Expat eats his words as Hoagland begs on C2C

Chris Lopes offers this review of last night's three-hour flim-flam on Coast-to-Coast AM:

         Not only was Hoagland begging for money for his trip to Egypt, he was also trying to get himself (and his redheaded sidekick) attached to the expedition investigating the "mysterious object" in the Baltic Sea. He even used (yet again) a quote from 2001: A Space Odyssey (another "what did Stanley know and when did he know it?" moment) to prove that the something is HD related. BTW, he got the quote wrong. In the movie the lady Russian scientist says her husband is doing "underwater research" in the Baltic not "underwater archaeology". In any case, it was a throw-away line used to show (by inference) the kind of social circles Heywood Floyd travels in.

        He did indeed spend a lot of the show going over his Accutron research, with the expected (by me anyway) result. I have suggested elsewhere on this site that such a topic would not exactly make for great radio. Hoagland was kind enough to prove me quite correct in that idea. It especially dragged when Hoagie decided to give a lecture on the history of HD physics, which couldn't have been more boring if he'd tried.

        I too thought the 12 hours thing was amusing (Expat adds: He said that "The Accutron went nuts for 12 hours non-stop" on the occasion of the summer solstice). Apparently "Mr. Science" didn't realize that the Earth was moving during that time and putting large bodies of water (that magic stuff that blocks HD waves remember?) between his watch and whatever celestial phenom was supposedly affecting it. Someday he'll learn to keep his BS straight, but last night was not that day.

        Mars was also covered for a bit, with Noory offering and Hoagland accepting praise for his "foresight" that Mars had recently (in the geological sense, a fact even Hoagland was sure to mention) had water. Hoagland then made a prediction about Obama (which he apparently no longer sees as destiny's child) saving his reelection by announcing evidence of microscopic life on Mars. I think it's interesting he has stepped back from his earlier prediction of an announcement of past intelligent life on Mars.

        The listener calls were lame as usual. The effort to protect Hoagland from questions that might expose him has left that part of the show as lifeless as it gets. There was one listener who offered a more conventional explanation for the Baltic thing, but Captain Not-So-Obvious was having nothing of that.

        All in all, it was a typical Hoagland/Noory show. Boring and pointless, with no chance for the listener to get those 3 hours of their life back.

Jamie Ecosse wants his money back

        Today's bloggery comes courtesy of the enterprising Jamie Ecosse—a nom de e-plume with a hidden clue as to the writer's real identity. As a further clue, I may add that Ecosse comes "from the same stable" as the estimable Irene Gardner, our heroine because of her very successful Hoagland bamboozle last month.

        Here's how this game was played:

==============================================
From: Jamie Ecosse
To: enterprisemission2001@yahoo.com
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2012 11:02 AM
Subject: Venus transit
Dear Mr Hoagland,

I donated what I could ill afford towards the planned trip to Egypt for the Venus transit HD measurements.
Since the trip never took place and no data was forthcoming I would like my money back.
Would you be so kind as to indicate how this will happen. Do you need me to set up a paypal account or something similar ?

Regards
Jamie

===============================================
From: enterprisemission2001@yahoo.com
To: Jamie Ecosse

Jamie,
Science does not happen overnight.

I have been working (literally) around the clock, for weeks, preparing a substantive Report on our first Eclipse results for a new post on Enterprise; the Venus Transit data -- which WAS acquired successfully two weeks after the Eclipse, just not in Egypt -- will follow after that.

The Egypt trip is still being planned, to measure the torsion physics of the Pyramids; merely the date has been moved back (now, to closer to the December, 2012, Winter Solstice Galactic Alignment) -- as I continue gathering the financial support to make that happen ....

After you have SEEN the spectacular results of what we recorded from both the Eclipse and the Transit, if you still want your donation returned, that will be arranged.

I just want you to realize that ANYTHING worthwhile in science, certainly something this "paradigm busting," takes time -- time to properly analyze and even begin to understand, let alone time to prepare the first results for publication.

I look forward to your reaction to what you helped us find ....

RCH
===============================================

        Holy shit! He intends to keep begging for the next FIVE MONTHS!

        Thanks for this, Jamie, and if Hoagland's "report" ever appears I sincerely hope you'll give him the reaction he's so looking forward to.

        Meanwhile, the Science Adviser himself is posted to appear on Coast-to-Coast AM tomorrow night, telling us about anti-gravity spaceships and free energy generators (also known as "bullshit science".) Since I recently wrote that C2C had apparently banned him from begging on the air, I fear I may be about to eat my words. Since it's barbecue season, I'll have some guacamole to help them down. Actually, in a few minutes I intend to have some guac with or without words. Cheers.

Does Mike Bara have a copyright problem?

