Robert Morningstar in la-la land

James Concannon writes...

        A very fetching young lady by name of Tiffany Rae Larkin just recently  finished editing a video interview she recorded with the nutcase psychologist Robert Morningstar, and she posted it on her Foo-Boo page. It seems to have been shot in a very large hangar, on a single camera, at last year's Secret Space Program conference in San Mateo before AM* gave his presentation. So he was in a sense selling himself.

credit: Dream Tree Productions

 02:00 AM*: "What I discovered are the most important photographs of the Apollo project, and they laid buried in archives for, now, 42 years. Since the last flight, Apollo 17 and 16 in 1972. And these photos ... they were difficult to access for many years. And even when you see them, if you don't look deeply into them you'll not find what's really recorded there. What I'm going to show you are towers on the Moon. For years -- decades -- we've heard legends of towers on the far side of the Moon ... UFOs, space stations, and that's what I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you a constellation of space stations ... on the far side of the Moon. Towers that are, in my estimate, almost 100 miles high, all over the Moon. And it indicates an extraterrestrial presence because these things could not be ours -- they're not of this Earth. It also explains why Apollo missions 18, 19 and 20 were canceled.

TRL: "When were those missions?

AM*: "They were supposed to be after 17, but 17 was the last one.

TRL: "But what year?"

AM*: "1972 was the last year. The Apollo mission was only supposed to be the beginning of Lunar exploration. We were supposed to then establish a Moon base, perhaps set up a space station, but as was reported during the conference, one of the astronauts said "Their ships were bigger than ours, faster than ours, menacing, and after we saw them there was no question of us having a Moon base." They were frightened off the Moon.  The other thing I'm going to show you is what frightened them off the Moon."

         During the video Tiffany or her editor cut away to what she thought were some appropriate things:

- Morningstar's depiction of Mare Imbrium, in which he mis-labeled all the craters.
- The "crashed spaceship", which we now know is just a dune feature.
- "Big Ben," which we now know is not a tower at all.
- The so-called "alien base" photographed by the Chinese Chang'e orbiter. Not only is this NOT an alien base, it isn't even a Chang'e image. It's a detail from Frame 3085 from Lunar Orbiter 3, dating from 1967.

OMG!! Mylar!!! Let's get outta here!
        As for showing us  "what frightened them off," perhaps he meant the 18-inch piece of floating mylar from Apollo 10.  He still insists that it's a space station 166 miles wide, and refuses to give his estimate of how far away it is (my estimate, based on knowledge of the optics, is 2,338 miles.) Actually it's 18-20 feet away.

        On FB, I asked him who exactly  was frightened. James Fletcher, the NASA Administrator? George Low, the Deputy? Remember it was George Low who made the very, very bold decision to send Apollo 8 round the Moon, even though the Lunar Module wasn't ready. This does not seem like a person who would get scared by any unexpected lunar discoveries. His reply:

The man who killed Apollo, managed & executed the dismantling of the Apollo Program was, eventually leading to the destruction of the blueprints and production tools was -> James C. Fletcher 'Nuff said" -> M*

        So then I asked him what evidence he had that Fletcher was scared, and he replied "Yes, James -> "Scared" ... Just like you. -> M*

        There was more in Tiffany's video, and it went on to a Part 2 in which AM* explained how the extraterrestrials ("The Greys") communicate with us. Honestly, I'm not a trained psychiatrist but he really did look and sound like a crazy man to me. Just my amateur opinion.

Update:
Today (15 Aug) I put erickson's good question to the Morningstar person. Here's how it went:

James Concannon: Robert my dear chap, do you not see that your story is self-contradictory? If NASA was "frightened" in 1969, WHY DID THEY LAND FIVE MORE MISSIONS????????

Robert Morningstar:  James, That one of the most stupid quearies [sic] that you have ever posed. It is unworthy of reply. -> M*

I tried.


Thanks to Carolb for additional info.

Richard Hoagland contradicts himself, Mike Bara goes to Church

        It's been a fun week on internet radio, to be sure. First, Stuart Robbins (that's DOCTOR Stuart Robbins to you) got through on the call-in line to Richard Hoagland's new digital radio  show and scored some good points before being drowned by Hoagland's appallingly rude, overbearing, debating style. To nobody's surprise, Hoagland eventually cut him off with "You're just wrong."

        Robbins wrote the experience up at some length on his blog. Personally (although I wasn't listening live) I was delighted that he was able to bring up one of my favorite topics—the question of contamination on Hoagland's office scanner. I think that's exactly what Hoagland is looking at when he says he sees glass skyscrapers on the Moon.

        I mean, come on—which is more likely? Glass skyscrapers or shazz on the scanner? The exchange went like this:

SJR: "You have the Apollo images... I know that you completely disagree—some people have argued that what you're looking at is noise from your scanner. "

RCH: "They're idiots!"

SJR: "..."

RCH: "No no no. There are some things people—critics—say that are totally stupid. The idea..."

SJR: "..."

RCH: "Hang on, hang on. You asked the question. The idea that I would put negatives or prints on a scanner, and a) not clean the screen, and b) not make sure there was no dust on the negatives etc. etc.— is ludicrous. That is a straw man that people are putting out there—it's not true. These are real artifacts recorded by the Apollo astronauts, both in orbit and from the surface, and all we've done is take that data and subject it to modern technology, to bring it out and to present it in terms of web posts."

