Bret Sheppard displays first his ignorance, then his vindictiveness

        If you feel the need to listen to three hours of two guys who basically agree about everything shouting at each other, check out Gary Leggiere interviewing Bret Sheppard on The Martian Revelation Show, recorded last Saturday. Bret Sheppard is the guy who knows nothing whatever about spaceflight or physics, but who wrote and self-published a book strongly supporting Ken Johnston's claim that the Apollo 14 astronauts made 16mm film of an alien base in the lunar crater Tsiolkovsky. Naturally, he cannot provide this film sequence as evidence for his claim, nor can he provide any other documentation as backup.

        Sheppard's book, Flyover Tsiolkovsky Crater, has now been withdrawn from circulation, but while it existed it attracted just one Amazon review. That review probably tells you all you need to know about the wretched thing.

        During the Martian Revelation interview, Sheppard did his best to defend the idea that a balloon might be useful on the Moon. He referred to a 1950s-era technology that used a helium balloon to hoist a rocket into the stratosphere, thus avoiding the need to expend large volumes of rocket fuel for the first 1% of a flight, when the pull of Earth gravity is at its strongest.

01:58:03 Sheppard: "NASA used that same thing later to test the atmosphere on the Moon, Mars and Venus. And what would happen is, they would have the balloon, with their [..] diagnostic equipment or whatever on the bottom, and when the Sun would come over the edge of the terminator it would heat up the balloon. The balloon would rise, and—keep this in mind—that we do not know what the atmosphere is. We're completely dependent on what NASA tells us."

        One of the many things that Sheppard does not understand is that science experiments may be carried by NASA spacecraft, but the experiment packages themselves are not built by NASA but by scientists who have successfully applied to have their experiments carried. The principal information we have about the Lunar atmosphere comes from the Lunar Atmosphere Composition Experiment, part of the ALSEP array carried on Apollo 17. It is not NASA telling us these results, but the Principal Investigator of LACE, Dr. John H. Hoffman of the University of Texas, Dallas.

        Much later (2013), the  Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) basically confirmed the ultra-low atmospheric pressure on the Moon. The atmosphere is very comparable to that at 400km above the Earth's surface, where the ISS orbits. The Neutral Mass Spectrometer (NMS) on LADEE was designed by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It is them that are telling us the results, not NASA.

        It goes without saying that the experiment Sheppard describes never happened. I'm giggling about the balloon on Venus, a planet whose mean surface temperature is ~460°C.

Pedophilia
        Before the Martian Revelation interview ever happened, I suggested to Gary that he might show Bret Sheppard this modern high-resolution image of Tsiolkovsky, from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter NACs, and ask him to point out where the aliens are. On Gary's foo boo page, Sheppard posted:

"You want me to show you on a map that is completely sanitized with CGI for the satisfaction of a bunch of debunkers who protect pedo's in court with false memory syndrome?"

         I lament the fact that Internet argument has now deteriorated to the extent that a belligerent and ignorant person losing a purely technical argument thinks it's all OK to accuse his opponent of advocating pedophilia without any evidence, purely to score a point. I challenge Bret Sheppard to provide evidence that I have ever advocated pedophilia, or retract the accusation publicly.

"I never said that"
        In the same foo boo dialog, Sheppard wrote:

"I never said they used balloons for safe touchdowns. I said they used them for atmospheric experiments like NASA has on both Venus and Mars."

        From Flyover Tsiolkovsky Crater by Bret C. Sheppard, pub. CreateSpace, 2016. ISBN 978-1541162624

"Questions have arisen about the reality of the Lunar landing due to there not being any blast zone under the L.E.M. The craft looks like it touched down gently ... Was it gently deposited on the surface by a balloon?"

        I'd cite a page number but the editor (Karen Patrick) quite forgot to paginate the book.

Thanks to "The Orbs Whiperer [sic]" for leading me to the quotes above.

Bret Sheppard, the satellite dish on the Moon, and the meaning of "acquisition"

        Bret Sheppard was invited for a long interview on something called Spaced Out Radio last night. He gave an insight into his motivations, and more important for me, his misunderstandings. He related how, as a young art student, he stayed after class one day to hear a presentation by someone from the Stanford Research Institute. He thinks now it must have been in connection with Ingo Swann's remote viewing experiments, that were ongoing at the time. Something about a photograph taken on the Moon impressed him sufficiently that he became something of an expert in the strange field known as "lunar anomalies," and he spent literally years, off and on, scouring Apollo photography. Then he continued...

