy of ritual numbers.

        Not finding any joy with the actual launch time, 3:47 pm or 15:47, he hit on the idea of reckoning the time in London, where some sort of wedding will, I understand, take place on the same day. London being 5 hours ahead of Florida, the time will be 8:47 pm or 20:47. To Hoagland, however, the answer is 7:47 pm or 19:47 which of course is the same as 19.5. Bingo! Or rather, non-Bingo.

        One interesting fact arose from the ensuing discussion. Hoagland posted as follows:

You're forgeting one important detail ... regarding "symbolic rituals":

It's NOT when they "eventually" happen ...; it's when (and how) they're first PROPOSED (birthed) that's critical. :)

He apparently didn't notice that, in that case, he should have been calculating his magic numerology based on a launch time yesterday, when the launch date of STS-134 was "birthed." But it answered a general question I posed in Part III of this analysis: Which launch time is considered "ritual"? The planned time or the actual time?

Now that we know the answer to that question, it further disqualifies the only space shuttle launch time that is claimed as "ritual" in Hoagland's 'Table of Coincidence.' That launch time is STS-88 at 03:36 EDT, 4th December 1998.

STS-88 is already disqualified on the following grounds:

- It references the planet Mars, not one of the 5 specified "ritual" stars
- The elevation is -3.33°, not one of the 5 specified "ritual" elevations
- The observation point is Phoenix, not a site associated with the launch

To that we must now add that the launch time itself is wrong. STS-88 was originally scheduled to launch a day earlier at 03:58.

Could anything possibly be MORE WRONG???

True, Richard, but then the Red Cross are there to HELP

2011-04-18T08:06:00.000-07:00

An amazing exchange of opinion took place on Richard Hoagland's FB page over the weekend—or perhaps nauseating is a better adjective than amazing. Hoagland has been claiming that the seismic events off the coast of Japan are caused, not by simple plate tectonics, but by DIRECTED ENERGY WEAPONS in the hands of unspecified EVIL PEOPLE. Believe it or not, at one point he posted that the 7.1 quake about 3 weeks after the main 9.0 PROVED the point, because "What are the odds of ANOTHER major quake ...with an epicenter ... only a few miles different from the earlier, devestating[sic] 9.0 quake ... and all, by "acident?![sic]" (somebody replied "The odds are 100%, Richard. It's called an aftershock. Look it up".)

Anyway, back to the thread that was generated over the weekend. Gavin James posted as follows:

There`s evidence for earthquakes since the dawn of time. I don`t know if you genuinely believe this crap Richard, but as someone whose family has strong Japanese links, I find your use of this humanitarian tragedy to sell your crank theories to desperate people quite sickening. Shame on you.

Hoagland replied:

Are you upset when the police, or the rescue workers, or the Red Cross ... or the media ... show up for a disaster?

And, if not ... why NOT!?--

After all, they're being PAID!

They LIVE off "disaster and human misery," do they not?

        The thread continued for over 160 posts, although if you discount a torrent of utter rubbish from someone called 'Ed BordSoHere' it'd come down to about half that.

        It quickly became obvious that Hoagland's main motivation was, indeed, marketing. He repeatedly reminded the faithful followers that this is all part of the SEEKRIT SPACE WAR that Judy Wood DEFINED, that he lectured about 15 days ago, and that will be the subject of A DVD -- COMING SHORTLY. He stopped just short of posting an 800 number.

        Gavin James stayed with it, keeping his cool. Another of his rejoinders was:

Yes people need to be prosecuted for 9-11, the JFK case needs to be reopened etc, but by putting out these wild theories first we condemn the movement to an existence of inactivity. The establishment don`t need to worry about putting out misinfo, when there are attention seakers and charlatans who crawl out of the wood work, and claim to have been to Mars, room shared with Elvis in the 90`s, that they`re Marilyn Monroe etc etc etc.

Precisely.

Thanks to Chris Lopes for bringing this to my attention. The full nauseating thread is here.

Update: The sub-title on Hoagland's FB page used to identify him as a "Public Figure." Suddenly it's changed to "Aerospace/Defense." It figures that his elephantine arrogance would have wanted the "Public Figure" label. Maybe FB slapped his wrist?

Richard Hoagland, Judy Wood, and Adam Parfrey

2011-04-13T09:12:00.000-07:00

        Latest victim of Hoagland's contempt for copyright[1] appears to be Dr Judy Wood of Where Did the Towers Go? pseudo-fame.

        I don't propose to get into analysis of the startling case that Dr Wood has made and Hoagland has now latched onto, hoping to make a buck out of it. Others have already pointed out some absurdities.

Two planes not enough
        We all saw two fully loaded Boeing 767s fly into the World Trade Center on 11th September 2001. In a nutshell, Wood and Hoagland say that this was not what caused the towers to collapse. I can't help giggling over Hoagland stating, last night on Coast to Coast AM, that the WTC towers collapsed "at escape velocity" — but OK, let's assume that was just a slip of the tongue.

        Andrew Johnson, another fringe investigator, is pretty annoyed with Hoagland for hijacking Dr Wood's research, lecturing on the subject for a couple of hours, and preparing to sell an edited DVD of that lecture, all without having contacted Dr Wood. In my opinion, although it was outrageously unprofessional of Hoagland, in the end Wood will have little to complain of, since she's going to be invited to C2C-AM pretty soon. As we know, that sells books rather efficiently.

Dangerous and stingy
        It was the story of the publication of her book that got my attention. According to Johnson's page, Wood signed a publisher's contract in early 2009 and accepted "a small advance." Two years of acrimony then followed, with the publisher refusing to publish 540 pages and protesting that he couldn't afford color illustrations. Eventually Judy Wood bought out her contract and self-published.

        So who was this intransigent publisher? Step forward Adam Parfrey, Univ. Calif. dropout and possibly the most dangerous publisher in America according to a HuffPo piece from last December.

        Others have wondered if Parfrey is the stingiest publisher in the world, since he published Hoagland & Bara's Dark Mission without an index and with totally inadequate photo reproduction, despite making a very large pile of $$$ with the first edition (55,000 copies sold.)

        In comments on an Amazon user's review titled "Where Did the Book Go?" a few of Judy Wood's fans took Parfrey to task over his handling of the contract.

Kim Greenhouse wrote:

Let me tell you this: You have no interest in this book becoming known or in the 10 years of her courageous work being fulfilled. Your comments are totally inappropriate about how you desperately wanted the book published, about how you were working to get high resolution images, about how Dr. Wood was upset about the idea of this and that.

She left you people because you are unprofessional, you refused to publish the book and you air your issues in a way that stinks. Stop urinating on her book launch.

As for saying that the book was quite stressful for Dr. Wood, you are simply condescending and so out of touch with the nature of the project that if you had an ounce of class and professional decorum, you would take yourselves off of the amazon page falsely representing that you are her publisher, since you are not.

Parfrey replied:

The commentary here has no relation at all to the reality of the situation, which would not reflect well on Ms. Wood. That said, I willingly relinquished rights to Ms. Wood after she disappeared from communication with me for months at a time. I'm glad the book finally appeared.

False book promo
I'm on Kim Greenhouse's side on the question of Parfrey's lack of professionalism. Even now, 18 months later, the Product Description of Dark Mission 2nd Edn on both Amazon and Borders includes this:

Authors Richard C. Hoagland and Mike Bara include a new chapter about the discoveries made by ex-Nazi scientist and NASA stalwart Wernher von Braun regarding what he termed "alternate gravitational solutions," or the rewriting of Newtonian physics into hyperdimensional spheres.

Buyers of the new edition will be provided a code that will enable them to log on to DarkMission.net to download hundreds of images discussed within the book.

The interesting thing about those two statements is that NEITHER IS TRUE. Adam Parfrey knows this, it has been brought to his attention, and he takes no action. It's even possible that commentary right here on The Emoluments of Mars in August 2008 was the reason the Von Braun chapter was killed.

About the only good thing I can think of to say about Parfrey is that he refused to publish Mike Bara's God-awful book The Choice. Deo Gratias.

====================================

[1] Other notable victims are Keith Laney and Walter Myers.

Numerology? Or is this dog poo?

2011-04-11T06:37:00.000-07:00

Richard Hoagland was in breathless form yesterday in Facebookistan, explaining to the faithful that ritualism was ruling the day. He built his case on pure numerology, featuring his favorite number 19.5.

Congress and the White House FINALLY agreed on "$39 billion dollars" (39 = 2 X 19.5!) in budget cuts.
The full Congressional vote is set for April 14, 2011.
195 DAYS From the beginning of "the 2011 Fiscal Year" -- October 1, 2010!

...a "budget agreement" that STARTED at $33 BILLION ....
And, ended at $39 BILLION ... at ~11:04 PM (President Obama is the 44th President of the United States )... on 4/8/11 = 23 = SIRIUS!! :)

Don't ask me why 23 = Sirius. At some point he also confused Syria with Sirius, predicting dramatic events in Damascus (a fairly safe prediction, one might think.)

There was more insanity to come...

Encoded now, in the events of Friday night -- at 11:04; Saturday's "surprise visit" to the Lincoln Memorial by Obama; and his repeated references to "George Washington" (3 times!) ... while standing in front of an Open Window in the Blue Room, at 11:04 PM ("his" Number" -- 44) ... to SPECIFICALLY show off the WASHINGTON MONUMENT behind him!

Which represents-
"Isis!"
On a day when "women" were extraordinarily "attacked" -- only to be "rescued" by--
Obama's "Horus Forces" .... :)
At 11:00 PM ("Code" for "19.5) ... announced in a budget agreement of--
39 billion (2 X "19.5")!

Don't ask me why 11:04 = 44. To show how willingly the faithful swallow Hoagland's Kool-Aid, a disciple named Abby Hudgins chimed in:

When I viewed this it had 19 "likes" and 39 comments. I will be the 20th, right in between 19 and 20, to "like" it. :-)

No, Abby, 20 is not right between 19 and 20. Hoagland was delighted, naturally:

Abby,
Ah ... then you're "19.5" .... :)
This developing "Obama Symbology"--

Only if you read him closely could the true motive be discerned. Guess what -- selling books.

The background to all this is in "Dark Mission." :)

So, it was numerology in the service of base commerce.

