Three bad weeks for Mike Bara

        Poor Mike. First, in a blog-post on 14th October, he was fooled by Luna Cognita's utterly misleading video about the so-called Stand-up EVA on Apollo 12. It never happened, as James Concannon explained right here. And btw, Mike still hasn't delivered on his promise to tell us what the Apollo 12 astronauts "were really looking for."

        Next, on 6th November, he made a total fool of himself by declaring that the Sol 3720 image from the Opportunity rover on Mars is a valve handle. He even showed us one in case we've never seen a valve.

photo credit: JPL/Bara

        As Mick West of Metabunk explained on 23rd October, the "valve" is in fact the impression of a Phillips-head screw in the casing of Opportunity's x-ray spectrometer. The head of the instrument is pressed firmly into the dirt in order to get a good reading.

 photo credit: JPL

        To complete Mike Bara's three weeks of misery, this magnificent image appeared yesterday:

photo credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

       The image was acquired by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, and it shows a protoplanetary disc around the young star HL Tauri, about 450 light-years from us in our home galaxy the Milky Way. In other words, we are seeing here a process that Mike Bara the world-famous astronomer has said does not happen. Bara, following the late Tom Van Flandern, has written that planets do not accrete from rings around a forming star, but are flung off in pairs after the star has completely formed. Van Flandern called this process solar fission.

        Blogging on 26th August last year, Bara hilariously cited the observation of a single exoplanet GJ 504b as good support for solar fission. As I wrote at the time, that's like somebody who believes there are two Moons circling Earth watching a single Moonrise and saying "See? That fits my theory perfectly!"

Mike Bara wrong on pareidolia

From Mike Bara's blog, 17th October 2013:

"According to the debunker crowd, pareidolia is a supposed human tendency to recognize facial patterns where none actually exist. This mythical, made-up tendency has no basis in fact, has never been written up or published in any scientific or medical journal, and has failed to meet even the most basic standards of a true medical or psychological disorder."

"It is nothing but  a phony, pseudo-scientific term invented in 1994 by a UFO debunker named Steven Goldstein in the June 22nd, 1994 edition of Skeptical Inquirer magazine."

Result of a search of the literature by the Google Ngram Viewer:

More detail here. I wonder why Mike Bara is looking for citations that treat pareidolia as a disorder. On the contrary, it's a normal and adaptive skill. Not a bug but a feature, Mike. Get it?

Point-by-point critique of 'Ancient Aliens on Mars' PART TWO

        As before, comprehension will be enhanced by loading the Picasa image gallery. Unfortunately the frame numbers aren't visible when the full gallery is displayed -- you have to select a specific image in order to see its frame number.

        I didn't plan it this way, but I'm picking up Part 2 at the exact mid point of the book -- p.107 of 214, chapter 4 of 8. A simply enormous majority of the second half is a straight lift from Hoagland. I wouldn't know what arrangements (if any) those rascals Hoagland & Bara have for profit-sharing but, at a rough guess, I'd say 40% would be a fair share for Hoagland. Not that there will be truckloads of money anyway. When first listed the Amazon ranking was 1,040,783. The day after Mike Bara's appearance on Coast to Coast AM it improved to 6,055 (and #1 in Books > Professional & Technical > Profesional Science > Astronomy & Space Science > Mars). When it actually went on sale it improved further to 4,666. Today it has slumped to 9,228 (still no competition in > Mars) and it's discounted from $19.95 to $16.50.

8. pp. 107-120 You might think that Ralph Greenberg, professor of mathematics at Univ. Washington, had killed off the sheer insanity of Richard Hoagland's pseudo-mathematical analysis of Cydonia with his 2002 epic debunk. Apparently not, for here it is resurrected in its entirety by Hoagland's acolyte Mike Bara, and Bara even attempts to refute Greenberg. He's outclassed. Picasa frames #106-132 tell the story, and if they don't leave you utterly confused I don't really know what would. What's going on here is that Hoagland starts off with a presupposition that the marsography of Cydonia contains a hidden mathematical message, and then "proves" it by cherry-picking features and angles, and in some cases outright cheating.

What would Hoagland know about math anyway? This is the man who abjectly failed to apply the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation correctly and consequently produced a huge web page that was totally useless and invalid. He refuses to correct it, so you can still see it. Read it and weep.

There are mathematical absurdities here, like declaring that 2.720699, which is π × (√3)/2, is close enough to e, the base of natural logarithms, that it can be used as a substitute. The value of e is actually 2.71828.

What strikes me as I see all this nonsense again is not just that kind of comedy performance, but the overall sloppiness of the diagramming. Compare Picasa frames #107 and #113. In #107, a vertex of the D&M pyramid is shown to be pointing fairly accurately at the "face." Fair enough. But then the pointer to the center of the "tholus" does not follow a vertex and appears to be random. In #113 the whole pyramid has been rotated and suddenly one of the vertices is pointing directly at the "tholus." In #130 the same vertex again points at the "tholus" but suddenly the important point is not the center of the tholus but a spot on the north-west crater rim.

