Ken Johnston makes a promise he can't keep

        A whole bunch of people are going to be disappointed at 1:30 pm on 22nd March, as they assemble for the following presentation at the Human Origins Conference in Rio Rancho, NM.

        I already know what Ken's going to show under the pretence that he's revealing alien bases. It'll be photo artifacts like this:

         The filespec of that image is Dr Ken Johnston Apollo Archive Collection_Page_487.jpg^{note 1} Bear in mind that this image was scanned by Ken's biographer Bret Sheppard from a reversal frame—a projector slide, in other words. Such scans are notoriously subject to reflections. Here's a correctly-scanned version of AS15-88-11967 for comparison:^{note 2}

photo: NASA

        Bear in mind, also, that Johnston himself is a bit of a skeptic about this rubbish. Interviewed by Kerry Cassidy in January 2016, Ken had this comment:

(1:27:49) "A lot of these anomalies that people will see -- I don't necessarily see them, 'cause I'm pretty much a straightforward engineer .. We know that if we stare at the wall long enough we can make all kinds of pictures."

        I guess Ken has learnt that you don't get invited to woo-woo conferences by expressing opinions like that, so he's taken the pragmatic line.

        He's gone so far as to associate himself with really woo-woo associations. Ascension Age (a.k.a. Allied Command Organisation Invisible College) is a coterie of people fantasizing about space colonies. Their web site proclaims:

"Commander Ken Johnston Sr. is one of our Main Directors on Planet Earth for educational Communication and recruitment for intergalactic contact."

        If ever Ken was "a straightforward engineer," he sure isn't one any more.

Nefertiti and a parrot on Mars
        Human Origins conference attenders are in for even more disillusion the following day, when George Haas presents The Mars Codex. George is the dreamer who sees patterns on Mars. When the patterns aren't clear anough to convince anyone, he simply draws things in.

photos: Cydonia Institute

Thanks to James Oberg for monitoring

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[1] A whole collection of this nonsense can be found here.

[2] When I blogged about this image in 2016, "Trekker" identified the terrain as this area in the Mare Fecunditatis.

Now you see it, now you don't

        Well, actually, now you don't see it, now you still don't. I'm referring to Nibiru, or Tyche, Planet X or Planet Nine. A trans-Neptunian object in a 15,000-year orbit, much loved by pseudo-astronomers including Messrs. Hoagland & Bara. These two half-educated speculators wrote about it in their 2007 book Dark Mission (NOT a NYT best-seller despite its authors' frequent claims). The speculation was, actually, either one massive planet in a posigrade orbit, or two smaller ones going retrograde (p.115, 2nd edn.). It was based on a diagram plotting specific luminosity (W/kg) vs. specific angular momentum (sq cm/sec) that hoagland took from a book called The New Solar System then slapped his own copyright on it. The figures the diagram uses include, in each case, the named body plus anything in orbit around it.

        According to him, the solar system as a whole has less angular momentum than it should, and Planet X (or Planets -y and -z) would bring it into line. I don't think either Hoagland or Bara understand what specific angular momentum means (it means angular momentum per unit mass, so to arrive at the true angular momentum of the solar system, you'd need to multiply that number for 'Sun' in the diagram—4 x 10²⁰ approx—by the mass of the whole kit and caboodle).

        When, in January 2016, Batygin & Brown of CalTech lent their support to Planet X on the basis of the orbital anomalies of six Kuiper Belt objects, Mike Bara did the Toldya dance on his blog. But he got totally confused between Planet X and Nemesis, a hypothetical brown dwarf companion of the Sun that has nothing to do with the Kuiper Belt. Stuart "astroguy" Robbins expressed more than a modicum of skepticism about the announcement from CalTech.

An icy disc
        This week Sefilian and Touma of Cambridge University and the American University of Beirut have come up with a model that explains the orbital anomalies without requiring a massive trans-Neptunian object (TNO).^{note 1}

 "We wanted to see whether there could be another, less dramatic and perhaps more natural, cause for the unusual orbits we see in some TNOs. We thought, rather than allowing for a ninth planet, and then worry about its formation and unusual orbit, why not simply account for the gravity of small objects constituting a disc beyond the orbit of Neptune and see what it does for us?
"If you remove planet nine from the model and instead allow for lots of small objects scattered across a wide area, collective attractions between those objects could just as easily account for the eccentric orbits we see in some TNOs." --Antranik Sefilian

        The hypothesised icy disc probably has a mass equivalent to ten Earths—not very much^{note 2}, but Sefilian and Touma say it's enough. They aren't claiming to have actually observed such a disc, just to have worked out the physical implications assuming it exists. It's important to understand that nobody claims to have actually observed Planet X, or Nibiru, either. Now you don't see it, now you still don't.

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[1] Antranik A. Sefilian, Jihad R. Touma. Shepherding in a Self-Gravitating Disk of Trans-Neptunian Objects. Astronomical Journal, 2019

[2] Neptune is 17 Earths, Jupiter 318

Bara banned!

I wonder if that's the real reason....

