Linda Moulton Howe capitulates

"I am preparing a fact check update for Earthfiles and my December 27-28, 2018, Coast to Coast AM radio broadcast with the finding that the original November 29, 2018, three-part tale by 71-year-old Jon Lavine ... appears to be mostly dishonest for reasons unknown. In the face of contradictory facts, Lavine keeps insisting his secret astronaut story is real, even though many of his assertions don't hold up credibly under research scrutiny that will be laid out in my upcoming fact check updates."

        That climb-down appeared before Christmas on LMH's earthfiles website. Always heart-warming to see a pseudo-scientist admit error—it doesn't happen nearly often enough, in my NSHO. My earlier bloggery pouring scorn on Linda's three-part cock-and-bull story about secret extended Apollo missions and aliens on the Moon was very popular, having 650 page views so far. I thought maybe my own efforts were partly responsible for the back-pedalling over at earthfiles, but in the same announcement LMH credits five specific information sources, and this blog isn't one of them.

        I also e-mailed LMH pouring a little more scorn in her direction. She wrote "My goal is always the pressure of fact" (LOL) and she cited this disclaimer:

"Real X-Files do not always have hard proof, but the firsthand testimonies are presented as valuable to consider in the challenge of determining facts and truth in subjects that American and other governments have hidden behind policies of lies and denials in the interest of national security."

        I interpret that as "CAUTION: This website contains unverified, un-investigated bullshit".

        Linda calls herself an "investigative reporter". It seems to me that she cannot possibly have done even the minimum investigation of Jon Lavine's story before swallowing it and promoting it both on earthfiles and on Coast-to-Coast AM. She would have saved herself this professional embarrassment if she'd merely asked the following questions:

• Where did the rockets and spacecraft for three Apollo missions come from?
• Where were they launched?
• Who were the flight controllers? (All the Apollo controllers retired or were re-assigned after Apollo 17. Apollo 20 was cancelled in January 1970. Apollo 18 and 19 were cancelled in September 1970)
• Is it reasonable to propose that the "secret Apollo 20" landed in a spot that NASA had no hope of communicating with?
• Is the so-called "crashed spaceship" actually a crashed spaceship, or a natural depression?

        Returning to Coast-to-Coast AM for her monthly stint on 27 December, LMH trotted out a whole bunch of hearsay about how the CIA and MK-Ultra have perfected the techniques of mind control, memory-wiping and memory substitution. In an almost-apology for the earlier story, her strong suggestion was that Jon Lavine had been the victim of false memory implantation. I think that's supposed to be excusing Lavine, along the lines of "He wasn't bullshitting me, he really believes he flew that mission". All I have to offer on that is more scorn.

Update 31 December:
        Linda's been busy. She has now published a long web page titled Trying to Separate Facts from Fiction in Strange Jon Lavine Tale. Later: ooops, she deleted it! Later still: oops, she put it back.  The piece is very disjointed, and takes off into irrelevant backwaters such as Project Horizon (which was cancelled before ever flying). To me, it looks like a first draft of something that will be rewritten and drastically trimmed at some later time.

        Linda admits that the curriculum vitae Lavine gave her was fraudulent. She admits that a photograph he gave her, purporting to be him preparing for the Apollo 20 launch in 1976, was in fact of NASA astronaut Katherine Sullivan. She admits that a Saturn V could not have launched from Vandenburg.  However, none of that seems to be enough for this "investigative reporter" to declare Lavine a liar, apologize for her gullibility, and put the story to bed. She rambles on about MKULTRA memory-substitution experiments, clearly continuing to suggest that Lavine may be a victim instead of a fraud. Is anybody going to believe this poppycock?

Happy New Year everyone...

Update 13 January, that fake photo that fooled LMH

        Here's the photo Linda embedded in her later essay, writing that it was Lavine's evidence that he really did meet an alien on the Moon:

Now here's the Sci-Fi film "AREA 51". Linda, go to your room.

