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 LevÃn, 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 LevÃn 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.