Better men than me have rejected this entire exercise because an orbital photograph has too much unknowable distortion to treat it as though it were a product of an accurate survey. Hoagland & Bara maintain that it's all OK because their images have been meticulously orthorectified. Actually, on p.107 Bara writes "orthographically rectified." That made me giggle -- it can only mean that the images were spell-checked. Mike Bara's spelling of the word "foreword" needs some orthographic rectification. Huuuurrrr...

9. pp.121, 125 (Picasa #123-127) Oh, here we go again. Another straight "lift" from Hoaglandiana. They want us to believe that there's something magic about the 19.5° latitude, and in support they cite all the wonderful instances of "energy upwelling" at that latitude throughout the solar system. On p.121 Bara specifically makes the claim that Jupiter's red spot, the giant Martian volcano Olympus Mons, and Mauna Kea are all at that latitude. Usually Hoagland writes "at or near," but here Bara says "at."

Such a pity that their data is dead wrong::
Jupiter's red spot is at 22°S
Olympus Mons is at 18°N
Mauna Kea is at 19° 49' N (if he'd written Mauna Loa he'd have been almost spot on)

On p.125 he makes the same claim about the Great Dark Spot of Neptune, adding for good measure that Hoagland specifically predicted it would be found at that latitude. Well, guess what? It's not true. Neptune's dark spot was first observed at about 25°S and it then wandered northwards before disappearing altogether. I believe there's a new one now, in the northern hemisphere.

What neither Hoagland nor Bara have ever addressed is the sad (for them) fact that NONE of history's top 100 volcanic eruptions or top 100 earthquakes has been at 19.5°.

10. pp.130-2 Here we go again, again. The claim that NASA suppressed the positive results of the Labeled Release biology experiment on both Viking landers. Untrue. The judgement of the experts (Gerry Soffen, again, and Harold "Chuck" Klein) was that, on balance, the enigmatic LR data could not prevail in the face of decidedly negative results from three other tests for life. That's not the same thing as suppressing the data -- in fact, the entire data set has been available on a NASA web site for 30 years. To be sure, Dr Gil Levín, the PI of the labeled release experiment, has protested pretty loudly over the years. Good luck to him, he's made some good points. His view has not found acceptance, particularly since the Phoenix lander found so much perchlorate hanging around Mars in 2008.

11. pp.132-5. More recycled anti-NASA propaganda. This is the one about how Mars really has a blue sky and sandy soil, but NASA artificially reddens it all. In particular, Bara tells the old, old story about the day JPL changed its mind and re-issued a bunch of Viking surface images making them redder.

I dunno, are these old fables really worth trotting out again today? Look -- here's what happened. The first few Viking images didn't capture the color wheel so the camera team just had to make a wild guess (Jim Bell has written about this.) When they were eventually able to get a look at the color wheel they realized the images they'd distributed were way off. So they reissued them with the correct color balance. It's as simple -- and as scientifically justified -- as that.

The space artist Don Davis has a very nice online resource dealing with the difficulties inherent in representing color on Mars. He knows what he's talking about. Mike Bara doesn't.

12. pp.147-67, Chapter 6, Picasa #151-182. Mars Pathfinder. Up pops the magic number 19.5 again, and also the almost equally magic 33. It's magic, you see, because of the masonic significance of the 33rd degree, and also because the sine of 19.5 is 0.333. Don't shoot me, I'm just the messenger.

Up pops another example of the blatant dishonesty of Hoagland & Bara. We see on p.148 that the designated landing site of Pathfinder was 19.5°N, 33.3°W. Actually according to the Press Kit it was 19.4°N, 33.1°W. OK, it's pretty close, but Bara's text is still a lie. And there's not the slightest reason in the world to think that there were any masonic or tetrahedral reasons for the choice. All planetary landing sites are a compromise between safety and scientific value. The actual landing site was 19.13°N, 33.22°W (and Bara reports that correctly.)

Take a look through the Picasa frames. Most of them are features Bara wants to persuade us are Martian technology. I want to persuade you that that's bullshit. #166-171 and #174-5 depict what Mike Bara calls the Sphinx. He writes (p.160) "this Martian sphinx has all the classic earmarks of its Egyptian counterpart." No it doesn't. He also writes that it faces due East, like the one at Giza. No it doesn't, it faces North.

("earmarks"???? Maybe he meant "hallmarks." Is anybody editing this rubbish?)

13. pp.169-179, Picasa #187-191. The famous catbox. I'm not going to write much about this because, frankly, it gets me annoyed. Mars Global Surveyor arrived overhead the so-called "face" at the worst possible moment for imaging. The mesa was basically fogged in. Picasa #187 is what came back from Mars. What gets me annoyed is when people like Hoagland & Bara fail to appreciate the effort Malin's boys exerted to process the image to #188. Instead they scream that it was a deliberate cover-up.

