Mike Bara's unsuccessful pitch to the Great Art Bell

        You know how good the internet is for spreading rumors. Yeah, really good. Well, the hot one of the week is that Art Bell, original creator of Coast to Coast AM, is making yet another comeback into talk radio. The Coastgab forum is agog with it. Follow that link to read a message from Art -- and it doesn't take much reading between the lines to get the point that Art thinks Premiere Radio have let his show turn to shit.

        Personally, I hate George Noory but I'm not a Bell fan either. I guess if Art set up shop in direct opposition to C2C I'd follow him.

Oh please! Take me! MEEEEEEEEE!!!

        All this is a preface to a cute little exchange on Twitter (where the internet twits can be found) over the last few days.Our Mike saw a chance....


Art Bell @ArtBell51        21 July
Closer and closer. I may announce here or on Facebook. I am bound right now to not say more.

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Mike Bara @mikebara33        24 July
@ArtBell51 @Art_Bell Gonna have me as a guest? I've got a new book coming out.


Art Bell @ArtBell51        13h
@mikebara33 Sorry but the last thing I need is another 4 hour book commercial. Call Noory. #GeorgeNoorySucks

Mike Bara @mikebara33        13h
@Art_Bell It'll be interesting to see what the content of the show is. Good luck

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Mike Bara celebrates the 44th anniversary of Apollo 11 with his usual inaccuracy

        Mike Bara often uses his twitter account to "relate" to celebrities. Brown-nosing icons of the extreme right like Ann Coulter, Greta Van Susteren and Donald Trump is a favorite. So is insulting any (US-style) football players who beat his idols the Seattle Seahawks. Today he's been telling people that the late Helen Thomas was notably anti-jewish (a grain of truth there, although she did apologize for saying "The Jews should get the hell out of Palestine."^{note 1})

        But the "tweet-of-the-day" was reserved for none other than Buzz Aldrin, who posted:

"44 years ago today Neil took this photo of me at Tranquility Base on the moon. We all miss you Neil."

photo credit: NASA

        Our Mike doesn't much like Buzz. He can't get over the fact that Buzz is a mason, who took a miniature masonic flag to the Moon as part of his personal kit. Why that should spook Bara out is anyone's guess, but apparently it does.

        Buzz also took a miniature communion kit to the Moon, and performed a personal ceremony of thanksgiving at MET 105:25:38, 2h 40m after landing. This evidently upset Mike Bara too, because he made several errors when alluding to it. On Ancient Aliens: The NASA Connection he said wrongly that the ceremony was 33 minutes (that magic number, geddit?) after landing, as the constellation Orion was exactly on the horizon (it wasn't.) He also said that Neil Armstrong took part in the ceremony, which is not true either. Then he said the Catholic mass "has it's origins" in Egyptian ritual^{note 2}. It does not. Its origin is, of course, the last supper of Christ.^{note 3}

        In the first edition of Dark Mission, he wrote that the star Sirius was at the magic elevation of 19.5° as the ceremony took place. In the second edition, he referred to the communion ceremony as "infamous" (page 11) and revised the star alignment to Regulus at MINUS 19.5°. How Aldrin could have sighted Regulus below the horizon to get his timing right is not stated.

        Anyway, Mike is obviously still stewing over this, because today he took disrespect to new heights by tweeting to Buzz Aldrin:

"Did you wear the Masonic apron during the "Communion" ceremony before the EVA?"

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

[1] If she'd said "The Israelis should get the hell out of Palestine," I'd say many people would agree with that, whether they would stand up to be counted or not. And in that case she would not have needed to add the much more offensive "...and go back where they came from."

[2] Egyptian ritual is a Hoagland/Bara meme, especially in relation to Moon landings, because Dr. Farouk El Baz was the most influential member of the landing site selection committee, and El Baz is Egyptian by birth. Bara said on Ancient Aliens that El Baz picked the dates and times of the landings in addition to the sites, which is totally untrue. So many errors!

[3] But see the second comment below.