        Let me be the first to bring you the tidings, which you may take as glad or sad, depending on how much you enjoy Mike Bara's writing style and his general lack of interest in the facts of what he writes about. His new book, Ancient Aliens on the Moon, has an ISBN (978-1935487852,) a publication date (15th October,) an Amazon page, and a publisher's blurb. Here is the latter:

 Best-selling author and Secret Space Program researcher Bara brings us this lavishly illustrated volume on alien structures on the Moon. He looks into the history of lunar anomalies and the early NASA programs. He gives us an examination of ruins on the Moon in the Sinus Medii region. Using images from the Surveyor, Lunar Orbiter and Ranger missions. He looks at the Apollo lunar missions to the Moon and the photographic evidence supporting the "transparent dome theory,” plus he looks at further anomalies in the Mare Crisium region, including the hexagonal shape of the Crisium region itself, watch- crystal type glass domes over the craters Cleomedes F and Cleomedes F/a, and an historical image of a giant shard of transparent material that was whitewashed from later versions of the same image. Bara discusses the popular theory that the film "2001 -A Space Odyssey” was used as a training ground for Stanley Kubrick to develop the technology to fake the footage of the landings plus the curious mission of Apollo 17-possibly a technology salvage mission, primarily concerned with investigating an opening into a massive hexagonal ruin near the landing site. Bara details how the astronauts managed to get nearly 30 minutes of "off camera” time to investigate an entrance into the ruin and then later proceeded to a nearby crater to retrieve technological objects. He examines evidence from the Russian Zond series of lunar probes as well as the more current Clementine and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data, including an in-depth study of strange objects in Tycho crater. Plus a look at the current politics of the new race to return to the Moon and what hidden agenda's may be behind it. Finally, Bara looks at the various arguments that the entire Moon is an artificial object. Bara shows how the Moon would have been an ideal place for an alien species involved in genetic experimentation on Earth to have set up a base.

        Two things pop out at me. First, "lavishly illustrated," and second, the "massive hexagonal ruin" near the landing site of Apollo 17. He means the hill known as "South Massif," which was Station 2 of EVA-2, also known as Nansen-Apollo after a ditch at the base of the massif (not to be confused, as one writer on this topic did recently, with the large crater Nansen way up at 80.9°N, 95.3°E.) South Massif is not, of course, a "ruin" but a perfectly normal selenological feature. It is, however, reasonably hexagonal with one side missing due to partial collapse. Nansen-Apollo is the dark spot at about 2 o'clock in the image below, and the landing site was roughly half way between that and the top right corner of the image.

Image credit: NASA

       There's an excellent composite astronaut's eye view of South Massif by Mike Constantine here. It's pretty obvious that for the new book, Mike Bara is mostly re-hashing material from the Lunar Anomalies web site he managed for a while. The original site was hacked long ago by some Chinese medical insurance enterprise. In 2006 Mike started a new blog and intended to transfer the material but soon got bored. The last entry is dated August 2009.

        But Mike is also re-hashing something else.  A major six-part essay by Keith Laney, orbital photography expert and "lunar anomalist," entitled A Hidden Mission for Apollo 17. This material is very clearly copyrighted (2002-11) by Keith Laney Productions™ and bears the additional warning All custom imagery use restricted without permission. All rights reserved. It's none of my business, really, but since the entire thrust of Laney's six-parter is that Nansen-Apollo could be a secret tunnel leading to the interior of the "artifact" known as South Massif, I sure hope Mike Bara gets proper clearance from Keith Laney before he writes that chapter. I might even contact the publisher, Adventures Unlimited Press, to remind them of the requirements of copyright law.

A Few Facts

        Here are some facts about Apollo 17 EVA-2 that you probably won't find in Mike Bara's book, because he doesn't deal in facts. The track to Nansen-Apollo and back is depicted in this composite — and note that Station 4 was the crater Shorty, famous to geologists for orange soil and to fans of Hoagland & Bara for an utterly fraudulent fairy-tale about a robot head.

         Station 2 was originally scheduled as a 50-minute stop. It was extended to 64 minutes because of its geological interest (and for that reason, Cernan & Schmitt were pressed for time at Shorty, making the idea that they could have descended into the crater and retrieved the "robot" self-evidently ridiculous.) The published Lunar Surface Journal covers the entire 64 minutes, from MET 142:43:37 to 143:46:34. Nowhere is there any unexplained gap of 30 minutes or anything like it. The video, cut up into clips of about 3:30, is continuous from 142:46:06 to 143:45:40 when the astronauts got back on the Lunar Rover. The astronauts are not continuously visible—in fact Cernan comments at 143:05:11 that he didn't choose an ideal place to park the rover from that point of view, but the entire time they can be heard doing their sampling activity, placing samples in numbered bags that correspond to samples in the catalog. At 143:13:40 the camera is pointing down into Nansen-Apollo and there's not the slightest evidence of any entrance to anywhere.There is no justification whatsoever for claiming that 30-minute "off-camera" time. It's simply nonsense.

