Hoagland shamed, Bara mocked

        As my internet-friend binaryspellbook rightly says (or rightly writes, to be right), the former museum curator Richard Hoagland has some back-pedaling to do in respect of Comet 67P Churyumov–Gerasimenko. It is now screamingly obvious that the ten-trillion kg rubber ducky IS NOT an abandoned space station and DOES NOT feature "ruins and eroded jagged metallic structures ... skyscrapers ...buildings," as Hoagland claimed earlier this year.

        Time for some public recantation, you'd think -- unless you already knew Hoagland's standard behavior of hiding when his pronouncements and predictions are shown to be false. As a matter of fact, right now he's doing an unprecedented job of hiding.

* Last update of his primitive web site: April 2014
* Last update of his Fartbook fan page: May 2012
* Last update of his Fuckbook "personal" page: Too far off to find
* Last appearance on Coast to Coast AM: 22nd April 2014 (there are rumors that George Noory is pissed off with him)
* Last known public appearance: 31st August 2014, Caravan  to Midnight (when he made the claim about 67P)
* Update: He was on something called the Tom Anderson Show much more recently (7th Nov) peddling the same story. Again, unchallenged.

Update 22nd Nov: Noory announced last night that RCH is not on the naughty chair and will be back soon. Apparently he moved house "and it did not go well," whatever that means.

Well done, ESA
        This blog adds its congratulations to the tidal wave sweeping over Arianespace, Astrium, ESA and its many, many collaborators. As of this writing, Philae may be on its side and rapidly running out of battery power, but to have got it that far is a gigantic achievement. Update: Turned out that it wasn't lying on its side after all, but the batteries failed on 14 Nov.

NOT well done, Mike Bara
        Mike Bara, the world-renowned theoretical physicist, came up with a blogpost this week that clanged somewhat like Big Ben would if it fell onto Westminster Bridge (yes, folks, the term Big Ben technically refers to the bell, not the tower it sits in). He gave us his analysis of the physics implied in the recently-released movie Interstellar, and in the process reiterated his well-known opinion that modern astrophysics is mostly rubbish, and physicists are idiots -- especially Neil deGrasse Tyson, who Bara calls a "science choad" no less than eight times (a choad being a short fat penis).

        He's not 100% wrong about physics -- I share his skepticism about dark matter/dark energy, for instance. But in writing that wormholes are nonsense because nobody has ever seen one, he's missing the point so spectacularly that the point is rumored to have committed suicide in despair. Quite likely wormholes don't exist, or if they do it's extremely hard to see how human space travelers could put one to effective use. But a wormhole, or an Einstein-Rosen bridge to give it its posh name, is a legitimate solution to the equations of General Relativity, and thus is of interest to theoretical physics. That arcane discipline, almost by definition, does not require the things it studies to be actually observable. Mike dear, think of a wormhole as a way of teaching relativity, not something that will necessarily ever be confirmed to exist.

        Time dilation is another matter. Well understood and accurately measured, this phenom is responsible, for instance, for the fact that GPS satellites have their time-keeping  adjusted to account for the reduced gravity field at 20,000 km altitude. Mike Bara the world-famous engineer wrote this:

"[T]here is some evidence to support time dilation, but it is pretty sketchy. As an example, identical nuclear clocks have been used to measure the passage of time on Earth relative to the passage of time in orbit, in near weightless conditions. The clocks farther away from the 1G gravitational field of Earth were found to operate faster than the ones on Earth. But this is categorically NOT proof that time passes more slowly under the influence of gravity. It is only proof that clocks operate more slowly under the influence of gravity. Since no one has a clue what time really is, the idea that we can measure it is a fairy tale. None of these experiments have actually measured the speed of time. They have only measured the effects of gravity on mechanical instruments, i.e. clocks."

       I can assure Mike Bara that a GPS satellite does not function by mechanical clockwork. In fact, there are no moving parts at all.

        Bara then quoted himself, in a passage from his book The Choice which demonstrated his utter ignorance of the nature of gravitation, and ended with this dictum:

" Science is observation, experimentation, measurement and insight."