Pseudoscience wikified

        I see where both Hoagland and Bara now have pages on the rational wiki. Appropriately enough, since the RatWiki exists to mock pseudoscience. It's "round up the usual suspects" time -- David Icke, George Tsoukalos, Graham Hancock, David Wilcock, , Linda M. Howe.... need I go on? (Hmmm, how come Sean David Morton isn't there? Surely even criminal pseuds need mocking.)

        RatWiki has the wikipedia look, but it's wikipedia without the citation nazis. So it's much, much looser and sarcasm is encouraged. Permanently upping the batshit ante is one sub-head in the Icke piece, for example.

        Coincidentally, I sent the following message to Mike Bara a few days ago:

To: Mike Bara
cc: Adrienne Loska, Mike Bara Management
Subject: Orbit of Explorer 1
Date: 13th July 2013

Know what this is, Mike?

image credit: Richard Hoagland

It's the actual vs. planned orbit of Explorer 1. It was drawn to scale by your former co-author Richard "Fraud" Hoagland.

Look at it. Does that look like an orbit that is 60% more energetic than planned, overall? If you agree that it does not, you are agreeing that an entire chapter of 'The Choice' (ch.12) is poppycock. Balderdash. Codswallop.

Think about that.

Regards,
[expat]

        Anybody who doesn't already know what Mikey wrote in chapter 12, and why it's so catastrophically wrong, can see a nice concise explanation on the rational wikipage.

Update:
This is what the orbit would have looked like if it had been 60% excess:

Hoagland: Two travesties

Text size: 4
Text color: #ffffff
Font: Times Roman
Background: #000000, plus starfield pattern
Line width: 1540px

        Know what that's called? AN UNREADABLE WEB PAGE, that's what. And that's what Richard Hoagland gave us, as his first website update in nearly nine months, under the title It Only Takes One White Crow. At one time I wrote a couple of books about HTML, so I know a piece-of-shit web page when I see it. Any other HTML hackers reading this might like to know that the W3C validator throws 81 errors and 14 warnings when asked to rate the page markup.

        OK, getting on Hoagland's case about his markup is a bit irrelevant, I hear you say. Never mind the technicalities, what about the content? Well, actually, I was giving you the good news first. The content is WORSE.

        The page was composed as a companion to last night's three-hour Hoagathon on Coast to Coast AM. By way of a preamble, he takes us through his brilliant (and totally false) analysis of the original 'Face' on Mars, his absolutely brilliant (and absolutely false) exposition of the Brookings Report, before getting to the meat of the thing -- namely, what Curiosity has found on Mars. I can do this like a picture book for you. (Actually these images are not from the web page but from the C2C-AM archive).

This is a child's sneaker. Surrounded by toys such as a model glider. ON MARS.

This is a cylinder.

This is an engine. ON MARS.

        I'm bored already, I won't continue with the collapsed motels and apartment blocks. We did those already. But you get the idea. This is bad science. VERY, VERY BAD SCIENCE.

        Then, for heaven's sake, he goes off into a wild and utterly ridiculous fantasy about a Reuleaux tetrahedron in West Candor Chasma -- nowhere near Gale crater, nothing to do with the Curiosity rover, and just about as painful as the HTML it's written in. I could tell you what a Reuleaux tetrahedron is but then I'd have to kill myself for even taking this preposterous idea that seriously. Look it up if you must -- everything's on the net these days. The main thing to understand here is that Richard Hoagland is wrong.

Reuleaux woo-woo
        On the woo-woo radio last night, he didn't venture into Reuleaux territory (imagine having to spell that out for George Noory), settling instead for the above-mentioned fantasy of a Martian child's bedroom complete with toys, and a scamper through the Wacky-Accy^{note 1}. At times there were awkward silences, as if neither Hoagland nor Noory could imagine what kind of bullshit to come up with next.

Here's one quote I particularly loved:

"The Accutron is a really robust portable field sensor that allows me to monitor the changes in the field strength in and around these sacred sites."

STRENGTH. Remember that word.

On 8th June, just a month ago, I wrote this in e-mail to Hoagland:

"You say you measure the torsion field, right?

So here's the simplest possible question:

What was the maximum intensity of the torsion field at Coral Castle during the Venus transit of 2004?"

