IMDB commenter slams Mike Bara and his fellow alien uncoverers

        I really wasn't going to comment on Mike Bara's TV show Uncovering Aliens any more. Yes, OK, it's a piece of shit that hasn't yet uncovered one single alien, but as long as Mike is busy doing this rubbish he isn't publishing astronomy rubbish, so it's a win for science.

        But I came across this IMDB comment from "jake_in_sd" and just had to share.

"This is the worst thing I've ever seen on such a serious topic. Where did you get the lunatics who are on the show? These guys believe ANYTHING. Im definately NOT a skeptic. I BELIEVE UFO's are real, but these guys are an embarrassment. They and other social misfits like them are exactly the reason this topic has little to no mainstream credibility. The guy masquerading as X CIA may well have worked for the agency, but likely only as a janitor they had to let go for being too mentally unstable to push a broom! And the lunatic Brit who thinks that "..millions of people a year are being abducted..." seems to have sucked too long on the tailpipe of his Morris Mini. Talk about the worst possible spokespeople for this topic, these guys make 'Bobo' off Searching For Bigfoot look like a Rhodes Scholar. This phenomenon is REAL, but until you yank these guys off the air and either leave the topic alone, or install credible people who dont see little green men behind every tree, all you are doing is disserving a very real topic and making everyone who believes look just as stupid, inbred-backward stupid, as these four half-wits who dont have a double-digit I.Q. between them. I thought last years Mermaids special was your low point, but sweet Jesus youve outdone yourselves and found an all time embarrassing bottom feeder. PLEASE, for the sanctity of the topic and out of respect for those who have had real encounters CANCEL THIS HORRIBLE SHOW!"

Review of 'Ancient Aliens on the Red Planet'

        At 09:20 in the commercial-free version of this latest History Channel travesty (S6E16), we see a region of Mars clearly labeled CYDONIA, and to make things perfectly clear, a flashing target over the spot. The narration is:

"The Cydonia region of Mars. July 20th, 1976. (CUT to animation of spacecraft approaching) An alien spacecraft, sent from Earth, touches down on the Red Planet. After a ten-month journey, Viking 1 has reached its destination." (CUT to historical footage at JPL, Gentry Lee and Gerry Soffen celebrating the success of Viking 1)

        I blinked, and re-ran the sequence to be quite sure. Then my face hit the desk (OK, metaphorically.) OMG, THEY THINK VIKING 1 LANDED AT CYDONIA!!!

source: Google Mars

FACT: Cydonia is at 40.74N, 9.46W. Viking 1 landed at Chryse Planitia, 22.46N, 47.96W.

        This appalling error takes Ancient Aliens to new depths of ignorance and mendacity. Jason Colavito has also reviewed the episode on his blog, and he makes a far better job of reviewing the monstrous errors in history and mythology than I possibly could, so please read it.

        In the Twitterscape, Mike Bara complained for the second time in a week that he'd been deprived of due credit:

        That may be how he remembers it now, but if you read Mike Bara's own account of the Enterprise Mission analysis of the Pathfinder images, written at the time, it's pretty plain that it was Guiseppe Pezzella who first pointed out the so-called sphinx.

        Bara's first complaint was over Richard Hoover being invited to the Open Minds International UFO Congress to talk about the controversial discovery of microbiology in a Martian meteorite -- work that Bara claims was his. Does Mike have an electron microscope in his kitchen, I wonder? He sniped at Maureen Elsberry, the congress organiser, and I loved Maureen's reply. "Mike, get over yourself."

        It's certainly true that a casual viewer would have got the idea that John Brandenburg came up with the "sphinx on Mars" fairy story. An elaborate sequence with Giorgio Tsoukalos and some models floated the preposterous idea that the "Twin Peaks" visible from the Mars Pathfinder landing site are a close analogy of the pyramids of Giza. The fact is that the Twin Peaks are nothing like pyramids and the mound Hoagland & Bara (and Brandenburg) have called the sphinx is not like a sphinx at all. And it faces North, not due East as Bara wrote in his nasty book.^{note 1} Here are high-res stereo pairs of Twin Peaks, the "sphinx," and other dark blocky outcrops showing that there's nothing special about the sphinxy rock.

photo credit: History Channel

        Predictably enough, Bara trotted out further fairy stories including several that this blog has discredited in fairly recent memory. The Viking Labeled Release experiment (and it was nice to see Dr. Gil Levín tell the story himself here), and the canard that Gerry Soffen lied about the second image of the so-called Face at Owen Mesa (see also this post.)

        Richard Hoagland, inventor of the Face at Cydonia (and much other balderdash besides) was conspicuous by his absence. Mike Bara said -- again, in Twitterstan -- that he'd  turned down the offer to appear on this show. I bet what really happened was that he said he'd love to be on the show but he'd want to  be credited as co-producer and he'd want first-class travel for him and his companion. His arrogance is such that he even talks himself out of opportunities to put his ego (and his disregard for truth) on parade.

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[1] Brandenburg speculated that, even if the Twin Peaks don't look like pyramids now, maybe they did when they were built, and millions of years of erosion has reduced them to the pitiful state we see now. The same thing has been claimed for the 'Face', too, and it's what is known in logic as argumentum ad excremetum torii. It's basically taking a desperate hope, unsupported by anything, and dressing it up to look like evidence. He also trotted out his theory about Xenon 129/132 ratios, "proving" that there was a nuclear war on Mars once. Stuart Robbins disposed of that one a year ago.