        I posted the following comment, with no expectation that Bara would allow it to be seen:

"Quite right. You'd do well to remember that precept before expounding on the false pseudo-science you call hyperdimensional physics^{note 1}. A few notes:

- None of the examples you cite of energy upwelling at 19.5° latitude are valid.
- Hoagland thinks nothing of lying in order to promote this idea -- as he did in respect of the Port-au-Prince earthquake.
- None of the top ten earthquakes or volcanic eruptions in history have been at 19.5°.
- Hoagland's Accutron "experiments"^{note 2} are a joke. No controls, no baselines, no data on the orientation of the device. The maximum recorded frequency excursions he ever reported were recorded at a time when there was no eclipse and no transit.

- In summary, neither you nor Hoagland has either observed or measured HD physics. Neither you nor Hoagland has conducted any meaningful or acceptable experiments.  It's a fraud."

====================================
[1] See this summary
[2] See this

Robbins falsifies Hoagland/Bara

        The tottering edifice which is the distortions and lies of Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara has been systematically demolished over the seven years of this blog's lifetime.

         First, Von Braun's Secret was falsified because of fatal mathematical errors.

        Then, the Table of Coincidence fell off its legs because 19 of 42 data points were invalid per Hoagland & Bara's own published rules. With it went the whole daft idea of NASA's worship of Egyptian Gods.

        Next was the Accutron "measurement" of the torsion field. Quite apart from the inadequacy of the protocol and the lack of key data, Hoagland accidentally revealed in Glendale that the baseline readings showed as much activity as his claimed data spikes.

Comes now Dr Stuart Robbins, with a blog and a professional-standard video that takes apart another key part of the edifice, stone by stone.

        The topic is what Hoagland (originally with co-author Errol Torun) called The Message of Cydonia. The theory -- to over-dignify what amounts to a whole lot of flim-flam -- rests on these two composite diagrams of the Cydonia area of Mars. Mike Bara recycled them, without specific attribution, in his inaccurate book Ancient Aliens on Mars.

credit: Hoagland & Torun

The authors

credit: Hoagland & Torun

        In the first, 19 angles have been created by connecting 16 marsographical features in a pseudo-random way. The authors then make the claim that nine ratios of these angles equate to simple arithmetical expressions such as √3, e/π etc. The accuracy claimed is three significant figures.

        In the second, something similar is done with the pseudo-pyramid Hoagland calls "D&M." Robbins' suspicion was immediately aroused when he noted that the list of angles and ratios in the two composites is identical. It suggests work that is so sloppy as to self-falsify.

Watch the video
For those who can't do that, here are a few bullet points:

• No two pairs of edges of the D&M actually converge at the same apex
• 9 angles are considered significant in the D&M, but in fact 35 angles are inherent
• The angles are in any case projections onto a horizontal plane. In 3-D reality they would all be different
• 595 angle ratios can be derived from the geometry
• 94 arithmetical expressions would qualify per the authors' implicit rules
• Only one of the nine ratios is accurate to the claimed tolerance of 0.1%
• Generating 16,000 random pentagonal shapes similar to the D&M, and using computer analysis, Robbins creates a null hypothesis and shows that Hoagland's nine equations are no less probable
• Re-checking the larger Cydonia map, Robbins could confirm Hoagland's data in only seven of the 19 angles, within 1% tolerance

        Neither Hoagland nor Bara has yet commented on this piece of work, and it's unlikely they ever will. In the first 36 hours the Youtube vid got 1000 hits, and the word is spreading among we lovers of the truth. I'm pleased to play a small part in that.

First lunar panorama from Chang'e-3

        The Chang'e-3 lunar lander touched down in Mare Imbrium (at 19.5°W  longitude, remember?) on 14th December.

        This week CNSA released enough imagery for photostitch enthusiasts to create a panorama.

image credit: CNSA/Chinanews/Universe Today

        A rather lovely interactive 360° rendering by Andrew Bodrov is here.

        Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara must have spat coffee all over their computer screens when they saw this, the poor dears. Not only are there no glass towers, condos, or satellite dishes in sight, but -- DAMMIT!!! -- the wily Chinese have toed the NASA party line and depicted the lunar surface as dull brownish gray.

        When Mike Bara put up that disastrous video on Youtube showing how the red stripe on 'Data's Head' was made, he said this:

"...the actual real colors of the Moon are significantly brighter, significantly more contrasty, significantly more interesting than NASA would have you believe."

He showed us what he meant:

image credit: NASA, corrupted by Mike Bara

        That was also included as artwork in his horrible book Ancient Aliens on the Moon. The giveaways are the wheelguards on the Lunar Rover. They're nothing like that bright scarlet in reality.

        So what are Hoagland & Bara going to say now? Anything other than "Sorry, we were wrong," judging on past performance. It'll either be "CNSA is in cahoots with NASA to lie about lunar colors" or "Just because that one particular place is colorless, doesn't mean the whole Moon is."

What fools.

Yes, Hoagland & Bara really do believe their nonsense

        Trained Observer asked about this today, in a comment to the previous post. Since H&B are not saying or writing anything I can critically review at the moment¹, I thought I could cobble together a posting on the subject.

        I truly believe they believe. Their problem is that they're so totally devoid of training in science that they lack the capacity for complete rational thought. As I wrote at least once recently, they seem to get ideas, then short-circuit the normal process of checking whether the ideas have any validity or evidential support. Instead, the ideas go straight to the printed page, or the radio show, or the pseud-psych conference auditorium. There are thousands of examples of this phenom. Well, perhaps hundreds.

        The motivation is a) making a living, and b) developing a following. By any measure, you'd have to say that in both cases they're a partial success. Probably more than if they'd turned the ideas into sci-fi—a very crowded field of endeavor. True, there is some evidence that Hoagland is hurting for funds (the rather desperate appeals to his disciples for cash), but he's not on the streets. In a triumph of "form over function", the fact that they are both really good at presenting themselves blinds radio show producers and conference organizers to they fact that they basically deal in lies.

As for building a following, comments like this are a commonplace:

"He is no crook. It is just the way he sees things. I was glad he was on coast again last week or the week before. Can't wait for another full 4 hour show with him! Hoagi is the best!"

 (sylvie82311, on Youtube, commenting on the Chichen Itza débacle)

 "Mike Bara has 4 published books, 2 television shows that he regularly appears on and several international radio shows. He has seen massive success and the only thing you've managed to master, is how to stalk him while bitching like the cunt you are. Find something better to do with your time, dickwad, because you clearly do nothing else right now, aside from twiddle your needledick to Mike's books and shows. WE GET IT, YOU'RE MAD HE WONT FUCK YOU... now move on, psycho."

 (Sara Shanae,  sniping at James Concannon on FooBoo)

        I hesitate to play psychiatrist (having no particular training in the discipline), but it's also possible that Mike Bara is one sandwich short of a picnic. Don't you wonder about a non-fiction author who includes his pet cats² in his acknowledgements? Or who applauds diatribes like the above insultathon?

Lunomaly

        T.O. also asked about Allan Sturm, who posts to internet forums as Lunomaly, and who very painstakingly teased out what he says are the artifacts of a lunar civilization from some Apollo images. Mike Bara used some of his work in Ch.9 of AAotM. Since his publisher only allowed one measly 4-page color signature in the book, the Sturm content was monochrome only, but one color example was used in Mike's online image library. It's nice work, judged strictly as computer art, but scientifically worthless.

image credit: Adventures Unlimited Press and Allan Sturm

This, Mike says, is a power plant. On p.223 he writes

"I wanted Allan's work to be a central part of this book, but for personal reasons he declined. However, I consider some of his findings so crucial ... that I don't feel they can be excluded."

        My sympathies are all with Sturm. I'd decline, too, if some two-bit author said he was about to rip off my ideas to make a little spare cash, and would it be OK if he used ALL my work instead of just bits of it?

