Tenth anniversary of the ‘Norway spiral’

The Birth Of An Internet Mythology

by James Oberg

In northern Norway in December, the sun never rises. For a few hours around noon the southern sky glows with bright twilight of the hidden sun, passing just below the horizon.

But human activity remains fixed on artificial timekeeping technology, and on December 9, 2009, residents awoke 'on schedule' to prepare for work and school. Many were outside shortly before 8 AM, the sky still dark, when an amazing light rose into the eastern sky where the sun would have appeared in a different season. But it wasn't a single bright shining orb they saw, it was an amazing spinning spiral that left a blue trail and lingered a few dozen seconds and then was swallowed up by a totally black nothingness.

Many of the witnesses had grabbed their pocketcams or cell phones, then quickly raced for their Internet connections.

That's how the sensation of the 'Norway spiral' was born, ten years ago. Combined with some tantalizing terrestrial coincidences, and soon reinforced by similar subsequent "sky spiral sightings" in Russia and Australia, an entirely new folklore phenomenon sprang up. A dozen bizarre theories burst into life, spread across the internet. As search engines can demonstrate, they still thrive.

It soon turned out that it really "just" was a rocket, performing strangely to be sure under unusual illumination conditions, but entirely terrestrial in origin [as were all the others]. It was a military missile code-named 'Bulava', with three solid-fuel stages, designed for launch from submarines.  But in the modern Internet culture, that prosaic [if 'Space Age'] explanation has been vehemently rejected in favor of more exciting theories, all of them mutually exclusive but all of them firmly based on the conviction that no human rocket could ever look like this [and subsequent] events.

Aside from the delightful story of how the mystery was correctly solved there is a less pleasant challenge. It's a sad realization that vast pockets of popular culture are not merely uninformed about the basics of 'rocket science', they are actively and enthusiastically misinformed. Worse, they are often cynically DISinformed by on-line media outlets which make their money by attracting credulous visitors.  What can be done to remedy this remains as uncertain as any genuine outer space mystery.

Wormholes
Almost immediately, a dozen different explanations for the 'Norway spiral' sprang up on the Internet. Aside from the stock claim of UFO aliens, there were proponents of 'wormholes' [widely depicted in movies and video games], an ionospheric manipulation of a local research facility called ' HAARP', a similar secretive lab called 'EISCAT', or a mythical Pentagon secret weapon called 'Blue Beam', an upward projected hologram, or some other fictional device designed by Nikola Tesla, or some kind of supernatural manifestation such as a demon or an angel, or a magical warning [or congratulations] to the Nobel Committee which was about to grant Barack Obama a 'Peace Prize in Oslo, or another stab at space aliens.

Disbelief in the 'official explanation' was both instinctively distrustful and based on a number of serious questions. The apparition appeared very close, stopping dead still in the sky in Norwegian airspace, yet no advance warning had ever been given.  It didn't look like any rocket most folks had ever seen before, and the weirdly glowing cloud implied an unknown energy source.  It appeared to float and defy gravity by drifting horizontally. At the end of the perfect spiraling the apparition the plume was swallowed by an expanding 'black hole' that closely matched Hollywood SFX. And previously failing rockets as shown in videos always dropped in flaming zig-zags  after exploding loudly, leaving wreckage falling to Earth.

The event was quickly identified as a Russian missile test, an explanation just as quickly rejected by dubious netizens. The 'missile explanation' united all the different theory promoters into harmonious derision. Here's a selection of typical comments on youtube videos .

Agumonkk -- if it was a rocket, then how is it that the "exhaust trails" are in a PERFECT spiral? that thing has to be pretty far away, and that would mean that the spiral is HUGE. how can the exhaust from a rocket stay in a perfect spiral for that long? the wind surely would have dispersed it.

phuckoff mmkay -- Bright blue circular light from a failed missile? They usually explode and fall down in a flaming fireball, wouldnt you say? 

Vladolenin --A missle? L.O.L. They DO think we're stupid. Missles dont grow into dark spheres that CONSUME LIGHT.  

Sxr5a -- a Russian missile flies DIRECTLY over Norway, violating their airspace, and the Norweigians do not make a peep about it? Does this make sense? 

Poopdome56 -- its sad that there are still ignorant people out there that actually believe this is a rocket. 

The.PhantomPain -- that is not a missile i don't care what anyone says. the large hadron collider created a wormhole. it even behaves like a wormhole. it doesn't behave like a missile  

NassimHarameinVedas -- ANYONE who thinks this was caused by a "failed missile launch" is beyond brainwashed and retarded. Missiles have been launched since the 50's ok . . . and we've NEVER seen anything like this or heard about it.

Sylph Viper -- That UFO was seen during NIGHT HOURS. And rocket fumes or exhaust DO NOT GLOW OR EMIT LIGHT. The missile theory is by far the most idiotic thing presented yet.  

WinduChi6 -- The other major problem for this being a rocket is, a rocket normally will be traveling at velocities in range of 1,000s mph. For anybody having knowledge of the dynamics of motion; a slight change in trajectory angle of a object traveling at several 1,000mph will generate enormous g-forces or centrifugal forces that will tear a rocket in to pieces, that will generate a, with combustive fuel on board, a explosive fire ball of bright orange-yellow-red color. So, the ICBM missile story is a LIE!

Special conditions

It would turn out that missile and space activity could [and had been] creating various forms of sky spirals for many years. The key feature which made them unusual ['once in a lifetime' for most observers] was the requirement for a narrow range of illumination conditions that rarely coincided. The rocket had to engage in plume-forming activity, either thrusting or dumping leftover fuel.  The sky had to be dark [and clear], but to illuminate the plume, the sun had to be only slightly below the horizon, preferably lighting the plume from behind [as seen by observers]. Calculations with Internet-based astronomy tools showed this was exactly the situation in these two December 2009 spiral events.

Mathematics also helped solve the initial mystery: WHERE exactly was the source of the apparition? How far away was it, really, since judging distance to an unknown-sized out-of-focus blob in the night sky is notoriously prone to random guesswork. That's especially true for objects near the horizon, which based on analogies with familiar objects such as aircraft lights, can be imagined to be nearby, perhaps within tens of meters, perhaps a few tens of kilometers at most.