I always loved a comment by an editor called "Cromulent Kwyjibo" on the wikipedia discussion page for numerology (this was back in September 2005, it's now archived.) Crom wrote that the hierarchy of mathematical disciplines, in descending order of rigor, is

advanced math
legitimate math
recreational math
coincidences
dog poo
numerology

Castles in the air, by Hoagland & Bara

2011-04-05T06:39:00.000-07:00

        On FB yesterday, James Concannon asked about the "lunar anomalies" that Hoagland & Bara refer to as "The Castle," "The Tower," and "The Shard." All three of them are depicted on this page from the now-defunct Lunar Anomalies web site, once managed by Mike Bara.

        James pointed out that the huge library of images from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has now been assembled into a user-friendly web interface called the ACT-REACT Quick Map. If the latitudes and longitudes of these so-called anomalies could be provided, we could all go see them for ourselves -- IF they actually exist, as opposed to being artifacts of 1960s-era photo processing.

The Castle
        As it so happens, I can help. The "Castle" was taken from a manipulated version of Hasselblad Frame AS10-32-4822 from the Apollo 10 mission. Numerous photographic imperfections are seen on that frame. The crater is Triesnecker, named for Austrian astronomer Franz de Paula Triesnecker, and its coordinates are known: 4.2°N, 3.6°E.

        ACT-REACT has no "search by name" feature, so here's how to find Triesnecker.

1. Ensure that the drop-down menu at center top is set to 'Equidistant Cylindrical Map.'
2. Set the radio buttons top left to 'Navigate.'
3. Set the resolution to 125 m/pix using the pop-up selector at lower left.
4. Enter the latitude & longitude of Triesnecker in the text fields bottom center.
5. Click the 'Recenter' button to the right of the Lon:/Lat: fields.
6. Having centered the display on Triesnecker, use the navigator at left (or drag the image around at will) to search for the Castle.

        LRO has two narrow-angle cameras, resolution 0.5m, and one wide-angle camera, resolution 100m. The entire Moon has been covered by WAC, and this is the image you see in ACT-REACT by default. Swaths outlined in red indicate where NAC imagery is available, and two of them overlay Triesnecker. By zooming in, the difference in resolution is very apparent.

        So did you find the Castle? No, me neither.

The Tower
        This is also derived from an Apollo 10 Hasselblad frame, AS10-32-4856. It comes from the very same monochrome magazine, Mag S. The crater is Blagg, named for astronomer Mary Blagg, and its co-ordinates are 1.3°N, 1.5°E. Some people see Blagg as a breast, with the tiny crater right on Blagg's East rim serving as a nipple. Personally, I've seen better. Craters and breasts.

The Shard
        This one is from the 1967 Lunar Orbiter 3 mission. The camera was capable of a resolution as good as 1m but because of its peculiar photo-processing method, artifacts on Lunar Orbiter images are ubiquitous. Hoagland & Bara spotted the Shard on frame LO-III-84M -- download the 1 megabyte .tiff to get a better look. The crater is Bruce, named for philanthropist Catherine W. Bruce. Coords 1.1°N, 0.4°E. This is very close to Blagg, and it's easy to fit the two craters into one frame.

No Answer
        Hoagland offered no reply to James's query yesterday, unless you count summarily deleting the thread as a reply. Christopher Lopes reposted and that's where things stand over in Facebook-land.

Hoagland in Europe

2011-04-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

Our favorite pseudo-scientist is in Europe for the purpose of being paid to spout nonsense about the Seekrit Space Program. While there, he explained to his FB fans that he wouldn't be able to pay much attention to the page (mostly deleting awkward questions) because, among other things, he had scheduled media interviews.

I'm having fun imagining a European newshound prepping for an interview with The Big [sic] Man:

Reporter: Hang on a minute Richard, I've been reading up on you. You reckon there's a robot head in a Moon crater, right? You reckon NASA times all its launches and landings to conform to a ritual of Egyptian God worship, right?

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

SECRET

2011-03-28T07:14:00.000-07:00

        Secret! Richard Hoagland's second favorite word, after "stunning" (usually followed by "...confirmation of my brilliant ideas".)

        It's definitely a high-value word for him. First because it allows his disciples to get the thrill of believing that they're "in on" something that was not intended to be known. Even more important, it forestalls any critical review—any attempt at analysis can be answered with "of course you can't confirm this. THEY have made it impossible to find the information!"

        Accordingly, we've had "Von Braun's Secret" which, as we've seen, is utter balderdash. While Hoagland's web site has been lying idle and un-updated all these many months, it's been stuck on promo for his DVD of a Secrets Conference. Next week the Big Man[1] himself will be appearing at an international conference on "The Secret Space Program and Breakaway Civilization."

        It's been a while since he pontificated about the Secret Space Program. If I recall right, the gist of it is that there's a space program run by the supra-national SECRET government. Its capabilities are very impressive, including the ability to destroy a comet. However, it has no manufacturing facilities, no personnel and no launch sites. Cute, huh? NO OF COURSE THERE'S NO EVIDENCE!! DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?? IT'S SECRET!!!!

=======================================

[1] Hoagland actually referred to himself in those words, on his FB page last weekend. The man's arrogance is .... STUNNING.

Hoagland and Bara still confused about Explorer 1

2011-03-23T07:10:00.000-07:00

        There are signs of a slight rift between those terminally erratic writers Hoagland & Bara on the question of Explorer 1, America's first satellite. Not that either of them is right about the orbit, but they now appear to be wrong in significantly different ways.

        Hoagland, as some readers of this blog will remember, made an attempt to apply the Tsiolkovsky equation to the four-stage rocket Juno 1 that launched Explorer. He completely screwed up the calculation, admitted as much about nine months ago but so far has made no move to correct his web page.

        Hoagland's general thesis was that the rotation of the three solid upper stages induced an "anti-gravity effect" which added significantly to the velocity of the final orbit insertion. An additional reason to discount this claim, beyond Hoagland's appalling math, is that by the time the upper stages fired the rocket was traveling horizontally, so gravity is not really the point.

        Mike Bara had his own excruciatingly fallacious attempt at deriving the excess velocity of Explorer 1, but perhaps he somehow sensed that they need something more plausible than anti-gravity to explain their incorrect figures. Earlier this week he stated that perhaps "the spinning changed the burning properties of the fuel." This was in the course of an hour-long podcast interview hosted by Robert Bradbury (who had failed to read any part of The Choice prior to the recording, oops.)

        I'm having a hard time imagining anything less plausible than this attempt to explain what does not need explaining. If the upper stages had been liquid-fueled the idea might have had some superficial credibility, since liquid rocket fuel does indeed slosh around in flight and needs management to ensure a good burn. But we're talking here about military-grade solid fuel which does nothing other than burn enthusiastically when someone puts a match to it.

        Now for the good news. In the course of the podcast (00:45:00 approx) Mike said "Probably not everything in my book is correct." HOORAY. The first step toward redemption is recognition of ones failings.

Rocketry geeks read on...
        Juno 1 was, frankly, a bit of a lash-up—put together in an atmosphere of near-panic as the USSR twice demonstrated its superiority at getting to orbit, and other US rocketry crashed and burned on national TV several times. It was a Jupiter-C rocket with one additional stage.

        Von Braun had a special version of the Redstone missile made, with tankage stretched by eight feet. He fueled it with 60% unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine and 40% diethylene-triamine, instead of the alcohol fuel the Redstone was designed for, increasing thrust to 83,000 lb. Burn time was 155 sec, and specific impulse 235 sec. On top of that he added three upper stages, consisting of clusters of 11, 3, and 1 Baby Sergeant solids, with specific impulse 220, 235 and 235 sec. The trajectory of the Redstone first stage was guided by aerodynamic surfaces, but the upper stages had no terminal guidance whatever. For stability, the whole upper stack was therefore spun up to a rotation rate varying from 450 to 750 r.p.m. Thus, it was known in advance that the actual orbit parameters could not be predicted with great accuracy. The nation didn't care—it wanted to see something American in any orbit that could be contrived.

        To achieve orbit, a rocket has two separate tasks—get the payload high enough, then boost it horizontally to sufficient velocity to maintain the orbit. An altitude of 122 km and a velocity of 7 km/sec are approximately the minimum requirements. At cutoff of Juno's first stage, it had a velocity of just over 4 km/sec pitched over to 40° from horizontal. The upper stages were then allowed to follow a purely ballistic trajectory for over four minutes until the stack was horizontal, before sequential firing under direct ground command.

        The ideal theoretical orbit was 352 x 1600 km. In fact they achieved 357 x 2547 km. It was in noticing that rather big apogee excess that Hoagland & Bara made the elementary error of declaring that the whole thing had 60%[1] more energy than anticipated, not realizing that orbital velocities are calculated on the semi-major axis, NOT altitude above the Earth's surface. Mike Bara wrote "I won't bore you with the details, but the fact is a miscalculation of that type simply cannot happen." He should perhaps have bored himself with some details before writing such garbage.

        When you work out the math correctly, the velocity at orbit insertion turns out to have been 8.215 km/sec, cf. the planned 8.018 km/sec— an excess of 2.46% and well within known slop factors such as rocket fuel performance, pitch angle, and upper atmosphere wind speed.

Hogwash
        So Hoagland & Bara between them delivered four hours of overnight radio, one long web page and two book chapters of complete hogwash, based on a childish lack of understanding of rocketry. I wish I thought their fans cared, but alas those people are so gullible I swear they'd accept kool-aid if it was offered.

==========================================
[1] 60% was Bara's figure (The Choice, p. 144.) Hoagland said 30% on Coast-to-Coast AM, but the inaccurate calculations in his web page suggest 17%. All three figures are, of course, wrong.

Screenplay

2011-03-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

Today, somebody using the name Damon Packard contacted Richard Hoagland on his FB page, inviting him to perform a cameo in a movie called Foxfur. He wrote:

It's an independent film I'm making, a short based on a feature script about a young girl named Foxfur. You are mentioned quite prominently in it and are even in a few scenes. I would love to send you the script or more detailed info. The climax deals with PHOBOS and Mt SHASTA. It treats all the material in an honest, serious (and hopefully) intelligent way. It would mean a lot to have you in it. My films are fairly well known in indie circles and a few in general release (Reflections of Evil, etc) so this is a serious inquiry. I guarantee you it would not only be a fun project but would portray you in a good light. And it would be your debut as an actor.