26:54 "I almost gave up. I almost said "Know what? I'm done with this lunar garbage." I was in there getting all of the anomalies out of them. You know... basically, the reason why I was doing that was to eliminate them from what I was seeing in the image that I remembered when I was 15 years old. You know, so that's what I was doing. And I was hitting a wall because I needed a control image, and the first image I got was actually from Donna Hare.^{note 1} And she had, er.. I wanna tell this right... she had gotten it out of the Dempsey Dumpster as part of her portfolio. She was allowed to keep that as part of her portfolio. So she had a few.. you know, mostly Apollo 12 images. You know, from Pete Conrad and Alan Bean. And this... this particular image showed the LEM and a satellite dish on the horizon of the Moon. And.. and there's Surveyor in the foreground, and Alan Bean posing next to Surveyor. I believe Pete Conrad was taking the picture. So...um... basically this ...what this image showed me... it was very clear, much clearer than the NASA image that they put on line. I mean, wiki-clear, you know. It was like "Wow! That is a picture!" So, there was this satellite dish in the background. You know, that they couldn't possibly fit in the LEM."

        Well, he must be referring to either AS12-48-7135 or AS12-48-7136, because they are the only shots showing Al Bean beside Surveyor 3.

        As for the satellite dish--well, could it be the S-band antenna that the astronauts erected as soon as they got off the ladder? Here's the actual Apollo 12 dish:

         "They couldn't possibly fit it in the LEM." Sure they could..

Ken was like a father to me
        A little later, Bret got around to talking about his association with Ken Johnston and the whole issue of the (non-existent) 16mm film of crater Tsiolkovsky shot by Ed Mitchell on Apollo 14. The topic of this blog from 19th March. He said he was living in Texarkana, in a house that was falling down, when he met up with Ken. He said Ken was a role model, "like a father to me." Some kind of deal was struck whereby Ken helped Bret move to Belen, NM in return for his and Karen Patrick's help finishing Ken's autobiography.

33:00 "The thing was, that there were a couple of issues with it... with the story. He didn't know at the time what... ahhm... what mission he saw that 16mm film. And so one of the things that I decided to do was to investigate his story. Thoroughly, you know. So anyway I started getting attacked by James Oberg and everything else, for even attempting this. So what I found was... James Oberg said that they never flew over Tsiolkovsky crater. And semantically he's right--the Command & Service Module never really flew over Tsiolkovsky crater, near it, or whatever. They never really filmed except I found a 70mm shot of Tsiolkovsky crater showing the exact sun angle that Ken was talking about from memory. And then, I found out that there were two 16mm cameras in the Lunar Module, and one in the Command Module. [He's right about that] The one in the Command Module was sort-of pointed down and going really fast, skitching across the lunar surface. And it looks just exactly like that... skitching over the lunar surface and grabbing some film. This is the one that Oberg showed Ken at one of the conferences. And that really got me thinking "What did Edgar Mitchell film in the Lunar Module?"
...
I looked up the Apollo 14 onboard voice transcription, because they say everything in those, even when they go to the bathroom. They say everything. [He means the recordings made by the Data Storage Equipment while the astronauts were out of contact with Houston, on the back side of the Moon.] So I looked that up, and I scoured this ... data, you know. And what I found was...um.. that basically right inside this... this transcript, on... let's see. it's... er...on the third day, around 2:29 p.m. and 26 seconds, that's how detailed this is. [He's misunderstood the notation. 03:14:29:26 is the Mission Elapsed Time, not the time of day.] And the Data Acquisition Camera, the 16mm, er... Edgar Mitchell said "I'm going to see... I'm going to see that.. I'm all set up for this acquisition." That doesn't mean anything else but a camera."

        Well, he's totally wrong. It has nothing to do with the camera. They were on the far side, remember, out of contact. "Acquisition" means acquisition of the radio signal from Houston, as they come around the Moon. It was known in NASA-speak as AOS, for Acquisition Of Signal. This becomes totally clear very shortly, although Bret doesn't see it. He continues:

"And then it says minus 39 plus 325..  He said "OK, HIGH GAIN, MANUAL, and WIDE." Those are camera settings."

        Once again, he's wrong. Those are antenna settings, required to get the best possible radio contact. If Bret had continued reading from the transcript, he would have seen this immediately following: "And 6 minutes away from it." Yes, six minutes until AOS. Here it all is, from the actual document:

        And sure enough, a couple of pages further on, we see:

        Another of  Sheppard's misconceptions is that this conversation took place in the LM. Actually, undocking didn't take place until M.E.T. 04:07:47:58, so all three astronauts were still in the CM at that time. Here's the part of the CM control panel concerned with the high gain antenna:

        It's a little hard to see, but the leftmost switch is for antenna tracking. The mid position is for MANUAL. The next switch controls the beam width: up for WIDE, down for NARROW. The two large dials control the pitch and yaw angles of the antenna. Mitchell was reading from the Flight Plan: Yaw -39, Pitch  +325. Those angles are much clearer on the LM control panel.

