Hoagland shamed, Bara mocked

        As my internet-friend binaryspellbook rightly says (or rightly writes, to be right), the former museum curator Richard Hoagland has some back-pedaling to do in respect of Comet 67P Churyumov–Gerasimenko. It is now screamingly obvious that the ten-trillion kg rubber ducky IS NOT an abandoned space station and DOES NOT feature "ruins and eroded jagged metallic structures ... skyscrapers ...buildings," as Hoagland claimed earlier this year.

        Time for some public recantation, you'd think -- unless you already knew Hoagland's standard behavior of hiding when his pronouncements and predictions are shown to be false. As a matter of fact, right now he's doing an unprecedented job of hiding.

* Last update of his primitive web site: April 2014
* Last update of his Fartbook fan page: May 2012
* Last update of his Fuckbook "personal" page: Too far off to find
* Last appearance on Coast to Coast AM: 22nd April 2014 (there are rumors that George Noory is pissed off with him)
* Last known public appearance: 31st August 2014, Caravan  to Midnight (when he made the claim about 67P)
* Update: He was on something called the Tom Anderson Show much more recently (7th Nov) peddling the same story. Again, unchallenged.

Update 22nd Nov: Noory announced last night that RCH is not on the naughty chair and will be back soon. Apparently he moved house "and it did not go well," whatever that means.

Well done, ESA
        This blog adds its congratulations to the tidal wave sweeping over Arianespace, Astrium, ESA and its many, many collaborators. As of this writing, Philae may be on its side and rapidly running out of battery power, but to have got it that far is a gigantic achievement. Update: Turned out that it wasn't lying on its side after all, but the batteries failed on 14 Nov.

NOT well done, Mike Bara
        Mike Bara, the world-renowned theoretical physicist, came up with a blogpost this week that clanged somewhat like Big Ben would if it fell onto Westminster Bridge (yes, folks, the term Big Ben technically refers to the bell, not the tower it sits in). He gave us his analysis of the physics implied in the recently-released movie Interstellar, and in the process reiterated his well-known opinion that modern astrophysics is mostly rubbish, and physicists are idiots -- especially Neil deGrasse Tyson, who Bara calls a "science choad" no less than eight times (a choad being a short fat penis).

        He's not 100% wrong about physics -- I share his skepticism about dark matter/dark energy, for instance. But in writing that wormholes are nonsense because nobody has ever seen one, he's missing the point so spectacularly that the point is rumored to have committed suicide in despair. Quite likely wormholes don't exist, or if they do it's extremely hard to see how human space travelers could put one to effective use. But a wormhole, or an Einstein-Rosen bridge to give it its posh name, is a legitimate solution to the equations of General Relativity, and thus is of interest to theoretical physics. That arcane discipline, almost by definition, does not require the things it studies to be actually observable. Mike dear, think of a wormhole as a way of teaching relativity, not something that will necessarily ever be confirmed to exist.

        Time dilation is another matter. Well understood and accurately measured, this phenom is responsible, for instance, for the fact that GPS satellites have their time-keeping  adjusted to account for the reduced gravity field at 20,000 km altitude. Mike Bara the world-famous engineer wrote this:

"[T]here is some evidence to support time dilation, but it is pretty sketchy. As an example, identical nuclear clocks have been used to measure the passage of time on Earth relative to the passage of time in orbit, in near weightless conditions. The clocks farther away from the 1G gravitational field of Earth were found to operate faster than the ones on Earth. But this is categorically NOT proof that time passes more slowly under the influence of gravity. It is only proof that clocks operate more slowly under the influence of gravity. Since no one has a clue what time really is, the idea that we can measure it is a fairy tale. None of these experiments have actually measured the speed of time. They have only measured the effects of gravity on mechanical instruments, i.e. clocks."

       I can assure Mike Bara that a GPS satellite does not function by mechanical clockwork. In fact, there are no moving parts at all.

        Bara then quoted himself, in a passage from his book The Choice which demonstrated his utter ignorance of the nature of gravitation, and ended with this dictum:

" Science is observation, experimentation, measurement and insight."