James Concannon very swiftly came up with a spoof screenplay for Foxfur, which deserves a longer shelf life than FB provides, especially with Hoagland himself on the prowl with his DELETE button. So I reprint it with permission, and with extra formatting that FB doesn't allow.

SCENE 21. INT. RADIO STUDIO. NITE
LOW ANGLE on RCH, looking confident

HOAGLAND
STS-125 will be canceled.
CUT to B-ROLL: STS-125 launch

HOAGLAND
Ares 1-X will never reach the launch pad.
WHIP PAN TO B-ROLL: Ares 1-X on the pad 2 days later

HOAGLAND
NASA will never resolve the ECO sensor problem using conventional engineering.
CUT to Lockheed engineer installing new (conventional) pass-through connector. Engineer grins and gives a thumbs-up.

HOAGLAND
STS-133 will be powered by hyperdimensional torsion fields.
FX WIPE TO B-ROLL: STS-133 launch using ordinary rocket fuels

By the way, Hoagland accepted. Well, provisionally. He said he'd read the script on his way to the Amsterdam "Secret Space Program" conf. (eyeroll)

Update: Yep, it's deleted.

Multiple-choice quiz questions about 'The Choice,' by Mike Bara

2011-03-17T08:57:00.000-07:00

A colleague brought this quiz to my attention. I don't usually boast, but I'm now a ten-for-ten man. How did you do?

A non-hyperdimensional event

2011-03-14T06:37:00.000-07:00

It must make Richard Hoagland & Mike Bara eat their hearts out that the colossal earthquake at Sendai didn't happen anywhere near 19.5° latitude (the epicenter was 38.321°N.) Neither did the recent Christchurch quake (43.58°S) or, in fact, any of the top ten:

Chile 1960, mag 9.5 - 38° 24' S
Alaska 1964, mag 9.2 - 61° 15' N
Sumatra 2004, mag 9.1 - 3° 19' N
Kamchatka 1952, mag 9.0 - 52° 45' N
Sendai 2011, mag 9.0 - 38° 19' N
Sumatra 1833, mag ~9.0 - 2° 30' S
Ecuador/Colombia 1906, mag 8.8 - 1° 00' N
Chile 2010, mag 8.8 - 35° 54' S
Cascadia 1700, mag ~8.8 - approx 45° 30' N
Valparaiso 1730, mag ~8.7 - 32° 30' S

        As we know, Richard Hoagland thinks nothing of announcing that a major earthquake is at 19.5° even when it quite obviously is not. However, even he would not stretch a point that far and so Sendai is another FAIL for the theory that rotating planets create energy upwelling at 19.5° N and S.

        Both Hoagland and Bara, in their respective publications, have listed energetic features in the solar system as confirming the theory when in fact they do not. They have even stated in writing that sunspots originate at 19.5° which must make solar system astronomers stretch their eyes somewhat. The one that makes me giggle is Io, the innermost moon of Jupiter.

Tidal heating from Jupiter makes Io the most geologically active object in the entire solar system, with at least 400 active volcanoes. Hoagland & Bara refer hand-wavingly to "the volcanoes of Io" as 19.5° features. I've tried asking Mike Bara which of the 400 are at 19.5° but, sadly, no answer has been forthcoming.

Update 1: Somebody who knows the Solar System better than me writes that Pillan Patera, Io's most active volcano, is at 12° 20' S.

        So, let's see—the planetary energy theory is blown, the ritual alignment "model" is blown, the undiscovered giant planet idea is blown. Not a good time for pseudoscience.

Update 2: Well, blow me down with a feather. Hoagland actually did try and force the Sendai event (now preferentially known as the Tohoku event) to fit his daft pattern, on Coast to Coast AM last Thursday/Friday 24/25 March. He pointed out that its latitude, 38° 19', was pretty close to double 19.5°, and its longitude, 142° 22', was pretty close to 120° east of the Great Pyramid.

        Well, it's certainly news to me that his theory predicts anything special at double-19.5, and as for the longitude, the "pyramid-plus-120" line passes 8° 46' -- or 765 km -- further East, out in the Pacific. So once again Hoagland is trying the ex post facto prediction trick.

        Later on his FB page he attempted to excuse himself:

Remember, we are NOT talking about precise longitude and latitude "lines" ... but "bands of activity" -- as with any physical process ....

        Pretty pathetic, since he didn't quantify the width of these "bands of activity," and the positions of tectonic plate junctions all over the world are of course known with far greater precision than 8°.

        By the way, he also predicted that Gabrielle Giffords will be Obama's running mate for the 2012 election.

        Noted.

Mike Bara recovered -- physically, at least. Mentally, we'll have to see

2011-03-07T08:41:00.000-08:00

        This just in, by exclusive video-blog[1]: Mike Bara declares himself cured — regrets having had to cancel his appearance on the Spiritual Cruise into 2012.

        The ship sailed on Saturday, bearing a cargo of what were billed as "the world’s greatest spiritual teachers, authors, visionaries, and experts"[2]. Did Mike Bara really take a look at that billing and self-disqualify? Just kidding. Actually, he probably made a wise decision. The last thing that ship of fools needs is a few million Bara-viruses. Faced with an outbreak, Robin Falkov would undertake to cure them all with homeopathy, then they'd really be in trouble.

        In his video-blog [at 11:27], Mike re-iterates his well-known position that people only point out his colossal errors because they're scared. That joke never seems to get old.

        I posted this welcoming message to his blog, but I doubt if I'll get a response:

I'm glad to know you've recovered. Perhaps now you'd be willing to say how many Space Shuttle launches and landings fit your "ritual alignment model."

Also, are the astrologically favorable alignments timed for the originally-announced launch/landing times, or the actual times?

Please recall that you are on record as saying "NASA always seems to want to land or launch when the stars are in favorable positions, at least according to their mythology."

Anybody not already familiar with this so-called ritual alignment model, and its many failures, can brush up on it here, here, and here.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8QRCTkomss
[2] http://www.divinetravels.com/2012Cruise.html

Pseudoscientist found to be denser than moons

2011-03-01T07:57:00.000-08:00

        This wonderful image is not new — it was returned from Cassini-Huygens back in 2005 when that brilliant over-achiever of a mission was in orbit around Saturn. It shows the honeycomb-like structure of Hyperion, one of Saturn's 62 moons and Titan's nearest neighbor. Since Bob Zimmerman referenced it in his blog today, I was reminded of the lesson to be learned.

        One of the many remarkable facts about Hyperion is its extremely low density—a mere 0.57 gram cm^-3 (water has a density of 1, ice is 0.92. Most rock is in the 2.2-2.9 range.) Scientists have interpreted that as meaning that Hyperion's porosity exceeds 40% even assuming it's mostly ice.[1] For comparison, the density of our own Moon is 3.35 gram cm^-3.

        Now, remember back in April 2010, when Richard Hoagland was dancing from foot to foot yelling that Phobos is an artificial spaceship? The density of Phobos is 1.876 gram cm^-3 and porosity about 30%. One of Hoagland's primary arguments was YOU CAN'T MAKE A NATURAL OBJECT THAT'S 30% HOLLOW.

        If I was any kind of artist I'd make a little animation of a Hoagland figure doing a Homer Simpson style D'oh!!

[1] Hyperion's sponge-like appearance (Thomas et al., Nature 2007)

Cicero's complaint

2011-02-27T09:11:00.000-08:00

On Richard Hoagland's FB page, James Concannon posts a justified rant originally posted by 'Cicero' on 22nd August last year:

"Richard, what would you call a person who beat all those people out of their money, people who mailed money ...in to you, in good faith, promised a year’s subscription, ...but left holding the bag when told something like:

“Something Very, VERY Important has come up and it is delaying the next newsletter coming out… but, “STAY TUNED!”

What would you call that type of person who would do that, Richard C. Hoagland?

You beat those people out of a lot of money, Richard C. Hoagland.

You beat me out of my money.

I’m still sore about it.
.:.
You USE people. You manipulate people. You make promises and then break them, with one of your most worn excuses – “something REELY important has come up and I’ve had to drop this whatever for a while, but I promise I’ll get back to you and “stay tuned, now!”… blaaahhhha!"

'Cicero' is Tim Redd, just one of many victims of the Hoagland bait-and switch. He added:

"I’ve stayed in awareness of your “mission” for going on 25 years and have thought on occasion that you showed flashes of brilliance in your thinking, or in your ability to communicate a complex idea… but lately I have had to Re-Evaluate your whole trip and the conclusion I’ve come to is that going to the core of who you are - you are really little more than a Hustler and a Cult Leader™."

It's really shameful that Hoagland failed to respond, either then or now (as far as we know—there is a possibility that he responded privately, of course.)

The best we can hope for publicly, based on past performance, is a counter-accusation that Cicero is a paid disinformation agent. Which he is not, and neither am I.

Review of Hoagland on Coast to Coast AM, 17/18 February

2011-02-21T09:55:00.000-08:00

The official topic of C2C 2/17/11 was "Energy Grids," and the official guest was Englishman Hugh Newman, who had a book of that name to plug (full title "Earth Grids -- the Secret Patterns of Gaia's Sacred Sites".)

It seems that Richard Hoagland was sending a blizzard of instant messaging to George Noory during Newman's first hour, claiming this topic as his territory. Stupidly, Noory impulsively allowed him on the air during the second hour (third of the entire show,) at which he very predictably drowned poor Hugh Newman in verbal diarrhea. It was the more shameful because Newman was giving us a relatively level-headed (albeit New Agey) account of the topic, and RCH took the topic and trashed it with pseudo-science. Here are two excerpts:

"These [megalithic] structures, to my thinking, the way I'm looking now at this physics, which has a tremendously venerable history, certainly in Russia, is the primary energy transfer in the universe. And the [electro-magnetic] stuff that we all think ... is primary is in fact secondary. So these things are transducers, these things are amplifiers—or if you want to use a really interesting term out of radio, they're transponders. What they do is they take in torsion energy—they amplify it—they re-radiate it, which has immediate and global effects ... and then they generate [electro-magnetism] as a kind of noisy side-effect. So when you see these shows, like Ghostbusters, the folks who look at megalithic monuments, or haunted hotels—they're detecting the after-effect of torsion as a secondary e/m thingy. And because Western physics has deliberately, by political intrigue à la the Intell Agencies, been kept in the dark regarding torsion, if you ask the average Russian physicist he's familiar with torsion. The average American guy will say "What? Is that the new bar down the street?"

