Point-by-point critique of Mike Bara's latest book

Ancient Aliens and Secret Societies; pub. Adventures Unlimited, ISBN 978-1939149404

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        We don't have to wait long for the first error in this incompetent book. Just as far as line 8 of the Introduction, to be precise, where we find the word 'Parrott.'  However, I'm not going to nit-pick all the keyboard errors (I refuse to call them 'typos') other than to say there are altogether too many, and a Grand Old Man of aeronautics like Theodore Von Kármán deserves to have his name spelled correctly (see pp 180,192). On to more important things.

1 >> p.33 "Modern man needs sunglasses in the modern daylight." 

 Chapter 1 is about the ubiquity of flood myths across many cultures, and Bara cites biblical sources as well as many others. Here he's citing the creationist Water Vapor Canopy theory, according to which everything was much darker before the flood. However, neither the need for eye protection nor the theory itself are true. Bara may need sunnies to look cool for the Las Vegas strippers he hangs around with, but the human eye is well able to adjust to all but the most extreme conditions. It's been calculated that the canopy, if it existed, would imply an atmospheric pressure at the Earth's surface 900 times what it is today.

He returns to the point later, on p.85, and manages to get it  even more wrong. By this time he's waded deep into the bullshit that is Zecharia Sitchin, and he's trying to wriggle out of the obvious  problem with the idea of living beings (the Anunnaki) on a planet (Nibiru) with such an eccentric solar orbit that the temperature at aphelion would be near absolute zero. Perhaps, he writes, Nibiru is not a planet but an orbiting moon of a brown dwarf (by the way, if it's orbiting a brown dwarf star, it's still a planet,not a moon. Duuhhhh.) And he adds, "Maybe we have Anunnaki eyes." Oh, Brother!

Later still, on p.97, he reports Sitchin's hilariously wrong explanation for Nibiru's thermoregulation. All it takes, according to this idea, is a very thick atmosphere and a constant flow of volcanic eruptions, to keep the planet warm while out beyond Pluto. And when it's at perihelion? Why, then the atmosphere deflects [sic] excessive heat. Oh, brother again!

2 >> p.41 "the Water Vapor Canopy theory certainly has its critics among the anti-Christian left and the science trolls."

So, objecting to some unsubstantiated idea on scientific grounds makes you a troll, in Bara's eyes. Mmmkay.

3 >> p.86 "Sedna blew away all the preconceived notions of orbital mechanics."

It did nothing of the kind. Bara correctly notes that Sedna, an inner Oort cloud object, was discovered in 2003 and has an orbit even more eccentric than that of Sitchin's imaginary Nibiru (period 11,400 years cf. Nibiru 3,600). But this is not in conflict with the orbital mechanics of Kepler and Copernicus at all.

What astronomers have said about Nibiru is that it's very unlikely that an orbit that eccentric could be stable over many passes through the solar system. Nobody is claiming that Sedna's orbit is stable -- how could they, we've only seen 12 years of an 11,400 year orbit so far.

4 >> pp.96-143 The material on these pages is absolutely gob-smacking. It is nothing less than a complete re-telling of Sitchin's book "The Lost Book of Enki" complete with extended quotes. How the fuck does Bara get away with quoting 47 pages of copyright text from an author who's only been dead five years? It's irritating to read because of Sitchin's reversed syntax. Here's a sample:

"At the Place of the Chariots multitudes gathered, to bid farewell to the heroes and their leader (Enki) did they come. The last to embark was Enki; to the gathering he bid farewell. Before his father Anu he knelt down, the king's blessing to receive. So did Anu to his son speak a blessing, bidding him farewell. 'My son the Firstborn: A far journey you have undertaken, for us all to be endangered; let your success calamity from Nibiru banish; go and in safety come back!"

The setup of the original work is that this tale was recovered from 12 Sumerian stone tablets--but Sitchin himself admits in his Introduction that the text is only "as if translated." Bara reports it all as fact, complete with the biting-off of a penis and some sneaky genetic engineering. Oh Brother again.

5 >> p.154 "Buzz Aldrin [performed] a ceremonial offering to Osiris on July 20, 1969."

No he did not. He performed a version of the catholic mass. Aldrin is actually a presbyterian.

Later, on p.163, Bara refers again to this ceremony, incorrectly including Neil Armstrong in the event. In fact, Armstrong took no part in it.

Later still, p 245/6, he connects the ceremony to the Egyptian God Osiris by writing  that the catholic mass is "a recreation of a much earlier Egyptian rite." Bullshit. For a scholarly refutation of that assertion, see Logos Apologia 21 May 2012.

6 >> p.173 "The truth is, NASA was literally born in a lie and hid many unpleasant truths about itself from the beginning."

Well, now at last we're getting to the secret societies. Chapter 6 is all recycled Hoagland material, developing the idea that NASA was, from the outset, controlled by Nazis, Magicians and Freemasons. Of course it isn't actually true, and neither were the tenuous connections ever hidden, as far as I know.

Sure, Wernher Von Braun, Kurt Debus and the rest of the 'Paperclip' Germans were ex-Nazis, and they were in key positions, but they were not in from the beginning. NASA was formed in July 1958, and the Nazis weren't recruited until two years later, to run the newly-formed Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville. There is absolutely zero evidence that their former allegiance to the Fuhrer had any influence on NASA whatsoever. Von Braun was hired to do a job, and we should all be grateful that he did it.

When Hoagland & Bara say "magicians" they're really only thinking of one man -- Jack Parsons, who was an orgiastic follower of Aleister Crowley in addition to being a rather brilliant rocketry pioneer. His story is well worth reading (and actually Bara tells it well on pp.180-192), but again there's no evidence that Parsons' weird ideas permeated JPL. On the contrary, I imagine that the few JPL personnel who actually knew about Parsons' high jinks were embarrassed by them.

As for the Freemasons--yes, there were plenty in the early years, Administrator James Webb for one--but so fucking what?

7 >> p.194 "The German space program led the way in rocket development in the early 1930s."

There was no "German space program" at Peenemunde. There was a ballistic weapons program, which was all too successful.

8 >> p.201 "From the beginning, NASA was under the thumb of the Department of Defense ... The agency was compromised from its inception. A civilian figurehead was trotted out for the public to consume, but he was always taking orders from the Pentagon on any question it determined was in the interests of national defense."

Nonsense. Although it would be fair to say that the NASA-DoD relationship was, and remains, complicated, the rivalry between the NASA Administrator and the Secretary of Defense was pretty much a contest of equals, especially once James Webb became Administrator. Webb was a powerful man in Washington -- he had access to the President, and used it. Check out the history of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program some time. A US Air Force mini-space station concept, it was canceled in 1969 and NASA got the Skylab program instead. "Under the thumb", my ass.

If you want to read more, Dwayne Day's excellent chapter in the NASA History is definitive.

9 >> p.202/3 "[The Brookings Report] makes it clear that the discovery of extraterrestrial ruins ... falls under the dark blanket of national security ... It goes on to state that the discovery of such ruins would be wholly destabilizing to the civilized world, and actually recommends that if such discoveries were made, they should be suppressed until such time as society could be properly 'conditioned' to receive such news."

The Brookings Report made no such recommendation, neither did it ever say that such a discovery was a matter of national security. It recommended that research should be undertaken to gauge the likely public reaction, but no such research was ever funded. This blog has already covered the question, here and here (point #14).

By the way, Bara writes that Margaret Mead was on the staff that produced the report. Not so -- she attended one of the monthly meetings and gave sombre advice about what happens when primitive societies are visited by high-tech ones. The staff were all Brookings bureaucrats.