I was favored with a reply, the very same day:

"I have NEVER stated that we're measuring the "amplitude" ... of ANYTHING.             :)

Frequency ... frequency ... frequency ....

Why don't you try actually READING what we've published (so far ...), before you ask (more) inane questions ..."

"Someone's living on the Moon"
        Good line. I bet the Branch Hoaglandians love it. Sad to say, it isn't true. Hoagland repeated that bit of nonsense last night, which is based on his utter misunderstanding of lunar atmospheric pressure measurements from Apollo vs. Chandrayaan. The story is here. Basically, Apollo was doing its measurement at night-time, Chandrayaan daytime. That's why the atmospheric pressure was different -- not because there are seekrit miltary bases.

Two false claims
        Around the middle of the second hour, Hoagland again claimed to have been the first to publish the hypothesis that Europa, the sixth moon of Jupiter, might have an ocean under its icy crust. This claim has been ridiculed by Phil Plait, Ralph Greenberg and Gary Posner. In response to Posner's rebuttal, Mike Bara wrote a vitriolic web page (also white size 4 Times Roman on starfield, but mercifully not 1540px line width) saying "Hoagland has never claimed any such thing".

This is not just bad science, it's disgraceful.

        Toward the end of that hour, Hoagland referred to the Apollo 15 Hammer & feather drop, in which Dave Scott proved that in the vacuum of the Moon, a hammer and feather dropped from the same height reach the ground together. A truly excellent demo. Almost as a casual throwaway, the pseudoscientist told us that the whole thing was his idea.

That is a falsehood. The demo was conceived by Dave Scott, Jim Irwin and Joe Allen^{note 2}.

Bad science. Disgraceful claims. Unforgivable arrogance and mendacity.

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

1. As ever, a backgrounder on this is here.

2. Thanks to  Jourget for pointing me to this note in the Lunar Surface Journal:

[Scott - "The basic idea was Joe Allen's. It was another thing from sitting in the crew quarters at night, trying to figure out interesting things to do - that were useful, too. And I guess we had a lot of ideas. But Joe came up with the hammer and feather idea, and we decided where to get a feather. I had a friend who was a professor at the Air Force Academy. Their mascot's the Falcon. And we had the (LM) Falcon. So that was indeed, a falcon feather from an Air Force Academy bird. In fact, I had two of them. I was going to try it, first, to see if it worked - because of static charge and all that stuff it might have stuck to my glove. Didn't have time (for the trial run), so we just winged it. And it worked!"]

Vanity thy name is Bara

        Mike Bara didn't create the caption himself, but he liked it enough to make it his FartBook profile pic.

Today he also posted:

"I am truly impressed at the lengths some people will go to hate on me. I must be doing something right."

        No, Mike, you're doing something WRONG. Publishing utter nonsense.

Mike Bara is wrong about kksamurai

         Mike Bara performed yet again on internet radio last friday. This was a 90-min drone-athon on the Inception Network, semi-wittily titled The Stench of Truth. Host/interviewer was Ted Torbich.

        Want to guess how much truth Torbich got from Mike? You're right — none. It was all the usual stuff we've heard before. Glass on the Moon is 2x stronger than steel (no it isn't, that's nonsense). There are unmistakable glass towers at Sinus Medii (no, it's crap on Hoagland's scanner glass). Bla bla bla. Paperclip, spire, robot head. Bla bla bla. The reverse of the truth.

        A goodly slice of time was spent on the non-existent Daedalus Ziggurat. Bara came right out and called Stuart Robbins a liar, in reference to Robbins' rebuttal of Bara's claims. He said that his critics use personal insults in preference to logical argument, when we all know it's Bara who calls the critics douchebags and morons. Females are called too ugly to reproduce, and males are called homosexual.

        None of this is new. One little nugget that was new, was Mike Bara denying that the image showing the ziggurat was originally the work of Terry James, a.k.a. kksamurai. I can refute that very easily. Here's the original:

I got that from Holloworbs. Easy. I believe it dates from around 2000.