Mike Bara in "Getting something right" shocker

        The last time this blog admitted that Mike Bara was right about something was back in July 2017, when he roundly debunked Jay Weidner's "Nazca mummy" hoax. Well, what do you know? He was right again in last night's Tell the truth Wednesday vlog—or at least, in one part of it.

00:58 "If you believe that airplanes didn't hit the buildings on 9/11, or that building number 1, I think it was, didn't fall on building number 7 and damage it, I can't help you. If you think a drone or a missile hit the pentagon, and all the people were actually taken off of the airplanes to some secret base somewhere, and the planes were replaced with different airplanes— I can't help you. This is not the place for me. Because that's all bullshit, OK? What happened on 9/11 was that four jetliners were hijacked by Muslim terrorists and they were flown into buildings. The twin towers, the Pentagon, and the fourth one crashed in Pennsylvania. It was shot down^{note 1} and crashed—that's the truth. And there's no mystery about what happened, it's all simply a matter of math, physics and structural dynamics, and gravity. It really is. So... I looked at all the details of this, to explain it to you guys, and I have. But [...] it's the only one that makes sense. There are some people out there doing some interviews saying things like "I was told by insiders, bla-bla-bla that the planes were hijacked and landed in a secret airfield, and all the people were taken off, and now they're working as slaves in underground bases, and empty planes were replaced and flown into the buildings." That's bullshit. First of all it's not only bullshit, but it's Sean David Morton's information from about 2012. And the people that are out there espousing it now... I'm not going to name any names, got it from Sean David Morton —they simply stole his ideas. Which by the way were completely fucking wrong in the first place. So it's just really frustrating to me to have to deal with this stuff. The important thing to remember about 9/11 is that it does not require bombs, missiles, [...], particle beams...none of that is required for there to be a conspiracy about 9/11. I'm very convinced it was a conspiracy, a financial based conspiracy, but the conspiracy was to use Arab terrorists to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings. That was the conspiracy!"

        That took us to about 03:30 in a one-hour performance. Later, he was right again in recommending that his followers "take with a grain of salt" the claims of "Jon Lavine" in relation to the so-called secret later Apollo missions. In that case he didn't go far enough, in my view.

        Well, obviously he couldn't keep on being right for a whole hour. He went off into political material for about ten minutes, then returned to "science" by reiterating a fairy-story first invented by Richard Hoagland, according to which The first Chinese Moon lander confirmed that the Moon was covered in vast glass domes. Here's the image:

        Hoagland arrived at this travesty by using the EQUALIZE tool in Photoshop. Using EQUALIZE when more than half of the image is expected to be RGB 0,0,0 is not likely to lead to anything authentic or true. In this case it simply revealed random CCD noise. I covered this four years ago. Naturally, last night Bara did not credit Hoagland as the creator...er, I should say corrupter, of this image. Neither did he give the true technical history of the image; he presented it as though it was exactly what the Chinese Space Agency released.

        I nearly fell off my chair when Bara pointed to the shazz in the sky exclaiming "see how geometrical it is!" None of the fans commenting in real time called bullshit, what a surprise.

Further reading
        Stuart Robbins did a far more thorough job of explaining why this image is invalid, back in May 2014.

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[1] Well, it would be too much to expect him to be completely right, wouldn't it?

Linda Moulton Howe throws her reputation away

Linda told such dreadful lies

It made one gasp and stretch one's eyes... 

(Hilaire Belloc, corrupted)

        Linda Moulton Howe's bio is at pains to emphasize what a serious, legitimate journalist she is—how her work has been recognized and awarded internationally, bla bla bla...

Get your filthy hand off her tits Erich

        So how come she has now thrown that rep into the trash bin by coming out with a three-parter that is balderdash, poppycock, and codswallop from start to finish? I suppose the answer has to be that, just like Robert Morningstar, Richard Hoagland, and other targets of this blog, she likes to cultivate the image of herself as someone in possession of arcane knowledge that the mainstream dare not print or speak of.