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...and so we come, finally, to the much-recycled, much-debunked Ritual Alignment Model which this blog has written about a lot.

10 >> p.263 "There is no doubt ... that NASA absolutely launches, lands and performs key events in the space program not based on scientific or academic reasons, but to serve some bizarre and ancient occult belief system... I don't know if NASA does this because they believe that if the stars are not right, the missions will fail, or if they do it simply to follow the traditions passed down from the gods and cared for by the secret societies over the millenia. What I do know is that NASA continues to follow these rituals to this day, on virtually every mission they undertake."

Well, they don't. It's as simple as that. The failure of Hoagland & Bara's own 'Table of Coincidence' -- in which 19 of 42 events fail to follow their own stated rules -- is enough. Bara doesn't even cite one single example from the Shuttle program -- 135 launches, 133 landings -- to support his case.

Instead, here, he gets all confused about that catholic mass of Buzz Aldrin's. When exactly did it happen? Was it 33 minutes after the landing, with Sirius at 19.5°? Or 3h 41m after landing, with Regulus at minus 19.5? He seems to conclude that both happened, one secret and one public.

In the last few pages of the book, Bara goes to some lengths to explain that yes, Aldrin could have seen Sirius with the Alignment Optical Telescope. What he doesn't explain is how Aldrin could have seen a star that hadn't yet risen. And by the way, that later time is the correct answer.

Consider this, too. Bara cannot claim any support for his whacky theory on the basis of Aldrin's little ceremony, regardless  of the astrology. It was not a NASA  event, not in the flight plan. Aldrin took his symbolic bread and wine in his personal preference kit, and NASA controllers probably didn't even know what he was planning to do with it. That being the case, within this book Bara has offered no evidence at all for the Ritual Alignment Model. FAIL.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll just write two things:

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

"Because of its highly "eccentric" ... orbit ... Mars' distance relative to Earth varies a great deal. In fact, Mars' orbit is so elliptical that its distance to the Earth can be as much as 249 million miles at its farthest to as little as about 34 million miles at its theoretical closest approach."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He has a wriggle-out which begins...

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

035A72

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

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


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

On to PART TWO

Point by point critique of 'Ancient Aliens on the Moon' - FULL VERSION

       Ancient Aliens on the Moon is Mike Bara's bid to cash in personally on the popularity of the History Channel's junk TV series. I'm assuming he doesn't get paid for his interview appearances on that piece of merde (see this blogpost for a list of errors in one show) but I could be wrong. In view of the fact that the book was discounted by Amazon from $19.95 to $11.73 before it was even published, however, I don't think Mike's fortune will be assured by this one. Continuing his astounding record of one factual error per 2 or 3 pages, Mike's gift to readers who understand science & technology is a gem of a book of unintentional comedy.

Intro:
1. p.1. "As I put it in my previous book The Choice .... Without the Moon's calming influence,the Earth would spin so fast that the winds caused by the centrifugal force would most likely flatten us all like pancakes." [emph. added]

As noted in this blogpost, the addition of the underlined words was a cynical and deceptive attempt to cover his original howler, and makes it no less wrong.  Centrifugal force does not create winds—temperature variations and other more subtle geophysical phenomena do.

2. p.1. "The Moon also regulates and agitates the Earth's magnetic field..."

FACT: No it doesn't.

3. p.3. "...as you'll see in the images I'll show you, these structures are there [on the Moon], defiantly upright in a place where they should have been ground to dust eons ago by the Moon's ... meteoric rain.

The repro quality in this book is marginally better than in Dark Mission, and the color signature inserted between pp 136 & 137 is even fairly good. Nevertheless as evidence of a past lunar civilization these images are woefully inadequate. Those from early chapters we've seen before —the "castle," the "shard," the "paperclip" et al. The Chapter 9 images of "the gun emplacement," "the drill," "the crane" etc. are simply laughable.

Now that Mike has published all his images as a Picasa gallery, you're honestly better off just browsing that and saving the money on the actual book.

4. p.4. "[T]he Ancient Aliens ... may have been forced off the Moon, either by some conflict of unimaginable proportions, or by a natural calamity of the same dimensions. Either way, the answers to that question are bound to have created a ton of fear and trepidation inside the halls of NASA and at the highest levels of government.

Mike just loves to imagine fear in other people, doesn't he? The haters are scared of the truth — the truth that only he, Mike Bara, is in possession of. JPL scientists were too scared to admit that Viking found life on Mars. On Paracast Radio in October, he actually said, hilariously, "NASA is desperately afraid of people like me." Yeah right, Mike. This is bunk, just pure bunk. When does he think this episode of fear and trepidation occurred? Obviously within the last 54 years, since NASA didn't exist prior to that. Doesn't he think NASA Public Affairs would have put out a teensy-weensy press release after discovering that a race of aliens had been forced to leave the Moon? How would they have discovered it, anyway?

Chapter 1:
5. p.5. "...nobody really knows much about [the Moon].

FACT: Hundreds of books, and thousands of scientific papers, have been written about the Moon since the Apollo results.

6. p.5. "...according to rogue geologist Jim Berkland, the Moon may play a significant role in the frequency of earthquakes"

Well, he did say "may." But Stuart Robbins, in his exposing pseudoastronomy blog, wrote very recently that Berkland's reputation is based on a single lucky hit, and that in general his predictions are worthless. No lunar influence on earthquake frequency has in fact been demonstrated. See Robbins' careful statistical analysis.

7. p.12. "The co-accretion theory [of the Moon's formation] arose from the accretion theory of planetary formation (which I thoroughly dismantled in my last book, The Choice)."

Oh no you didn't, Mike. You did no such thing. In fact, your attempt to "dismantle" it led you into the most crashing, howling error in the entire train-wreck of a book. The one where you wrote that if the orbits of both Earth and Mars were perfectly circular, they would remain at the same distance from each other. OUCH!!!

Chapter 2:
8. p. 25. Recycled Dark Mission material. Bara here reiterates the falsehood that NASA is not really a civilian agency. He quotes the Space Act, Sec 305 (i), accurately:

"The Administration shall be considered a defense agency of the United States for the purpose of Chapter 17, Title 35 of the United States Code."

Bara sees those words for the purpose of Chapter 17, Title 35 of the United States Code, and yet somehow he doesn't see them. If he did see them he'd perhaps take the trouble to discover what they mean. Title 35 is exclusively concerned with patent law. Chapter 17 is headed SECRECY OF CERTAIN INVENTIONS AND FILING APPLICATIONS IN FOREIGN COUNTRY [sic], and its second paragraph reads as follows:

Whenever the publication or disclosure of an invention by the publication of an application or by the granting of a patent, ... might, in the opinion of the Commissioner of Patents, be detrimental to the national security, he shall make the application for patent in which such invention is disclosed available for inspection to the Atomic Energy Commission, the Secretary of Defense, and the chief officer of any other department or agency of the Government designated by the President as a defense agency of the United States.

(emphasis added)

I'm sure my regular readers will get the point. But in case Mike Bara himself, or his manager Adrienne Loska, read this review, let me flog the dead horse by explaining that this paragraph simply brings NASA into line with other governmental agencies on the means of dealing with patent applications relating to classified material. Yes, Mike, it means that some aspects of NASA's work are secret. Everyone except you and Hoagland already knew that. IT DOES NOT MEAN that NASA is under the thumb of, still less an actual adjunct of, DoD.

9. pp. 24-29. Recycled Dark Mission material. Bara gives us his version of what the Brookings Report of 1961 meant. At first it looks as though his position is a little mollified from the Dark Mission passage, for he writes

"it quickly becomes apparent that the underlying purpose of the Brookings Report was to provide legal and political cover for NASA..."