Ask yourself these simple questions: If Malin couldn't bear to let us see what was really down there at Cydonia, how come he was happy to go back when the fog had cleared and shoot a clear picture (#198)? The maximum resolution of the camera was 1.5 m/px. If NASA/JPL/Malin are so desperate to keep the "face" a secret, how come they later presented us with the magnificent image from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, at 0.5 m/px?

Well, I will just make one other comment because it's amusing. On p. 177 Bara protests that only 42 of a possible 256 levels in the gray-scale were present. My mind went back to that night on the Art Bell radio show (it was Art who christened the image "catbox") when Richard Hoagland was practically screaming "Somebody stole 200 gray levels!!!!"

Dear Richard Hoagland and Michael Bara, I have some information for you. Not every gray level has to have a value for an image to be faithful. It's perfectly possible for many gray levels to have a value of zero, in fact it's expected for an ultra-low contrast scene such as MGS saw that day.

Here's an actual concrete example of gray levels in a space image:

Levels 0-11 and 170-256 are zero. Only 157 of a possible 256 levels have information in them. Yet the image is perfectly readable, if low contrast.

Know what that histogram comes from? Thank you Stuart Robbins, it's the histogram of the original "ziggurat" image that Mike Bara got from Call of Duty Zombies.

Point-by-point critique of 'Ancient Aliens on Mars' PART ONE

        I don't propose to write much about the nauseating Foreword to this book -- an exercise in adolescent petulance whose main target is Dr Stuart Robbins. Robbins is a well qualified working astronomer who knows infinitely more about planetary astronomy than Mike Bara. The foreword (which Bara inexplicably calls a "Forward") is available on Mike's blog. This is not quite the same as the book version -- it includes a ridiculous juvenile cartoon depicting me driving a bus over Stuart Robbins, plus other cringe-worthy excesses.

I'll just write two things:

ONE: Mr Michael Bara, you wretched, ignorant, belligerent man, if you're going to accuse me of sending sexually harassing messages to your female FB friends, LET'S SEE THE EVIDENCE. James Concannon has provided a specific and clear example of sexual harassment in the other direction. Unless you can show a similarly specific example of what you mean, SHUT THE FUCK UP.


TWO: You never did get around to explaining why the ziggurat does not appear in images that are far, far more up-to-date and with far, far better resolution than the Apollo frame. Now's your chance. WHERE IS THAT ZIGGY, BARA?

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Wide Angle Camera
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Narrow Angle Camera
Japanese Selene lunar orbiter

===========================

So, now to the book. There's a Picasa gallery containing all the figures from the book (plus some that got trimmed out,) and you might like to have that handy as you read on.

1.  p.40 "In Egyptian mythology, the Sphinx God Horus was also frequently associated with the planet Mars, and in fact the Sphinx was at one time painted red in honor of this connection. They also shared a name in the ancient Egyptian tongue, Hor-Dshr, literally 'Horus the Red.' "

This is pure Graham Hancock, and therefore unreliable. As is now well known, Hancock was a major fan of recreational pharmaceuticals, and they are what largely inspired his work Fingerprints of the Gods ( see Hancock's page on the Rational Wiki.)  As far as I know, the ancient name of the Great Sphinx of Giza was Hor-em-Akhet (trans: Horus of the horizon) but then I make no claim to any expertise in Egyptology. I was able to find some corroboration for the claim that the Sphinx was once stained red. Interesting. -ish. Nothing to do with Mars, though (just like the foreword.)

2. p.41. We know we're in trouble with this book when we read this as early on as p.42:

"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."

This, of course, is almost word for word the same catastrophic error that Mike Bara made in his earlier book The Choice. I got on his case about it, so did an Amazon reviewer, and so did Stuart Robbins. In case you're wondering why it's such a dreadful howler, Robbins explains.

3. pp. 42-43. It immediately gets worse, much worse. Mike Bara reveals such incredible ignorance about simple astronomical terminology that I really had to force myself to keep reading. On p. 42 we see an illustration of Earth and Mars at conjunction, which Bara labels as aphelion. On p. 43 an illustration of opposition is labeled as perihelion. You can see these images as #7 and #8 in the Picasa gallery, along with snarky comments mocking Stuart Robbins. Can you possibly imagine anything more embarrassing for an author than ridiculing his critics and getting it wrong??

It doesn't stop. He writes "[Mars and Earth] are at their closest to each other when they are on the same side of the Sun and both at their perihelion points." (p.43)

Not true. They're closest when Mars is at perihelion and Earth is at aphelion. What an unmitigated disaster these two pages are.

4. pp.53-56 At the end of an exposition of a device called the Jenkins Radio Camera, Bara shows us one of its prints. This apparatus was a far-fetched idea used during the 1924 opposition. In some way that Bara doesn't make quite clear, this thing detected radio signals from Mars and made them into crude and very fuzzy images. You can see the three images Bara shows as #60, #61 and #63 in the Picasa gallery, plus a better pic of Voldemort (#62.) Mike is saying "Oh look, doesn't this radio transmission from Mars look like a J.K. Rowling character?"