Update:

Mike Bara, unorthoDOX

     Mike Bara really does love the word imbecile. In the world of twitter, anyone who disses his fave sports teams gets that epithet, and also anyone who thinks it's tacky to turn an image of a landslide on the Moon upside down and label it as a "crystal city". Actually, for the latter, he sometimes favors  "lick my balls, asshole". He does have a way with words, although it's not a way I favor personally.

        Of course he didn't really hold up that sign during his recent Tell The Truth Wednesday vlog—that's just an internet fake, I can't think where it came from. What he did hold up was an envelope containing two free tix to Alien Snowfest, a prize he was offering to one of his fans. The interesting part is that the lucky prizewinner got to see her name and full street address plastered across YouTube thanks to Bara. The address was entirely readable.

Congratulations to the China National Space Agency

        Chang'e 4 touched down on the floor of Von Kármán crater at 02:26 GMT today. This is the first image from the lander:

photo: CNSA

        There is no direct communication between Earth and Chang'e 4. Data is relayed via a satellite called Queqiao (trans: Magpie bridge) at the L2 libration point, 64,000 km beyond the Moon. Queqiao was pre-positioned in May last year. I don't know whether the relay has spare channels that might be available to other nations' far side landers, if and when they arrive.

        Von Kármán is an enormous crater, whose Eastern edge is right on the 180° longitude. The cross marks the exact landing point, 45.471° S 177.606° E.

        Here's where it is in relation to the whole far side. The very large dark area at 26.5° N, 148° E is the Mare Moscoviense, one of the very few maria on this side of the Moon. Tsiolkovsky, the crater that Ken Johnston says contains an alien base, is also notably dark, at 20.4° S, 129.1° E (almost due NW from Von Kármán). The so-called "crashed spaceship" visited by the non-existent Apollo 20 mission is at 18.66° S, 117.68° E; NW again from Tsiolkovsky and well over toward the near side.

ref: Space.com

Trivia: The crater is named for Theodore Von Kármán (born Kármán Tódor in Budapest), a mathematician and aeronautical engineer who was one of the founders of JPL. The public auditorium at JPL is also named for him.

Update 4 January:

photo: CNSA

        This is how far the Yutu rover has progressed. It will now go into sleep mode for six days to assure survival during the hottest part of the lunar day.

Update 11 January:

The real-time descent and landing video is now available.

Solution to the year-end acrostic

"Following the political tumult and excitement of the first successful lunar landings, the White House and NASA dramatically changed the direction of the entire space program under the excuse of a lack of public interest and insufficient funding."
--Richard Hoagland, Dark Mission

A. Ruffians
B. Ice-T
C. Cupped
D. Hellhole
E. Acceded
F. Ratline
G. Duffle
H. Hexadecimal
I. Oberg
J. Accutron
K. George Noory
L. Lustful
M. Aching
N. Nuffield
O. Diffidence
P. Dwelt
Q. Atticum
R. Rosh Hashannah
S. Kitten paws
T. Morningstar
U. Institute
V. Space station
W. Staunch
X. Illuminati
Y. Often
Z.  Netsex

For reference, the acrostic is here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9znevp8qmax7kqh/blogacrostic.pdf?dl=0

Linda Moulton Howe capitulates

"I am preparing a fact check update for Earthfiles and my December 27-28, 2018, Coast to Coast AM radio broadcast with the finding that the original November 29, 2018, three-part tale by 71-year-old Jon Lavine ... appears to be mostly dishonest for reasons unknown. In the face of contradictory facts, Lavine keeps insisting his secret astronaut story is real, even though many of his assertions don't hold up credibly under research scrutiny that will be laid out in my upcoming fact check updates."

        That climb-down appeared before Christmas on LMH's earthfiles website. Always heart-warming to see a pseudo-scientist admit error—it doesn't happen nearly often enough, in my NSHO. My earlier bloggery pouring scorn on Linda's three-part cock-and-bull story about secret extended Apollo missions and aliens on the Moon was very popular, having 650 page views so far. I thought maybe my own efforts were partly responsible for the back-pedalling over at earthfiles, but in the same announcement LMH credits five specific information sources, and this blog isn't one of them.

        I also e-mailed LMH pouring a little more scorn in her direction. She wrote "My goal is always the pressure of fact" (LOL) and she cited this disclaimer:

"Real X-Files do not always have hard proof, but the firsthand testimonies are presented as valuable to consider in the challenge of determining facts and truth in subjects that American and other governments have hidden behind policies of lies and denials in the interest of national security."

        I interpret that as "CAUTION: This website contains unverified, un-investigated bullshit".

        Linda calls herself an "investigative reporter". It seems to me that she cannot possibly have done even the minimum investigation of Jon Lavine's story before swallowing it and promoting it both on earthfiles and on Coast-to-Coast AM. She would have saved herself this professional embarrassment if she'd merely asked the following questions:

• Where did the rockets and spacecraft for three Apollo missions come from?
• Where were they launched?
• Who were the flight controllers? (All the Apollo controllers retired or were re-assigned after Apollo 17. Apollo 20 was cancelled in January 1970. Apollo 18 and 19 were cancelled in September 1970)
• Is it reasonable to propose that the "secret Apollo 20" landed in a spot that NASA had no hope of communicating with?
• Is the so-called "crashed spaceship" actually a crashed spaceship, or a natural depression?