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

1. Hoagland is, understandably, somewhat preoccupied by the fact that his companion, Dr Robin Falkov, had major colon surgery this week. I wish her well even though I think her views on health are as wrong as Richard's views on Phobos. Bara is off shooting somewhere on his Top Secret video project.

2. The Lady Aurora and Miss Fluffy-Muffy, acknowledged in AAotM

Expat clears his throat, ready to bore the masses

        Tomorrow morning Stuart "astroguy" Robbins will be interviewing me again for his regular podcast, probably available by the end of the week. Topic will be the more political side of Richard Hoagland's work—NASA as a defense agency, Neil Armstrong as a parrot, and so on. I think we'll also touch on the Accutron nonsense.

        In the evening, I'm taking up a kind offer from the Jammerstream Dark Matters producers to rebut Mike Bara's hour-long exposition last Thursday. I invited the producers to read my review and they did. Unless I screw up royally that will be on the net next Thursday at 9am and 9pm EDT. Pod thereafter.

        I seriously doubt any of the material will be new to regular readers of this blog, so take a pass by all means.

Strong lunar glass -- the real story

        In writing Glass, steel, water, and the art of the misquote (30 Jan) I remarked that both Dark Mission (p. 244, 2nd edn) and Ancient Aliens on the Moon (pp.51-2) had flagrantly misquoted the source both books cited.

        Further research tells me that they simply cited the wrong paper from W. W. Mendell, ed.; Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century. (Houston, TX, Lunar and Planetary Institute, 1985.) They should have cited Blacic, J. D.; Mechanical Properties of Lunar Materials Under Anhydrous, Hard Vacuum Conditions: Applications of Lunar Glass Structural Components (1985.) Blacic was cited by Rowley & Neudecker, and it was Blacic who made the point about the effect of water contamination on silicate bonding. Blacic even has a figure to help us visualize the problem.

        Hydrolization inserts a hydrogen bond into the chain of covalent O-Si bonds, and in general that would indeed cause potential weakness.

How strong is strong?

        So does Blacic support Hoagland & Bara's statement that lunar glass would be "approximately twice as strong as steel under the same stress conditions"? No, not at all. In fact, Blacic's Table 1 specifically falsifies the statement.

Here are the key comparisons in that table:

Young's modulus of lunar glass: 100 GPa, cf. alloy steel 224 GPa, terrestrial glass 68 GPa.
Ultimate tensile strength, alloy steel 2.3 GPa. For lunar glass, ultimate tensile strength is dependent on many factors especially temperature. Blacic gives a range of 0.007 - 3.0

Blacic writes (p. 491):

How can lunar glass be utilized? One obvious way is in the form of glass fibers in tensile stress situations. Although lunar glass will be very strong, it will still be a very brittle material, and therefore it makes sense to distribute the load over many small elements. .... lunar glass fibers should always be coated with a metal such as Fe, Al or Mg to protect the glass from inadvertent or purposeful exposure to water vapor. Otherwise, a highly stressed glass component might fail catastrophically due to water-induced stress corrosion.

Summary

:: Lunar glass has only half the Young's modulus of steel.
:: If the absolute maximum of the range given for ultimate tensile strength is achieved, lunar glass fibers might be about one-third stronger than steel. At the low end of the range, lunar glass would be about 300x weaker.
:: Using lunar soil in the form of glass does not get you out of the need to mine metals. The metals will be needed for coating.

:: Hoagland & Bara lied.
:: Hoagland & Bara lied, not just in their books, but repeatedly in many radio programs, most recently only 10 days ago.

Proving my point

I deliberately did not clean my scanner glass before scanning this image. I even made sure a stray human hair was around:

In Paint Shop Pro v. 7.02, I then stonked brightness to 90, contrast to 80, and saved the image again.