So is it now his theory that NASA had already decided that it would suppress knowledge of an extraterrestrial intelligence, and Brookings merely "provided cover" for a policy that was already in place? Alas no, for a page or two later he recycles word for word the utterly incorrect passage from Dark Mission:

"So here we had the proverbial smoking gun. Not only was NASA advised--almost from its inception--to withhold any data that supported the reality of Cydonia or any other discovery like it, they were told to do so for the good of human society as a whole."

My point by point critique of Dark Mission (error #14) explained how wrong that is.

10. p.30. Writing of early attempts to send spacecraft to the Moon, Bara notes that the Soviet probe Luna 1 (1959) missed the Moon by 3,725 miles. He writes "that is simply not possible if Newtonian mechanics is correct."

FACT: It certainly is, especially if, as in this case, a mission management error caused a completely erroneous burn time to be commanded. As we know, Mike Bara's ignorance of rocketry and orbital mechanics is as vast as the Cosmos itself. By the way, 3,725 miles is 1.5% of the distance traveled.

Chapter 3:
11 p.42. "NASA's photographic exploration of [Sinus Medii] must have quickly scared them off..."

Again, the fantasy that NASA is "scared." I've had the privilege of being acquainted with many NASA engineers, scientists, astronauts and managers, and not one of them has struck me as the type to be scared by the results of a reconnaissance for landing sites. Note that Sinus Medii is the site  of several of Richard Hoagland's fanciful "alien structures," including the terrain he has called Los Angeles, the paperclip (one of Hoagland's beard hairs caught in his scanner?), the castle, and the ridiculous glass skyscrapers I debunked a week or so ago.

In the present work Bara notes, as Hoagland has in the past, that the "Castle" — a mile-high structure which is actually a photographic fault — is held up by "a sagging support cable". Neither Hoagland nor Bara have ever said what the top ends of this cable are attached to.

 11a p.51-2. "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."

 FACT: This page cites a paper by Rowley and Neudecker, but it's the wrong citation. The real citation -- J.D. Blacic -- does not support the text here. It quotes the Young's modulus of lunar glass as 100 GPa, cf. steel 224 GPa.

Chapter 4:
12. p.70. In this chapter Bara introduces us again to Ken Johnston, and what his personal collection of photo prints revealed. He writes that Ken dealt with "...first-generation photographic negatives and prints." That is not the case. The main photo archive was not in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, where Ken worked, but in a completely different building.

This blog has previously commented on:

p.73. The impossibility of airbrushing film negatives
p.75. The blue flares on six shots from Apollo 14 Mag #66 (written as a briefing for Mike, which he obviously didn't read. I'm casting my pearls before swine, obviously)
p.89. The "inclined buttresses" shown in some of Al Bean's paintings of the lunar landscape (see error #17)

13. p.90. Writing of the tense situation during the Apollo 11 landing, Bara writes of "..the 1202 alarm that no one could figure out."

FACT: The whole point is that somebody DID figure it out, and very bravely declared that it could safely be ignored. The 1202 was an executive overload alarm from the tiny LM computer, and it was a young GUIDO called Steve Bales who took the responsibility to give it the OK (although Bales himself also credits computer whiz Jack Garman.) Bales was quite correct, and was commended by President Nixon as a result.


Chapter 5:
14. pp.108-113. This is the chapter in which Bara tells us, very unconvincingly, that there are satellite dishes in the craters Asada and Proclus. He shows us images from Apollo 16, but obviously didn't take the trouble to consult the far better imagery of these craters now available in the LROC image library. There are no satellite dishes in those craters. See for yourselves. Asada is notably dish-shaped, Proclus is not even that.

Asada is at 7.3°N, 49.9°E
Proclus is at 16.1°N, 46.8°E

15. p.125. This is also the chapter in which Mike Bara writes this about images of Earth from space:

  "the clouds are the highest in the atmosphere, meaning that they are reflecting more light back to the camera and at a faster rate. Since they are returning more light, the clouds are the lightest. The surface areas ... are darker, because they are a bit further away from the camera than the clouds and therefore the light has to travel further before it is reflected back. The deep blue oceans are therefore the darkest, because the light has to travel all the way to the ocean floor before it is reflected back to the camera."

This paragraph has been cited by more than one negative Amazon reviewer, as a clear indication of how tragically far Mike Bara falls short of the minimum comprehension of the physical world to be credible as an author on such topics. It's frighteningly inaccurate, as Neville Parchemin has pointed out on this blog.

Chapter 6:
In this chapter, Bara takes us through several of the theories advanced by Moon hoax loonies, and does a pretty good job of debunking them. I can't help wondering, however, if he somehow forgot to credit that excellent web site Moon Base Clavius for most, if not all, of his text.


16. p.128. Recycled Dark Mission material: "Almost from the moment that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot upon the Moon ... rumors began circulating that the whole thing was faked. I have always felt that there was something a little more to this than simple stupidity or naïveté, something a bit insidious about the whole thing. That was more than confirmed in the Forward [sic] to Dark Mission, when Richard related his memories of being handed a pamphlet claiming the landings were faked even before Neil and Buzz had splashed down ...  What made that moment so extraordinary was not that someone had made up a pamphlet making such a claim, it was that the person who authored it was being escorted around the NASA press room by a NASA press officer to make sure every reporter got one."

FACT: This is Hoagland's oft-repeated story of "Greatcoat Man" being led around the press room at JPL, where Hoagland was part of a CBS team reporting, not Apollo, which JPL had almost nothing to do with, but the approach to Mars by Mariner 6 & 7. The fatal flaw in Hoagland's theory that NASA itself started the hoax rumors is this: If they had wanted to seed this thought in the minds of the specialist press, surely they would have addressed that to the press in Houston, where Apollo 11 was being managed, rather than Pasadena where it was not. Of course, I have no idea who "Greatcoat Man" was (neither have Hoagland & Bara,) but the possibility occurs to me that this person asked if he might distribute his pamphlet, and Frank Bristow (then chief PAO at JPL) was with him to make sure he didn't start lecturing or haranguing members of the press corps. Friar Occam would prefer that explanation, I believe.

Chapter 7:
This chapter is all about the Apollo 17 mission, and its fanciful interpretation as the clandestine exploration of a seekrit tunnel, and the collection of the technical artifacts of the dead lunar civilisation that exists in the minds of Hoagland & Bara. Bara refers to the South Massif as "an ancient alien base in the Taurus-Littrow valley." This blog commented back in June this year, when this horrible book was first announced.

The material draws heavily on the six-part www series A Hidden Mission for Apollo 17? by Keith Laney. Mike Bara credits Laney more than once in his text, but that has apparently not appeased Laney himself, who has recently written:

"...if he's going to expound on my musings he really ought to consult with me first, or at least use the same "we don't know but it looks like we did" attitude I took when investigating this. Would also be nice for once if one of these guys that use my stuff to make money would cut me a check as well. that's the part that pisses me off the most. I do what I do not for cash, but for the sheer wonder, if someone takes it and makes money it's only right to share. So far I've got not so much as an email..."

17. p.154. "The first thing that's notable about the Apollo 17 Mission is the very dangerous look of the landing site itself. Positioned at 19.5° N by 33° E, the target landing ellipse....etc."

FACT: The nominal landing site was at 30° 44' 58.3" E, 20° 09' 50.5" N. This is per the official press kit (p.33)  -- a more reliable source than anything Hoagland & Bara have ever written. Those scoundrels think nothing of bald-faced lies when it comes to introducing those "magic" numbers 19.5 and 33. They did it notably for the landing site of Mars Pathfinder, now known officially as Carl Sagan Station. In that case they said the co-ordinates were 19.5°N by 33°W—in fact they are 19.13°N, 33.22°W. If Mike reads this he'll probably be saying to himself "page 33, hmmm....see? It works."