...which is a very strange fantasy for someone who has repeatedly insisted that there's no such thing as pareidolia (and he says it yet again, on p.99)!

5. pp. 60-63  Mike Bara really loves the astronomer Tom Van Flandern, for some reason -- possibly because Van Flandern is the only professional astronomer Mike ever met.  Van Flandern, who died in 2009, was a very bright spark who had some ideas that are considered eccentric by the mainstream. One of them was that the accepted theory about how the solar system was formed is wrong.

The accepted theory is that planets are left behind in orbit as a circumstellar accretion disk shrinks and coalesces. Van Flandern said "No, the star forms first, then spins off planets in pairs in a process called solar fission." Fission is depicted in Picasa gallery #38.

In vigorously supporting this now discredited theory, Mike once again shows ignorance. On p.61 he writes "The accretion model ... requires the planets to have highly eccentric (elliptical) orbits during their proto-planet phase." On p. 63 he writes "Only the fission theory can explain why all the planets are in the so-called 'plane of the ecliptic,' the equatorial plane of the Sun. If the accretion model was correct, planets would form all over the place and have orbits at all different angles to the Sun."

As far as I know, both those statements are what is technically known as poppycock. The second one, in particular, simply contradicts common sense. If planets form from a spinning disc, it's pretty obvious that all their orbits will stay in the same plane as the disc that gave them birth. Duhhhh. (Pluto is a different story).

6. pp. 69-78 Another Van Flandern idea that both Bara and Hoagland love is that Mars was once the moon of a larger planet that exploded. Hoagland has also proposed that Mars was tidally locked to this planet that he calls Planet V or Maldek. I previously blogged about how these two ideas, not by any means silly in themselves, don't sit well together. I'll just quote myself (ref. Picasa gallery #28-34):

        There are the two claimed tidal bulges, Arabia at the 60° longitude and Tharsis at 240°. They define Mars's orientation in relation to the claimed parent planet. And it's tidally locked, too, so Tharsis is always on the planet side. But then, what happens when the parent planet explodes? Van Flandern observes, correctly, that one hemisphere of Mars is much more heavily cratered than the other. So logically that would be on the Tharsis side, the equatorial west.

        Except it isn't. It's the entire Southern hemisphere that got preferentially splatted. The hemisphere that was not pointing at the planet when the biggie went down. Oops...

I'm obliged to my commenter Dee for pointing out that Hoagland himself cited this problem in his web article. (Load this page into MSIE, the only browser that will render it readably.) He writes:

"the authors acknowledge that this presents some serious problems for this entire model."

He has a wriggle-out which begins...

"We propose that as it was approaching Planet V toward its ultimate collision, Planet K passed close by Mars in its orbit around Planet V (Figure 19).  This close encounter gravitationally interfered with the tidal lock between Mars with Planet V.  In fact, it began a radical, gravitationally induced reorientation of the entire Mars’ spin axis relative to Planet V."

It's all very hypothetical and, to me at least, not at all convincing.

7. pp.90-105 This is really bad writing -- or perhaps more accurately, bad book planning. Fifteen pages (of a total 216) about the early discovery of the so-called Face on Mars. It reads now, in 2013, like a piece of discarded history that some old codger wants to reminisce about (Mike is 53 and not yet a codger.)  We have so much better imagery available for inspection now that, really, who cares what DiPietro, Molenaar and Carlotto did to enhance the image?

However, I can't resist once again coming to the defense of someone I admired greatly -- Gerry Soffen, Chief Scientist of the Viking missions to Mars in 1976. It was the Viking 1 Orbiter, of course, that took the picture that Richard Hoagland built a career out of -- Frame 035A72 (#99 in the Picasa gallery.) Gerry Soffen presented the image to the press on 26th July, and added "When we took another picture a few hours later, it all went away; it was just a trick,  just the way light fell on it." Mike Bara has been saying for years, and repeats here on p. 92, that Soffen was lying. This blog previously discussed this in September 2012. Picasa gallery #101 is the actual announcement, showing left to right Jim Martin, Viking Project Manager, Tobias Owen (who first spotted the "face") and Gerry Soffen.

The basis of Bara's accusation is that there was no second picture, and could not have been because by the time the orbiter hit that latitude again the "face" was rotated out of range. How far? Bara, very math-challenged as we know, cannot be more precise than "between 15 and more than 20.4 miles." (p.92)

Well, let's see. I prefer to work in kilometers but for the purpose of explicit comparison with Bara, let's do it in miles. The difference in longitude on successive passes of a satellite is known as the "walk."


DATA:
Orbit of Viking 1: Polar, 24.66 hours
Rotation period of Mars: 24.622 hours
Equatorial radius of Mars: 2110 miles
Latitude of Cydonia: ~40°N

During one Viking orbit, Mars rotates 360 x 24.66 / 24.622 degrees.
That's slightly more than a full rotation -- 360.55°.
So when Viking came around to 40°N latitude again, the "face" was 0.55° cross-track

Rotational circumference at 40° is 2.π.2210.cos40 = 2 x 3.1416 x 2210 x 0.766 = 10,636 miles
Walk for 0.55° = 10636 x 0.55 / 360 = 16.25 miles.