        My scanner glass is a lot cleaner than Hoagland's (we haven't had any office parties lately,) but the effect is nevertheless clear. Smears and sparkles are picked up wherever the image is black. The resemblance to this, which Hoagland & Bara swear shows Al Bean under a glass dome, is fairly striking.

        Again, scanner sparkle in the blacks, including Al Bean's shadow. This is another of Hoagland's scans from the Ken Johnston collection, and he's never explained why there's "glass dome" material down there on the surface.

Retouching

        Here's what I think accounts for the accusations we hear about NASA "airbrushing" Hasselblad frames for release. I think it's well-nigh impossible to eliminate the sparkle altogether, on something as absolute black as the lunar sky. So I think some sparkle quite likely was removed. If working on a print, the tool was more probably a black felt pen rather than an airbrush, but the purpose was the same—to give a truer rendering than the printing process provided. And, once again, this could not have been done on a negative, as Mike Bara has alleged. That would mean eliminating black spots instead of white ones, and turning them transparent. Impossible, basically.

I challenge Hoagland & Bara

        When, last week, I was looking for the quote I used in Glass, steel, water, and the art of the misquote, I re-read chapter 4 of Dark Mission.

        It's fairly obvious that Hoagland was the principal author, and this is the chapter in which he lays out his thesis that artificial structures are common on the Moon, and they can be seen in certain images in the Apollo (and other lunar mission) archives "after digital enhancement." 66 pages (plus 45 figures) recycled by Mike Bara five years later to make a large part of his own book Ancient Aliens on the Moon.

        On page 214 et seq. Hoagland tells how Ken Johnston approached him after a lecture in Seattle, 2nd May 1995. As this blog has related more than once, Johnston, as a Brown-Root employee, was at one time responsible for an archive of Apollo 10x8 photo-prints kept in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, separate from the main photo-archive that was in a different building, under different curatorship. It was scans of some of those prints, done by Hoagland himself, that underpin the entire Hoagland/Bara lunar structure thesis, if such a shaky set of fantasies may be called such. On page 226, I found this passage:

"In scanning Ken's priceless Apollo 14 C-prints, [I'd] discovered that the computer could "see" what the human eye could not—incredible geometric detail in the pitch black areas, like the lunar sky. The sensitivity of modern CCD imaging technology, in even commercially-available image scanners, coupled with the amazing enhancement capabilities of state-of-the-art commercial software—like Adobe's Photoshop—allowed the invisible detail buried in these supposedly black layers, of these thirty-year-old emulsions, to ultimately be revealed—a "democratization" of technology that no censor at NASA could have possibly foreseen over more than thirty years."

        I giggled a bit when I transcribed those words "incredible geometric detail," because incredible is precisely what the detail is. Of course an image scanner can't see what isn't there—that's ridiculous. Unbelievably, those bozos Hoagland & Bara fail to realize that THEY ADDED SOMETHING in order to make the so-called "detail" appear. What did they add? Whatever crud was on their scanner glass, that's what. Hoagland's scanner looks like there may have been hijinks during an office party.

Fig. from chapter 4 of AAotM, supposedly showing glass skyscrapers

I challenge

        Here's the challenge. Richard Hoagland, Mike Bara — I challenge you to get that print of AS10-32-4820.jpg back from Ken Johnston and scan it again. I guarantee your "glass skyscrapers" won't be there.

        Anybody reading this who has the ear of Hoagland or Bara, please pass this on. I don't think they read my e-mails these days.

Glass, steel, water, and the art of the misquote

        You'd think that a world-renowned designer of jet aircraft like Mike Bara would understand what tensile strength¹ means. You'd think that co-authors of a book published by Feral House would have an agreement preventing either of them from copying paragraphs of their joint work and presenting the text as the work of a sole author, as published by Adventures Unlimited. Research proves that neither proposition is true.