18. p.175. Bara likes this image, AS17-135-20680, run off as Cernan & Schmitt arrived at station 2. Is it a pyramid on the Moon? No, it isn't. It's one of a sequence of five junk shots showing parts of the LRV (see the Apollo 17 Image Library, Mag #135).

19. p.180. Writing of the infamous "Data's Head" rock in the crater Shorty, which this blog has written about at length, Bara here writes "The red stripe is plainly visible even without enhancement on several photos Schmitt took of the interior of Shorty."

FACT: It is not. See the far better quality image this blog obtained for analysis. And by the way -- small point -- it was Gene Cernan who shot the photo-panorama.

Chapter 8:
Skipped -- just more silliness about a "factory in Hortensius" -- again, with no attempt to validate against the LROC library.

Chapter 9:
p.204. "Wow. Just wow! AS11-38-5564 [is] covered with machinery, structures, buildings, artifacts and Ancient Alien ruins of all types."

Almost the entire chapter concerns that one Apollo 11 shot of the far side of the Moon, and what Mike Bara thinks he sees. Here it is for your delectation. It's a pretty wide angle shot, at a  fairly low sun angle, so it's not too surprising that shadows form in all sorts of random shapes. To Mike Bara, however, they aren't random.

20. pp. 199-202, 211-222. He sees a ziggurat. See this blog passim. But Stuart Robbins has done a better job than I could have done on the ziggy. Here's his summary page and "Final Words."

21. p.203. He sees a crane. This is bad.

22. p.205. He sees a spaceship. Really, really bad. Why would it be aerodynamic?

23. p.207. He sees a gun emplacement. Terrible!

24. p.208. He sees a jack. Awful!!

25. p.208. He sees a flying saucer in a hangar. Childish!

26. p.209. He sees a beach house. Not like any beach house I've ever seen.

27. p.209. He sees a human head. Can you see it?

28. p.210. He sees a drill. Laughable!!

On his blog, Mike Bara spent some time telling us that pareidolia doesn't exist.

 "The word was actually first coined by a douchebag debunker ... named Steven Goldstein in a 1994 issue of Skeptical Inquirer. Since then, every major debunker from Oberg to “Dr. Phil” has fallen back on it, but it is still a load of B.S. There is no such thing. "

 It doesn't matter what you call it, Mike, the phenomenon of finding familiar things in random patterns is absolutely real, and this chapter is as fine an illustration of it as can be imagined. It really is pathetic that Bara didn't take the obvious step that any serious researcher would, and check the LROC images to see what these smeared shadows really are. The fact that he didn't further invalidates this wretched, wretched book.

29. p.213. "Stuart Robbins has a long history of false and utterly silly accusations against me and Mr. Hoagland, and frequently teams up with someone calling himself "Expat" to attack us within hours of anything we post. "Expat" in fact has made a habit of stalking my radio appearances to ask me in-depth questions along the lines of "are you still beating your wife?""

FACT: Stalking?

Point-by-point critique of Mike Bara's 'The Choice'

        The Choice is Mike Bara's bid to cash in on the 2012 Apocalypse mini-panic. According to its cover sell, it's a guide to "using conscious thought and physics of the mind to reshape the world." It won't surprise anyone to know that Bara no more delivers on that promise than Rhonda Byrne delivered on hers in The Secret. That part is poppycock. Well, actually, the whole book is poppycock.

        What good can possibly be said about a book that has so many errors and accomplishes so tragically little? Well, let's see — at least it has an index, which is more than can be said for Dark Mission. The copy-edit is not too bad, although since it was done by a computer there are plenty of missing words, homophones and misplaced apostrophes to giggle at. Do book editors ever actually read MS these days? Mike Bara evidently worked commendably hard, delivering 75,000 words to New Page Books on June 21st, having signed only in March. It's very unlikely he got an advance. That's about all the positive I can think of.

        Rather than take issue with the bone-headed pseudo-psychology this book represents, I will try and simply point out factual errors in the order in which they appear in the text. I may not be able to resist a little sarcasm. Sorry, it's my nature, just as it's Mike Bara's nature to chastise us all for our left-brained materialism as he steers his 2007 BMW 5 Series toward Las Vegas one more time for a rendezvous with his favorite strippers and porn starlets.

OK, here goes:

1 p.15 After a scattershot dismissal of the whole of conventional physics, Bara writes "What we have been missing ... is that Newton and Einstein aren't the whole picture."
Who does he think has been missing this? Certainly not every physicist in the entire world, all of whom are engaged in a daily struggle to fine-tune their equations and unravel the logic of the Universe. Does he think nine billion dollars were spent building the Large Hadron Collider by people who had missed this point?

2 p.17 "...if radio waves can be influenced by the positions of the planets, then our own thoughts, moods, and dreams can be affected, too."
Oh yeah? Who sez? A human brain and a short wave radio transmitter are not quite the same, Mike.

3 p.31 "...astrology is a perfectly valid and defensible science."
FACT: No it isn't.

4 p.32 "Without the Moon's calming influence, the Earth would spin so fast that the centrifugal force would most likely flatten us all like pancakes."
No, the reverse would happen. CentriFUGAL means "directed away from the center," so we'd become lighter, not heavier.

5 p.34 "Many of the planet's orbits, which ... should be perfectly circular by now, are highly elliptical. In fact, Mars's orbit is so eccentric that its distance from Earth goes from 34 million miles at its closest to 249 million miles at its greatest."
Ahem, excuse me but aren't planetary orbital eccentricities measured in relation to the Sun, not to some other random planet? Yes indeed they are.

FACT: Mars' aphelion is 154 million miles, perihelion 128 million miles, eccentricity 0.09 (cf. Earth 0.017.) Mars' orbit, although more eccentric than that of Earth, is not remarkably so. The figures Bara cites are correct but they do not illustrate the point he says they do.

This is a truly appalling, inexcusable error, coming so early in the book and making it absolutely certain that Mike Bara is not qualified to write on the subject of planetary science. When the New Page editors saw this they should have canceled his contract on the spot. Terrible, terrible. Embarrassing.

6 p.47 "Neptune's Great Dark Spot, the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, the erupting volcanoes of Jupiter's moon Io, Olympus Mons on Mars... and Earth's own Maunakea volcano ...all were at, or very near, the 19.5° latitude.

FACT: Neptune's dark spots are transient, forming and dissipating in just a few years. The one Mike is presumably citing, observed by Voyager 2, was first observed around 25°S and drifted north before dissipating.
The Great Red Spot of Jupiter is stable, and centered at 22°S.
The volcanoes of Io are far too numerous to be assigned any specific latitude. 12 known volcanoes are cited in the reference.
Olympus Mons is at 18°N.
Mauna Loa is at exactly 19.5°N - Bara almost got one right but he got the wrong Hawaiian volcano.

I'm sure he's going to say "I only wrote that they were very near 19.5°." Yes, Mike, you did, but that has no real meaning. Olympus Mons may be "very near" 19.5° but it's even nearer to 17.8°, or 18.8°, or.... etc. If this is supposed to be a geometric theory you're selling, it's either exact or it's useless.

7 p.57 "The human brain is nothing but a complex electrical signal transmitter."
FACT: Although there are some electrical pathways in the brain, chemical information exchange by neurotransmitters has overwhelmingly more influence. Why else does Mike Bara think the whiskey sours he knocks back in the lounges of Las Vegas, as he eyes the cougars across the bar, make him feel so nice and relaxed?