Trigonometry came to the rescue, aided by old-fashioned 'orienteering' [finding true direction]. Accurate line-of-sight azimuths could be derived from the photos, which showed recognizable silhouettes of nearby mountains [and star backgrounds]. Combined with exact knowledge of the observer locations this gave quite accurate angles.  Because such azimuths could be derived from several sites along the northern Norwegian coast, they allowed triangulation of the geographic location of the object forming the spectacle. It was far to the east, over Russian territorial waters. This was fully consistent with the explanation that a military missile test aimed at the normal impact zone in Siberia was the cause of the sightings.

Viewpoint

An entirely reasonable follow-on question is to ask why, if the rocket was over Russian coastal waters, it was only seen from Norway and Sweden, but not from Russian cities in the northwest corner of that country that were much closer. The valid explanation involves timing and the round shape of the Earth. 

Over northern Norway [the only part of the country that wasn't cloud-covered, as weather satellite images show] the skies were still dark. At the same time, regions farther southeast would be experiencing pre-dawn sky brightening, when stars become invisible behind the sky glare. Meanwhile, any object at very high altitude [such as an artificial satellite or long-range missile] would be fully lit by the still-not-risen sun [as indeed the missile plume was].

So even if the skies were cloudless over Murmansk and Arkhangelsk and nearby regions, the dawn sunlight would have masked any space objects passing nearby. Numerous websites [such as heavens-above.com, or wolframalpha.com] offer programs to determine exact solar illumination conditions for any site at any date/time. One can also obtain the sun's "depression angle" for a  nighttime location, and from it then approximate the altitude required to be in sunlight ["Grahn's Law" states that the altitude of the overhead shadowed region boundary in kilometers is close to the square of the depression angle in degrees].  

The TIMING of this launch near dawn at launch site meant that while observers to the west still had a dark sky, the plume was high enough to be in sunlight. So it was visible from regions to the west but not in sky-brightened regions east of the launch site.

**********

Some skeptics of the missile explanation suggested that a missile test would have been announced in advance, and the "missile explanation" would not then have appeared until only AFTER the event, as a made-up ad hoc excuse.  

But the missile test launch was indeed openly discussed ahead of time. Moscow's "Kommersant" newspaper reported on November 3, 2009, that the launch would occur in a few weeks. Closer to launch, official warnings [called NOTAMS]  were released for the period in early December where the test had been delayed to. An article by Vladimir Voronov, "Bulava Stupidity", in Moscow's 'Sobesednik' newspaper, reported on November 17: "The Bulava missile complex with which it is intended to equip our submarines is terminally unfortunate: either it doesn't fly, or it flies -- but off course, or it completely explodes. The next tests have been officially announced for 24 November, but there are major doubts that these, too, will be successful." A few days later, Moscow Interfax-AVN news agency reported on November 24, "The next test launch of a Bulava sea-based intercontinental ballistic missile is expected to be carried out in early December, a missile industry spokesman told Interfax on Tuesday."

As already stated, all worldwide activities that are hazardous to air and sea traffic are announced in advance in a system called 'Notice to Airmen and Mariners' or NOTAMS. The USSR and China did it, too. There are standard public-accessible data bases containing all such notices that sea and air traffic controllers consult regularly. The notice contains the locations, altitude ranges, and the time intervals that traffic is warned to avoid. True, the messages are written in technical formats that must be used for interpreting them, but the coding is straightforward. News agencies rarely if ever note or publicize such routine information

All these precursor warnings in both the Russian news media and on world air/sea travel websites effectively answered the 'not-a-missile' claim that an absence of such warnings prove it was not a missile. Just the opposite is true.

Some 'rocket science' may cast more light on the nature of the apparition, and of the failure. 

The frequency of spiral effects for Russian missile tests, and their rarity during US military missile tests from Florida and California, may merely be due to a difference in geography. The central issue is the distance to the target zone and how this influences the missile's ascent performance. The US has entire wide oceans to shoot missiles to full range, but although Russia  is a wide country, even the farthest part of eastern  Siberia is still well short of matching the range needed to reach North American targets, which determines the maximum operational capability of any ICBM.  Full-range Russian tests [which do occur occasionally] would impact in mid-Pacific, near Hawaii. They are rare because they are easily tracked by US surveillance systems and may leave top secret hardware where it can be retrieved by US devices. 

This range limitation means that to avoid overshooting the far end of the in-country test range, Soviet missiles had to restrain their final velocity well below the maximum. They had to cut off thrusting earlier than what they were designed for.

Thrust termination

Rocket engines that use liquid fuels could accomplish this easily, by just closing the fuel flow valves. But solid rocket motors, burning not from the hind end but from a length-wise central cavity, were next to impossible to extinguish on demand. So a design was developed [both in the US and the USSR] to allow the engines to continue burning to fuel exhaustion, but while doing so, just stop thrusting forward during this terminal phase. 

This was accomplished by installing openable windows ["thrust ports"] near the nose of the booster, to enable venting exhaust gasses forward so as to null out the continuing [but much reduced] backwards flow.  Since usually there was a nuclear warhead sitting directly atop this stage, the thrusting had to be accomplished with twin opposite-side vents facing sideways but canted forward, like a letter 'Y'. As a result, at the moment chosen by the control program, it could cut off pushing forward while continuing to burn harmlessly until all fuel was consumed.  

Solid-rocket builder THIOKOL discusses this on its website: "Thrust Termination Port. == A port provided in the rocket motor case to vent combustion gases so that rocket operation can be terminated. The port usually is provided for in the head end of the motor so that gas flow is effectively diverted from the nozzle. The port is formed by firing a shaped charge of explosive placed against the outside of the forward end of the motor."

As an additional flight technique, the last stage also usually also rotates rapidly, both for stability and also as countermeasure to the effects of anti-missile energy weapons. This rotary motion creates strikingly regular double-spiral patterns similar to rotating twin-nozzle lawn sprinkler. As with the lawn sprinkler, nothing is spinning AROUND the central point, every particle is moving directly AWAY from the origin, but each subsequent particle is ejected in a slightly different direction, creating the visual impression of a solid, moving ring. 

This is worth repeating. A spiral form can be created by linear expulsion of material from a spinning object. Nothing is actually MOVING in a spiral AROUND the central object.  