So there's a real time-lag between the parts of the community—speaking now of science in general—as to how to properly analyze and interpret what you're measuring when you get in the field and measure.

[HE THEN DESCRIBES HIS ACCUTRON "EXPERIMENT" AT TEOTIHUACAN, WHICH MEASURED PRECISELY NOTHING]

My model is that what we're seeing in Egypt is being sparked, in part, by the amplifying effects of the Great Pyramid sitting right there just outside town, resonating with the changing background torsion field. And the model predicts there should be other interesting weirdnesses at nodal points—tetrahedral points."

His "the model predicts..." at the end was a thoroughly dishonest piece of back-think, designed to give him a spurious "toldya!" when chaos erupted in the state senate in Madison, Wisconsin—120° of longitude (well, sort-of) from the Great Pyramid. Make no mistake, folks—his "model" predicts no such thing, and if you're a scientist you aren't allowed to predict something that's already happening.

Here are the longitudes of the "weirdnesses" that have happened since 17th:

Tripoli, civil unrest - 13° 11' E
Benghazi, civil unrest - 20° 04' E
Yemen, civil unrest - 44° 12' E
Mali, stadium stampede - 8° 00' W
Philippines, Bulusan volcano - 124° 03' E
Christchurch NZ, 6.3 earthquake - 172° 37' E

Not a single one at a so-called "tetrahedral point." Meanwhile, at the other tetrahedral longitude matching Giza and Madison, 151° E, not a lot was happening, weird or otherwise. It's almost all ocean, Richard. So if the "model" really did predict what he claimed, the model is hereby falsified.

I had to laugh when Hoagland twice referred to the Russian work as well-founded and validated. Here's what the wikipedia article has to say, in part:

"The torsion field concept was conceived in the Soviet Union by a group of physicists in the 1980s. The group, led by Anatoly Akimov and Gennady Shipov, began the research as the state-sponsored Center for Nontraditional Technologies, but was disbanded in 1991 when their research was exposed as a fraud and an embezzlement of State funding..."

His opinions are pure hot air, and it's a thousand pities that the producers of Coast to Coast are too ignorant to get the point.

======================
Launch of the shuttle Discovery is set for next Thursday. Keep an eye on the way it launches, and remember that Hoagland has stated that this will be the first 'post-Newtonian' mission. According to him, it will derive its energy from a hyperdimensional torsion field.

Update: WRONG AGAIN!

Small comet defeats pseudoscientist

2011-02-17T07:54:00.000-08:00

On Coast to Coast AM last night, the "science [sic] adviser" Richard Hoagland stated that the comet Tempel 1 is an alien spaceship, a proposition that even the infinitely gullible George Noory refused to swallow.

With a breathtaking lapse of logic, Hoagland first alleged that NASA had deliberately delayed releasing the images acquired by Stardust-NExT for seven hours in order to substitute doctored-up fakes, and then declared that the 7-hour-late images themselves proved that this object was artificial. His argument was as follows:

Look closely into the crater. You can see layers. But you can't make layers in zero-g.

        Who said anything about zero-g? Tempel 1's mass is 7.5 x 10¹³ kg—enough to create a micro gravitational field. Although certainly very small, Tempel 1's gravity was sufficient that some of the debris thrown out by the Deep Impact experiment fell back into the crater.

        Just as our own planet periodically passes through dust clouds, creating seasonal meteor displays like the Perseids and Geminids, so any comet is bound to pass through similar clouds, and inevitably some will adhere even in the very small gravity of Tempel 1. It does not stretch my imagination that dust might accumulate in layers, although I personally can't see Hoagland's "layers" any more than I could see his rivits [sic] holding Phobos together.

        Tempel looks just like a battered rock that's been around for billions of years. Fans of RCH should ask themselves if Tempel is:

a) An alien spaceship cunningly disguised to look like a rock, or
b) A rock.

        They might also ask themselves: Is Richard Hoagland:

a) A scientist, or
b) A showman

Who's right? Mike Bara or every professional astronomer?

2011-02-14T13:03:00.000-08:00

The Moon has an apogee of 405,696 km and a perigee of 384,399 km.
At apogee it has an angular diameter of 29.3 minutes — at perigee, 34.1'

Earth has an aphelion of 152,098,232 km and a perihelion of 147,098,290 km.
At aphelion, the Sun has an angular diameter of 31.6' — at perihelion, 32.7'.

Here's a sort of ASCII-graphics visual aid:
29         30         31         32         33         34 minutes of arc
       |-------------------Moon--------------------|
                                 |--Sun--|

(I realize that this could go seriously adrift for readers with non-standard browser settings, or who are reading this on their wristwatches.)

         For almost half its orbit, toward the apogee end, the Moon is apparently smaller than the Sun. For about a third of its orbit, toward the perigee, it appears larger. For the rest of the time the angular diameters of the two bodies are essentially identical. More competent people than you and me have found that rather amazing.

         So what does that mean for solar eclipses? Well, that depends on whether you are A) a trained astronomer or otherwise educated and sane person, or B) Mike Bara.

         If you're in Group A, you would say that when the Moon is in the apogee half of its orbit, a solar eclipse cannot ever reach totality because the apparent size of the Moon ain't enough to mask the Sun. Instead you have the rather spectacular effect of an annular eclipse.

         If you're in Group B, however, you would disagree. You'd say that an annular eclipse happens when the Moon is near perigee.

         Since Mike Bara's automatic response to any criticism of his writings and lectures is "I never said that," the question has to be, "Did Mike Bara write the following on page 214 of The Choice, or didn't he?

"An annular eclipse means that the Moon and Sun are in perfect alignment, but the Sun is not totally blotted out because the Moon is a little too close to the Earth."

Mike Bara takes ad hominem debating to new heights

2011-02-04T11:41:00.000-08:00

This dialog is such an outstanding example of Mike Bara's debating tactics that it deserves to be preserved here, in case he decides to delete it. It's from his blog comments.

Expat
February 3rd, 2011 @ 00:37

The recent conclusion of the WISE infra-red survey looks like extremely bad news for hyperdimensional physics. The massive extrasolar planet(s) required by the theory simply don’t exist. Bummer!

http://dorkmission.blogspot.com/2011/02/hyperdimensional-fail.html

MikeBara
February 3rd, 2011 @ 04:59

Once again, you prove you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground. Nor do you understand anything about the theory.

What’s it like to go through life with so much fear, bile and hated [sic] in your heart? It must be a bummer to be you. I’d have more sympathy, but you’re too pathetic to even feel sorry for. Hopefully you didn’t reproduce.

Expat
February 3rd, 2011 @ 17:59

Well, Mike, the insults were terrific fun, as usual. Now that you’ve got them off your chest, how about responding in rational terms?

Note: You wrote that at least one massive undiscovered planet is REQUIRED BY THE THEORY. Now that we know there’s no such planet, the theory is falsified. That’s science, Mike.

MikeBara
February 4th, 2011 @ 14:50

Once again DouchePat, all you prove is how little you know about everything, even the things you claim to read. The only thing that’s completed is the NEO survey. The WISE search hasn’t really even begun, will take years, and won’t even release its 1st snippett of data until April.

Why must you continue to prove how dumb you are publically? Does it give you some sexual pleasure to look like a fool in front of people? Oh, wait, that can’t be it. Nobody pays any attention to you anyway.

Expat
February 4th, 2011 @ 18:40

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-031

Key quote: “In early October 2010, after completing its prime science mission, the spacecraft ran out of the frozen coolant that keeps its instrumentation cold.”

Does that sound like a search that hasn’t even really begun?

MikeBara
February 4th, 2011 @ 20:59

Thank you again for publically demonstrating how much you don’t know about science, how you haven’t read the information on the website, and what an idiot you are.

Update:

George Benkel
February 5th, 2011 @ 00:56

I pay attention to Expat.

If you can’t handle Science, you could try Science Fiction. You’re really just doing that anyways.

MikeBara
February 5th, 2011 @ 01:27

That’s too bad, he’s an idiot.

Expat
February 8th, 2011 (suppressed)
Let's try a different topic. Speaking at the Alien Event in November 2009, you said "NASA always seems to want to land or launch when the stars are in favorable positions, at least according to their mythology."

In "Dark Mission," you precisely identify the 5 stars and 5 elevations which you consider "favorable."

How many Shuttle launches and landings qualify as favorable by these criteria?

Update 2:

MikeBara
February 16th, 2011 @ 02:12
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/up-telescope-search-begins-for-giant-new-planet-2213119.html
Once again, I am vindicated and you look like the fool that you are

Expat
February 16th, 2011 (suppressed)
I guess some very slim possibility has been restored to your daft idea. But you have definitely not been vindicated in your assertion that WISE has not even begun.

...and, whaddya mean, "Once again"?

Expat
February 16th, 2011 @ 17:43 (suppressed)
“What Matese claims is that he sees an excess of comets coming from a particular place, which he attributes to the gravitational effects of a large planet in the Oort cloud. I have nothing against the idea, but I think the signal that he claims he sees is very subtle, and I’m not sure it’s statistically significant,”

–Dr Hal Levison, planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, COL

MikeBara
February 16th, 2011 @ 19:54
Yeah dumbass but what you claimed was that the study had been completed and no object had been found. All it took was a cursory reading of the article you cited to know that wasn’t true; all that had been done was that the images had been taken. The article you cited (but failed to understand) made it clear that SOME of the results would be available in April, not that all the results were “in,” as you claimed. If you knew anything about how these projects work you’d know it takes years and sometimes decades before all the results of the studies are known. Maybe if you had a clue about anything you would have known that and not made a fool of yourself yet again. But it seems to be the only thing you’re good at.