8 p.58 "...aren't our thoughts, which are also nothing more than electrical energy, actually coming from higher dimensions?"
It's hard to say what meaning to attach to this muddled idea. It's something to do with astrology, I think. The safe answer is "No, they aren't."

9 p.60 "Newton's laws of motion ... only work if the object being measured doesn't rotate."
Poppycock. The planet Earth, to name but one, is rotating, and objects in orbit around it still obey Newton's equation of gravity. If he'd written "Newton's laws of motion only work if the object being measured isn't moving at a substantial fraction of the speed of light," he'd have been right.

There's a terrible tendency for people like Mike Bara, who know just a little physics, to think "Einstein came along and disproved Newton." It's absolutely not true. Einstein came along and ADDED to Newton — EXTENDED Newton into more exotic contexts. A young man sitting under an apple tree can still reckon the falling apple is going to bonk him on the head according to Newton.

10 p.67 "...most mainstream physicists are actually blithering idiots..."
Well, perhaps I shouldn't classify that one as a factual error, exactly. I include it so that readers who don't plan on ever reading this ridiculous book get an insight into Mike Bara's personality flaws.

11 p.72 After expounding on ancient cultures such as the Mayans, Egyptians and Indo-Aryan Hindus and how life, to them, is a continuous repeating cycle, Bara writes "...in the west, time is an arrow. To the ancients, time is a wheel."

Is he saying that we in "the west" don't understand that the Sun rises and sets every day, or that the seasons repeat every 365 days? Is he saying that the ancients didn't understand that a human life is lived from birth to death? This is a sentence that sounds as if it's an aphorism but is actually without useful meaning.

12 p.128 Mike Bara is perenially confused about the International Space Station, or ISS for short. He thinks it's really called Isis, to fit in with Richard Hoagland's utterly indefensible theory that NASA spends its time worshipping Egyptian Gods.
FACT: The international space station is known as "International Space Station." ISS is not the same as Isis. Nobody attempts to pronounce it as though it were an acronym.
FACT: NASA is not interested in Egyptian Gods. When it isn't launching spacecraft, it spends its time trying to get a decent annual budget.

13 p.134 On this page Mike Bara demonstrates his ignorance of the nature of gravity. He writes "On the surface of the Earth, the magnitude of the gravitational field is more than enough to keep me in place, but if I was in orbit around the Earth, ... the influence of gravity would be so slight that I would be essentially weightless and float freely."
And what, pray, does Mike Bara think would be keeping him in orbit?

FACT: The pull of gravity simply follows an inverse square law. Newton, brilliantly, told us that the force exerted by the Earth on Mike Bara's body is equal to G*m₁m₂/d² where G is the gravitational constant, m₁ the mass of the Earth and m₂ the mass of Mike Bara (less than it was a year ago, we understand. Well done Mike.) d is the distance Mike is from the center of the Earth, 6371 kM at the surface, about 6726 kM at ISS orbit. Yes, Newton's equation works perfectly well even though the Earth is rotating (see Bara's other error, p.60.)

Bara goes on to compare gravity with his imagined aether, and to state that, whereas gravity has a limited field of influence, the aether "exists everywhere and connects everything." This is just an extension of his ignorance. To be sure, if Mike Bara were to take his body to Alpha Centauri, he could safely ignore Earth's gravitational influence. But mathematically, no matter how large the factor d becomes, some infinitesimal value for G*m₁m₂/d² could be calculated. So it's totally misleading to portray gravity as local only.


14 p.139 Bara describes a Faraday cage as being shielded by lead.
FACT: If it were, it'd be highly ineffective. The whole point of a Faraday cage is that its material is a good electrical conductor. Lead isn't.

15 p.143 "In November 1957 the Soviets had launched Sputnik 1..."
FACT: Sputnik 1 was launched on 4th October 1957.

16 p.144
Chapter 12 is all about the higher-than-expected orbit of USA's first satellite, Explorer 1. Richard Hoagland made a disastrous attempt to work out the mathematics of this on a web page, and this blog explained why he failed. Mike Bara's take on the situation is a little different but no less inaccurate.

He writes that "Explorer 1 ended up in an orbit that was almost 60% higher than it should have been." That is approximately true — the apogee was almost 60% higher than planned — but it's extremely misleading. What really matters is the additional energy the satellite had at orbit insertion, as measured by its instantaneous velocity. And a small change in velocity results in a much larger excursion in apogee (even Hoagland understood this, actually.)

So here's the calculation for Explorer 1

DATA:
Planned orbit 354 x 1,609 kM (220 x 1,000 miles)
Actual orbit 359 x 2,562 kM (223 x 1,592 miles)
Radius of Earth 6,375 kM
Gravitational constant, µ, of Earth 398,660 kM³/s²

CALCULATION:
semi-major axis of planned orbit, L_smaj, (354+6375+6375+1609)/2 = 7356 kM
distance from center of Earth to orbit point, R, 6375+354 = 6729 kM

planned velocity at orbit injection, V_orb = sqrt(µ(2/R - 1/L_smaj))
2/R - 1/L_smaj = 0.0001613
V_orb = sqrt(64.3) = 8.018 kM/sec

semi-major axis of actual orbit, L_smaj, (359+6375+6375+2562)/2 = 7835 kM
distance from center of Earth to orbit point, R, 6375+359 = 6734 kM

actual velocity at orbit injection, V_orb = sqrt(µ(2/R - 1/L_smaj))
2/R - 1/L_smaj = 0.000169
V_orb = sqrt(67.493) = 8.215 kM/sec

So we're talking about a velocity excess of about 3%. Bara writes "Despite various conventional explanations being bandied about over the decades since then, none of them have stood up to scrutiny." The conventional explanations that I'm aware of are a) cumulative overperformance of the fifteen small "Baby Sergeant" solid rockets, b) uncertainty about the pitch angle during burn of the 3rd/4th stages, and c) unusually strong high altitude winds.

I have to ask, in what sense have these not stood up to scrutiny? Who did the scrutiny? Not the notoriously error-prone Richard Hoagland, I hope for their sakes.

(The equation is presented here.)

17 p.146 "Werner Von Braun ... must have realized that if you wanted a spacecraft to follow conventional Newtonian celestial mechanics, Rule One had to be: Don't let it rotate. .... they immediately abandoned solid fuel rockets, spinning upper stages..."
FACT: Spin-stabilization continued to be a very common technique in spacecraft design, and it's still sometimes used to this day (See this, for example.) Solid fuel rockets are an extremely common phenomenon, especially for military applications in which instant readiness is an important factor. Bara is just wrong about this.

18 p.162 "...vibration ... is really just partial rotation..."
No it isn't.

19 p.165 "...every cell and every atom in our bodies is vibrating..."
FACT: Perhaps every atom is. It would be more correct to say that every sub-atomic particle is. But, every cell? I don't think so, Mike. It's amazing how this totally false idea has caught on in the crackpot New Age community. It seems that every two-bit spiritual guidance enthusiast who gets guested on "Coast to Coast AM" talks about getting the vibrations of our bodies tuned, or whatever. Bla-bla-bla. There's no foundation to the idea at all.

20 p.202 *sigh* Here we go again. Hoagland & Bara persist in claiming that the Brookings Report of 1960 directed NASA to withhold evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence lest it spread panic. They've been told, many times, that it just ain't so, but they will keep trotting it out. Here Bara writes that the report "detailed how best to inform the public in the event that NASA discovered extraterrestrial artifacts on the Moon or Mars." What utter poppycock!

