Mike Bara has his own idea of what the word "tribute" means

        Mike Bara was handed two hours to flog his latest horrible book on Coast to Coast AM last night. It was a typical George Noory interview--no challenges at all, just wall-to-wall marketing. There were some oddities, as indeed there were in the book. Somehow the topic of secret space programs expanded to include the airships of the Sonora Aero Club and the EM drive. The airships may have been secret but they had nothing to do with space, and the EM drive may connect with spaceflight but it's not secret.

        Toward the end, Bara suggested the listeners might like to go read his blog, which today contains "a tribute" to John Glenn (who kicked the bucket yesterday at the grand old age of 95--the last of the "Original Seven".) Well, it was the wee small hours in my time zone, but, hearing that, I mustered enough strength to pound my bedside radio into tiny pieces and throw it down the canyon.

         Just kidding. But my point is, Bara's blog piece, far from being a tribute, is a repeat of his totally mistaken accusation that John Glenn was a liar. This is an echo of the same Mike Bara's "tribute" to Neil Armstrong on the Book of Faces in 2012:

"RIP Neil Armstrong - a true American hero who wanted to tell the truth but was loyal to his oath.^{note 1}"

        So much for de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicenda est. Bara doesn't understand latin (or much of anything else, come to that) so he just gives himself permission to shoot his mouth off as he pleases.

Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V
        Bara's snide blogpost wasn't even original. It was a verbatim copy of a page from Richard Hoagland's web site, written in February 2012 to mark the 50th anniversary of Glenn's historic Mercury mission. Bara only attributes it to Enterprise Mission, not to its author, although here I must allow that Bara ghost-wrote plenty of pages for Hoagland, so it's possible that the author is himself. The bottom line, as I have written before, is that Glenn's guest-spot on Frasier was A JOKE. The liars are Richard C. Hoagland and Michael Bara.

Performance
        Last night I noted, as I have before, how well Bara performs on the mass media as long as you judge the performance and not its content. He's articulate, and delivers interview answers of just the right length. He does have a few too many intrusive "you know"s, but not to the point of real annoyance. So it might exasperate me, but it shouldn't surprise me, that he gets these free marketing opportunities after every book. And indeed, he scooped the traditional reward--the book ranking on Amazon (Kindle edition) went from 533,780 on November 2nd to 56,489 this morning^{note 2}. Nowhere near good enough to sustain Bara's lifestyle for very long, but a boost nevertheless.

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[1] On that occasion, Yelp Pacifica ran a thread titled What do you think of somebody calling Neil Armstrong a liar when his body isn't even cold?

[2] From 274 to 34 in Nonfiction > Science > Astronomy & Space Science > Astrophysics & Space Science.