Yet another hour of drivel from Mike Bara

        "I go with my gut feelings... If it feels right, it's probably the truth." That was the delusional Mike Bara, deep into an hour or so of amateurish internet radio yesterday. The show was Freedom of Perception hosted by Monique Lessan. Monique, a private investigator specializing in abductions (but not the alien kind) looks and sounds charming -- she has a pretty face, a tinkling giggle and a foreign accent that can sometimes be hard to decipher. Since she's listed as speaking fluent Farsi it seems likely that she was born in Iran. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld memorably said about something quite different.

        Mike's declaration about his guts (other than his promise, later, to go on a diet) chimes with his philosophy as enunciated in his book Ancient Aliens on Mars II. On page 11 he wrote "This book ... is about truth ... the kind of truth that you can only know in your heart and in your mind." Could there be a plainer warning that what he has to say and write is primarily bullshit?

        Indeed the excrementum tauri piled high as Monique led him down the well-trodden paths of his fantasies about the Moon. Artifacts of a former civilization? Oh yes. "To me it's pretty simple and pretty straightforward," he said. "Rocks have very specific shapes." So anything out of the ordinary has to be an artifact, right? Sure.

 The White Desert of Egypt. Credit: Touropia

        Asked about the Apollo program, Mike repeated the lie that Apollo's mission was to collect artifacts for the purpose of reverse engineering. He has said and written that so many times, but not once has he produced one shred of evidence. Specifically on Apollo 11, the first landing, he thinks Buzz Aldrin's private masonic ceremony^{note 1} was "the main purpose" of the mission. "[M]asons had a tremendous influence on the Apollo program," he said. Well, Mike, not half as much as the actual.. you know, engineers.

Rang like a bell
        Monique had obviously heard the sound bite from geologist Clive Neal, "The Moon rang like a bell," and she asked Mike about it. Mike kindly and patiently explained that when the Apollo 16 LM ascent stage was deliberately crashed into the Moon, seismometers left by previous missions went on reacting for 30 hours. He said that "obviously there are vast caverns.. I think they contain ruins, machinery... that is one of the things that conventional science can't explain." There are a few things adrift there:

- It wasn't Apollo 16, it was 13.
- It wasn't the LM Ascent Stage, it was the SIVB upper rocket stage.
- It was 10 minutes, not 30 hours.
- It did not, and does not, mean that there are caverns. It means the Moon is very dry.
- Conventional science explains it quite well, thank you.

Mars and Sex
        Asked about Mars, Mike came up with a number of fantasies including "If you have liquid water then you have the ingredients for life," and "NASA worked very hard to suppress [Viking biology results]." The first statement is just plain wrong, and this blog has refuted the second at least once.

         Perhaps my favorite quote, though, came at the very beginning. Monique started right out by saying "I'm going to ask you the question I most want to know the answer to." Mike replied "The answer is -- I'm single." Oh, tacky. Monique giggled.

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[1] Bara interprets it as a masonic ceremony. Actually it was a form of catholic mass, including consumption of tiny amounts of bread and wine. On this occasion, as on many others, Bara asserted that the mass "has its roots in Egyptian Osiris-worship,"  thus tying Aldrin's ritual and the whole mission to a fantasy of a NASA obsession with ancient Egypt. The mass, of course, is a re-enactment of the biblical Last Supper, and has nothing to do with Osiris. The ritual was not in the Flight Plan, and NASA as a whole probably didn't even know Aldrin was planning it, so it can hardly be linked to any NASA "obsession." Bara tells these lies with such confidence that his interlocutors generally believe him.