And of course, once I pointed that out by posting this new article, you do the usual debunker avoidance trick; instead of admitting you were just plain wrong (as I have proven you to be many times over) you change the subject and try to get me to defend something else. I’m sure you’d love it if I spent all my time responding to your idiocy, but I have better things to do with my energy than waste it on responding to a serial douchbag who can’t even be bothered to read a complete article before he starts attacking me. And please, before you go whining on your blog about how mean I am, you attacked me first. I was never anything but polite to you until you started accusing me and my associates of dishonesty.

“It’s no secret that a liar won’t believe anyone else” — Bono

Expat
February 18th, 2011 (suppressed)

02/16/11, Mike Bara: "I was never anything but polite to you until you started accusing me and my associates of dishonesty."

12/10/07, Mike Bara: "Face it, you lost. Go away."
12/21/07, Mike Bara: "bison breath ... ignoramus and\or liar"
01/03/08, Mike Bara: "a significant character disorder....I’d match wits with him, but he’s only half prepared."
01/07/08, Mike Bara: "You are irrational. Step away from the computer before you injure yourself. .... your continued demonstrations of your own stupidity ..."
02/23/08, Mike Bara: "your arrogance, stupidity and venality is quite obvious to everyone who reads anything you've already posted."
03/23/08, Mike Bara: "As if we needed more proof you are a complete idiot,"
04/20/08, Mike Bara: "More proof that you're an abject moron"
06/29/08, Mike Bara: "I'm not confused. You're a complete idiot."
07/26/08, Mike Bara: "all you prove here is what a fool you are "
12/21/08, Mike Bara: "how many more times must you be embarrassed in public before you give up?"
03/17/09, Mike Bara: "No, .... you blithering idiot, it wasn't a lie. You just never get tired of coming in here and revealing the depths of your idiocy, do you?"

etc. etc.
LOL

Expat
February 18th, 2011 (suppressed)
On Oct 15th, 2007 8:23 AM PDT Mike Bara: "Why is it those who are so frightened and threatened by the data we present never want to argue the data itself, but always try to attack us personally? Could it be because arguing the data is a losing proposition for you?"

I really don't think I've ever come across such an incompetent debater.

Hyperdimensional FAIL

2011-02-02T12:41:00.000-08:00

This just in: WISE is all done.

        The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission ran out of LH2 last October, but was given a short non-cryogenic life-extension called NEOWISE. That, too, has now ended.

        Launched into polar orbit from Vandenburgh in December 2009, the telescope discovered 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids, and 134 near-Earth objects (NEOs.)

        It's the NEOs that interested—or at least, should have interested—Richard Hoagland, because the NEO that WISE didn't find is a specific requirement of his pet theory, Hyperdimensional Physics.

        Writing in chapter 2 of Dark Mission, Hoagland congratulated himself on spotting what he said was a linear relationship between the infrared emission of a planet (exactly the kind of emission WISE was looking for) and its angular momentum. He wrote:

When one graphs the total angular momentum of a set of objects, such as the radiating outer planets of this solar system (plus Earth and the sun) against the total amount of internal energy each object radiates to space, the results are striking [Fig 2.7].

Well, figure 2.7 is reproduced below and it doesn't show what he says it shows. The y-axis is not the total energy each object radiates, but its specific luminosity—in other words, luminosity per unit mass. Likewise the x-axis is not total angular momentum but also angular momentum per unit mass.

The diagram is taken from The New Solar System by Sky Publishing. Undeterred as ever by copyright ownership, Hoagland slaps a © 1998 The Enterprise Mission on it.

Hoagland apparently doesn't notice that his diagram doesn't show what he says it does, as he blunders on worrying about why the Sun isn't on the same straight line as the five planets. If the hyperdimensional model is correct, he writes, it ought to be. He continues:

The obvious answer to this dilemma is that that the hyperdimensional model is simply wrong. The less obvious conclusion is that we're missing something—like additional planets.
::
So the first implicit prediction of the hyperdimensional model was that eventually, observatories would find one massive planet in a prograde orbit, or two smaller solar system members in retrograde orbits.

        Well, "eventually" means RIGHT NOW, because if these massive planets existed at all, WISE would have found them. According to its wikipedia page, WISE could have detected a Jupiter-sized planet up to a light-year from the Sun. The 134 NEOs it did detect were assuredly not candidates for bashing Hoagland's Fig. 2.7 into line. They were all classified as asteroids or comets; Pluto-sized or smaller. So we're left with what he called "the obvious answer"—the hyperdimensional model is simply wrong.

        Take this together with the fact that none of the things Hoagland says are at 19.5° latitude actually are at that latitude, and it sure looks like thumbs down for HD physics.

        OH NO!!! First the so-called Ritual Alignment Model is falsified, and now this. Where next for Hoagland & Bara?

NASA's Egyptian God-worship examined - Zero out of 262

2011-02-01T09:04:00.000-08:00

Previous posts on this topic here and here.
        RECAP: In their horrible book Dark Mission, and in other venues also, Hoagland & Bara allege that an Egyptian God-worshiping clique within NASA favors certain star alignments as markers for mission events such as launches and landings. Bara in particular has made this very explicit, saying "NASA always seems to want to land or launch when the stars are in favorable positions." (video, at 04:07)

        The five stars are Sirius, Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka and Regulus. The five elevations are -33°, -19.5°, 0°, 19.5° and 33°, AS SEEN FROM SOME RELEVANT POINT, typically the launch site, the landing site, or the mission management site.

Space Shuttle
        So what's their record of coincidence for Shuttle launches and landings?

        There have been 132 Shuttle launches, and, sadly, two fewer landings. So that's 262 events, and they give themselves 50 chances for a "ritual" star alignment at each event (25 for the launch or landing site, and another 25 for the mission management site.) How many do they claim? According to their so-called "Table of Coincidence" — the answer is ONE. The launch of STS-88.

        Now take a look at the coincidence diagram. It doesn't take a genius to see that this breaks their own rules in three separate ways:

- It uses the planet Mars, not one of the specified stars
- It uses an elevation of -3.33°, not one of the specified elevations
- Its viewpoint is Phoenix AZ, nothing to do with the principal sites

UH-OH, that reduces the "hit rate" to precisely ZERO out of a possible 262.

Launch delays
        There's a definite problem with this whole business (apart from the fact that it's obviously nonsensical, I mean.) As we know, Space Shuttle launches and landings are very frequently delayed — for weather, technical glitches, or availability of abort landing sites. For example, the ill-fated launch of Challenger on 28th January 1986 was delayed five times before soaring off to catastrophe. STS-88 itself was delayed one day due to an unexplained master alarm.

        So which launch time do Hoagland & Bara expect us to believe in? Does this sinister NASA clique only choose astrologically favorable times for the launch as initially planned, or are they clever enough to know in advance all about the various postponements?

        Hoagland certainly thinks they're unusually prescient. Fig. 5-10 of Dark Mission shows that, at the time of LOI of Apollo 8, Christmas Eve 1968, Alnilam was dead on the horizon of the Apollo 11 landing site in the Sea of Tranquility. So clearly the clique had full knowledge of an event that was seven months in the future.

        Are you convinced? No, thought not.

More lousy math from Hoagland

2011-01-24T11:57:00.000-08:00

Post withdrawn. I was wrong.

Ken Johnston gets another 15 minutes

2011-01-05T09:07:00.000-08:00

        Ken is the former Grumman technician and former clerk in the Lunar Receiving Lab who was trotted out by Richard Hoagland at the notoriously underattended "press conference" at the National Press Club on 29th October 2007 (video).

        Ken's job at the LRL was to ship moonrocks to scientists who had successfully applied to conduct experiments on them, along with context photographs showing their original environment and exact orientation. As such he had in his file cabinets a collection of copies of photo prints from the main Apollo archive, which was in a separate building.

        Somehow Johnston's role in Apollo became inflated in the tiny minds of Hoagland & Bara to "Director of Apollo Photo Archives" and the reason he was introduced (to almost nobody) at the 2007 press conference was that Hoagland was convinced that Johnston was the sole possessor of incriminating Apollo photography which showed unequivocal evidence of a lunar civilization. As it turned out, the so-called evidence was not merely equivocal but downright unconvincing (compare the actual file images AS14-66-9301 and AS14-66-9279.)

        Nor was that all. James Oberg found time to look into the curriculum vitae ascribed to Johnston by Hoagland & Bara and found it largely fictional. Mike Bara made a valiant attempt at defending it on the Dark Mission blog, but Hoagland, Bara, and their ignorant publisher Adam Parfrey all had to climb down and amend the text of Dark Mission's second edition. Pity they didn't correct more of the errors while they were at it.

        Just over a week ago, somebody using the pseudonym LiveForever8 posted two Youtube videos (originally from Sacred Mysteries Productions) of Ken Johnston on Above Top Secret, and the controversy gained a second life. The thread makes a good read, with Oberg in fine form giving us all a lesson in how to stick to the topic in the face of many attempts to derail the discussion into irrelevance.

What do you do when....

2011-01-03T07:59:00.000-08:00

        ....one of your most persistent and confident predictions for 2010 crashes and burns? If you're Richard Hoagland, you just declare that it happened anyway, but nobody noticed.

        That was the official Hoagland line on Coast to Coast AM last night, confronted with the undeniable fact that "The Year We Make Contact" just ended with a distinct lack of contact unless you count the contact of Lindsay Lohan's hand on a Betty Ford Center technician in December. In a discursive three-hour chat with George Noory, Hoagland said several times that "contact has happened. You just have to look."

        The announced topic for last night was astrobiology, but as it turned out arsenic-tolerant bacteria weren't on the menu—Hoagland having perhaps realized that it's not a topic upon which he can hope to shine. Instead we got about an hour of what jolly good buddies Arthur C. Clarke and Richard C. Hoagland once were, then a tour of his favorite bits of nonsense including the robot head on the Moon and the Nazis in space. "Somebody," he said, is preparing us for "something," by coming up with all these science fiction movies (Transformers et al.) This was perhaps a bit of a slip-up, since if contact has already happened what need is there for preparation?

        It was a sleep-inducing three hours, ending with guess what? Oh yes, the 800 number.

        Of course.