So in fact that does fall within Bara's "between 15 and more than 20.4 miles" (which is a very strange way of expressing a range, actually.) But why couldn't he have done the math himself?

Well now let's see what that means for the camera, and a possible second shot. Here's the dataset for 035A72 (the designation means the 72nd image taken on the 35th orbit by Orbiter A.) Data from this source.

035A72

VO75 1B PICNO= 035A72 
FILTER 4 (CLEAR) EXP 34 MSEC FGD 111 
FSC 26588045 OET-GMT 76 207 15 25 14 TPER +00 12 05 
RNG= 5239 KM HFOV= 55 KM VFOV= 50 KM SCL= 46 M/PXL 
NOR AZ 154 DG SUN AZ 88 DG S/C AZ 323 DG INA 79 DG EMA 10 DG 
PHA 86 DG SUNS LS= 99.2 DG EDR= CN1244 01 MAX-D= 
LAT C= +40.90 UL= +41.14 UR= +40.28 LL= +41.52 LR= +40.65 
LONG C= 9.52 UL= 8.76 UR= 9.28 LL= 9.77 LR= 10.28 

HFOV means Horizontal Field of View -- the width of the image on the ground. It's 55 km, or 34 miles. It follows that, since the "Face" was only 16.25 miles cross-track, it was in range. Now, I'm not saying I know that second image exists, only that it could have been taken. Mike Bara is mistaken, and I call on him to withdraw the accusation.


There's much more detail on the Malin Education page. Pseudoscientists like Hoagland & Bara hate Michael Malin because they think he keeps too tight a control over the imagery his technology creates, but he certainly releases plenty of info. And yet the ignorant Mike Bara has the nerve to write (p.170) of "Malin's well-documented hostility toward the Cydonia issue."

On to PART TWO

Mike Bara: As wrong as it's possible to be

James Concannon guest-blogs:

        Well, that was pretty funny.I've been contributing to a lively discussion about the so-called "Face" on Mars, on the Final Frontier Farcebook page. My posts today amounted to the following:

Features claimed by the gullible, when the resolution was 125 m/px:

- Headdress
- 2 eyes
- A tear duct in one eye
- Nostrils
- Teeth
- Lateral symmetry

Now that the resolution has improved to 0.3 m/px, all those have gone away. All they have left is lateral symmetry of the BASE, which is striking but not too unusual.

You'd have to be really, really gullible or really, really obstinate to persist in claiming artificiality.
=============================
Mike Bara's new book "Ancient Aliens on Mars" is due out 1st November. We can confidently expect fresh claims that this is a large artwork made by ancient aliens, since Bara falls into both categories "really, really gullible" and "really, really obstinate." He also belongs in the categories "really, really inaccurate" and "really, really obnoxious."

        Well, behold, just minutes later Mike Bara posted this utterly wrong, utterly hilarious essay to his blog.

How wrong is Mike Bara? Let me count the ways...

º "In recent years, as better and better images of the Face on Mars and other anomalies on the Red Planet have become increasingly recognized as artificial..." No, Mike, the "Face" is increasingly recognized as just an eroded mesa. See my text from FB.

º "Debunkers ... never ... use the far more accurate and more directly overhead views, of which there are now many. " Oh yes we do, oh yes we do. In fact, the excellent image taken in 2007 by the HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is the very first thing I would use if explaining this controversy to someone who didn't already know about it.

credit: NASA/JPL/Univ. Ariz.

        That's the one whose resolution is 0.3 m/px. The full version is here. Anyone see any tear-ducts or teeth? Headdress? By the way, it's upside down. They did that to annoy George Haas.

º Bara states, emphatically, that no scientific or medical literature exists authenticating pareidolia. Oh yeah??

Hadjikhan et al. "Early (M170) activation of face-specific cortex by face-like objects" in Neuroreport 2009 Mar 4;20(4):403-7. doi: 10.1097/WNR.0b013e328325a8e1

Uchiyama et al. "Pareidolias: complex visual illusions in dementia with Lewy bodies" in Brain 2012 Aug;135(Pt 8):2458-69. doi: 10.1093/brain/aws126. Epub 2012 May 30.

Maranhão-Filho et al. "Neuropareidolia: diagnostic clues apropos of visual illusions" in Arquivas de neuro-psychiatria 2009 Dec;67(4):1117-23.

º Bara cites prosopagnosia as a well-documented and medically-established disorder, "unlike pareidolia." He should have followed his own hyperlink, and actually read the text. It reads, in part,

"The specific brain area usually associated with prosopagnosia is the fusiform gyrus,[2] which activates specifically in response to faces. Thanks to this specialization, most people recognize faces much more effectively than they do similarly complex inanimate objects."

º Bara might usefully have followed, and read, the hyperlink in his own footnote.

