Barrors

        Quite early during Mike Bara's delusional two hours on the woo-woo radio show last Wednesday, he admitted that -- gasp! -- he isn't perfect.

MB: "Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody makes minor errors. I've written -- what? -- five books now, gonna be six next year..."

GN: "You made mistakes? YOU?"

MB: "I actually have made, I think, a couple of errors. A couple of transpositions, a couple of typos. Maybe even an immaterial technical error, in my description of something. It does happen."

        "A couple of typos"???  Pardon me while I fall off my chair laughing. Bara's books are absolutely stuffed with errors both minor and major. After the first edition of Dark Mission, an official list of errata was provided -- 29 items, not too bad for a work of over 500 pages. But second editions are the opportunity to make these good, and in this respect the publisher Adam Parfrey was a dismal failure. There are uncorrected errata on pages 131, 145, 178, 215, 278, 286, 312, 320, 386(2), 430 (all using 2nd edition pagination.) This is inexcusable.

        AAoM2 has, for example, "west and rast" for "west and east" (p.122), "Fortunatley" (p.170), "poured over" for "pored over" (p.183), "side by- ide" (p.186). The latter looks like a copy edit screw-up rather than an author's.

        As I've written before, "typo" is short for "typographical error." Since there are no typographers in modern publishing, a better word for "typo" is "error."

Whoppers
        Well, OK, no author is immune from minor errors. I don't expect Bara's books to be totally free of them, and I assume he wouldn't expect mine to be. However, his estimate of "a couple" in all five books is prevarication in the extreme. Much more serious are the calamitous technical errors that totally mislead the readership. Nor are these just "immaterial technical errors." Let's remind ourselves of some really bad Barrors, just restricting ourselves to one per book:

Dark Mission
 "[O]n the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Apollo 11 ... [Neil] Armstrong himself had seemed frustrated. He started his highly emotional address by first comparing himself to a parrot--saying only what he had been told to say." (Armstrong actually said the exact opposite.)

The Choice
"Without the Moon's calming influence, the Earth would spin so fast that the centrifugal force would most likely flatten us all like pancakes." (No, other way round.)

AAotM
(Writing of images of Earth from space)  "the clouds are the highest in the atmosphere, meaning that they are reflecting more light back to the camera and at a faster rate. Since they are returning more light, the clouds are the lightest. The surface areas ... are darker, because they are a bit further away from the camera than the clouds and therefore the light has to travel further before it is reflected back. The deep blue oceans are therefore the darkest, because the light has to travel all the way to the ocean floor before it is reflected back to the camera." (Wrong in so many ways that I don't know where to start.)

AAoM1
"Because of its highly "eccentric" ... orbit ... Mars' distance relative to Earth varies a great deal. In fact, Mars' orbit is so elliptical that its distance to the Earth can be as much as 249 million miles at its farthest to as little as about 34 million miles at its theoretical closest approach." (The difference is due to their different orbits, not to eccentricity.)

AAoM2
"Allow me to translate for you. If Phobos is not a captured asteroid ... then it by definition must be an artificial satellite." (There is no such "definition." The consensus is that Phobos was formed by re-accretion of orbital debris.)

Plus, of course, every one of Bara's ridiculous Mars images, purportedly showing "unmistakably artificial" things, is a lie. Moreover, Bara doesn't even have the honesty to cite catalog references so we could go to the NASA sources and find out what they really show.

Disgraceful.

Richard Hoagland, Judy Wood, and Adam Parfrey

        Latest victim of Hoagland's contempt for copyright[1] appears to be Dr Judy Wood of Where Did the Towers Go? pseudo-fame.

        I don't propose to get into analysis of the startling case that Dr Wood has made and Hoagland has now latched onto, hoping to make a buck out of it. Others have already pointed out some absurdities.

Two planes not enough
        We all saw two fully loaded Boeing 767s fly into the World Trade Center on 11th September 2001. In a nutshell, Wood and Hoagland say that this was not what caused the towers to collapse. I can't help giggling over Hoagland stating, last night on Coast to Coast AM, that the WTC towers collapsed "at escape velocity" — but OK, let's assume that was just a slip of the tongue.

        Andrew Johnson, another fringe investigator, is pretty annoyed with Hoagland for hijacking Dr Wood's research, lecturing on the subject for a couple of hours, and preparing to sell an edited DVD of that lecture, all without having contacted Dr Wood. In my opinion, although it was outrageously unprofessional of Hoagland, in the end Wood will have little to complain of, since she's going to be invited to C2C-AM pretty soon. As we know, that sells books rather efficiently.

Dangerous and stingy
        It was the story of the publication of her book that got my attention. According to Johnson's page, Wood signed a publisher's contract in early 2009 and accepted "a small advance." Two years of acrimony then followed, with the publisher refusing to publish 540 pages and protesting that he couldn't afford color illustrations. Eventually Judy Wood bought out her contract and self-published.

        So who was this intransigent publisher? Step forward Adam Parfrey, Univ. Calif. dropout and possibly the most dangerous publisher in America according to a HuffPo piece from last December.

        Others have wondered if Parfrey is the stingiest publisher in the world, since he published Hoagland & Bara's Dark Mission without an index and with totally inadequate photo reproduction, despite making a very large pile of $$$ with the first edition (55,000 copies sold.)

        In comments on an Amazon user's review titled "Where Did the Book Go?" a few of Judy Wood's fans took Parfrey to task over his handling of the contract.

Kim Greenhouse wrote:

Let me tell you this: You have no interest in this book becoming known or in the 10 years of her courageous work being fulfilled. Your comments are totally inappropriate about how you desperately wanted the book published, about how you were working to get high resolution images, about how Dr. Wood was upset about the idea of this and that.

She left you people because you are unprofessional, you refused to publish the book and you air your issues in a way that stinks. Stop urinating on her book launch.

As for saying that the book was quite stressful for Dr. Wood, you are simply condescending and so out of touch with the nature of the project that if you had an ounce of class and professional decorum, you would take yourselves off of the amazon page falsely representing that you are her publisher, since you are not.

Parfrey replied:

The commentary here has no relation at all to the reality of the situation, which would not reflect well on Ms. Wood. That said, I willingly relinquished rights to Ms. Wood after she disappeared from communication with me for months at a time. I'm glad the book finally appeared.

False book promo
        I'm on Kim Greenhouse's side on the question of Parfrey's lack of professionalism. Even now, 18 months later, the Product Description of Dark Mission 2nd Edn on both Amazon and Borders includes this:

Authors Richard C. Hoagland and Mike Bara include a new chapter about the discoveries made by ex-Nazi scientist and NASA stalwart Wernher von Braun regarding what he termed "alternate gravitational solutions," or the rewriting of Newtonian physics into hyperdimensional spheres.

Buyers of the new edition will be provided a code that will enable them to log on to DarkMission.net to download hundreds of images discussed within the book.

        The interesting thing about those two statements is that NEITHER IS TRUE. Adam Parfrey knows this, it has been brought to his attention, and he takes no action. It's even possible that commentary right here on The Emoluments of Mars in August 2008 was the reason the Von Braun chapter was killed.

        About the only good thing I can think of to say about Parfrey is that he refused to publish Mike Bara's God-awful book The Choice. Deo Gratias.

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[1] Other notable victims are Keith Laney and Walter Myers.

Official DM blog officially dead

See the revised header up there. This blog will continue to comment on Hoagland's many errors as an author and Adam Parfrey's many failures as a publisher.