        I posted the following comment, with no expectation that Bara would allow it to be seen:

"Quite right. You'd do well to remember that precept before expounding on the false pseudo-science you call hyperdimensional physics^{note 1}. A few notes:

- None of the examples you cite of energy upwelling at 19.5° latitude are valid.
- Hoagland thinks nothing of lying in order to promote this idea -- as he did in respect of the Port-au-Prince earthquake.
- None of the top ten earthquakes or volcanic eruptions in history have been at 19.5°.
- Hoagland's Accutron "experiments"^{note 2} are a joke. No controls, no baselines, no data on the orientation of the device. The maximum recorded frequency excursions he ever reported were recorded at a time when there was no eclipse and no transit.

- In summary, neither you nor Hoagland has either observed or measured HD physics. Neither you nor Hoagland has conducted any meaningful or acceptable experiments.  It's a fraud."

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[1] See this summary
[2] See this

Three bad weeks for Mike Bara

        Poor Mike. First, in a blog-post on 14th October, he was fooled by Luna Cognita's utterly misleading video about the so-called Stand-up EVA on Apollo 12. It never happened, as James Concannon explained right here. And btw, Mike still hasn't delivered on his promise to tell us what the Apollo 12 astronauts "were really looking for."

        Next, on 6th November, he made a total fool of himself by declaring that the Sol 3720 image from the Opportunity rover on Mars is a valve handle. He even showed us one in case we've never seen a valve.

photo credit: JPL/Bara

        As Mick West of Metabunk explained on 23rd October, the "valve" is in fact the impression of a Phillips-head screw in the casing of Opportunity's x-ray spectrometer. The head of the instrument is pressed firmly into the dirt in order to get a good reading.

 photo credit: JPL

        To complete Mike Bara's three weeks of misery, this magnificent image appeared yesterday:

photo credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

       The image was acquired by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, and it shows a protoplanetary disc around the young star HL Tauri, about 450 light-years from us in our home galaxy the Milky Way. In other words, we are seeing here a process that Mike Bara the world-famous astronomer has said does not happen. Bara, following the late Tom Van Flandern, has written that planets do not accrete from rings around a forming star, but are flung off in pairs after the star has completely formed. Van Flandern called this process solar fission.

        Blogging on 26th August last year, Bara hilariously cited the observation of a single exoplanet GJ 504b as good support for solar fission. As I wrote at the time, that's like somebody who believes there are two Moons circling Earth watching a single Moonrise and saying "See? That fits my theory perfectly!"

Two videos from Luna Cognita

James Concannon writes...

        Two videos by "Luna Cognita" have re-surfaced in the blogosphere recently. Both make accusations of NASA-Apollo cover-ups, both are quite well put together, and both are utterly wrong.

        Luna Cognita might be José Escamilla, or maybe John Lear, or someone funded by one of those specimens. His (or her?) production values are way above standard Youtube quality. The editing and scripting are quite close to broadcast quality. Here's the video index.

Stand-up
        The first one to be given new exposure was "APOLLO 12's COVERT EVA - Proof of NASA's Off-The-Record Lunar Surface Operations," dating from October 2011 and over an hour long. The allegation is that the Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean conducted a clandestine Stand-up EVA shortly after landing. The notoriously error-prone Mike Bara drew attention to this in a recent blog post, remarking "Yes, they did. But not for the reasons the narrator believes... The truth is, they were looking for something." In a tweet the same day, he added "And I will show you what they were looking for soon." So far, he hasn't delivered.

        A Stand-up EVA (SEVA) involves depressurizing the Lunar Module, suiting up, and opening the docking tunnel hatch over the astronauts' heads. By standing on the ascent engine cover, one astronaut can then get an unobstructed 360° view of the surroundings. Only one SEVA was ever actually performed -- that was by Apollo 15 astronauts Dave Scott and Jim Irwin. Here's the transcript of that event. Note that the whole process takes from MET 106:41:20 to 107:16:23 -- some 35 minutes.

        There was no SEVA in the Apollo 12 flight plan or in any of the mission transcripts. Luna Cognita anchors his hour-long accusation of an Apollo 12 coverup on a document dated September 2006: The Apollo Experience: Lessons Learned for Constellation Lunar Dust Management by Sandra A. Wagner. And indeed, on page 1 we find this paragraph:

"The blowing dust caused by the Apollo 12 LM landing appears to have been worse than that of Apollo 11. In fact, a standup extravehicular activity (EVA) was performed by the crew to assess the site prior to performing lunar surface EVAs because blowing dust completely obscured the view during landing."

        Seems straightforward. However, Robert Pearlman, editor of collectSpace, contacted Sandra Wagner about this and she confessed that it was an error. She simply wrote 12 when she meant 15. Scroll down to Pearlman's 3-19-2014 post in this forum.