"In 1978, some 8,000 people made pilgrimages to the home of a New Mexico woman who discovered a picture of Jesus in a burned tortilla. And in 2001, thousands saw the face of Satan captured in a CNN video and Associated Press photos of smoke billowing from the World Trade Center."

        Bara cited this article from Wordspy to establish that the earliest citation was from Skeptical Inquirer 1994. True. But it also establishes that, regardless of what you call it, it's REAL.

º One final point: If the ancient aliens built a 2 km long sculpture to resemble a face, weren't they relying on pareidolia (regardless of what they called it) for us to recognize it as a face?

--James C (thanks to Chris Lawrence for speedy research and Photoshoppery)

Update: 

This just in from Mike Bara to me:

"As to the papers you cite (we all know there is no "James Concannon") the first only measures how fast a portion of the brain responds to visual stimuli, and nothing more. The 2nd only makes subjective conclusions about patients with dementia, and the 3rd is a study of animals. None of these establishes that there is any such thing as "pareidolia" in humans. So once again, you have nothing to stand on. Good luck finding a real medical study on the subject. There isn't one. It doesn't exist.

Nice touch turning the image of the Face upside down. All it does is prove how desperate and pathetic your arguments are.

Not that anybody's paying attention to you anyway."

A study of animals??? Yes, the pareidolic images of animals IN THE HUMAN BRAIN. Sheesh...

Question time -- a comedy in 2 scenes

        Anonymous's suggestion that someone knowledgeable might infiltrate Mike Bara's upcoming Powerpointery had me fantasizing about how that might go.

MUS. CUE:  Harp arpeggios

Scene 1: DAY.INT. CENTURY C ROOM, LAX HILTON. 4:45 PM SUNDAY FEBRUARY 10th.

Mike Bara

 OK, well, that's about it. I think we have time for a few questions.  OK, yes, on the right here.

1st Knowing Questioner

 Mike, could we have a look at the image of Asada again, please?

Yes, that's the one. You say it's a satellite dish. That's a detail from an Apollo 16 lunar orbital shot, right? AS16-121-19438, as I recall. What's the resolution of that shot, Mike?

Mike Bara

I don't know off the top of my head. What's your point?

1KQ

Well, Asada's 12 km across. I measured before coming out here and it's 78 pixels in the image. So that's 154 metres per pixel, give or take. Are you aware that Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has shot Asada at 0.8 metres per pixel, nearly 200 times better than the Apollo 16 shot?

Mike Bara

Yes, of course I'm aware, douchebag. How was life in that Turkish prison? Get along well with your cell-mate, did you?

1KQ

My point is -- why would you use a poorly resolved, 40-year old image when a far better image is easily available from the LROC library?

Mike Bara

Look, you abject moron, I'm fed up with explaining simple things to haters like you. The sun angle is just too high in those Reconnaissance Orbiter shots. Security!

1KQ IS HUSTLED OUT BY TWO SAMOAN BOUNCERS. HE THROWS OUT A PHOTO PRINT AS HE GETS TO THE DOOR.

Scene 2: DAY.INT. CENTURY C ROOM, LAX HILTON. 4:51 PM SUNDAY FEBRUARY 10th.

 Mike Bara

Sorry about that, folks. I think that asshole must have just come from Barney Frank's boudoir or something. Time for one more... Yes, at the back...

2nd Knowing Questioner (female)

I'd like to take another look at the image of the glass skyscrapers, from chapter 4 of your book. Yes -- No, the close-up. Yes, that's the one.

It's from Apollo 10, which stayed in lunar orbit and didn't land, right? Your skyscrapers aren't in the online version of that shot.

Mike Bara

No, of course they aren't. NASA airbrushed the negative. Oh Christ! Not another douchebag. You're as ugly as Tara Jordan or Sarah Bilgri. Please don't reproduce.

2KQ

So your version came from Ken Johnston's personal collection, right? Those were all 10x8 photo-prints, right? Well, who scanned that print?

Mike Bara

I dunno, Richard Hoagland I assume. Yes, it was Richard.

2KQ

So the NASA version was scanned in clean conditions using professional equipment, and your version was done off the cuff with a consumer-grade scanner? I ask because what you call skyscrapers look to me exactly like what you'd get from a dirty, smeared scanner glass with the brightness turned way up. Isn't that a hair, up top right?

Mike Bara

Security!!

FADE TO BLACK

Why Mike Bara didn't get his Time Magazine cover this year

photo credit: David Mitchell (25%) Time-Life (the rest)

His insults are out of date. Nobody uses a douche bag nowadays.

His predictions for the Presidential election were about as wrong as it's possible to be.

He used the massacre of 20 children to promote his wretched book.

He claimed that he never believed in the December 21 apocalypse. Yet the cover sell on The Choice included the words There is a Great Shift coming in the near future....

He trusted the Call of Duty Zombies web gaming forum as an authentic source of space imagery.

He published 40-year-old lunar images at very low resolution, ignoring the LROC images that were 100 times better.

He utterly failed to respond to some stinging criticism of his work in Amazon reader reviews.

He deliberately misquoted his own book, attempting to cover a gross error.