***********

What exactly HAD gone wrong is still a deeply guarded military secret in Moscow. The Bulava ICBM program was most troubled Russian missile development effort in half a century. Officially, this failure occurred late in ascent during the third stage performance. Its exact nature has never been disclosed, but it might have been loss of attitude control and tumbling, or partial rupture of propellant casing wall, or [my preference] the premature activation of thrust venting. But it any case, the malfunction was high enough for its consequences to remain visible for a minute or so. 

The second Russian test may not have been pure coincidence, but merely reflect practical operational limits. Sometimes, different missile tests that rely on common tracking facilities are timed close together to keep special deployed teams on station. The December 10 launch [announced in Moscow] was part of a new program to test maneuverable warheads to evade US missile defense system [ten years later, the test program continues, it most recently launched on November 29, setting off new UFO panics in Russia and central Asia]. Launch of a surplus 'Topol' missile from Kapustin Yar [on the lower Volga] to Sary Shagan [in Kazakhstan] was right over ground observation points just after sunset, on purpose, presumably to enable high-precision optical tracking.

***************

To sum up, the technological puzzle was straightforward in its iron-clad solution, but the sociological/cultural puzzle is more amorphous and daunting. 

The spectacular apparition observed in Norway on December 9, 2009 was created by a Russian sub-launched ICBM, called 'Bulava'. The missile was following a standard test profile into Kamchatka. Weather was clear and plume was backlit by the pre-dawn sun. Some anomaly during third stage caused the object to eject plumes laterally. This spiral-forming phase lasted unusually long but there had been a few earlier precedents. Because of its great distance, it was easy to misinterpret speed and location. 

These kinds of events will be occurring more frequently [and video recordings will be spread even wider] in years to come. Only by recognizing these 'new-normal' prosaic stimuli will people be able to identify and isolate any truly anomalous aerial phenomena.

UFO over France?

        James Oberg has collected a whole slew of excited UFO reports from French observers, occasioned by the Falcon-9 second stage deorbit burn on 11th November. The orbital path passed over the Pyrenees and the display was visible from much of Western Europe and North Africa.

A selection of reports:
« [Y]esterday evening, Monday 11/11/2019 around 17h55, I observed  above the end of
the Ardeche river canyon, between Saint Martin d'Ardèche and Saint Just d'Ardèche . Flying
slowly in a West-East direction, at an indefinite altitude but definitely in our sky, our atmosphere. The "main lighting" in the form of a camembert was noted, the arc of a circle to the front, coming from two sources side by side at the front of the object, and a line or a ray slightly offset towards the 'front’ left. [I had] no time to focus with my poor smartphone, just a photo and a seven-second blurred video, all in maximum optical + digital zoom, too bad. What a surprise...»

--Jérôme JAQUIN - Link to video

« Hello, seen on LSA 38260 at 17:52 too, Flight Radar helping it was Lyon-Ajaccio at sunset. The image does not do justice to the magnificent plume of light generated by the aircraft's headlights on the clouds Yes! You are not accustomed to observe the sky: last night the conditions of light and humidity allowed good observations like these. I saw the phenomenon and cross checked on Flight Radar in RT! What evidence do you have that it was not an airplane? »

--Cyril Bargeton, pilot

« Strange object in the sky that I filmed near Gretz Armainvilliers this Monday 11/11/19 before
18h. I do not know what it was, it looked like a plane with landing lights, but I did not actually see a plane, it made no noise at all. I do not know if it was an aircraft, a drone, a helicopter, a glider, a weather balloon, a cloud of insects, a  meteorological / spatial phenomenon / paranormal or UFO ... We do not know .. No clouds other than the fog that followed the object like a luminous cone.»

--Mahé Abbad

Oberg's comments:
        In recent years I’ve collected an amazing range of analogies and metaphors from witnesses trying to relate the appearance of a space rocket plume to some familiar earthly item. Aside from the spirals and spheres and other highly unusual forms, the descriptions of simple exoatmospheric plumes has inspired analogies to headlights, to parachutes, to ice cream cones, but never before this France overflight had I ever heard a witness compare it to a slice of Camembert cheese^{note 1}. But the French being French, I should not have been surprised. Mais pourquoi pas!?

• Witnesses exhibited standard inability to judge distance
• Witnesses exhibited good ability to describe shape variations
• Stronger than usual delight in imagining it was an alien UFO
• Bizarre coincidence with moderate [5.4 Richter] local earthquake
• Some witnesses accurately noted unusual feature that plume PRECEDED rather than FOLLOWED the object [it WAS a deorbit burn]

===========================/ \======================
[1] Note that the French call a pie chart "a camembert." So it's a very common descriptor of a circle segment.

Oberg vs. Bassett

        James Oberg was recently interviewed by a journalist with the delightful name Faye Flam, for an article for Bloomberg Opinion about the recent reports of UFO sightings by US Navy pilots.

        Ms. Flam noted that both the New York Times and the Washington Post have both tentatively proposed that these sightings are evidence of alien visitation. She then wrote:

"But the pro-extraterrestrial visitation arguments rest on two serious errors. One is the confusion of observations with interpretations, and the other is a slight twist on an error called god of the gaps. The UFO sightings should be investigated in a scientific way, but the errors are undermining the effort.
The first error made in most of the news coverage was to claim that Navy pilots observed craft that accelerated, rose upwards or turned faster than was physically possible. But pilots can’t know any object’s speed or acceleration without knowing whether these were little things, seen close up, or bigger things, that were farther away. It’s just one clue that the vocabulary is being blurred.
James Oberg, a former NASA engineer turned space journalist, pointed out: “The bizarre events reported by Navy pilots are not ‘observations’; they are interpretations of what the raw observations might mean.” To start an investigation from a conclusion rather than from data is, he says, “a recipe for confusion and frustration and dead-ended detours.”

        Stephen  Bassett is one of the foremost believers in the alien invasion and a tireless advocate of official disclosure. His org, The Paradigm Research Group, proclaims that it represents "the people's right to know the truth regarding an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race." Another slogan is "It's not just about lights in the sky, it's about lies on the ground."

        Reacting to the Bloomberg article, Bassett wrote:

"This article's argument rests on two serious errors. One is a deep ignorance of the history of the phenomena. The other is calling on James Oberg who hasn't been right about anything since the Nixon administration".

       Oberg's comment was that he took criticism from Bassett as a mark of honor.

Update:
Here's a NYT article dated 26th May this year detailing what the Navy pilots have reported. Leslie Kean, who Oberg says is clearly biased, is one of the authors.