NASA's Egyptian God-worship examined, Part II

2010-12-20T12:08:00.000-08:00

        Hoagland & Bara's so-called Table of Coincidence—the raw data on which they base their ridiculous theory—doesn't stop at Apollo. It continues with a hilarious claim that the Orion belt star Alnitak was at +19.5° over the Martian horizon as it would have been seen from the so-called 'face' in Cydonia, at the exact moment when the feature was first imaged by the Viking 1 orbiter on July 25th 1976.

        You have to think about that for a bit to understand how truly ludicrous this claim is. In order for the hypothetical Egyptian God-worshiping NASA clique to have contrived this feat of astrology, they first of all had to have known of the existence and exact latitude/longitude of this feature. That in itself is impossible. THEN they had to have calculated the arrival overhead of the orbiter to the nearest fifteen seconds or so. To do that, they'd have to have worked backwards to the arrival of Viking 1 in orbit, then to the trans-Mars trajectory, then to the exact time and azimuth of the launch. In short, the entire mission profile would have to have been contingent on that one astrological imperative. And if any part of that profile did not coincide with what was being planned anyway, by engineers who didn't care about Egyptian Gods, the clique would have had some explaining to do.

Ridiculous!!

        The table of coincidence concludes with a mixed bag of 43 data points, of which 35 relate to the Shuttle and/or ISS—launches of Zarya and STS-88 for example. Then a couple of events related to the solar observatory SOHO. Finally, the world premiere of the Hollywood movie Armageddon—as if the NASA clique had any control over that.

        Of these 43 data points, 14 are disqualified because they involve celestial objects that are not any of the five specified in the book "Dark Mission," and four are disqualified because their viewpoints do not persuasively relate to the mission (Phoenix AZ, the Egyptian pyramids.)

        Considering that Hoagland & Bara allow themselves to search Apollo landing sites for star elevation data that have nothing to do with Apollo (Sirius at -33° as seen from the Apollo 11 landing site at the moment of the first STS-88 EVA,) it's quite surprising that they didn't find more "coincidences."

        But really, as a piece of data-gathering this is beyond pathetic. Mike Bara says "NASA always seems to want to land or launch when the stars are in favorable positions" (Video, at 04:07.) What he should do, now that the Shuttle program is almost at an end, is to do the analysis and find out whether what he said was true. He should restrict himself to shuttle launches/landings, to the five named stars and to viewpoints from KSC (the Cape) or JSC (Houston.) There were also several landings at Edwards AFB, and one at White Sands.

        I don't believe Mike Bara will do this. I think he knows he'd finally be proved wrong.

Pumping the bio, by R.C. Hoagland

2010-12-13T08:07:00.000-08:00

Exaggerating one's accomplishments in a curriculum vitae is not a crime. It's almost a standard practice, to the point where I'm told that HR managers mentally allow for it, much as doctors silently multiply by two any self-reporting of how much alcohol their patients drink.

In the annals of résumé-polishing, however, Richard Hoagland's latest effort must surely be right up there with the worst. Hoagland has a new website, and he really got out the shiny stuff and went to work on his bio. Here's the whole thing:

Richard is regarded by many as the world's foremost expert in investigation and disclosing extraterrestrial evidence of life. Richard is a three time author on this subject. All three of these books are New York Times best sellers. Richard is a former museum space science curator and NASA Consultant. During the historic Apollo Missions to the Moon, Richard was science advisor to Walter Cronkite and CBS News.

Hoagland created his first elaborate commemorative event -- around NASA's first historic unmanned fly-by of the planet Mars, Mariner 4. A simultaneous all-night, transcontinental radio program the evening of the Encounter (linking the museum in Springfield, Mass., and NASA's JPL control center, in Pasadena, Ca.), co-produced by Hoagland and WTIC-Radio, in Hartford, Ct., was subsequently nominated for a Peabody Award, one of journalism's most prestigious.

In the early 1970's, Hoagland proposed to Carl Sagan (along with Eric Burgess) the placement of a "message to Mankind" aboard Pioneer 10 -- humanity's "first unmanned probe of Jupiter"; subsequent to its 1973 Jovian Encounter, celestial mechanics resulted in Pioneer 10 becoming the first artifact to successfully escape the solar system into the vast Galaxy beyond -- carrying "the Plaque" -- whose origins were officially acknowledged by Sagan in the prestigious journal, SCIENCE (175 [1972], 881).

In the early 1990's Mr. Hoagland led a team of volunteers and consultants in the creation of a pioneering "space-age" inner-city educational effort at Dunbar Senior High, just off Capitol Hill, in Washington D.C. The experiment was built around the concept of "student involvement in real time' mission planning and data acquisition" during various NASA planetary exploration missions, such as "Hubble" and the ill-fated "Mars Observer." Starting as an after school extracurricular activity, and using donated state-of-the-art computer imaging equipment and enhancement algorithms, "The Enterprise Mission" and "becoming a crew member of the 'U.S.S. Dunbar'" eventually became an accredited course in the Dunbar school curriculum.

Since 1983, Hoagland has been leading an outside scientific team in a critically acclaimed independent analysis of possible intelligently-designed artifacts on NASA (and other) data sets -- beginning with the unmanned NASA VIKING mission to Mars in 1976, and its provocative images of a region called "Cydonia." Hoagland and his team have been invited numerous times to various NASA Centers since 1988, to brief thousands of NASA scientists and engineers on the results of their on-going "Cydonia investigation." In 1989, Hoagland and his colleagues briefed then-Chairman of the House Committee on Space Science and Applications, Representative Robert Roe, on the status of their "Mars Investigation." As a result, Chairman Roe directed NASA to acquire better images from Mars during its then-upcoming "Mars Observer mission".

In 1993, Hoagland was awarded the International Angstrom Medal for Excellence in Science by the Angstrom Foundation, in Stockholm, Sweden, for that continuing research.

Richard is currently a regular guest on the nationally syndicated radio program, Coast to Coast.

Richard continues conducting this research, and sharing his findings at speaking engagements, on the radio and through publications including a newsletter and a much anticipated new book.

NYT best-sellers?
What exactly are these three best-sellers?
Dark Mission? Both Hoagland, his co-author Mike Bara, and his ignorant publisher Adam Parfrey repeatedly claim this as a best-seller. Technically, it's not true. The book was ranked 21st on the New York Times best seller list for paperback nonfiction for one week on November 18, 2007. Since the best seller list is defined as "the 20 books that have sold best" it missed by one. However, it's common practice to stretch this point so I'll let him have that one. 21 is something to be legitimately proud of.

The Monuments of Mars? Now in a 5th edition, this book was first published on 1/1/87. A search of the best-seller lists for the whole of 1987 does not show it. Interestingly, Hoagland was in competition with Whitley Strieber's Communion, which was #1 for three weeks in May and stayed on the list through September. It's possible that a later edition of Monuments made it to the list, but that would be highly unusual.

A third book? Now what might that be? It couldn't be The Breakthroughs of Cydonia (1991) which did very poorly. It couldn't be The Cydonia Codex (2005) because Hoagland only wrote a foreword to that. So it remains a mystery.

The Night of the Encounter
        That was the title of the radio show that Hoagland "co-produced" back in July 1965, when he was just 20 years old. Hoagland tells us that this show was "nominated for a Peabody Award, one of journalism's most prestigious." Well, yes, that's technically true. It was nominated by its own producer, Charles Renaud. Peabody is one of those awards that anybody can put in for — all you need is the fee, the entry form and the correct postage on the envelope. It has nothing in common with, say, an Oscar nomination.

        Besides, 1965 is a whopping 45 years ago. Who the hell puts 45-year old achievements on their résumé? Only people who haven't achieved a lot since, you might answer.

Critically acclaimed?
        Hoagland slaps this adjectival clause onto his horrible web site all the time — and George Noory parrots it faithfully on the radio show. Neither of them ever says which critics have acclaimed it. Neither, apparently, gives thought to the unlikelihood of any critic praising a web site that solely consists of 800px banners, featuring pages that have been "coming soon" for 15 years, and no CSS at all.

That Angstrom Medal
        Much controversy surrounds that award. The paragraph about it was reduced to this by wikipedia editors:

Hoagland was awarded an "International Angstrom Medal for Excellence in Science" in 1993. This was an unauthorized and unofficial award, given to Hoagland by the Angstrom Foundation Aktiebolag (AFAB), and without the permission of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences or Uppsala University.

        In January 2009 the paragraph was deleted altogether on grounds that it "lacked notability."

        For more on this, see Phil Plait's analysis.

A much anticipated new book?
        Oh yeah? What would that be? Surely not Dark Mission II, which was canceled last year when Hoagland, Bara and the publisher couldn't come to an agreement about it. And by the way, where's this "newsletter"?

NASA's Egyptian God-worship examined

2010-12-08T07:46:00.000-08:00

        Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara persist in claiming that a ritual-minded faction of senior NASA managers arranges for key mission events to take place at astrologically favorable times. They do this, according to Hoagland & Bara, to honor the Egyptian Gods Isis, Osiris and Horus. Isis is represented by the star Sirius, Osiris by the three belt stars of Orion (Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka,) and Horus by the star Regulus (also known as Alpha Leonis, being the main star of the constellation Leo.)

        A time is considered favorable if one of these five stars is at certain key elevations as seen from some place relevant to that mission — a launch or landing site, typically. The key elevations are as follows: -33°, -19.5°, 0°, 19.5° and 33°. 19.5 is chosen because it is the latitude at which three vertices of an inscribed tetrahedron appear when the fourth vertex is at one of the poles of a sphere. 33 is chosen because of its Masonic significance, and because the sine of 19.5° is 0.333.

        The combination of astrology and numerology alerts any but the most devoted Hoagland disciple to the fact that we are not here dealing with science — but Hoagland & Bara give the theory the sciency-sounding name The Ritual Alignment Model, and the rules of the game are spelled out simply. Mike Bara wrote on p.14 of "Dark Mission" 2nd edn. "only five stellar objects ... have any significance ...: the three belt stars of Orion, ...Sirius, ... and Regulus. And only five narrow bands of stellar altitude (19.5° above and below the horizon, 33° above and below the horizon, and the horizon itself) have any significance."

        Speaking at the so-called Alien Event in November 2009, Mike Bara said "NASA always seems to want to land or launch when the stars are in favorable positions, at least according to their mythology." [at 04:07]

        Richard Hoagland wrote, in the caption to Fig. 5-10 of "Dark Mission," of "NASA's fanatical, relentless, redundantly symbolic message of resurrection."