He went on Ancient Aliens: The NASA Connection and made nine mistakes.

He wrote I haven't looked at them in response to a Farcebook query about lunar images from the Japanese Selene, Indian Chandrayaan, and Chinese Chang'E missions.  This is a statement by someone who claims expertise on interpretation of such imagery. Furthermore it isn't entirely true. He was made to look at the Selene image covering the part of the Moon where he claimed to identify a mile-square ziggurat.

Malice and homage

        I do declayah, I don't know what to do about y'all blog readers and commenters. I go away for a few days (and the wine wasn't too bad, thanks James—there was even a bottle of Picpoul de Pinet to be had) —I go away for a few days and first you let Mike Bara post 20,000 words of ad hominem drivel, then you go and let one of my all-time heroes die from surgery that should never have been attempted in the first place. Then to cap it all you let Mike make an utter drooling nincompoop of himself by calling that hero a liar. Now I suppose you expect me to clean this place up. Well, I will—first things first.

The day I met Neil Armstrong

        The occasion was a small press conference announcing his appointment as Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at Cincinnati University. I was there as producer of a BBC TV documentary about the Apollo program 10 years after Apollo 11. Prof. Armstrong had just recently slammed one of his hands in the door of a pickup truck. He'd had surgery on two fingers, and was very noticeably rubbing at the stitch-line as he spoke. On the one hand it humanized him, but on the other it seemed to emphasize the nervousness he always had when speaking in public. During question-time his answers were brief but not in any sense evasive. I was able to use about a minute of the tape in my production.

        Afterwards I approached him personally and he was pleasant, asking about my project and which other Apollo astronauts I was going to interview. He even signed a photo for me—a practice he later discontinued after he learned how much $$$ his autograph was worth.

        R.I.P., world-class hero. James Oberg was a guest on a short NPR obit show.

Mike's blogpost malice

        An extraordinary performance, wasn't it? According to Mike Bara, I'm a dumbass and an obsessive nutcase. Stuart Robbins is a NASA shill "on the take," and James Oberg is a bloated sack of protoplasm. Well, I say Mike's tutorials on image editing are inaccurate, irrelevant and needlessly rebarbative. All that matters for him to truly make his case is the Kaguya imagery. If the ziggy exists, he should be able to show it. He cannot do that. In fact, he conspicuously tries and fails. In public.

It's not there, Mike

        Mike's attempt to make a direct comparison with the features of the Ziggurat at Ur shows, in my opinion, the exact reverse of what he intends. Since there's no conceivable way anyone outside a loony bin would believe an exact copy of the Urzig was built on the Moon, it simply shows that if you badly want to see something in a jumble of lunar craters, that's what you will see.

        Anyway, as usual Stuart Robbins has done a far better job than I could rebutting the rebuttal of the rebuttal (it's not RUBUTTING, Mike), I'll direct you to read that and just say "Yes, I agree." It's here and here and here and  here.

More malice

        First we had Richard Hoagland using the anniversary of Apollo 11 to launch a wholly specious attack on NASA. Then Mike Bara commemorated the death of Neil Armstrong by calling him a liar. Malice seems more natural than homage to these two specimens.

        Hoagland & Bara don't seem too good at reading their own work, either. Nowhere in the oeuvre have they ever said that glass domes and technical artifacts were present at the Apollo 11 site. Unless I misunderstand, the only Apollo sites they are claiming are under glass are 12, 14 and 17. So what are Prof. Armstrong's "secrets" supposed to be?

On p. 541 of Dark Mission, we find this:

"[O]n the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Apollo 11 ... 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."

         In fact, Armstrong said the exact opposite. His words were "Wilbur Wright once noted that the only bird that could talk was the parrot, and he didn't fly very well. So I'll be brief." Quite obviously, he's apologizing for not being a good speaker because his talent, UNLIKE A PARROT, is for flying, not talking.

        Anybody can judge for themselves whether he seemed frustrated, or whether this speech was "highly emotional." I personally don't find it so. That's what Armstrong is always like as a public speaker. And remember, I have personal knowledge of this.

Are we done?

        There, that's cleaned this place  up a bit. It's nice to be back, congratulations to Catriona for joining the ranks of the banned douchebags, and I sincerely hope this is the last time I write about the damned ziggy. Mike Bara, SHAME ON YOU.

Open letter to Adrienne Loska

        Adrienne is Mike Bara's manager. As such, of course, she's obligated to defend him against the douchebags and dumbasses who question whether he has even the slightest grasp of physics and astronomy. She demurred, however, when asked if she wished to defend Mike for writing this to Sarah Bilgri:

God Sarah I just looked at you pictures [sic] on your Facebook page. Please don't reproduce. You are just too ugly to be allowed to have children.

        Adrienne did, however, defend Mike's unwillingness to respond to the many criticisms of his "work." She posted this to FooBoo yesterday.