 "Glass on Earth is well known to have little tensile strength, meaning it doesn't stretch easily (because it is brittle) and will not withstand even a very weak impact from a hard object (shear). ... The reason for these properties on Earth is that it is pretty much impossible to extract the water from glass as it is forming.... Water is all around us, even in the most arid deserts. ... But the Moon is a completely different story. It is airless, with no humidity to interfere with the molecular bonding of the silicates that make-up the glass that is omnipresent. The hard-cold vacuum enhances the strength of lunar glass to the point that it is approximately twice as strong as steel under the same stress conditions. In fact, several papers from scientists at Harvard and other universities have suggested that lunar glass is the ideal substance from which to construct a domed lunar base. All we are proposing is that somebody else came up with the idea long before we did."

-- Dark Mission (2nd edn), by Richard Hoagland & Mike Bara, p.244. Written in 2007.

"Glass on Earth is well known to have little tensile strength, meaning it doesn't stretch easily because it is brittle and will not withstand even a very weak impact from a hard object. ... The reason for these properties on Earth is that it is pretty much impossible to extract the water from glass as it is forming. Water is all around us, even in the most arid deserts. ... But the Moon is a completely different story. It is airless, with no humidity to interfere with the molecular bonding of the silicates that make-up the glass that is omnipresent. The hard-cold vacuum enhances the strength of lunar glass to the point that it is approximately twice as strong as steel under the same stress conditions. In fact, several papers from scientists at Harvard and other universities have suggested that lunar glass is the ideal substance from which to construct a domed lunar base. All I'm proposing is that somebody else came up with the idea long before we did. "Somebody," as in Ancient Aliens."

-- Ancient Aliens on the Moon, by Mike Bara, pp 51-52. "Written" in Summer 2012.

       So it's the water in glass as we know it that makes it brittle. Lunar glass, having no water, is what you make 2-mile high skyscrapers (that look just like photo scanning errors) from. You'd think that two authors could keep that simple, albeit wrong, idea in their heads as they continue to inflict their drivel on an increasingly indifferent readership. That turns out to be untrue too.

"The Moon contains as much water as the Earth."

-- Mike Bara, blog 6 Sept 2011. MORE HERE. (Interestingly, Mike transferred all the posts from mikebara.com to mikebara.blogspot.com when he abandoned the former domain name. Except that one. May we hope that he realized he was writing poppycock?)

"the moon has as much water inside it as the Earth has in its oceans."

-- Richard Hoagland, on Coast to Coast AM, 25/26 May 2011. MORE HERE.

Misquote

        Both the above book extracts cite the same source: In Situ Rock Melting Applied to Lunar Base Construction (...etc) by J.C.Rowley and J.W. Neudecker.² However, Hoagland & Bara flagrantly misquote Rowley & Neudecker. This is what the paper actually says:

"It is anticipated that vacuum conditions  and essentially zero moisture content of the lunar soils and rocks should have significantly reduced thermal diffusivity relative to terrestrial counterparts. Therefore, reduced heat losses could be expected for lunar applications. The absence of moisture and oxygen should reduce the corrosion rate of the refractory metal penetrators. ... This property for lunar soils and basalts, as reported in the literature (MacKenzie and Claridge, 1980), appears to be within the same range as terrestrial materials of roughly the same composition."

        The paper discusses lining and stabilizing tunnels and caverns by melting of the inside surfaces, not construction of skyscrapers or glass domes over craters. Really, Hoagland & Bara should be more careful with their citations.

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

1. Low tensile strength does not translate into vernacular as "doesn't stretch easily." "Does stretch easily" would be somewhat more accurate, but the real point about tensile strength is not whether a material stretches but whether it breaks when someone attempts to stretch it. The measure of resistance to stretch is the Young's modulus, which for typical glass is around 70,000 Mega-Pascals, cf. steel upwards of 200,000 MPa. A really low tensile-strength material like polyethylene would have Young's modulus around 230 MPa. You won't want to build lunar skyscrapers out of that, for sure.

Tensile strength also does not correlate with brittleness. A brittle material might still have a high Young's modulus. The measure of brittleness is the Shear modulus, which for typical glass is ~30 MPa, cf. steel 80,000 MPa. Yes, glass is very brittle. Who knew?