 

       So that completely explains the above dialog--nothing to do with cameras at all. I don't want to be too hard on Bret Sheppard, but he just keeps revealing his ignorance of Apollo hardware and history. And honestly, if he thinks there is 16mm film of Tsiolkovsky, why doesn't he show it? If he thinks there's an alien base there, why won't he look at the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter image, which is 40 years newer and 0.5 meters/pixel resolution?

Update:
        Using Google Moon, OneBigMonkey has derived this simulated view representing what Ed Mitchell could see as he spoke the words "That's Tsiolkovsky. OK, I've got it." OBM set the altitude at 90km, somewhat below apolune. Very useful.

Tsiolkovsky is on the horizon. No view inside the crater is possible.


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[1] Donna Hare is an important figure in the mythology of lunar anomaly hunting. A so-called whistle-blower, Donna was actually employed on image processing for NASA JSC and alleges that one of her duties was to airbrush out alien structures.

Balloons on the Moon... and other errors by Bret Sheppard

        Bret Colin Sheppard is the artist-type from New Mexico who was so massively impressed by Ken Johnston that he became Johnston's publicist--probably without compensation, although we don't know that for sure. This blog took a critical look at what Sheppard and his squeeze Karen Patrick came up with last June, and a lively discussion including comments from BCS himself ensued. So there's no need to flog the dead horse of Sheppard's "lunar anomalies" here.

        Sheppard has now self-published a 104-page book, Flyover Tsiolkovsky Crater: A Secret Base on the Moon^{note 1}. I just had to giggle when I came to this bit:

        This is Apollo 12 Hasselblad image AS12-47-6890, and that little white blemish in the large crater lower right is what Sheppard thinks is a balloon. He even wonders if Apollo Lunar Modules benefited from a secret balloon-assist to ensure gentle touchdowns. Hilarious. I like to think that my readership is sufficiently au fait with fundamental principles of physics that I don't need to spell out why the idea of a balloon on the Moon makes me giggle. Hint: There's no atmosphere on the Moon.

"Tsiolkovsky... Okay, I've got it"
        But the central thesis of the book is that Apollo 14 shot 16mm footage of crater Tsiolkovsky which revealed a lunar base, exactly as Ken Johnston has claimed. Sheppard's thesis fails, however, because he can not overcome the following objections:

1. The entire 01:29:12 film is available online and Tsiolkovsky does not even have a walk-on role.
2. An index map identifying all Apollo 14 terrain filming targets is also online. Tsiolkovsky is the large dark blotchy crater very far to the lower right.
3. Modern digital images of Tsiolkovsky, from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, show no lunar base, even at the best resolution of 0.5 m/px (the images Sheppard  uses are about 100 times worse.)
4. The dialog Sheppard considers clinches the case does not clinch anything. Ed Mitchell says "..that's Tsiolkovsky. Okay. I've got it." But that was during only the third lunar orbit, and Mitchell was not shooting film but merely sighting in the navigation sextant.
5. Apollo 14 never flew directly over Tsiolkovsky. The crater is at latitude  20.4° S, and the orbital inclination of Apollo 14 was 14°. The Apollo 14 crew captured Tsiolkovsky in four still frames, all of them very wide angle. Here it is in frame 10301 (with brightness boosted,) its very steep central peak catching the sunlight in a way that a layman might think was a sign of life. This shot was taken after the lunar surface mission was over and they were headed home.

6. Sheppard keeps insisting that the navigation sextant was an integral part of the 16mm Data Acquisition Camera, but that's not true. The normal use of the sextant was through an eyepiece--an adapter was provided to attach the DAC if needed. This is plainly stated in a handbook and several examples of this are seen in the film.

Editing
        Karen Patrick is credited as editor of this garbage. In which case, I hold her responsible for the following text, which I swear I have transcribed exactly as printed. I'd cite a page number but I can't because Karen forgot to provide pagination:

"The image was analized for any known possibilities of mechanical artifacts and found to be part of the image and not an affectation of poor scanning by a proffessional photographer. It is truly a subject in the image as oposed to a reflection. It is exactly what it looks like, an un-natural structure or engineered structure as oposed to natural geological lunar formations on the surface due to the array which woulld be considered beyond coincidence in nature. In the same way a crop of corn would be considered engineered on Earth."

        I make that five keyboard errors plus one incomprehensible sentence. Since we live in an age of self-publishing, I guess we have to brace ourselves for more and more of this kind of crap.