        Howe recently conducted a long interview with someone calling himself Jon Lavine, and claiming to have been an astronaut on at least one of the Apollo 18-20 missions, that  were not canceled as we all believe but launched in secret, perhaps from Vandenburg AFB, and actually landed on the Moon. There they were met by an alien who quoth "We'd like you to leave. We don't want you on the moon.” The mainstream does not print or speak of this BECAUSE IT'S NOT FUCKING TRUE.

       This so-called "serious, legitimate journalist" made it all the worse by a) repeating the story for two solid and nauseating hours on Coast to Coast AM last week, and b) monetizing this pile of steaming merde by only allowing those who pay her $55/year to see it. How can anyone calling themselves a journalist do so little research that they actually believe this?

A few problems with this story
       Just for a start, those missions could not have been launched from anywhere without the rockets and spacecraft they would have needed. As a matter of fact, quite a lot of the hardware for 18/19/20 was actually manufactured, but we know what became of it. For example, the second stage of the launcher intended for A18 became Skylab. Various parts of surplus rocketry are on display as a complete Saturn V stack, at the Cape. The CSM for Apollo 18 was used for the Apollo-Soyuz linkup. The LM for Apollo 18 was never quite finished and was used in the mini-series From the Earth to the Moon. The full story of the unused hardware is here.

        Launches from Vandenburg are generally southwards, into polar or near-polar orbits. They cannot be eastward for safety reasons, and so cannot benefit from the free eastward velocity of the Earth's rotation. The site is therefore very unsuitable for Moon launches. And then, there are no facilities at Vandenburg for stacking and launching a Saturn V rocket, and never have been.

        Unbelievably, LMH swallowed "Jon Lavine"'s story even to the point of re-telling the totally false story of Apollo 20 visiting a crashed spaceship on the far side of the Moon, and retrieving a beautiful-ish woman who was one of its pilots. God save us, that 3 mile long "crashed spaceship" is the lunar feature this blog has shown many times already. Here it is once again, first on Apollo 15's pan camera...

...then as seen by LRO's narrow-angle cameras at 8m/px.

        Note, once again, that the feature (actually a trench about 7km long) is cratered to the same density as its surroundings.

Trekker proves it's a depression not an object

Latest high-def view from Chinese orbiter, provided by One Big Monkey

        This baby is centered at 117.68°E, 18.66°S, well round the back side, out of radio contact with Mother Earth. It's unthinkable that NASA would land at a place from which they couldn't get any data or voice. Exploration of the back side will have to wait until we've established a data relay satellite in lunar orbit (as the Chinese plan to do very soon).
Update: They've done it! Chang'e 4 landed in Von Kármán crater on 2 Januaty 2019. Congratulations.

         The producers of Coast to Coast AM have to share some blame for foisting this caca on their audience of millions, but it's LMH herself I want to excoriate. I'm disgusted, actually...

End-of-year acrostic

        After the hurly-burly of six serious posts in November, relax now with the first annual "Emoluments" acrostic puzzle. Click here, print it, and go find a sharp pencil and a functioning eraser. No prizes. Solution will be posted on 1/1/19.

INSTRUCTIONS
An acrostic comes in two parts—a diagram and a word list. The cells in the diagram are numbered sequentially from 1 to (in this case) 206, reading left-to-right line by line just like a book. When solved, the diagram and the word list will contain exactly the same set of 206 letters, but arranged differently.

The diagram will contain a quote from a certain book, with black cells delineating the words. The first letters of the words in the word list, reading top-to-bottom, will spell out the author and title of the book quoted.

TIPS
Write in what words you can from the clues given. Transfer each letter into the diagram, using the number under each letter as the cell number. Make a few guesses, such as that plural words end in S (usually), and single-letter words are either A or I (again, usually). After a while, you should start to guess at words in the diagram. Complete these words and transfer the new letters backwards into the word list, using the letter in each cell as a guide to the word they belong to.

Success at acrostics depends on inspired guesswork, and liberal use of the eraser. Have fun.

In case of problems linking to dropbox, here's the link on its own:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9znevp8qmax7kqh/blogacrostic.pdf?dl=0