Sloppy compilations for the Apollo anniversary

James Oberg writes...

The recent blizzard of Apollo-11 anniversary programs was a fine tribute to that historical achievement of the American space program. The events of half a century ago came back to life in the dramatic portrayal seen on millions of television screens. But at the same time, many of the programs also displayed the sloppy errors, distortions and revisionist dramatizations which have come to characterize much of television journalism.

The wrong ship
To put the shortcomings of many of these programs into perspective, imagine the following practices for other historical documentaries or news, and ask whether they would ever be considered acceptable.

A Civil War film discusses Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, but since there is no photograph of Lincoln actually giving the speech, a photograph of him at his 1865 inauguration is shown instead.

A program on the loss of the Lusitania in 1915 needs dramatic video of an ocean liner sinking, so with a voice-over describing the Lusitania, news film is shown instead of the Andrea Doria going down.

A sportscast of the World Cup is in progress, but since video difficulties prevented receipt of the views of the Colombia-Rumania game which was the subject of the report, an already-used clip of a goal from the recent Germany- Thailand game is shown instead.

Clearly, none of these hypothetical cases can be considered acceptable. Anyone trying to do so would be considered irresponsible, even unethical. And since there are legions of history buffs, ship buffs, and sports buffs out there, any such attempts would be immediately recognized and widely criticized.

"Apollo Two"
But since spaceflight has always been an esoteric subject with a relatively short "history" and usually only superficial news coverage, similar misrepresentations are easier, even if by accident. Catching them and complaining about them is harder. But an effort must be made both to discourage future historical errors and to encourage those other programs which took the extra effort and got it right.

There's no need to exaggerate the inevitable innocent "bloopers" that any human effort is prone to. A TV network had a national newscast where the announcer kept seeing "Apollo-11" on the teleprompter, misinterpreted it as "Apollo-II", and pronounced it "Apollo Two". The N.Y. Times deserves minor embarrassment for twice referring to the "Apollo-1 moon landing" in a book review a few weeks ago. That's life.

In illustrating a Mercury splashdown, the TBS special 4-hour program "Moon Shot" used views of a Gemini splashdown instead. The difference is that Mercury capsules landed vertically beneath a parachute while Gemini capsules were slung horizontally from two separate lines. On July 20, CNN showed Apollo-11 graphics of a moon-walking astronaut whose spacesuit had red leg stripes not introduced until Apollo-13. "Space buffs" gleefully spotted the errors, but viewers were unlikely to be misled by these minor slipups.

Such naive bloopers even struck the White House during the July 20 ceremony honoring the Apollo-11 astronauts. In an otherwise fine speech, President Clinton related in his folksy style how "on the third day" Armstrong and Aldrin's Eagle lunar module descended toward a dangerous boulder field and Armstrong had to take manual control. But since July 16 was the first day of the flight, the landing on July 20 actually occurred on the fifth day. But again, it was no big deal.

Some historical visual scenes are certainly "interchangeable" by even the tightest standards, since no viewer is misled by showing one Gemini launch for another, or one group of engineers in Mission Control for another (unless, say, their actions are allegedly keyed to some event being described), or one "out the window" Earth or moon view for another. The criteria is clearly whether viewers will gain an authentic impression of the event, or not.

The serious distortions of space history which characterized many -- but by no means all -- of the anniversary documentaries went beyond this allowable flexibility, and include outright historical falsifications such as the following:

To compress events, Neil Armstrong's comments about making "One small step" have often been matched with video of him dropping down from the Lunar Module ladder. Actually, he landed on one of the vehicle's footpads, made several comments, jumped back up on the ladder to make sure he could, jumped down a second time, discussed his impressions of his surroundings, and only after that did he make the "small step" onto the moondust. So the rearranged video completely misrepresents what he meant by "one small step". For similar time compression, the dozens of immediately post-landing words from the crew about their spacecraft status are usually edited out, so that viewers get the false impression that "Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed" were the FIRST words from the Moon.

To make use of a recently released Russian filmclip showing burning men running from a rocket pad fire, Ted Turner's "Moon Shot" used the shocking scenes to illustrate a 1969 Soviet moon rocket explosion, with a narrator comment about reminders of the dangers of space flight. The horrible film was actually from a military missile mishap in 1960 that killed 165 men, but really had nothing to do with the Russian space exploration program. The "Moon Shot" producers must have known this, yet evidently decided to misrepresent it for dramatic effects, even though nobody was killed in the actual 1969 Russian moon rocket explosion which was the subject of the sequence.

Flag-waving at the wrong time
To stress the "ordinary humanity" of excited space workers, they were often falsely shown behaving unprofessionally. In the prize-winning film "For All Mankind", right after the Apollo-11 landing, the Mission Control Center is shown erupting in cheering, flag-waving, and cigar-smoking. The historical truth is that the duty controllers stuck to their jobs, and the filmclips which were used really show them celebrating four days later after the successful splashdown of the crew and the end of their official responsibility.

Also, for the sake of visual impact and dramatic effects, film has often been misrepresented for what it was not. Viewers were told they were seeing authentic footage of space events which were not actually there.

Beginning with "For All Mankind", and copied by "Moon Shot", a striking view of the reentry plasma trail behind a descending Gemini capsule was presented as the rocket plume trail of an Apollo capsule heading for the Moon. The film invokes a marvelous image of speed across Earth's surface, but the Apollo's Saturn booster actually left no trail, and was never filmed since there was no view in that direction.

To stress the dangers of early manned space shots, sequences of rocket explosions are shown. Most of the explosions were identifiable as Jupiter and Titan rockets which had no connection at all with the Mercury program. But for colorful excitement and tension enhancers, they have been widely presented as unsuccessful Mercury tests.

The most egregious misrepresentation in "Moon Shot" was during the treatment of the Apollo-1 fire in 1967. As the narrator discusses the death of the three astronauts inside their burning capsule, a video is running of flames dancing behind a spacecraft window. TV critics who previewed the show called the scene "wrenching". But the video was actually a view from inside a Gemini capsule looking outward during the flames of reentry, and it had nothing to do with the Apollo fire. Instead, for emotional impact. the view was falsely described.