Update:
        Using the wayback machine, Terry James' work can be narrowed down to 1999. On May 4th he published a "coming soon" announcement for this book, to be self-published by Radical Science Publications:

        I can't confirm that the book was ever published, or that the ziggurat image was included. Neither does kksamurai specifically admit that he shopped the ziggy. In fact, he writes that someone called Frank made the scan. That would be Frank Gault, who had a large collection of Apollo imagery inherited from his ex-NASA father. Frank was an accomplished artist, and at the time a promoter of the 'Face' on Mars, although he later became a skeptic.

Mike Bara: HD 95086 b "Totally supports the fission model of planetary formation"

        I sent this to Mike today:

I see where you are claiming that the direct imaging of a large planet 56 AU from HD 95086 ^{[note 1]} "Totally supports the fission model of planetary formation."

Your statement is not true. The mere existence of a single massive planet accompanying a star tells us nothing about its formation. It could as well be explained by accretion, fission, or capture. Before astronomers could even begin to make deductions about the formation of such a planet, they would need at least some information about its orbit, and preferably about many other planets in the same system.

As you know, a key part --almost the only coherent part-- of the evidence Van Flandern ^{[note 2]} presented in support of planetary fission was that planets in our own solar system seem to occur in pairs. I remind you of what Van Flandern (1997) wrote:

"The spin-up of the proto-Sun will make it first oblate, then prolate as it approaches an overspin state where centrifugal forces exceed gravitational forces. This shape is called a “Maclaurin spheroid." When the star-disk boundary reaches the overspin condition, the two prolate bulges on opposite sides of the proto-Sun break away and form twin proto-planets in low orbits just above the proto-star surface in the inner disk."

Accordingly, you are not permitted to write that HD 95086 b supports the theory in the absence of a twin companion.

As you probably also know, the fission model is in difficulty when it comes to explaining planetary differentiation, and in further difficulty now that a proto-planetary disc has been observed in the Orion nebula ^{[note 3]}.

I might add that I'm surprised you have not considered yourself permanently disqualified from writing about this topic, since the unforgivable errors on p.34 of The Choice have been publicly exposed and mocked.

Regards,
(expat)

[1] http://www.space.com/21395-alien-planet-direct-image.html

[2] http://metaresearch.org/solar%20system/origins/original-solar-system.asp

[3] http://www.gemini.edu/index.php?q=node/226

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

I copied the text to Mike's manager, Adrienne Loska, which generated this auto-reply:

Unfortunately, Mike has informed me that you are too stupid to converse with, and in fact that the entire Universe is dumber for having you in it. Please take a moment to thin the heard and improve the quality of the gene pool by removing yourself from it.

Evidently, Adrienne is as weak on spelling as she is on cartography.

Mike's e-mail is mikebara33@gmail.com. Adrienne is mike.bara.mgmt@gmail.com.

More on the Wacky-Acky

        I'm going to be accused of doing this Accutron nonsense way too much, but bear with me. This is kind-of interesting.

(Readers new to the whole topic can get a briefing here.)

        Hoagland has actually offered three separate versions of the Accutron trace he recorded at Coral Castle during the Venus transit on 8th June 2004. First, this one, in his original article Von Braun's Secret Part 2:

        Then there was this one, published much later in a document entitled A Most Hyperdimensional Eclipse... and final Venus Transit.

        Then finally there was this one, with a  much extended horizontal scale, showing 5.8 hours from before 3rd contact all the way to 12:15. That was also in the Von Braun article, down at the bitter end.

        Richard Hoagland was queried, some time back, about the fact that those first two didn't seem to be compatible. Astronomer Stuart Robbins also drew attention to this, in his recent podcast. "Maybe he mislabeled something. I’d prefer not to say that he faked his data," said Robbins, generously. Hoagland's response, at the time, was "Same data, different scale." Well IS IT? The horizontal scales -- representing the passage of time left to right -- on both traces are the same, so they're easy enough to compare as long as the image widths are made the same. Both cover a period of 1.4 hours, although not the same 1.4 hours. The vertical scales -- the tuning fork frequency -- are different, so some stretching is required to provide a fair comparison.

        Here are the two traces, with the moment of 3rd contact aligned and the vertical scale forced to be the same.

        ...and here are the two vertical scales side by side, to prove that I did an accurate job of stretching.

        Looking at the results, just one word comes to mind. That word is Busted!