SJR: "But that's not what I'm asking. I'm saying 'Some people say that, that you're using these Apollo images, and that's one explanation that your critics make, and'...."

RCH: "But that doesn't mean it's right. They can claim anything... Look, you can hold these photographs up to the light and see it on the analog..."

SJR: "..."

RCH: "Hang on, hang on. You don't have to scan. I can't show you an analog print because you're not in the same room. So I have to scan it and put it on the web. But the originals show what we're showing. All you have to do in the dark room is basically bring out the low-level detail from the negative, and Bingo! There it is on an analog print."

        So he's saying the skyscrapers are there, not just on the digital scans but on Ken Johnston's 30-year-old 10x8 prints, as well. I wonder how he reconciles that with this passage from Dark Mission p. 226:

"In scanning Ken's priceless Apollo 14 C-prints, [I'd] discovered that the computer could "see" what the human eye could not—incredible geometric detail in the pitch black areas, like the lunar sky. The sensitivity of modern CCD imaging technology, in even commercially-available image scanners, coupled with the amazing enhancement capabilities of state-of-the-art commercial software—like Adobe's Photoshop—allowed the invisible detail [emph. added] buried in these supposedly black layers, of these thirty-year-old emulsions, to ultimately be revealed—a "democratization" of technology that no censor at NASA could have possibly foreseen over more than thirty years."

Go clean that scanner glass right now, Hoagland.

We're all Mundanes
        Mike Bara, meanwhile, was one of a gallimaufry of small-time guests on Jimmy Church's 300th Fade to Black internet radio show. They fell to discussing their sense of duty to all the true believers who feel isolated from society because they believe in rubbish like restaurants on Mars. Here's most of it:

Bara: "What we're doing is important ... it's really really important ..Without shows like Fade to Black they have no place to go, they have no sense of community, they have no sense of family. In many ways we have to replace the family members of the people that don't accept them and don't acknowledge them or recognize that they're different. And then the next thing, once we do that, is to turn it around and force all of the Mundanes out there to understand and to recognize that they're the ones that are weird, not us. They're the ones that live in fantasy land, because they simply do not see, or refuse to look at, all the amazing things that go on around us all the time. All the paranormal, supernatural, alien stuff that's happening."

[Church: "It's Us against Them"]

"And eventually Jimmy, what we have to do is create a forum where there is no "Them," there's only "Us" ... We're the normal ones, because we understand the way the universe really works. We appreciate it, we experience it. So that's what we're working toward, that's what I'm working toward anyway, and I think everyone else in their own way is doing the same."

Church: "Do you feel different about "Them"? ... Are they starting to take Mike Bara seriously?"

Bara: "No, and I don't think they ever will. I think the biggest thing we have to get away from is caring what they think of us, and caring whether we have their approval ... I guess I just do not care whether they recognize us or not. We've got to form our own thing, go our own way, and just let the truth be the truth."

        So just like Hoagland, Bara accuses us "mundanes" of refusing to look at the data. Excuse me while I shout something from the rooftops:

WE'VE LOOKED AT YOUR FUCKING DATA AND IT'S NO FUCKING GOOD.

"Ancient Aliens" -- Your show for barefaced lies

        I suppose nobody tunes in to Ancient Aliens (History Channel) expecting to be shown the truth. So I can't really pretend I'm shocked—shocked!—that Season 8 Ep 2 "NASA's Secret Agenda" was full of balderdash.

        And yet, when that sorry excuse for a television "documentary" series touches on a subject you know well, it gives a special kind of pain. Watching "NASA's Secret Agenda," I felt like Jason Colavito does when the series covers his special subject, history of mythology (follow that link and you'll see Colavito describing this episode as a "steaming turd." That's not nice, Jason. Oh, perhaps it is.) This episode devoted itself to saying, about 20 times in 20 slightly different ways, that Wernher Von Braun was such a genius that he had to have acquired some secret knowledge from—you guessed it, I'm sure—Ancient Aliens. As Colavito correctly notes, the Soviets of that era seem to have done very nicely without alien intervention. Calculation of how to get to the Moon on an elliptical semi-orbit is mathematics, folks, not mysticism.

        The history of early spaceflight (well, some of it) was told with only a few minor errors. Then  around the 30:00 mark, on came Mike Bara and the lies came thick and fast. Describing the Apollo 17 mission yet again, in a narrative he stole from Keith Laney, Bara talked about the "mysterious" hexagonal-shaped mountain astronauts Cernan & Schmitt spent some time at. The video showed us this:

credit: Prometheus Entertainment

He was talking about South Massif, which actually looks like this:

credit: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter WAC

Is that honest television documentary reporting? Or pure bullshit?

Negatives
        Then it was on to the skull-like rock in crater Shorty, which Richard Hoagland dubbed Data's Head. This blog has covered that piece of nonsense again and again. The narration said "Bara and Hoagland obtained early-generation negatives from NASA..." However, IT'S NOT TRUE. Here's what Hoagland told Kerry Cassidy about his perfunctory research:

[W]e've gotten two copies of film - not just the web but film, (which is really crappy copies that were sent to us), and what I was able to do was a computerized robot comparison with C3PO.

        NASA does not hand out "early generation negatives," especially not to hostile nincompoops. To be fair to Mike Bara, those sins were committed by the producers and writers, not him personally. But for me, re-telling the lies about South Massif and Shorty is quite bad enough. Ugh.