FACT: The Brookings Report did not even consider the question. It recommended that the question ought to be considered, that's all. Here's the full quote:

"...two research areas can be recommended -- Continuing studies to determine [the public's] emotional and intellectual understanding and attitudes -- and successive alterations of them if any -- regarding the possibility and consequences of discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life. Historical and empirical studies of the behavior of peoples and their leaders when confronted with dramatic and unfamiliar events or social pressures. Such studies might help to provide programs for meeting and adjusting to the implications of such a discovery. Questions one might wish to answer by such studies would include: how might such information, under what circumstances, be presented to or withheld from the public for what ends? What might be the role of the discovering scientists and other decision makers regarding release of the fact of discovery?"

If Mike Bara thinks that's "detailing how best to inform the public," he's got a reading comprehension problem.

21 p.206 Bara writes here that HAARP, although operating in the 3.6 megawatt range, can combine its 180 antennas to yield an energetic output of 5.1 terawatts. I've no idea where he gets the terawatt figure from — it's certainly an error.

22 p.214 "An annular eclipse means that the Moon and Sun are in perfect alignment, but the Sun is not totally blotted out because the Moon is a little too close to the Earth..."
No, Mike. Too far away. tsk, tsk, careless.....

23 p.217 "We have, each of us, enough energy to make this world into anything we wish it to be."
FACT: This is not true.

24 p.222 Bara writes that he'd love to have a Porsche to cruise around Hollywood with. He writes "It would feed my ego, and that is an aspect of my personality."
FACT: That's one thing he got right. And what an appropriate way to end this review. Thanks for reading, if you did.

Point-by-point critique of "Dark Mission" 2nd Edition

        The second edition of "Dark Mission" is out, and it is no less of a paranoid fantasy than the first edition. It expresses nothing other than the authors' bizarre hatred of NASA and utter ignorance of science. Neither of them has any training in science, and neither of them has ever conducted a scientific experiment in his life. In their zeal to excoriate NASA, they have omitted a very important step in book authorship -- the one in which, having finally got all those words down on silicon, you check your facts. (A responsible publisher, by the way, would have hired a technical editor as backup to that process. Adam Parfrey, saving the nails and thus sinking the ship, did not take this step.)

        Here, then, are some of the major factual errors in this work. I apologise for the interminable length of this post -- it would have been a more reasonable length if those clowns hadn't made so many mistakes:

1 p.9. (first page of Mike Bara's "update"). Obviously stung by the total lack of attention to the first edition on the part of the US media, in particular the lack of any professional review whatsoever, Bara snipes at Dwayne A. Day, author of a comedy piece about the Hoagland/Johnston press conference of October 2007. He writes of Day as a "shameless hack" who "has so many NASA connections on his resume [sic] that he may as well be an official press officer for the agency."

FACT: Dwayne Day is a well-respected space historian who has never at any time been an employee or a contractor of NASA. He is currently serves on a program officer at the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council.

FACT: Bara makes the same petulant accusation against James Oberg. Oberg will defend his own reputation more eloquently than I could, I'm sure.

FACT: Bara was not even at that disastrous event (a "press conference" that was not attended by the press, unless you count Russian tabloids.)

2 p.14. Bara writes, elucidating this book's theory that some NASA space events are timed to coincide with "ritual" star alignments, "only five stellar objects ... have any significance ...: the three belt stars of Orion, ...Sirius, ... and Regulus." Yet on p.327 we find the planets Earth and Mars also used to support this ridiculous theory. In the past Hoagland has used other objects, too, such as the comet Encke.

FACT: That makes seven, not five, astronomical objects, and five astronomical altitudes (-33°, -19.5°, 0°, +19.5° and +33°) -- 35 chances of finding a "ritual" alignment to associate with any given space event. Yes, sometimes alignments coincide with events. It would be very surprising if they did not. Hoagland and Bara's theory is bunk.

3 p.57. "The NASA that we've known for over 50 years has been a lie."

This sentence, the very first sentence in the first edition of this book, is itself a lie.

p. 58. "The Space Agency was quietly founded as a direct adjunct to the Department of Defense..."

Hoagland offers lame support for this contention with a quote from Sec. 305 (i) of the Space Act: "The Administration shall be considered a defense agency of the United States for the purpose of Chapter 17, Title 35 of the US Code." He doesn't say how he knows the passage of this act was "quiet."

He also complains -- as though he's only just come across this fact and is "shocked--SHOCKED" -- that Sec. 205(d) of the Act allows NASA activities to be classified for reasons of national security.

FACT: Title 35 of the US Code is exclusively concerned with patent law. Title 35 Chapter 17 is concerned with patent applications filed by employees of any defense agency, hence the inclusive definition in Sec 305(i). This is purely legal language, that emphatically does not mean that the agency was founded, whether quietly or accompanied by 76 trombones, as a direct adjunct to the Department of Defense. A parade of NASA Administrators, starting with James Webb, has expended political capital asserting NASA's independence from DoD.

FACT: As every journalist who has ever covered NASA knows, the Agency sometimes engages in classified activities, and they don't get published. If Richard Hoagland did not know this when he was a consultant to CBS News, he was negligent.

4 p.60. "The Apollo crews [brought] back to NASA laboratories not just rocks, but actual samples of the ancient technologies they found--for highly classified efforts at 'back engineering.'"

FACT: There is not a shred of evidence, in this book or anywhere else, to support this wild idea. Mike Bara admitted as such in an internet radio interview on Jan 17th 2008.

5 p.62. Hoagland claims that the 'A' on the Apollo mission patch actually stands for, not 'Apollo' as the designers of the patch (and everyone else except Hoagland) think, but the Egyptian God Asar, a.k.a. Osiris. He writes that this is "redundantly confirmed because Asar/Osiris is none other than the familiar Greek constellation of Orion--which is, of course, the background ... constellation on the patch itself."

FACT: Hoagland is confused. Osiris and Orion have only incidental links. They are far from synonymous. Likewise with Horus and Apollo, which he is also confused about.

On p. 275 Hoagland develops this theory again, writing "it is distinctly possible (and Hoagland certainly believes it)." Is this code for "Bara has enough vestiges of sanity to disbelieve it"? We may hope so.

6 p.76. Writing of the so-called "Face on Mars," the authors write "NASA seemed to have an aversion to investigating what seemed to be an ideal subject for the agency's agenda. In fact, they vociferously refused to even consider making the imaging of Cydonia a priority for any new Mars missions."

The book repeats this claim -- that NASA is averse to re-photographing the so-called face -- a few more times in the book. Strangely, however, in the Epilogue on p.591 we find this: "After 30 years, and probably a hundred (yes, a hundred) repeated imagings of 'The Face'...." Perhaps when he was writing the epilogue, Richard Hoagland didn't cross-check his own book.

FACT: In 1997, when Mars Global Surveyor was in Martian orbit, Jim Garvin, chief scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, said "We felt this was important to taxpayers. We photographed the Face as soon as we could get a good shot at it."

More

7 p.81 and Fig. 1-8. Writing about their fantasy of mathematical relationships between features on Cydonia, the authors state "these constants ...were not dependant [sic] on terrestrial methods of measurement (i.e. a radial measurement system based on a 360° circle)"

FACT: In Fig 1-8 itself, the so-called relationships clearly depend on the angles 19.5°, 60° and 90°. Notice, too, that even to achieve this fantasy geometry, facts have been fudged. The intersection at the so-called face actually just misses it, and that at Crater Tetrahedron is just barely within the crater at two o'clock, not at the center. This figure is the height of unscientific silliness.