Some of these Apollo-11 historical video howlers have wider national implications, beyond mere questions of TV documentary ethics and practices. At the "Space Center Houston" museum developed for NASA by Disney consultants and their contractors, the feature movie "On Human Destiny" uses the false Gemini reentry plume for the Apollo lunar burn, then falsely portrays the flight control team in an orgy of irresponsible celebration immediately after the lunar touchdown, and then inaccurately overlays the view of Armstrong's descent down the ladder with his later words about "one small step". The film was reviewed and approved by NASA public affairs officials, who evidently did not recognize the errors. But if this is the level of Disney's historical reliability, it bodes ill for any similar Disney history projects elsewhere.

Accuracy sacrificed
Documentaries such as these shows have presented exciting views of the dramatic historical events, but providing entertainment was clearly their primary goal. Historical accuracy was repeatedly sacrificed to do so. These measures certainly are acceptable when the goals are well understood, such as in the delightfully entertaining Hollywood version of "The Right Stuff", where all pretence of respecting the book's historical accuracy is subordinated to clear-cut visual stereotypes and amusing oversimplifications. And deadline- driven TV news programs often use stock footage, not always carefully labeled as such, to "fill in" for unavailable authentic scenes. But when TV programs pose as "true history" and are presented as documentaries, a higher standard of authenticity should be required.

The Apollo-11 anniversary programs showed again that such standards are not universally met. Some programs, such as Discovery's "One Giant Leap", were strikingly accurate, showing signs that some producers took the extra trouble to "get it right", and knew how to do so. But the widespread misrepresentations in other shows are more reminders that people should seek truth where it can be found, and the TV screen, with its need for visual excitement and compressed action, is not an environment always conducive to historical accuracy.

Oberg rebuts Elizondo

“If this was a court of law, we are beyond reasonable doubt.” --Luis Elizondo

        Elizondo is the former Pentagon official who was responsible for the recent (last December) release of gun camera images of UFO-type objects; the fruits of the five-year-long Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. More deets can be read in an online article by something called "Collective Evolution."

        At the time James Oberg wrote, on this blog, "ufology has sadly disappointed, never becoming a science." Now he reacts to this latest bid to give the fantasy some respectability.

James Oberg writes...
        The 'court of law' analogy is logically fallacious, and its widespread use does not indicate reliable rationality or serious intellectual capabilities on the part of those who use it. All the court of law is concerned with is the cause of a crime whose existence has already been established -- WHO is guilty, not whether or not the crime [or the anomaly] exists. Imagine how strong eyewitness testimony would have to be, against an accused murderer in order for a successful verdict of murder with no victim's body, no missing hypothetical victim, no means, no motive, nothing to connect the accused with the alleged crime.

        Equally fatal to this preposterous legalistic analogy is the onus probandi, the in-going presumption of innocence of the accused in a court of law [in the UFO case the 'accused' is science-as-we-know-it] -- whereas in the UFO debate, it is claimed that the failure to produce a prosaic explanation is by default proof of the guilt of the default assumption of normalcy, which assumes a non-extraordinary event. This is the classic 'argument by elimination' with the unspoken [because it's unprovable] cheater-assumption that a complete list of potential explanations is on hand for testing [with phenomena such as UFOs it never is].

        Reliance on that non-logical thinking about the implications of alleged explanatory elimination leads to the same malodorous result as bovine alimentary elimination.

THAT secret UFO project

        In a prominent article titled Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program (December 16th, bylines Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean,) The New York Times  revealed for the first time a $22 million Pentagon project called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The NYT reporters wrote that it was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring. It ran from 2007 to 2012, and its objectives included investigations of UFOs.

        The UFO connection, of course, was what ensured that this piece was picked up by the mass media, re-tweeted, instagrammed, and googled to death by people passionately interested in such phenomena. But those who were perhaps hoping that this was the magic DISCLOSURE they've been anticipating as eagerly as the Pope anticipates the Second Coming, were disappointed yet again. Judging by the two videos that were embedded in the online version of the NYT article, the cases investigated were reports by military pilots of encounters with unknown aircraft, with nary a suggestion that such things were actually alien visitations. The first was an undated encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object.

         The second was  a 2004 encounter near San Diego between two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets and another unknown object.

The NYT piece included these two sentences:

"The shadowy program ... was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space."

Misperception
James Oberg, co-founder of, and occasional contributor to, this blog comments:

"I understand the media frenzy, but as usual it seems irrational. Reid set up a 'hobby shop' to please a political donor's personal interests, which involved validating the donor's personal devotion to UFO theories. The DoD never seems to have shown the slightest interest or concern in the issue. 

Per the original story: "The former staffer said that eventually, however, even Reid agreed it was not worth continuing. 'After a while the consensus was we really couldn’t find anything of substance,' he recalled. 'They produced reams of paperwork. After all of that there was really nothing there that we could find. It all pretty much dissolved from that reason alone—and the interest level was losing steam. We only did it a couple years.' ... 'There was really nothing there that we could justify using taxpayer money,' he added. 'We let it die a slow death. It was well-spent money in the beginning.' " 

Also --'ufology' has sadly disappointed, never becoming a 'science' -- forty years ago I won a worldwide essay contest with that assessment,  expressing hope it would change -- and so far, no signs of that."

        Oberg also points out that Leslie Kean, co-author of the NYT piece, is a committed UFO promoter and author of  "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record." In a 2010 critique, Oberg questioned Kean's assertion that pilots are the best observers of aerial phenomena. Today he wrote to me that Kean's inclusion is "a  journalistic travesty of the first order, worth making a fuss over, considering her track record [especially the fiasco over her championing a 'true UFO' video from Chile not long ago that turned out to have been a scheduled commercial airliner]."

        Oberg was interviewed by the Canadian CTV News Channel on Sunday night, and here's a partial transcript:

JO: "The report is on airborne threats, and threats come in all flavors. Whether it's equipment problems, or procedural errors, criminals, hackers or real enemies or even space aliens. So anything you see out there, whether it's in the air or in my experience in Mission Control, in space, you want to track it down."
CTV: "James, have you ever heard of this program in the past?"
JO: "I haven't , but I know there are people interested and there should be. In fact, there's another tremendously important reason to pay attention to the reports. You can't study UFOs because we don't have any. But you can sudy UFO reports, [and it] turns out that among the UFO reports ... one of the causes are misperception by startled viewers, especially in Russia and around the Russian border, of secret missile and space activities."

A CAD-CAM technician speaks out
        As for Mike Bara, he seems to have achieved what for him is a minor miracle—being right twice in one year. First he was almost certainly right about the so-called Nazca mummy, and now he's probably correct in dismissing this story as over-hyped.