        Wagner's assumed reason for the Apollo 15 SEVA is at odds, by the way, with Dave Scott's own comments (following MET 106:50:01 in the transcript) and the fact that the SEVA was in the flight plan well before any dust problems occurred or were even contemplated. But that's a side issue. To me, the bottom line is that there is not sufficient "missing time" in the 12 transcript to allow for a clandestine SEVA. The radio silence from MET 04:15:09:31 to 04:15:18:34 just doesn't cut it.

        Luna Cognita claims that the SEVA happened a bit later, from MET 04:15:39:57 to 04:15:58:43 -- a stretch of 18:46. But this is still not enough time, and in fact the astronauts spent that time re-programming the computer, correcting an error they had made when tracking the star Pollux.^{note 1}

        Here's Mission Control (from the Tech Air-Ground transcript) giving them clearance for the re-program at the exact time at which Luna Cognita claims the SEVA began:

        Perhaps Mike Bara will astonish us all with a complete explanation in a few days. But given Bara's past performances, we're likely to get either nothing at all or ignorant bullshit.

Music behind the Moon
        The second Luna Cognita vid was The stunning Apollo 10 coverup - The Music Behind The Moon. This is mercifully less than nine minutes, and originally posted May 2008. It was recently promoted by the error-prone psychologist Robert Morningstar on 29th October, on Fussbook.

        It beats me how this "Luna Cognita" fellow (or female?) can claim that an event was covered up while simultaneously showing us the transcript of it, freely available to anyone with a computer and net access. But there you are -- conspiracy theorists have their own logic.

        Apollo 10 was the "dress rehearsal" for the Moon landing. Astronauts Stafford, Cernan and Young went into low lunar orbit, separated the LM from the CSM, and flew it to within 8.4 nautical miles of the surface before backing off and redocking. While behind the Moon, out of contact with Houston, all three astronauts made several remarks about "weird music" audible on the VHF radio channel. The source of these sounds was almost certainly artifacts of VHF ranging at a time when there was no line-of-sight between the two spacecraft.

04 06 13 02 LMP That music even sounds outer-spaeey, doesn't it? You hear that? That whistling sound?
04 06 13 06 CDR Yes.
04 06 13 07 LMP Who0ooooo. Say your - -
04 06 13 12 CMP Did you hear that whistling sound, too?
04 06 13 14 LMP Yes. Sounds like - you know, outer-space-type music.

04 06 17 58 LMP Boy, that sure is weird music.
04 06 18 01 CMP We're going to have to find out about that. Nobody will believe us.
04 06 18 07 LMP Yes. It's a whistling, you know, like an outerspace-type thing.
04 06 18 10 CMP Yes .... VHF-A ...

        At AOS (Acquisition of Signal), when the LM was once more contactable from Earth, this dialog took place.

        Luna Cognita makes the following allegations: 1) Some incriminating material was edited out just before the PAO said "That was John Young", and 2) What Young actually said was "Boy, you wouldn't believe this, Frank" (meaning Frank Borman.)

        Well, the idea that some substantial dialog was edited out is laughable. The audio was released in real time to accredited news media. There was even a feed to guest rooms at the Nassau Bay Hotel, the favorite haunt of NASA junkies (and groupies). As for the remark being addressed to Frank Borman, the problem with that is that Borman was not even in Houston at the time. He was in Prague, accepting a gold medal from the Czech Academy of Sciences. If you don't believe me, read the mission transcript, page 671 (by pdf count), 118:58 GET.

        This blog has commented before about Mr. Morningstar's inaccuracy in respect of the DSE and DSEA^{note 2} tapes. He should find himself some sources that are more credible than Luna Cognita.

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[1] Verb 32 initiates the Coelliptic Sequence, meaning the calculation needed to perform the circularization burn, nominally one hour after LOI. Very fortunately for Apollo 12, VERB 32 did not start the burn itself -- that required a separate VERB 41.

[2] DSE, Data Storage Equipment, was installed in the Command Module. It stored  voice and data during the times that the CM was out of contact behind the Moon. DSEA, Data Storage Equipment Assembly, was likewise installed in the Lunar Module. The purpose of both systems was to provide information in the event that some serious anomaly occurred behind the Moon and the astronauts were never heard from again. Morningstar has stated on several occasions that the astronauts were not aware of this -- an allegation that is easily refuted.