So "as strong as" doesn't mean much unless we know whether we're pushing, pulling, bending, or throwing stones. Earth-bound glass is already twice as strong as steel, in one sense. Glass actually has higher compressive strength than typical steel — 1000 MPa cf. steel 350 MPa.This makes it an architecturally useful material, since a primary source of stress on a building is compression due to gravity. Seen any glass-clad office blocks lately?

2. Link to the Rowley & Neudecker paper

Did Gerry Soffen lie about the second orbit?

        Both Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara, those two untrained and unqualified pontificators on all things extraterrestrial (and in some cases terrestrial, too) have said more than once that Gerry Soffen, Chief Scientist of the highly successful Viking program of 1976, lied about the "Face on Mars" image captured on 25th July 1976 and first noticed by Tobias Owen.

photo credit: NASA

        Here's their story. Gerry showed the "Face" image -- Frame 35A72 -- to the press in the Von Karman auditorium, chuckled, and added "On the next orbit, it all went away. The feature looked quite different." This was when he called the mesa the oft-quoted "trick of light and shadow." Hoagland & Bara have said more than once that Gerry must have been lying, because by the time the Viking 1 orbiter came over that latitude again, Cydonia would have moved "hundreds of miles" due to the natural rotation of the planet. The orbiter was in a more or less polar orbit.

        They're thinking of a typical Earth-satellite situation, where the so-called "walk rate" is typically about 22.5° of longitude. The period of a low reconnaissance-type orbit is ~90 min, and (360° x 1.5)/24 = 22.5. However, the situation at Mars in 1976 was very, very different. The Martian day is 24.622 hours -- very similar to that of Earth. However, the Viking orbiter's orbit was much higher -- 1513 x 33,000 km, and its period was, guess what? 24.66 hours¹. Almost the same as the rotation rate of the planet it was spinning around. Now the calculation is (360° x 24.66)/24.622. = 360.55°. In other words, the walk on Viking 1 was only 0.55°. That works out to only 25.3 km on the ground, at the sub-satellite point. The orbital camera could surely have re-photographed "Owen Mesa" with relative ease.

Gerry Soffen. Not a liar.

image credit: NASA

        I thought of this again today, listening to Mike Bara parading his ignorance around Internet radio once again, as he plugged his error-filled book on Paracast. He was complaining about the tyranny of what he called 'Googlepedia' -- the google-wikipedia axis that is, according to him, totally dominated by 'NASA Brownshirts' in matters of space technology. As an example he stated that he had more than once added a note about Gerry Soffen's lie to the Face on Mars wikipedia article, only to have his edit wiped out immediately by "NASA."

        One of the fine features of the wiki is the ability to reconstruct the entire edit history of any article, and indeed there's evidence of an attempt to insert such material at least once. At 03:57 on 27th July this year, somebody with IP address 213.152.225.82 inserted this text:

"He also added that a second image, taken hours later, shows no sign of the Face at all - to support his claim of the "light and shadow trickery". It was a lie as the mentioned "second image" taken "hours later" never existed - the orbiter was imaging completely different part of the planet at that point."

        The edit was reverted at 07:48 by an editor called Dougweller, with the comment "find a reliable source first." Here's Dougweller's personal page -- I see no indication whatsoever that he has any connection with NASA. Here's a list of his edits -- he seems to be interested in the Queen of Sheba, and Edinburgh Academy.

        I do a little wiki-editing myself, and I've been known to gnash my teeth somewhat about "citation nazis." The geek-comic xkcd had fun with them, too, a while back.

image credit: xkcd

        But really, it isn't that arduous. The point is that anything that would be likely to be challenged by other editors must be accompanied by a citation from a reliable source.

        Mike Bara isn't a reliable source. And now for the really bad news -- he revealed on Paracast that he has a contract for his next book, Ancient Aliens on Mars. Oh no, here we go again........

==========================
[1] Viking 1 Orbiter Mission Profile

John Glenn: Hoagland misses the point

        Richard C. Hoagland made a right ass of himself on Coast to Coast AM last night. Nothing unusual there, you may say. True, but this was a doozy.