        Returning to Coast-to-Coast AM for her monthly stint on 27 December, LMH trotted out a whole bunch of hearsay about how the CIA and MK-Ultra have perfected the techniques of mind control, memory-wiping and memory substitution. In an almost-apology for the earlier story, her strong suggestion was that Jon Lavine had been the victim of false memory implantation. I think that's supposed to be excusing Lavine, along the lines of "He wasn't bullshitting me, he really believes he flew that mission". All I have to offer on that is more scorn.

Update 31 December:
        Linda's been busy. She has now published a long web page titled Trying to Separate Facts from Fiction in Strange Jon Lavine Tale. Later: ooops, she deleted it! Later still: oops, she put it back.  The piece is very disjointed, and takes off into irrelevant backwaters such as Project Horizon (which was cancelled before ever flying). To me, it looks like a first draft of something that will be rewritten and drastically trimmed at some later time.

        Linda admits that the curriculum vitae Lavine gave her was fraudulent. She admits that a photograph he gave her, purporting to be him preparing for the Apollo 20 launch in 1976, was in fact of NASA astronaut Katherine Sullivan. She admits that a Saturn V could not have launched from Vandenburg.  However, none of that seems to be enough for this "investigative reporter" to declare Lavine a liar, apologize for her gullibility, and put the story to bed. She rambles on about MKULTRA memory-substitution experiments, clearly continuing to suggest that Lavine may be a victim instead of a fraud. Is anybody going to believe this poppycock?

Happy New Year everyone...

Update 13 January, that fake photo that fooled LMH

        Here's the photo Linda embedded in her later essay, writing that it was Lavine's evidence that he really did meet an alien on the Moon:

Now here's the Sci-Fi film "AREA 51". Linda, go to your room.

Mike Bara in "Getting something right" shocker

        The last time this blog admitted that Mike Bara was right about something was back in July 2017, when he roundly debunked Jay Weidner's "Nazca mummy" hoax. Well, what do you know? He was right again in last night's Tell the truth Wednesday vlog—or at least, in one part of it.

00:58 "If you believe that airplanes didn't hit the buildings on 9/11, or that building number 1, I think it was, didn't fall on building number 7 and damage it, I can't help you. If you think a drone or a missile hit the pentagon, and all the people were actually taken off of the airplanes to some secret base somewhere, and the planes were replaced with different airplanes— I can't help you. This is not the place for me. Because that's all bullshit, OK? What happened on 9/11 was that four jetliners were hijacked by Muslim terrorists and they were flown into buildings. The twin towers, the Pentagon, and the fourth one crashed in Pennsylvania. It was shot down^{note 1} and crashed—that's the truth. And there's no mystery about what happened, it's all simply a matter of math, physics and structural dynamics, and gravity. It really is. So... I looked at all the details of this, to explain it to you guys, and I have. But [...] it's the only one that makes sense. There are some people out there doing some interviews saying things like "I was told by insiders, bla-bla-bla that the planes were hijacked and landed in a secret airfield, and all the people were taken off, and now they're working as slaves in underground bases, and empty planes were replaced and flown into the buildings." That's bullshit. First of all it's not only bullshit, but it's Sean David Morton's information from about 2012. And the people that are out there espousing it now... I'm not going to name any names, got it from Sean David Morton —they simply stole his ideas. Which by the way were completely fucking wrong in the first place. So it's just really frustrating to me to have to deal with this stuff. The important thing to remember about 9/11 is that it does not require bombs, missiles, [...], particle beams...none of that is required for there to be a conspiracy about 9/11. I'm very convinced it was a conspiracy, a financial based conspiracy, but the conspiracy was to use Arab terrorists to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings. That was the conspiracy!"

        That took us to about 03:30 in a one-hour performance. Later, he was right again in recommending that his followers "take with a grain of salt" the claims of "Jon Lavine" in relation to the so-called secret later Apollo missions. In that case he didn't go far enough, in my view.

        Well, obviously he couldn't keep on being right for a whole hour. He went off into political material for about ten minutes, then returned to "science" by reiterating a fairy-story first invented by Richard Hoagland, according to which The first Chinese Moon lander confirmed that the Moon was covered in vast glass domes. Here's the image:

        Hoagland arrived at this travesty by using the EQUALIZE tool in Photoshop. Using EQUALIZE when more than half of the image is expected to be RGB 0,0,0 is not likely to lead to anything authentic or true. In this case it simply revealed random CCD noise. I covered this four years ago. Naturally, last night Bara did not credit Hoagland as the creator...er, I should say corrupter, of this image. Neither did he give the true technical history of the image; he presented it as though it was exactly what the Chinese Space Agency released.

        I nearly fell off my chair when Bara pointed to the shazz in the sky exclaiming "see how geometrical it is!" None of the fans commenting in real time called bullshit, what a surprise.

Further reading
        Stuart Robbins did a far more thorough job of explaining why this image is invalid, back in May 2014.

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[1] Well, it would be too much to expect him to be completely right, wouldn't it?