        So we have five heavenly bodies and five possible elevations, and a "relentless" drive to make these coincidences happen.

        Hoagland & Bara use the "Redshift" astronomical software to check for coincidences, and back in 1999 they posted a 'Table of Coincidence' to Hoagland's web site, listing some 35 candidate events over the 53 year history of NASA that they consider validate their theory. I took a look at the list up through the end of the Apollo program, and here's my analysis:

1 Moon at -33°at launch of Ranger 7, as seen from Cape Canaveral, 7/28/1964. DISQUALIFIED. Moon not one of the five specified stars.
2 Alnitak at +19.5° at launch of Ranger 7, as seen from Ranger 7's eventual impact site on the Moon. DISQUALIFIED. Since the exact impact site was not known to anyone at the time of launch, this could not have been contrived.

That's all for the Ranger program. They claim nothing for Rangers 1,2,3,4,5,6,8 or 9.

3 Moon at +33°at landing on Moon of Surveyor 3, as seen from JPL. DISQUALIFIED. Moon not one of the five specified stars.

That's all for the Surveyor program. They claim nothing for Surveyors 1,2,4,5,6 or 7.

4 Sirius at 51° at launch of Mercury-Redstone 3, 5/5/61, as seen from the future landing site of Apollo 14 on the Moon. DISQUALIFIED. 51° not one of the specified elevations.
5 Comet Encke at +33°at launch of Mercury-Atlas 6, 2/20/62, as seen from Cape Canaveral. DISQUALIFIED. Encke not one of the five specified stars.

They claim nothing for the other 5 Mercury flights, or for any of the 12 Gemini flights. So far we have ZERO hits.

6 Mintaka at 0° at Apollo 8 LOI, 12/24/68, as seen from the future landing site of Apollo 11. DISQUALIFIED. Since the exact date and time of the Apollo 11 landing was not known to anyone at that time, this could not have been contrived.
7 Sirius at 19.5° 33 minutes after the Apollo 11 landing, as seen from the landing site. THIS WAS LATER AMENDED by Mike Bara to the following (see "Dark Mission" pp.11-14, 2nd edn): Regulus at -19.5° later, at MET 105:25:38, after Aldrin made a short speech asking everyone to pause a moment and "give thanks in his or her own way." DISQUALIFIED. Mission managers were not aware of Aldrin's plans, therefore they could not have contrived this. Although it's conceivable that Aldrin himself is "in on" the ritual, since Regulus was 19° 30' below the horizon, it's quite hard to imagine how he would have seen it in order to measure its elevation.
8 Alnilam at +19.5°at landing of Apollo 12, 11/19/69, as seen from the landing site itself. ALLOWED.
9 Pegasus at some unspecified elevation at what should have been the Apollo 13 landing site. DISQUALIFIED. Pegasus not one of the five specified stars.
10 Sirius at +33.3°at launch of Apollo 15, 7/26/71, as seen from Cape Canaveral. ALLOWED.
11 Sirius at -33°at landing of Apollo 16, 4/20/72, as seen from the landing site itself. ALLOWED.
12 Mintaka at +19.5° at landing of Apollo 16, 4/20/72, as seen from Houston. ALLOWED
13 Betelgeuse at some unspecified elevation at ascent of Apollo 17, as seen from the Apollo 12 landing site. DISQUALIFIED. Betelgeuse not one of the five specified stars.

        So only four of Hoagland & Bara's claimed "hits" conform to THEIR OWN RULES for determining which events are part of what they call their "model."

        I will now atempt to estimate — conservatively — how many possible opportunities NASA's Moon programs generated for Hoagland & Bara to examine with their software.

RANGER
There were 9 launches and 5 lunar impact events. The program was managed by JPL, thus the point of view for star elevations could have been either Cape Canaveral or JPL. 28 OPPORTUNITIES.

SURVEYOR
There were 7 launches and 7 lunar landing events. 35 OPPORTUNITIES, allowing an additional point of view for landing events.

LUNAR ORBITER
5 launches. All eventually impacted the Moon but, being conservative, I assume those are not candidate ritual events. 10 OPPORTUNITIES.

MERCURY
Managed from Houston. 7 launches for 14 OPPORTUNITIES

GEMINI
10 manned launches, 4 EVAs, 7 rendezvous. Point of view could have been the Cape or Houston. 42 OPPORTUNITIES

APOLLO
11 manned launches, 6 lunar landings, 6 lunar takeoffs, 9 Lunar Orbit Insertions, 9 Trans Earth Insertions. 94 OPPORTUNITIES, allowing for an additional point of view for lunar landings and takeoffs.

NOTE: Considering that Hoagland & Bara actually allow themselves to identify cross-mission events as significant (ascent of Apollo 17 as seen from Apollo 12 landing site, e.g.) the number of opportunities in the Apollo program is actually many hundreds. However, being conservative, I'll stick with 94.

SUMMARY
        A conservative estimate of the number of opportunities for ritual star alignments in these six programs is 223. Four actual alignments are identified — a 1.8% success rate.

        Hoagland & Bara's theory must therefore be judged bankrupt. A total failure. Richard Hoagland & Mike Bara are liars.

Tiny bacterium defeats pseudoscientist

2010-12-03T08:47:00.000-08:00

        Last night, in a spectacular display of superhuman ignorance, Richard Hoagland managed to ask the wrongest possible question about arsenic substitution in biochemistry, and then capped it by coming up with the most ridiculous possible answer. He wondered aloud to his radio audience of millions why none of the journalists at the afternoon's NASA press conference had asked whether the extremophile bacterium GFAJ-1 came from an extraterrestrial source, and declared that to him the answer was obvious — yes, of course it did. "There is an alien in our midst," he said theatrically.

        To recap, for those who did not follow the day's events, the NASA astrobiology program called the conference to announce a very unusual finding. Geomicrobiologist (and, it turns out, accomplished oboist) Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a rather fetching tousle-haired nerd's dream-girl, took the credit for the discovery that, in conditions of restricted environmental phosphorous, GFAJ-1 can use arsenic instead, in building the DNA backbone upon which it depends to function. Wolfe-Simon had theorized that this might be possible, and had gone to Mono Lake in a successful search for proof.

        It was a pretty brilliant piece of work by Dr Wolfe-Simon, and it took an intellect as puny as that of Richard C. Hoagland to misunderstand it quite that thoroughly.

A nearly toxic lake

        Mono Lake, a couple of hundred miles East of San Francisco, is a natural chemistry experiment gone awry. Indifferent water management over the centuries has made it highly saline and unusually alkaline, and mine tailings from the California gold rush have bequeathed it near-toxic levels of arsenic. Yet gamma-proteobacteria like GFAJ-1 have found a way to make a living there.

        It's one of the best-established principles of evolution that organisms adapt to their environment. If the environment places stress on a population — say by getting hotter, drier, or more acidic — the population is selected for those individuals that tolerate the stress best. Over time, the population either fails to adapt and dies out, or develops a new strain that finds the environment congenial. Well, lo and behold, as Lake Mono became deficient in phosphorous and oversupplied with arsenic, the plucky little bacterium found a way of making do. High arsenic = arsenic-tolerant bacteria. Simple, really. So for Richard Hoagland, with no knowledge of biochemistry whatsoever, to ask which distant galaxy might have seeded the lake with GFAJ-1 is like him finding an apple on the ground under an apple tree and saying "Hmmm, wonder where that came from?"

Sagan misquoted
        We did not have to wait long, either, before Hoagland's attempts to justify his error led him deeper into the jungle of misunderstanding. He quoted Carl Sagan to the effect that a different form of DNA would be the hallmark of an extraterrestrial organism. What Sagan actually said was that a different DNA code would be the hallmark. That's a crucially different proposition, because phosphorous (or in the present case, arsenic) takes no part in the genetic code that is DNA's primary business.

        The DNA molecule has been likened to two intertwined spiral staircases — and the metaphor works well up to a point. The four-letter code of A,T,C,G is contained on the stair steps. Where one step is an A, its matching step on the other spiral must be a T. Where one is a C, the other must be a G. However, an actual double stairway would have a central pillar to support the whole structure — and there the metaphor fails because there's no molecular equivalent. Instead the supporting "backbone" of DNA is on the outside — looking more like the handrails of the stairs. And it's here that phosphorous, alternating with what are essentially sugars, plays its essential role. In short, the substitution of arsenic for phosphorous is just a cleverly improvised feat of molecular carpentry and would not signify extraterrestrial origin to anyone with any knowledge of biochemistry.

Testing for life on Mars
        Later in the first hour, Hoagland remarked "This marks the first time NASA has grappled with the concept 'What is Life?'" That idea would certainly bring a smile to the face of any of the hundreds of NASA-contracted bioscientists who confronted that very question as the biology instruments for the Viking Mars landers were being designed in the early 1970s. The question defies any easy answer — in fact, the Viking biology group never really made up its collective mind, instead sending three separate instruments each with its own assumption about the sine qua non of Life. It's also worth noting that some people — including Hoagland himself, as it happens — think that, even with 2 belts and one pair of braces, Viking's trousers still fell down.

The numerology of the space shuttle
        In the second hour Hoagland took off into the unintentionally comic territory of numerology. I found it hard to follow — it appeared to incorporate a strange form of mathematics in which the numbers 33 and 133 are identical. It came as no surprise, though, that he wanted to make something ritualistic of the fact that the atomic number of arsenic is 33. That's right, Richard — the sinister Masonic conspiracy within NASA reached back across 100 years of history to dump arsenic in Mono Lake for just that reason. Yeah, man.

        I did sort-of follow his next proposition — namely, that the still-upcoming STS-133 space shuttle mission is the first "post-Newtonian" mission. This means, according to Hoaglandian logic, that the energy needed to get the shuttle to orbit will come, not from old-fashioned rocket fuel, but from "hyperdimensional space, torsion physics, and etc. etc. etc." I'm sure this comes as a surprise to everybody involved in the mission.

        A classic Hoaglandian performance, ending with — guess what? — an 800 number that will put cash in the Hoagland pocket.

Way to go, Coast.