           In a vlog on Sunday, he alleged that the true purpose of the Pentagon project was money-laundering by Harry Reid and enrichment of his pal Bigelow. He questions whether the voices heard on the video releases were really the voices of the pilots recorded live, and points out that when the first "UFO" zips out of frame, it's most likely because the gimbal camera moved.

        As for the second "UFO," he identifies it as an X-47B attack drone.

        He boasts that he actually worked on the X-47B as "an aerospace engineer for more than 25 years," which to my knowledge is an exaggeration. A CAD-CAM technician is not an engineer but just a draughtsman using a computer screen instead of a sharp pencil.

       But I have to agree with him that these videos are nothing to get too excited about. Well done Mike—dare we hope that one day you'll correct the horrible technical errors in your non-fiction books? No, I thought not...

NOTE:
        Richard Hoagland has a scheduled podcast on this topic next weekend, with guest Steve Bassett. THAT'S IF he can get his show on the air. Since he switched to blogtalkradio in October, SEVEN shows have been canceled for "technical reasons."

Update:
        The Bassett show got on the air but Bassett was inaudible (see Comment #24 from anonymous.) On C2C december 29/30 Jimmy Church poured scorn on those who maintain that the object was a drone. "If it was, it was a drone that can fly sideways," he said—and then proceeded to tell the story of his UFO experience at Joshua Tree for the nth time.

Ken Johnston - the Life & Times

        Ken Johnston, the so-called "NASA whistleblower", popped up on Youtube a couple of weeks ago, interviewed for nearly two hours by Janet Kira Lessin & Dr. Sasha Lessin. The original interview was from what is variously known as Revolution Radio, Aquarian Radio, and Sacred Matrix -- and was first podcast on freedomslips.com, 30 August.

        Rather curiously, I thought, Janet Lessin introduced Johnston by reading verbatim from the RationalWiki article about him. Johnston didn't demur, other than correcting his birthplace from Hart TX to Corpus Christie. So the rational wiki is authenticated up to a point, and any readers who have NFI who this gentleman is can follow the above link and read.

        Among the many topics that came up for discussion was Johnston's story about the Apollo 11 astronauts being greeted by alien creatures on the Moon. He said, quite rightly, that he had been challenged on this story by space historian James Oberg. Oberg has been associated with this blog since the very beginning, and he now gives me permission to reproduce an open letter from him to Ken Johnston originally written on 17 November 2014. Here it is in toto:

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

Dear Ken: 
I was glad for the chance to express my admiration for the way you have inspired many different groups of young people in space and aviation careers, and to repeat my admonition that us geezers need to have a lot of slack cut for embellishment and exaggeration. And in reminiscing over our bldg 4 conversations in 1977-80 or so, I'm  glad for the chance to dispel your recollections about any Masters thesis I was working on about media propaganda - there was no such thesis, no such Masters program, so there could never have been such a discussion.

In discussing the way we both give credit to space pioneers, I think we should focus on factual differences of what we recall. Specifically, I asked you about how you learned of your story of Armstrong's secret Apollo-11 UFO report, which you told me you'd heard from your former LM buddies. That doesn't make sense to me, let me explain why.
Here's how you gave the story on the Syfy channel. (At 00:32:52, crawler "Ken Johnston;  label "FMR. NASA PHOTO MANAGER")

"There have been a lot of rumors about what actually took place during the lunar mission. while Neil and Buzz were on the lunar surface. Back at the Johnson Space Center [sic! Wasn't named that until years later] during a couple of minutes of broken communications, Neil switched over to the medical channel to speak directly to the chief medical officer of the mission. And at that, the comment was, he says , 'They're here, they're parked around the rim of the crater and they're watching us. "

Since you have described how you watched Apollo-11 from the home of your wife's family in New Jersey, while on terminal leave after being laid off, I also deduced that Grumman couldn't have rated your "LM test pilot" experience all that highly, since as I recall it, ALL those real test pilots were on duty during the landing to run test procedures for contingencies. How was it possible, if you were really the crew's ALSEP trainer as you have claimed, that you weren't there on duty for the mission you had trained them for? All of the real trainers were, every one. But by your own disclosure, YOU weren't.

Now about that secret conversation you attested to in front of a world audience. I can't see how that could be authentic, since the original version of the secret communication had been published in a grocery store tabloid newspaper a few months later, and it's easy to see that the terminology used was clearly fictional since it didn't follow normal NASA space-to-ground protocols that both of us were familiar with.

[left, myth of meeting moon aliens; right, Johnston on opening sequence of Kiviat's "Alien Bases on the Moon", July 2014.]

I had written up this very hoax "secret transcript" in my 1982 book "UFOs and Outer Space Mysteries", and that section is reproduced here. It includes an alleged quotation, "I'm telling you, there are other spacecraft out there. They're lined up in ranks on the far side of the crater edge...." along with a torrent of gobbledegook meant to SOUND outer-spacey to the tabloid's readership:

The speakers use the call sign "Mission Control", but as you know, this was never a phrase used [by] astronauts, who instead referred always to "Houston." Technical-sounding gibberish such as "field distortion," "orbit scanned," "625 to the fifth," "auto-relays," etc. were never found in real transcripts.

The speakers call out "Repeat, repeat" but that is never used on the radio; instead, astronauts and Mission Control use the phrase "Say Again." They refer to "three of us"...actually, only two men were on the lunar surface.

So way back in 1982 I had concluded, "The unavoidable conclusion is that [the tabloid] either fabricated the fake "transcript" himself or used very poor judgment in allowing himself to be victimized by somebody else's fake. … Fortunately, the hoax was so rickety that it collapses under its own weight."

Also, there's no attempt to reconcile these claimed transcripts with the thorough documentation at "The Apollo 11 Flight Journal"  which have been annotated by the crew and by Mission Control veterans - and has become the authoritative chronicle of what was said on the Moon.

[Sep 11, 1979] 

[Sep 9, 1979 London 'Sunday Mirror']

But thirty years later, 45 years after the original event, a recognizable mutation of this original hoax came out of your mouth on cable TV.
So I asked you why you thought it was true. "Darn those guys," you shook your head when I explained it, "They must have been teasing me." Glad to see you agreed the story was bogus.