8 p.82. Developing his mathematical fantasy further, Hoagland writes "...the value of e ... is 2.718282, a near exact match for the ratio of the surface area of a sphere to the surface area of a tetrahedron (2.720699)."

FACT: He has the value of e right, but in mathematics the qualifier "near exact" has no useful meaning. Values are either exact or they aren't. And then, if by some chance these two constants were exactly the same, so what? Hoagland doesn't say.

9 p.91. The authors claim that the following features are at, "or very near," a latitude of 19.5°:

The Great Dark Spot of Neptune
The Great Red Spot of Jupiter
The erupting volcanoes of Io
Olympus Mons on Mars
Mauna Kea

FACT: Neptune's dark spots are transient, forming and dissipating in just a few years. The one Hoagland is presumably citing, observed by Voyager 2, was first observed around 25°S and drifted north before dissipating.
The Great Red Spot of Jupiter is stable, and centered at 22°S.
The volcanoes of Io are far too numerous to be assigned any specific latitude. 12 known volcanoes are cited in the reference.
Olympus Mons is at 18°N.
Mauna Kea is at 19° 49' N - if he'd written Mauna Loa he'd have got one right. D'oh!!

Hoagland's use of the expression "very near" again reveals his ignorance of science. A layman might say "22 is very near 19.5" but a scientist would say "It's even nearer to 20, to 23.2, to 21.5, to 20.3, to 19.8... and 22 is of no help whatever to a person attempting to make the case that 19.5 is somehow special."

10 p.115/6. Hoagland's utterly spurious claims about energy at 19.5° are an essential part of another fantasy -- this time in the world of physics. After developing this for some 25 pages, he arrives at the proposition that there's a yet undiscovered massive planet in the solar system (or perhaps two smaller ones.) This, he writes, is an essential prediction of his "hyperdimensional physics" theory. He (or possibly his co-author) then writes "In 1982, a front-page article appeared in the Washington Post, ... about an object spotted in Orion by the IRAS infrared satellite, at an estimated 50 billion miles from Earth. This object fit Hoagland's prediction within very tight parameters. To date, no follow-up observations or papers have been published on this object..."

FACT: Thomas J. Chester of IPAC (the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center) at Caltech has, in a follow-up paper, debunked this canard. He wrote that not one, but several, distant IR objects were at one time claimed to be solar system objects. "Many of these observations turned out to be IRC+10216, a bright previously known source which is almost exactly in the ecliptic plane (the plane of the planets)." All others were likewise accounted for, and Chester definitively states that no undiscovered massive planet exists. Therefore Hoagland's theory is falsified.

(This report is undated but was unquestionably available before publication of "Dark Mission" 1st edn. If Adam Parfrey had seen fit to employ a technical editor this entire section would most likely have been cut.)

11,12,13 pp. 156-157, 383-387

On these pages the authors make breathtakingly ridiculous assertions that three failed Mars missions of the 1990s were deliberately sabotaged (either by NASA or by a "powerful cabal") to prevent them from returning high-resolution photography which would inevitably confirm the existence of ancient civilizations.

Mars Observer (1993)
Mars Polar Lander (1999)
Mars Climate Orbiter (1999)

FACT: James Oberg, who is mentioned on p.386 as part of this story, has exposed these allegations as utterly false in a Space Review article.

I would just add that the "powerful cabal" that supposedly nixed these missions cannot be that powerful after all, since it was apparently powerless to prevent many subsequent Mars Missions with cameras of far higher resolution from succeeding. The HiRISE telescope on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (2006) has a resolution of 0.3 m/pixel, compared with the 40 m/pixel of the MARCI camera of the 1990s.

14 p.163. In Chapter 3, Hoagland devotes five pages to another of his perennial hobby-horses, the "Brookings Report." This 1961 paper speculated on what might happen if clear evidence of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations were ever to be found. Richard Hoagland misunderstands this document consistently and has quoted it many times as a "smoking gun" justifying NASA's "cover-up" of what he says it has found in Space. On this page he writes "So here we had the proverbial smoking gun. Not only was NASA advised--almost from its inception--to withhold any data that supported the reality of Cydonia or any other discovery like it, they were told to do so for the good of human society as a whole."

FACT: The Brookings Report offered no such advice. Here's what the report actually contained, on the subject of release of evidence:

"Questions one might wish to answer by such studies would include: how might such information, under what circumstances, be presented to or withheld from the public for what ends?"

Note that the wording of the report GAVE EXACTLY EQUAL WEIGHT to "presented to" and "withheld from."

Image

15 p.191. On this page the authors allege that some images from the Apollo 10 image catalog have been deliberately blacked out to conceal evidence of a lunar civilization. Fig 4-4 shows a block of 12 images, in which frames 4815, 4821, 4822 and 4823 are either totally black or so underexposed as to be useless -- it's impossible to tell from this book's atrocious photo-reproduction.

FACT: Those frames are perfectly readable in the current LPI catalog. It's conceivable that the catalog now is not the same as it was when the authors reproduced it, in which case this book is merely out of date instead of mendacious on this point.

16 p.230 and color Fig 8. Chapter 4 is devoted to Hoagland's personal manipulations and interpretations of Apollo photography -- he shows us "the shard," "the castle," and other fuzzy, hard to interpret, flaws in some of the images. All of them have more probable explanations than that they are constructs of a dead civilization. Then he turns to his notoriously daft assertion that there are vast glass dome structures overarching many of the Apollo landing sites on the Moon (he doesn't ever say where the factories that produced this enormous quantity of glass and steel are.)

He cites Hasselblad frame AS17-134-20426 as an example of a photograph that, when "color adjusted," shows refraction of light through "hundreds of miles of shattered bits of glass and rebar." But his version is not the pristine version (see reference.)

FACT: He has manipulated the color, contrast, and gamma of this photograph based on a misunderstanding. In his video interview for Project Camelot (at 1:00:04) he shows this same frame and it is perfectly plain that he thinks the color patches on the gnomon are red, green, and blue. However, they are not. They are orange, green and blue. (see p. 53 of the official Press Kit.) Therefore, his adjustment of the color of this frame is a corruption rather than a correction, and valueless.

17 p.232 and color Fig 12. The authors maintain that Al Bean, LMP of Apollo 12, included the buttresses holding up the glass domes in some of his paintings. They write "...the sky above the astronauts unmistakably depicts not only Hoagland's 'battered lunar dome' but its specifically 'inclined buttresses' as well."

FACT: The angled lines across this artwork are the imprint of Bean's lunar boot. Bean gave this treatment to several of his acrylics, as he felt it added authenticity. This is made specifically clear here. So now we all know what value to place on that word "unmistakably" when its author is Richard Hoagland.

18 p.243. One of several places in this book in which the authors assert that NASA itself is responsible for the myth that the Apollo moon landings were faked.

FACT: This is so patently absurd that it needs no reference to refute it. Did Adam Parfrey EVEN THINK about this before he published such drivel?

 18a p.244. "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."

FACT: This page cites a paper by Rowley and Neudecker, but it's the wrong citation. The real citation -- J.D. Blacic -- does not support the text here. It quotes the Young's modulus of lunar glass as 100 GPa, cf. steel 224 GPa.

19 Fig 4-45 and color Fig 6. These illustrations purport to show a curve of transmission vs. wavelength for the gold solar-protective visors fitted to the Apollo EVA spacesuits. They are confused. Although the curve is prominently labeled "Spectral Transmission" the y-axis is equally clearly labeled "Absorbance," which is the converse of transmission.

