Monday, April 21, 2008

No errors in "Dark Mission"?

On April 18th, "jjrakman" posted this:

"take expat for instance...it's almost like it is his lifelong ambition to divert the attention away from any presented data..and then start arguing in a manner like "...well, oke so you think you have found an apple...but since there's no appletree in the picture...it can't be an apple"."

Mike Bara suppressed this response:

"No, what I'm saying is much simpler than that. I'm saying that verifiable errors in a published work should be corrected in subsequent editions, that's all. Here are some examples from "Dark Mission":

* NASA is a direct adjunct of DoD
* NASA concealed the results of the Viking biology LR experiment
* Neil Armstrong likened himself to a parrot
* The Brookings Report recommended concealment of evidence of alien civilizations
* Cernan and/or Schmitt could have retrieved a skull-sized rock from Shorty crater
* Farouk El-Baz was the most powerful figure in the entire Apollo Program
* Failure of the 1993 Mars Observer mission was the result of sabotage

All of the above statements are false. They are errors, mistakes. They are non-factual. Thanks to the magnificent resources of the world-wide web, any of us can verify that for ourselves in about 5 minutes per factoid.

In addition, there are a number of statements in the book that are not so easily falsified but are nonetheless highly problematic. One such is the statement in the Intro that Apollo crews brought back from the moon "not just rocks, but actual _samples_ of the ancient technologies they found -- for highly classified efforts at "back engineering".

Very hard to prove a negative, but since in that particular case Mike Bara has conceded that he and Hoagland know of no evidence to support the statement, common sense says that the passage should be deleted.

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