The more important point I should have made then was that how could you possibly have fallen for the story to begin with -- because what you SHOULD have known as a trained LM expert would have exposed the story's fatal flaw.

Armstrong didn't HAVE a secret "medical channel" to switch to, as the story claimed. He could NOT have 'switched' to it.

As I'm sure you realize, during Apollo, whenever an astronaut requested a private medical conference, the request was made over the open loop and approved in Mission Control. The voice loops in the MCC building were then physically reconnected at a plug board so the voice link was transferred to and only to the Flight Surgeon console and back room. Everyone else heard nothing but they were still aware a private conference was in progress.

The Apollo crew did not have a switch selector or any other control over communications privacy, it all was controlled from within the Mission Control Center. But there's no record on the public loop of ever requesting a private loop, and no time gap in the on-going air-to-ground chatter heard live by hundreds of journalists in Houston.

Whereever the downlink audio was routed to in Houston, the actual comm transmission would have continued unencrypted [as a LM expert you would have known there was no voice encryption on the actual signal]. However, the completeness and authenticity of the released air-to-ground was independently verified by one talented amateur named Larry Baysinger who listened in to a long segment of the VHF transmission [see http://www.arrl.org/eavesdropping-on-apollo-11]

A recent retrospective article included a relevant paragraph:

I asked Baysinger whether he found anything that NASA edited out - comments about things going wrong, the astronauts being loose with their language or exclamations about meeting space aliens. He said no - absolutely everything was transmitted to the public on TV. In fact he said, "that was kind of disappointing." Part of the idea of the project was to hear the unedited "real story," and it turned out there was nothing edited. Indeed, Rutherford's story makes no mention of hearing anything unusual.

 Now, if there really had been a dedicated private channel selectable by the Apollo crew, that would go a long way towards authenticating the basic premise of the story that you told on national television. It would disprove what I think is a refutation of it. I'm open to persuasion when shown documentation, so please give it a try.

Technical specs of the LM comm system can be found here:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19720023255.pdf &
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20090015392.pdf 

Apollo Operations Handbook Lunar Module (LM 11 and Subsequent) Vol. 2 Operational Procedures http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19710071423.pdf
Apollo experience report: Lunar module communications system // Sep 01, 1972,
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19720023255.pdf

That would be very helpful, if you want to argue the authenticity of the story [which maybe you don't]. From other comments you've made over the years, I can see no indications that you originally recalled awareness of any credible evidence of the crew encountering landed UFOs at their own touchdown point. I consider an alternate possibility that you read a version of the secret conversation years later, and gradually amalgamated it into your own stories and, eventually, into your memory itself. Like my imaginary MS thesis, for example.

Second issue of fact - the smoking alien base on the moon's back side. You have described seeing a film of an alien moon base altered to remove the sighting, apparently under command of astronomer Thornton Page. I had prepared for our discussion of this by studying the image manifest of the mission you named, Apollo-14, and borrowing a DVD of the 16-mm "Reel B" that contained the only from-orbit imaging of the surface.

[right photo by Antonio Huneeus, who did a fine interview with Page at http://www.openminds.tv/exclusive-interview-with-member-of-cia-panel-on-ufos-1053/22302 ; left, Page and Oberg lighter moment.]

Here's how you had first told it on the July 20 SYFY "Alien Bases on the Moon" program, about 34 minutes into the show:

Narrator: Yet another NASA mission, the one ET believer Edgar Mitchell was on, might have filmed the definitive evidence of aliens on the moon.
KJ: "The Apollo-14 mission was a really pivotal mission. Most people don't realize that only two of the astronauts actually were, walked on the surface, the other one stayed on board in the command module and continued to circle around and around the moon, and taking filmstrips and photographs completely covering all of the backside of the moon.
Narrator: Back on Earth, the film was shown to one of NASA's top astronomers… During the viewing, an extraordinary sequence came on screen.
KJ   The Command Module was coming around the back side of the Moon, the cameras rolling, and there's a cluster of five little domes with a light shining inside, and there was one with something looked like a column of steam or something [gestures with hand going up and down] projected up from the top. So, there was something really there, I guaranty, it was certainly something that was not natural. On the surface of the moon."
Narrator: "But when the footage was played again the next day for NASA engineers the key section, with the mysterious domes, had somehow disappeared.
KJ: "I took the film out [mimes holding strip in both hands level], and there were no splices, there were no cuts, and all the holes lined up. That means that within twenty four hours they had to have taken the film out, cut the portion out, made a copy, airbrushed it out, spliced it back in, and then made a duplicate of it, and had it available for me. "

Well, Ken, I showed you the only Apollo-14 16-mm cine of the lunar surface, a 6-minute sequence of landmark tracking exercises through the sextant, with craters and rilles and mountains zooming by. But you quickly said you didn't recognize it as the film you had shown Page and the others. "That reel came from the Service Module," you told me.
"That's impossible," I replied, "There wasn't any imaging hardware back there on Apollo-14, the observation package wasn't installed until Apollo-15, 16, and 17. All the Apollo-14 cine surface imaging was part of landmark tracking tests through the Command Module sextant"
You paused to ponder, then shrugged: "Maybe I'm misremembering the mission number." That was it. 

The problem now is that the cameras in the "SIM bay" on subsequent missions don't seem to have been taking the 'gun camera' mode motion views you described. Here's the Apollo-15 press kit that describes them.
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a15/A15_PressKit.pdf

24-inch Panoramic Camera (SM orbital photo task): Gathers stereo and high-resolution [l meter) photographs of the lunar surface from orbit. The camera produces an image size of 15 x 180 nm with a field of view 1l° downtrack and 108° cross track. The rotating lens system can be stowed face-inward to avoid contamination during effluent dumps and thruster firings. The 72-pound film cassette of 1,650 frames will be retrieved by the command module pilot during a transearth coast EVA. The 24-inch camera works in conjunction with the 3-inch mapping camera and the laser altimeter to gain data to construct a comprehensive map of the lunar surface ground track flown by this mission---about 1.16 million square miles, or 8 percent of the lunar surface. 