Update: Was Karen Patrick dreaming of Paris when she composed this crap?
        A page from the book. Who knew they had boulevards at the Space Center?

Update, late April 2017
        The book is now listed OUT OF PRINT, a mere four months after its publication date. I can't help wondering if Bret Sheppard recalled it, after the devastating errors were pointed out by this blog and others.
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[1] ISBN 978-1541162624

Ken Johnston and truth

        Ken Johnston, the former Brown & Root employee who worked under contract in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, put out a press release six days ago. The occasion was so minor that I forgive myself for not having noticed it at the time. The release merely noted that Ken generously donated a copy of his self-published triple-book Ken's Moon (plus an additional multi-media package) to the Roswell UFO Research Center. Well, bully for Ken.

        This 650-word text was written, not by Johnston himself but by Karen Christine Patrick — Ken's editor and co-host of an internet radio show specializing in ufology and exopolitics. It's pretty clear that KCP is not God's gift to the technical writing profession — we see "The the three-book series includes...", "Ken's archives has been of interest...", "world reknowned" [sic in all cases, it goes without writing], plus other minor solecisms.

Painting over the stars
        But as in previous announcements and pronouncements by Johnston, truthiness is in short supply here. Consider this key passage:

"Most researchers today only have access to the current database of images that are in electronic format. Researchers have noted, there are significant differences between images in Ken’s archives and what is available to the public. Johnston is an eyewitness to NASA personnel scrubbing out details of photos and painting over the stars in the sky."

        I don't myself know of any significant differences between Ken's photo prints and the NASA electronic archive. Where the differences arise is between the "official" archive and the electronic scans of Ken's prints. But the comparison is between, on the one hand, a professionally scanned image from an original negative or internegative done in a clean room — and on the other hand, a photoprint stored in a ring binder for 23 years, then pulled out and scanned on a consumer-grade scanner. In the case of scans done by Richard Hoagland for his book Dark Mission,  the scanner glass is quite clearly contaminated. Compare, for example, the official version of AS10-32-4820 with Hoagland's scan:

Sparkle
        Quite apart from the scratches — emphasized by Hoagland's manipulation of the image brightness — there's something in there that surely can only be a human hair.

        As for "painting over the stars in the sky," that cannot possibly be the truth because the astronauts' chest-mounted cameras could not have been set to expose both dim stars and very bright lunar terrain in the same shot. It seems certain that what Johnston witnessed was strippers eliminating sparkle in the totally black lunar sky that might have been misinterpreted as stars.

Blobberies
        Appended to the release is a collection of a couple of dozen scans which are presumably there to convince us that Johnston really has something worth looking at. In fact, they convince me that the archivist, Bret Colin Sheppard (he actually calls himself an anomalist) lacks rigor to the point of despair. We see some of the usual fuzzy things declared to be "a lunar base", "a parabolic dish array"^{note 1}, "an effigy or statue"^{note 2}, "a sculpture", and so on. We are not told who carried out these scans or under what conditions of cleanliness. In not one single case did the industrious Mr. Sheppard find time to consult the library of ultra-high definition images returned by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to see what these blobberies really are (if anything at all.) The resolution of the LRO images would be typically 300 times that of the Apollo collection, and considering that LRO has been giving us these free gifts for seven years now, there really is no excuse for this slop.

        Think I'm making too much fuss about a mere press release that nobody noticed? Wrong. Notwithstanding its grammatical shortcomings, The Roswell Daily Record picked it up, and to my horror (and that of James Oberg) it found its way into AP, datelined 7th June. For whatever reason, AP decided to add its own bit of untruthiness in the tail-end paragraph: "Johnston was later fired from NASA." Given that Johnston never worked for NASA, it's hard to see how he could have been fired. His status as hero within the NASA-hating contingent is based on this falsehood, but the true story is that he was dropped from the all-volunteer Solar System Ambassador program after his loyalty was questioned and his self-reported career résumé was found to contain important prevarications.

        Oberg added a comment to the online AP story, including these words: "If you're going to promote a claim that NASA has been lying to the world for half a century about what Apollo found on the moon, please research your sources more thoroughly." Amen to that, and see Oberg's comments below.

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[1] The so-called "parabolic dish array" is seen in AS15-88-11967. The Johnston version differs only in tiny detail from the official version. It's a collection of small craters behind the rightmost fiducial in row 3. Sheppard presents an over-zoomed detail which is far more likely to be dust or a reflection than anything real. The bright dots appear to be beyond the limiting resolution of the scan.

[2] The"effigy" also appears in the "official" version of AS12-49-7224. It's just a large rock. The scan provided by anomalist Sheppard is notably dirty, including another hair or fiber.

Also note Johnston's own comment about this particular image, noted in this blogpost.