        The proximate reason for booking this self-publicizing pseudo-scientist was the 50th anniversary of John Glenn's heroic Mercury mission, orbiting an American astronaut for the first time. Toward the end of hour 1, Hoagland made reference to Glenn's famous appearance on the Frasier comedy sitcom. Hoagland, hilariously, called Glenn's appearance a "scathing indictment of NASA," and proceeded to read Glenn's script as reprinted in Dark Mission p. 542 (2nd edn.)

"Back in those glory days, I was very uncomfortable when they asked us to say things we didn't want to say and deny other things. Some people asked ... "Were you alone out there?" We never gave the real answer, and yet we see things out there -- strange things -- but we know what we saw out there. And we couldn't really say anything. The bosses were really afraid of this, they were afraid  of the 'War of the Worlds'-type stuff, and about panic in the streets. So we had to keep quiet."

        Hoagland & Bara apparently believe this was an example of a NASA astronaut spilling the beans, revealing his true thoughts. Well, first off, it's quite true. Col. Glenn did say that. It was Frasier Season 8, Ep 184, first aired March 6, 2001. Frasier is A COMEDY SHOW. In case Hoagland or Bara is reading this, please let me explain the joke, because you obviously don't get it.

        The plot involved the character of Roz planning a radio show about space exploration. In a reversal of their usual roles, Roz is in charge, with Frasier merely booked to narrate the show. Neither of them adapts well to the work situation, and they clash repeatedly. Eventually Roz announces that Frasier is off the show, to be replaced by none other than John Glenn. Frasier, outraged, persists in interfering, and the argument escalates. Glenn sits down in the recording studio and begins the "improvised" monolog that Hoagland & Bara quoted. Glenn's monolog is actually intercut with scenes of Roz and Frasier still fighting and paying no attention to what their celebrity guest is saying.

        THE JOKE, Mr Hoagland and Mr Bara, IS THAT THE CHARACTERS ARE SO SELF-ABSORBED THAT THEY TOTALLY MISS SENSATIONAL MATERIAL. In fact they even hand over the recorded tape without having heard it. Just to be quite sure we understand this is a spoof, the producers added a laugh track throughout Glenn's monolog.

        Geddit? Geddit? Oh dear me, what clowns Hoagland & Bara are to be sure.....

Parrots and Pilots

        Later last night Hoagland trotted out his other total misunderstanding of astronaut quotes, saying that Neil  Armstrong, on the occasion of the Apollo 11 20th anniversary, likened astronauts to parrots, saying only what they'd been told to say. Here's what Armstrong actually said:

"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."

         Armstrong, of course, is possibly the greatest pilot the world has ever known but is also well known for being a poor and nervous public speaker. Is he likening himself to a bird whose talents are the exact opposite? No, of course not. He's apologizing for not being eloquent and saying that therefore he won't speak for long. He's the exact opposite of a parrot.

        Later still, Hoagland gave a pretty accurate account of US Space Policy, with all its hiccups and inconsistencies, since the Mike Griffin days, but then spoiled it all by revealing his extreme political naiveté. He said that the Republicans will deliberately lose the presidential election in November, because "somebody" has decided that Barack Obama is the right man to lead us through the 2012 apocalypse.

        Even George Noory had a hard time with that one.

James Oberg adds that he correctly anticipated this nonsense three days earlier. His confidential advisory to news media clients, emailed at 10:46 AM CST on February 17, included this paragraph:

15. In 2001 on the TV show ‘Frasier’, Glenn took part in a spoof in which he secretly confessed to encountering terrifying space aliens. As should have been expected, UFO nuts have claimed the scripted satire is actually an authentic admission of truth: search “Glenn, UFO, Frasier”, see http://www.enterprisemission.com/glenn.htm  & http://kauilapele.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/john-glenn-discloses-ufo-presence-on-2001-frasier-show-and-a-few-more-astronaut-ical-tales/