I don't think that Mike should be expected to repeat work that has already been done by Einstein, Kozyrev and DePalma. Mike is an engineer. As I understand it, engineering is the practical application of math and science to solve problems. Engineers test theories and then turn them into something practical that people can have access to and use. This is what Mike does. Of course, he understands the math. He's done the work he’s needed to do in order to reach his conclusions and because of his desire to share his knowledge and discoveries, he’s put his findings out there for everyone to see. By doing that he’s opened himself up to criticism, and that’s to be expected, but just because someone doesn’t understand something he has stated or they don't agree with a topic or concept of his, it doesn’t mean that he is obligated to explain it to them further.

        The text was really addressed to Catriona, not me, so I didn't presume to respond directly. But this is what I would have written if it had been any of my business:

Dear Adrienne,
I accept your definition of what an engineer does. I merely wonder whether, in fact, your client has ever done it. A man who thinks that "astrology is a perfectly valid and defensible science" (The Choice, p.31) or that "Newton's laws of motion ... only work if the object being measured doesn't rotate" (The Choice, p.60) must be suspected of having a highly impractical view of the world and how it works. A man who has said he's an experienced jetliner designer (Shiny Side Out radio, 4th August) and yet makes a colossal error in a rather simple calculation of orbital mechanics (The Choice, whole of ch.12) must be suspected of self-delusion at the very least, and quite possibly of fraud. At any rate, I for one would not wish to step on board any jetliner he had designed — if, indeed, any such aircraft exists.

You write that "Of course, he understands the math." How do you know that, Adrienne? He has stated that "hyperdimensional physics" — a vaguely-expressed concept that your client and two other people in the entire world believe in — is based on Maxwell's original 20 quaternion equations. And yet, not once in all the writings and lectures of your client and his former co-author has any single one of those quaternions been used or even, as far as I know, mentioned. You'll have to forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical about your client's mathematical talent.

Your client, echoing Richard Hoagland almost word for word, has written (The Choice, p.47) that the following features are at a latitude of 19.5°:

Neptune's Great Dark Spot
The Great Red Spot of Jupiter
The erupting volcanoes of Jupiter's moon Io
Olympus Mons on Mars
Earth's own Maunakea volcano

This, he has told us, is evidence of this concept he calls "hyperdimensional physics." Well, Adrienne, do you know what? None of those features are actually at 19.5°. If he'd written Mauna Loa instead of Mauna Kea, he'd have got one right. Oh, I suppose some of the 400 volcanoes on Io are probably at 19.5° just by chance, but is that the foundation of a new branch of physics?

Bruce DePalma documented the fact that a rapidly-rotating sphere in air describes a higher arc when projected than a non-rotating one. Physicists (that's the collection of people your client calls "blithering idiots") would say that's a nice example of the Magnus Effect. You referred to this experiment in what you wrote on Facebook. Could you please cite any mathematical analysis of this phenomenon written by DePalma or Hoagland? Are you truly, truly, convinced that Mike Bara, in spite of being wrong about almost everything in physics and astronomy, understands the mathematics involved?

I suppose you're correct in writing that Mike has no obligation to answer follow-up questions from his readers. Perhaps, then, the best service you can offer him as manager at this point is to advise him not to respond at all, rather than to respond by insulting readers who are better qualified than him in physics and astronomy. Another service you could usefully deliver is to explain to your client that fact-checking, in these days of google and wikipedia, is so incredibly easy that it's well worth giving it a shot. And another is that juvenile web forums like Call of Duty Zombies are not really a reliable source of graphics for professional publication

Regards,
expat

Mike Bara chimes in

     Mike Bara got in on the act Aug 3rd, posting on his new blog (that doesn't allow comments, he-he) the same inaccuracies as Hoagland about the newly colored HiRISE image. His angle was just a little bit different, citing a foxnews.com piece:

Usually, these linds[sic] of articles pop-up when NASA is about to release something new and interesting about Mars. It serves as a warning to anyone in science and academia not to start asking too many uncomfortable questions because they will be subsequently ridiculed.

So, the real issue here is; what’s coming up about Mars that NASA is worried about? We’ll see.

     Oh please. This was just one of HUNDREDS of images released by the Univ Ariz HiRISE lab last month. It was simply labelled 'Popular Landform in Cydonia Region.' Links were prominently provided to other treatments of the basic acquired swath, including the "Full Mona." Warning-schwarning, Mike. Do you really believe foxnews.com is at NASA's beck and call to post sinister warnings to scientists? Aren't there far more direct ways for NASA/JPL/Univ Ariz to get messages to the academic community? Do real scientists (as opposed to fake ones, like Hoagland & Bara) even read foxnews?

     This is exactly the kind of speculative, unsupported, alarmist, thoroughly unscientific analysis we've learned to expect from these two clowns. But at least Bara didn't claim any inside info.

Update: The Scientist Speaks - Aug 27th
     Now that Mike Bara's blog does allow comments, I made some of these points in comment today. The eminent scientist Prof. Michael Bara pronounced as follows:

As if I needed any more proof that you are a complete blithering idiot, the fact that you are obviously a democrat confirms it. Enjoy November.