Update:
Two criticisms of the experiment from biochemists have now surfaced in the blogosphere. Both seem quite harsh.

Rosie Redfield
Alex Bradley

Although it might be entertaining to watch the biochemists slug it out in blogs, you can bet that isn't going to happen. It's just not dignified for the lead author of a paper in a peer-reviewed journal to respond to informal critiques.

Update 2:
Well, surprise—there is now a response from Dr Wolfe-Simon, although not in a blog or a tweet.

Update 3:
STS-133 went from ground to orbit powered by LH2/LO2, just as normal.

The 'The Choice' 2011 calendar, featuring "Wrong statement of the Month"

2010-12-01T09:46:00.000-08:00

I suggested this brilliant idea to Mike Bara today, and if it was a success I wouldn't even invoice him for the marketing consultancy.

Since my suggestion is very likely to disappear from his blog quite soon, and it seems a shame to waste the ten minutes it took me to come up with 12 errors, I reproduce it here:

JANUARY (p.34) Mars and Earth would remain at the same distance from each other if Mars’ orbit were circular.
FEBRUARY (p.47) Mauna Kea is at 19.5°N.
MARCH (p.15) Scientists don’t realize that Newton & Einstein aren’t the whole picture.
APRIL (p.31) Astrology is a perfectly valid and defensible science.
MAY (p.32) The centrifugal force of Earth’s rotation tends to make us heavier.
JUNE (p.60) Newton’s laws of motion only work if the object being measured doesn’t rotate.
JULY (p.128) The International Space Station is really called Isis.
AUGUST (p.134) Gravity is only a local effect.
SEPTEMBER (p.139) Faraday cages are made of lead.
OCTOBER (p.202) The Brookings Report “detailed how best to inform the public in the event that NASA discovered extraterrestrial artifacts on the Moon or Mars.”
NOVEMBER (p.143) (appropriately) Sputnik was launched in November 1957.
DECEMBER (P.214) An annular eclipse occurs when the Moon is closer than usual to the Earth.

Even Hoagland's own procrastination, it seems, is a "stunning confirmation...."

2010-11-29T09:31:00.000-08:00

Today's comedy routine.

        Three days ago Richard Hoagland called an end to his two-week absence from his Facebook page (during which the Branch Hoaglandians had flagrant separation anxiety) in order to plug the "Cruise into 2012" which he's participating in as a guest speaker. He's been engaged to talk nonsense on a ship for eight straight hours.

        OK, that last part was an exaggeration — but perhaps not much. He promised that This multi-hour, multi-media Enterprise Mission Presentation will address the stunning, rapidly unfolding "consc-iousness changes" now demonstrably occurring worldwide. Whatever that means. And no, I'm damned if I'll put in a link to the cruise details. He can do his own plugging.

        Anyway, yesterday a few commenters expressed some impatience that they'd be forced to wait until next Spring and/or fork out $1200 in order to receive the next dose of wisdom from The Great Hoagland-Master. They wondered if a little preview might be in order.

Hoagland replied:

"Now" is not the time to present this developing information; it will not be "ready for Prime Time" until next Spring ....

"Make no wine before its time." :)

...and then, you could almost hear his brain clicking into auto-mode: HOW TO END THIS IN A WAY THAT AFFIRMS HYPERDIMENSIONAL PHYSICS???

...then it was "Ah, got it!"

"Timing" is a KEY component of Hyperdimensional Physics -- because of the constantly changing astronomical alignments.

It remains to be seen whether this will satisfy the throngs of disciples. It sounds suspiciously like another nod to astrology to me.

Hoagland says he can't post to his own website

2010-11-17T11:05:00.000-08:00

(I originally posted this as a comment but it's worth a separate thread)

       Richard Hoagland has written more than once on his FB page that he's unable to post anything to his web site because of a hackathon that's been denying him access since last April.

       He repeated that claim last night on Coast to Coast AM, adding that even the talented network admin Keith Rowland had been unable to penetrate the diabolical conspiracy.

       James Concannon is in touch with Keith, and checked out the story. Here's Keith's reply:

Keith Rowland November 17 at 10:48am
The site has been operational and available for update all along. I know RCH has had problems on his own computer that may have limited his own access to the site. But the website is and has been functional all this time.

Keith Rowland has a good rep among long-time netizens and it would certainly be a surprise if he was unable to debug a simple web site for seven months. Once again, Hoagland is trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

This just in: Mike Bara explains he's being stalked

2010-11-12T15:56:00.000-08:00

       Apparently, posing a challenge to a very inaccurate statement about planetary astronomy counts as stalking in Bara's mind.

Bara reflects on his 3-hour radio show.

       Just in case Mike ever reads this, or in case a reader can get a message to him, here's a science note:

       The sidereal period of a planet (also known as the "true" period) is a function of the semi-major axis of its orbit only. The eccentricity of the orbit does not feature in the equation¹. In the special case of an orbit with eccentricity zero — perfectly circular, in other words — semi-major axis is simply another way of saying radius.

       It follows that, if the orbits of Earth and Mars were zero-eccentric, the period of Earth would still be one year exactly and that of Mars 1.88 years. There is, therefore, no possibility that they could remain at the same distance from each other over time, as Mike claimed today.

[1] The equation is T = √r³ where T = period in Earth-years, r = semi-major axis in astronomical units.

Update: Peter Uwira of the Final Frontier FB page has very expertly compiled the Coast-to-Coast confrontation. Thanks a bunch, Peter. Very well done.

Further update: Mike has now left my comment on his blog for about a week without deleting it. I may be entirely misinterpreting that, but it's possible that this is as close as we're ever going to see to Mike Bara conceding a point.

====================================================

       On another topic, I'm genuinely interested in the proposed mass consciousness experiment in conjunction with the Princeton GCP. I hope they go ahead with it.

The sheer sales power of Coast to Coast AM

2010-11-11T05:36:00.000-08:00

       Last night, at 8pm EST, Mike Bara's book The Choice was ranked 90,418 in overall popularity at Amazon. Overnight, Mike did three hours on C2C and today (8:30am) it's at 1,049.

       Mike can do all the pseud-psych radio in the world, but this is where the gold is. This is why authors willingly give up a night's sleep.

       As to what Mike actually said — it seemed like gobbledegook to me (and to at least one commenter on this blog.) I think he mentioned that hyperdimensional physics is the direct path to God. That might explain why he and his buddy Richard Hoagland have such a hard time explaining it.

Comet Hartley 2: Oh so predictable

2010-11-05T12:45:00.000-07:00

The EPOXI flyby of Comet Hartley 2 yesterday was another brilliant success for JPL, and the images were extraordinary. The body of the comet looks like a two-kM-long jet-propelled peanut.

In less than 24 hours, Richard Hoagland had figured out a highly unoriginal way of using this scientific triumph to draw attention to himself and his crackpot ideas. OF COURSE! CLAIM IT'S AN ALIEN SPACESHIP!!! He posted this:

Just look at the regular, tiered GEOMETRY of the lower end -- like a cutaway, 3-D view of a large skyscraper ... with many exposed "floors" ... after a massive internal explosion.

It's those subtle, interior SYMMETRIES that "give the game away."

And then, OF COURSE, NASA is hiding the true story.

[S]tudies (at MIT, I believe) some years ago, with cats, demonstrated that the human visual/brain mechanisms (cats are CLOSELY related to humans, genetically) ONLY see such 3-D regular geometry--

At CERTAIN ANGLES ....

NASA releases its images so those ANGLES are specifically NOT "triggered."

        Oh yes, sure, JPL scientists were up all night figuring out how they could release the images in a deceptive way. Never mind that Hoagland has, as usual, got the science totally wrong. The cat vision study was at UC Berkeley, and showed that the retina-brain interface acted far more rapidly for horizontal motion than for vertical motion. Nothing to do with seeing angles in static objects, and nobody said that the same applies to humans in any case.

        I wonder if the NASA/JPL scientists who work so hard and so effectively to bring us news from the Cosmos ever hear about Hoagland's ravings and unfounded accusations? I assume not, but you never know.

        Meanwhile, back on the FB page, even some of the gullible disciples apparently find this tale hard to swallow. Several of them have expressed doubt.

        James Concannon posted this, and of course Hoagland deleted it immediately:

To all the Branch Hoaglandians and True Disciples:

Now look, you guys... your NASA-hating and science-ignorant guru has spent most of the summer assuring you not only that Phobos is an alien spaceship but that ESA scientists will DEFINITELY confirm that at the EPSC conference in October.

IT NEVER HAPPENED.

Your glorious leader wrote, in mid-July, that the attempt to cap the Macondo oil well was certain to end in failure and make the oil gusher worse.

HE WAS DEAD WRONG.

Now he comes at you with this cock-and-bull story about Hartley being an alien spaceship, and some of you are willing to believe him.

WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOUR JUDGMENT??????

[Reprinted by permission]

Useful links:
EPOXI/Hartley quick image gallery
Full resolution images
Morph animation by Daniel Machacek
EPOXI fact sheet (pdf)

Lunar Loony Libraries

2010-10-31T06:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Richard Hoagland posted the following on his FB page. I don't think any explanatory comment from me is necessary.

No advanced, technological civilization -- going back (in our own history) to the Sumerians -- have advanced and continued to exist, unless they WROTE THINGS DOWN ... and left those crucial insights to FUTURE generations.

The media (as in "means of keeping such vital records" in existence) may change over millennia ... BUT--

The "messages" should be THE SAME:

Unless you "write things down," and store those writings (pictures of grandma ... Hollywood movies ... Bill Gates' computer graphics Windows animations ..., etc., etc.), the future will TOTALLY COLLAPSE ... in ONE or TWO generations--

Directly back into BARBARISM!

On a place (the Moon!) where there's NO air to (literally) breath ... unless the "breathing machines" are understood ... and MAINTAINED

--
Everyone will simply DIE. In a very short time.

So -- there MUST be fabulous LIBRARIES out there ... on the Moon, on Mars ... elsewhere in the solar system ... ANYWHERE where this amazing "previous civilization" lived and flourished ....

All we have to do is a) FIND them, and b) figure out how to READ them ....

NOT a trivial set of tasks.

But, FINDING them comes first .... :)

Or, getting NASA to 'fess up -- if THEY have already found them