3-inch Mapping Camera: Combines 20-meter resolution terrain manning photography on five-inch film with 3-inch focal length lens with stellar camera shooting the star field on 35mm firm simultaneously at 96° from the surface camera optical axis. The stellar photos allow accurate correlation of mapping photography postflight by comparing simultaneous star field photos with lunar surface photos of the nadir (straight down). Additionally, the stellar camera provides pointing vectors for the laser altimeter during darkside passes. The 3-inch f4.5 mapping camera metric lens covers a 74° square field of view, or 92x92 nm from 60 nm altitude. The stellar camera is fitted with a +inch f/2.8 lens covering a 24° field with cone flats. The 23-pound film cassette containing mapping camera film (3,600) frames) and the stellar camera film will be retrieved during the same EVA described in the panorama camera discussion. The Apollo Orbital Science Photographic Team is headed by Frederick J. Doyle of the U.S. Geological Survey, McLean, VA

So there's no record of any camera in the SM instrument bay capable of taking the type of full-motion scenes you claim to have seen. There aren't ANY such sequences of ANY other regions on ANY of the released imagery from all three of those later missions.

[Oberg and Johnston viewing Apollo-14 lunar backside video, Aug 10, 2014]

The crater name just seems more confusing to me, first you said Tsiolkovskiy, then you told me last month that it was actually a nearby crater with another Russian name you wanted to misreport to protect your sources, or something. Can you name the crater now, and also check on the following chart [to see if even was scanned by any of the last three Apollo missions?

Whatever else that map shows, it also shows you again seriously misremembered the photography mission when you stated these missions were "taking filmstrips and photographs completely covering all of the backside of the moon." [Most of the backside was in shadow anyway, and thus unphotographable, because our guys wanted daylight on the front side for landing visibility].

Red = Apollo 15; Yellow = Apollo 16; Blue = Apollo 17 http://history.nasa.gov/afj/simbaycam/simbaycameras.htm]

 And that issue brings up an even more serious problem with your story - both the Lunar Orbiter-4 and -5 missions and decades later, mapping missions by European Space Agency, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian probes, plus several new NASA probes [and maybe Clementine?], mapped and re-mapped these regions at much higher resolutions than the Apollo missions, and none of their images show anything where you seem to say you saw [and then didn't see, after it was supposedly removed] something artificial-looking. 

If you're going to seriously expect anyone to believe your story, you'll need better explanations for decades of contrary imaging. Especially now that you're no longer even sure what year and what mission your lone glance occurred on.

I don't want to quibble over job titles and personal experiences, Ken, but statements by you that put you in the position of accusing other program participants [such as Neil Armstrong or Thornton Page] of deception and fraud really need more solid, error-free testimony, as well as independent corroboration. Otherwise, as you already know, I think such comments are a disservice to the history of space exploration and without more firmly based substantiation, put all the rest of your tales of Apollo lessons in doubt.

You have had such distinguished and honorable service during a challenging period of history, and I'm proud of you, and of us all who played our parts. Your future prospects are exciting and I wish you success and satisfaction in however far your dream leads you.

Jim Oberg

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

        Ken Johnston replied briefly on 20 November. Since I don't have his permission, and the text is not in the public domain, I won't reproduce it verbatim. His suggestion was that, since Oberg still lives in the Houston area, he might like to go to JSC and search the archives for confirmation of the Thornton Page story. Oberg thought that task would be more appropriately assigned to Johnston himself.

Ken Johnston, Thornton Page and Tsiolkovsky

        Ken^{note 1} was on "Coast" last night, plugging his application to be one of the first crew members on the "slow suicide" mission to Mars in 2022. Since he'll be 80 by then I don't reckon his chances much, but I wish him well. He lobbed a verbal grenade in James Oberg's direction -- once he remembered Oberg's name, which took several seconds. It seems to be Down With Oberg week, what with that and snarking on this blog from Misti/Jaq. I doubt if JimO cares, but he's well able to riposte without any help from me.

        Ken trotted out his standard story about how he was once showing Apollo14 lunar backside pass film to Thornton Page and other miscellaneous scientists — some "meaningful looks" were exchanged, and they remarked on what looked like a manned base in Tsiolkovsky, complete with a flashing light. Which was later "covered up". Oh yeah. Just like those "glass skyscrapers" which were really crap on Hoagland's scanner.

        Here's the followup question a well-briefed host would have asked: "Very interesting, Ken. Now, the resolution of those Apollo images would have been -- what? 200m per pixel? Since that time Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has covered the entire Moon at 77m and most of it at 0.8m resolution, 200x better than what you saw that night. Have you checked the LRO image library to see if there's a manned base?" Do I need add that that's NOT what George Noory asked? I thought not.

Here's the link.


        By the way, at the time of Apollo 14 Tsiolkovsky was under serious consideration as a future landing site, despite being out of contact with Planet Earth (the plan was to do comms via a lunar satellite). So there would have been nothing unusual about Page et al. showing special interest.

        As for the "flashing light"... is he sure Page didn't have a laser pointer?

Update 1: I'm wrong
        The resolution of those images was most likely much better than 200m. See comment #7. It does remain true that the LRO images are the best, and certainly the most accessible.

        Also, if the frames were from the Topographic Camera, they would not have been in the form of a movie. So it's a mystery how a flashing light could have been seen. I sure wish Ken would respond to my e-mails.

Update 2: James Oberg sets the record straight
Partial transcript from last night:

24:15 GN: You’re a whistle-blower, aren’t you?

KJ: Well (laugh), you know, that’s funny. I don’t usually go on and look up myself, [but] a person said, you need to check this out, and I went and did google on a name, and up pops, um, (laugh) my old nemesis (laugh..draws breath) help me out here, will you? What’s his name? Um ..

GN: Give me a hint.

KJ: James Oberg

GN: OK. All right.

KJ: He always pops up again and starts chipping away at my credentials and my background, and things like that. You know, he never was … He and I used to sit in the same room talking stories about his Master’s thesis which was “Mass Media Indoctrination” having to do with space, and all. For some reason he’s the hatchet man, he’s trying his best to do a number on me, I just sorta blow it off and don’t pay any attention to it, 'cause the people themselves can filter through and find out what the truth is. 

JimO: Needless to say, there is NO 'Master's thesis in mass media indoctrination' I ever wrote, nor ever talked to anyone about. My MS degrees are in "Computational Methods in Astrodynamics for Space mission Planning" [applied mathematics], and "New Developments in Compiler Theory"  [computer sciences]

        The deets of the dispute over Johnston's credentials are still here, on the Unexplained Mysteries forum.

 ====================

[1] For newbies, this is who Ken Johnston is.

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.