FACT: The NASA reference (p. 20) shows these figures for transmittance:

UV, up to 0.38 µm: 0.01
Visible, 0.38-0.76 µm: 0.19
Near IR, 0.76-3.0 µm: 0.12
Far IR, 3.0+ µm: zero

20 p.273. Hoagland notes that the arctangent of the latitude of the so-called "D&M Pyramid" on Mars is nearly the same as the cosine of the Sphinx's latitude on Earth. He calls these "shared latitude relationships."

FACT: This so-called "relationship" has no conceivable meaning. It would be hard to find anything in this book which better falsifies Hoagland's p.224 claim to be a scientist.

21 p.280. Discussing the Apollo 10 mission, the authors apparently don't know how to read technical documentation. They write of the Apollo 10 Lunar Module "while the spacecraft was theoretically fully capable of landing on the moon, inexplicably, it was not given the capability to do so."

FACT: "Snoopy" was emphatically NOT capable of landing (well perhaps, technically, it was, but not of successfully taking off again.) Grumman engineers had not yet implemented SWIP (the Super Weight Improvement Program) and the spacecraft was too heavy. More accurately, it would have been too heavy if it had been fully-fueled for a landing and takeoff. So now we all know what value to place on that word "inexplicably" when its author is Richard Hoagland.

22 p. 286. Farouk El-Baz was "the most powerful single individual in the American space program."

FACT: The authors have Dr. El-Baz's credentials right, but his status dead wrong. He was secretary of the Apollo Landing Site Selection Committee from 1967-72.

People such as Rocco Petrone, Apollo Program Director, George Low, Manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, George Mueller, Administrator of the Office of Manned Space Flight, Bob Gilruth, Director of JSC, even the flight controllers -- all these men were far more "powerful" within the Apollo Program. Expanding the scope to the entire space program, the proposition becomes even more ridiculous because the Administrator and a whole army of Deputy Administrators outranked all of the above.

It suits Richard Hoagland to propagate this gross exaggeration because it chimes with his thesis that NASA management is influenced by Egyptian mythology, but it's a racist and bankrupt falsehood.

23 p.331 and Fig 5-42. The authors think one of the rock formations photographed by Mars Pathfinder in 1997 is a sphinx. "The resemblance is uncanny," they write. Perhaps that's merely a matter of opinion. What is not opinion, however, is the co-ordinates of the landing site. Hoagland & Bara continue "And remember -- this Martian sphinx is guarding an obvious pyramid on Mars ...at 19.5°N by 33°W."

FACT: The landing site of Pathfinder was 19.13°N, 33.22°W.

Reference

24 p.404. "By the early 1990s, Hoagland had come to the conclusion that the Face was significantly asymmetric."

FACT: On Australian TV in 1993, in an interview whose main purpose was to allege that Mars Observer was sabotaged, Hoagland said "[The Face] has symmetry both in the center ridge line and left-and-right."

25 p.475. The authors note that some images released from the THEMIS imager on Mars Odyssey are 1947 x 333 pixels. They add "Or, 19.5 x 33."

FACT: 1947 is not 19.5. 333 is not 33. This is Grade 2 arithmetic.

26 p.514. Another of Hoagland's perennially mistaken beliefs is that NASA-JPL suppressed the fact that the two Viking Lander spacecraft (1976) actually found life on Mars. On this page he writes "What most people do not remember is that the Lander tests for life both came back positive. NASA, however, quickly moved to suppress this news and present an 'alternative' view..." and later, "NASA's determined efforts to suppress such a conclusion..."

FACT: Both the Viking spacecraft landers had identical biology experiments. Each spacecraft carried three separate experiments designed to test for biology in Martian topsoil. The experiments were developed independently by three different Principal Investigators (PIs). The experiments were:

Gas Exchange (GEX) PI Vance Oyama, NASA Ames
Labeled Release (LR) PI Gilbert Levín, Biospherics, Inc.
Pyrolytic Release (PR) PI Norman Horowitz, CalTech

In addition, a Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer (PI Klaus Biemann, MIT) supported the main biology package by testing for organic molecules.

Results: At both landing sites the results were essentially identical. GEX and PR were unequivocally negative. LR initially showed strongly positive results, with the control (a sterilized sample) showing negative as expected. Subsequent nutrient injections, however, showed no response. The GCMS detected no organic molecules.

Interpretation: Responsibility for interpreting this enigma fell on the Head of Viking Biology, Harold Klein, with support from Viking Chief Scientist Gerry Soffen. Both were NASA employees. Their call was thumbs down for Martian biology. From a scientific point of view, looking at the overall picture, an absolutely correct call.

Reference

FACT: The complete LR data set, including the PI's notebook, is available to anyone on a NASA-sponsored web site. Dr. Gil Levín continues to publish evidence contesting the "official" Viking Biology conclusions. No effort has been exerted, by JPL or any other institution, to suppress him. He has some good points to make, but they have not yet prevailed. Yes, science can be a tough business. Hoagland, Bara, and Parfrey wouldn't know about that, of course.

27 p.541. "[O]n the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Apollo 11 ... [Neil] 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."

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 this speech was "highly emotional." I personally don't find it so. That's what Armstrong is always like as a public speaker.)

28 pp. 559-562, figs 12-13,14,15,16,17 and color figs. 27,28.
This section of "Dark Mission" is about EVA-2 of Apollo 17, specifically the last stop (Station 4) of this lunar trek, at a small crater called "Shorty." Shorty became famous as the place where astronauts Cernan and Schmitt discovered orange soil on the Moon. Hoagland alleges that, deep inside Shorty, the severed head of a robot can be seen in several of the Hasselblad frames taken by Jack Schmitt. Color fig. 28 is his "enhanced" enlargement of this rock.

On p.559 he writes that this was derived from "the highest resolution versions available from the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal website." That would be AS17-137-21000HR.jpg, a 2340 x 2364 pixel, 1073 kB image. An independent investigator has examined a far higher quality version of this image, derived not from the web but from a high-definition scan of the original negative. That image is a 5190 x 6175 pixel, 46.1 MB tiff image file. The finding was that Hoagland's manipulation of the lower-quality image was fraudulent. He artificially colorized the image in strips, then rotated it 45° to obfuscate that fact. The 45° strips can be seen by closely examining color fig. 28 and its equivalent on the web.

Hoagland goes further, asserting on p.561 that Cernan and Schmitt could actually have collected the rock and brought it back to Earth. He writes "...they certainly had enough off-camera time to descend the crater unobserved and bring it back."

FACT: Cernan and Schmitt had neither the means nor the opportunity to collect this rock. Here are five reasons why:

[1] It cannot be recognized as being "skull-like" with the unaided human eye from the position the astronauts were in, at the crater rim. This was their view, as recorded by the hand-held Hasselblad camera. Can you find the robot head?

[2] They had no means of descending the steep side of the crater — not to mention getting back up, carrying a rather heavy object even allowing for reduced lunar gravity.

[3] Even if they had wished to do so, they would undoubtedly have been forbidden to by Mission Control. The EVA was already running late, and the transcript shows that Mission Control reminded them more than once of walk-back constraints at this station.

[4] No discussion of robot retrieval is heard on the tapes of this station. It's inconceivable that the astronauts would have contemplated such a risky venture without discussion. It's equally impossible that such discussion was edited out because this was happening on live TV all across Planet Earth.

Reference

The archive video is not continuous, but examination of the timeline on this transcript shows no unexplained interval conceivably long enough for such a precarious venture as an unplanned descent into Shorty.

[5] They had no means of picking up a skull-sized rock. The hand-held scoop was sized for "fist-sized" rocks only, and the rake was completely inadequate.

Reference official press kit (pp 52-54)

It is not possible to bend down and pick up such a rock by hand when wearing the lunar spacesuit.