        By all means buy Mike's book. You can pre-order it from Amazon right now. Just remember that, when you read about an "entrance" to the "ruin," you're reading just one more ignorant fantasy from the mind of a man who has no expertise in any relevant discipline. And very likely one more instance of the flagrant copyvio that Hoagland & Bara are notorious for.

I never said Elenin was a nit-pick

        Wonder of wonders!! I actually got an e-mail reply from 'The Big Man,' as Richard Hoagland self-describes. I don't think any preamble is needed, and not much postamble either. Here's the entire épistolat.

expat to RCH:

Greetings. During the 'Awake & Aware' conference last year you stated as follows (times relate to the Youtube video set):

"Elenin is NOT a comet." Part 1, 04:15
"Something is active on board."  Part 5, 07:50
"So we've got a spacecraft of some kind, flying in an orbit of some kind..." Part 5, 09:52

On Coast to Coast AM, 2nd April, you shouted down a caller with the words "I NEVER SAID ELENIN WAS A SPACESHIP."

Do you think you owe that caller an apology?

RCH to expat:

A "spacecraft" is NOT axiomatically a "spaceship" ....     :)

"Mariner 9" was NOT "Apollo 11."

"Something active on board ..." described anything from "a possible active, automated control system ..." to "a real AI."

Never once mentioned "living beings" -- driving an crewed [sic] "spaceship."    

Words HAVE meaning.

expat to RCH: 

In this page you use the word "spaceship" three times to describe Phobos, yet you have never said that Phobos is "occupied" and indeed it certainly is not. It follows that the definition, to you, includes any celestial object that has ever been under intelligent control. Incidentally, your assertion, in support of your ideas about Phobos, that "You can't have a natural object that's 30% hollow" is laughably incorrect. To name but two contradictory examples, Hyperion is about 40% hollow. Kelp floats are >90% hollow.

In another interesting example of words having meanings, the meaning of "geodetic latitude" is the angle made by the extension of the local vertical with the equatorial plane.  The geodetic latitude of the Port-au-Prince earthquake was NOT 19.5°.

Bandy

        I hesitate to bandy words (Bandy? How did something describing dodgy legs also come to mean verbal sparring?) with one so totally skilled at picking the nit, but I'll just point out that wikipedia says 'spacecraft' and 'spaceship' are synonyms. I realize wikipedia is largely the work of bored twelve-year-olds in the Manchester suburbs, but I think if there were originally two separate articles the kiddies would have had a hard time merging them.

         I've waited most of today, like a Tennessee Williams spinster longing for a gentleman caller, for the continuation of this dialog, but I don't think it'll continue. If it does, you'll be the first to know.

        Meanwhile, back in Facebookistan, nothing but dead air on the subject of the Inaccutron "experiment" during the Venus transit. Even some of the Branch Hoaglandians are getting testy. No doubt the testiest are the ones who gave Hoagland money for nothing.

Update:

        Just for fun I hit the translate button, and translated this post into French, a language I understand a bit. Here's what the frenchies would read as the first line of RCH's e-mail:

Un "vaisseau spatial" n'est pas axiomatiquement un «vaisseau spatial»

What's French for "WTF"?

German: Ein "Raumschiff" ist NICHT axiomatisch ein "Raumschiff" ..

Frantic fun in Facebooklandia

        More kudos to Irene Gardner, for a very daring raid on Hoagland's smug arrogance yesterday, which included these words:

"You are a liar Hoagland. YES THAT IS LIBEL. Take me to court you bastard."

        I <3 it. I've preserved the entire text plus the 67 comments it attracted. It even brought the notorious Max Kiejzik out of the psychiatric hospital to peddle his ridiculous pseudo-geometry for the 5,000th time. Hoagland himself must be in one of his periodic attention-lapses, because Irene's bold challenge has been allowed to remain for nearly 24 hours now.

        Then today, courtesy of Esteban Navarro Galán, we got this treat:

image credit: icanhazcheeseburger

        Well, not that exactly, but something related. You know how Richard Hoagland never tires of reminding us that he and Carl Sagan were such good buddies they were practically a mutual admiration society? Well, Esteban dug up a quote from Sagan which cast some doubt on that. Sagan gave a keynote address at the CSICOP Conference in Seattle, Washington, June 23—26, 1994. This was just three weeks after Hoagland's lecture at Ohio State, which this blog has referred to. He took questions, and this was one of them:

Richard Hoagland has recently got hold of some pictures, Hasselblad pictures from NASA, which were taken some twenty years ago of the moon, and he has been describing those in great detail. He gave a talk at Ohio State University a couple of weeks ago and he had video cameras on and they were supposed to have videos available. I wonder if you’ve heard about this and had previous knowledge of...

