A second look at Mike Bara's rant

        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 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 or plastic 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.