Sagan responded:

Richard Hoagland is a fabulist. By the way, it’s not difficult getting hold of the hand-held Hasselblad camera pictures; NASA freely releases them to everybody. ...The aspect of this story I know best has to do with the so-called Face on Mars. There is a place on Mars called Cydonia, which was photographed in a mission I was deeply involved in, the Viking mission to Mars in 1976. And there is one picture in which along a range of hulking mesas and hillocks, there is what looks very much like a face, about three kilometers across at the base and a kilometer high. It’s flat on the ground, looking up. It has a helmet or a hair-do, depending on how you look at it, it has a nose, a forehead, one eye—the other half is in shadow—pretty eerie looking. You could almost imagine it was done by Praxiteles on a monumental scale. And this gentleman deduces from this that there was a race of ancient Martians. He has dated them, he purports to have deduced when they were around, and it was 500,000 years ago or something like that, when our ancestors were certainly not able to do space flights, and then all sorts of wonderful conclusions are deduced and “we came from Mars”or “guys from other star systems came here and left a statue on Mars and left some of them on Earth.” By the way, all of which fails to explain how it is that humans share 99.6 percent of their active genes with chimpanzees. If we were just dropped here, how come we’re so closely related to them? What is the basis of the argument? How good is it? My standard way of approaching this is to point out that there is an eggplant that looks exactly like former President Richard Nixon. The eggplant has this ski nose and, “that’s Richard Nixon, I’d know him anywhere.”

What shall we deduce from this eggplant phenomenon? Extraterrestrials messing with our eggplants? A miracle? God is talking to us through the eggplant? Or, that there have been tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of eggplants in history, and they all have funny little knobs, and every now and then there is going to be one that by accident looks like a human face. ... I think clearly the latter. Now let’s go to Mars. Thousands of low, hilly mesas have all sorts of features. Here’s one that looks a little like a human face. When you bring out the contrast in the shadowed area it doesn’t look as good. Now, we’re very good at picking out human faces. We have so many of these blocky mesas. Is it really a compelling sign of extraterrestrial intelligence that there’s one that looks a little like a human face? I think not. But I don’t blame people who are going into the NASA archives and trying to find things there; that is in the scientific spirit. I don’t blame people who are trying to find signs of extraterrestrial intelligence—I think it’s a good idea, in fact. But I do object to people who consider shoddy and insufficient evidence as compelling.

        Bravo, Sagan. As clear and convincing as ever. And Gracias, Esteban, for finding it.

         A Hoagland disciple called Val Williams, evidently outraged, posted "Don't bother reading......SMEAR CAMPAIGN!!! aka 'INFLAMING' 'BAITING'". It's not clear who Val thought was doing the smearing —Sagan or Galán. If any more similarly craven or intolerant comments turn up, I'll add them.

Update:

        I think we're done with the thread. It's still there but so far down the scroll-mountain that nobody's going to find it. Here's the final comment, from Max Kiejzik—not so much craven as all too self-revealing:

 Is it the ~crazy train~
Or the *LOGIC TRAIN*
Decide for YOURSELF.
ALL ABOARD!!!!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaa! Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay...
:)

At least Mike Bara's honest about his vanity

A few days ago, Mike Bara tweeted this:

I LOVE watching myself on TV. Seriously, it never gets old

        I guess he was watching re-runs of Ancient Aliens. Was it Season 4 Ep 5 "The NASA Connection", in which Mike made at least four major errors? Season 3 Ep 12 "Aliens and Deadly Cults", which he also screwed up? Or Ep 13, "Aliens and the Secret Code", featuring Mike pontificating about a subject that he not only had no expertise in, but that he knew nothing whatsoever about?

        It's endearing that he comes so clean about his narcissism (I suspect it's really directed at the Las Vegas strippers who frequent his Fuckbook page,) but it's a shame that what Mike is so proud of shows him up as so hopelessly wrong to those of us who actually understand science.

Meanwhile, Richard Hoagland's vanity has taken a hit....

        It's beginning to seem certain that Coast-to-Coast AM has totally stiffed Hoagland, their "science adviser." It's a safe bet that he pleaded to be allowed, first, to beg for funds for that proposed jaunt to the pyramids with his girlfriend Robin Falkov, then when that didn't work, at least come on the air to report his Accutron "experiment" during this week's Venus transit.

        He was not invited to talk about the Venus transit, however. Instead, the night before the event, Eric Francis was given the topic for most of an hour. The general rejoicing in the lack of Hoagland was spoiled by the unfortunate fact that Francis deals in astrology and told us a bunch of poppycock about how the transit would help our "relationships." Oh dear.

        To add insult, Hoagland's nemesis (and we sincerely hope, one day, replacement as science adviser) Bob Zimmerman turned up a night later to talk about the USAF's X-37B, a topic Hoagland considers his (despite the fact that he gets the name wrong and totally mis-reports its mission.)