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.

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

Linda Moulton Howe throws her reputation away

Linda told such dreadful lies

It made one gasp and stretch one's eyes... 

(Hilaire Belloc, corrupted)

        Linda Moulton Howe's bio is at pains to emphasize what a serious, legitimate journalist she is—how her work has been recognized and awarded internationally, bla bla bla...

Get your filthy hand off her tits Erich

        So how come she has now thrown that rep into the trash bin by coming out with a three-parter that is balderdash, poppycock, and codswallop from start to finish? I suppose the answer has to be that, just like Robert Morningstar, Richard Hoagland, and other targets of this blog, she likes to cultivate the image of herself as someone in possession of arcane knowledge that the mainstream dare not print or speak of.

        Howe recently conducted a long interview with someone calling himself Jon Lavine, and claiming to have been an astronaut on at least one of the Apollo 18-20 missions, that  were not canceled as we all believe but launched in secret, perhaps from Vandenburg AFB, and actually landed on the Moon. There they were met by an alien who quoth "We'd like you to leave. We don't want you on the moon.” The mainstream does not print or speak of this BECAUSE IT'S NOT FUCKING TRUE.

       This so-called "serious, legitimate journalist" made it all the worse by a) repeating the story for two solid and nauseating hours on Coast to Coast AM last week, and b) monetizing this pile of steaming merde by only allowing those who pay her $55/year to see it. How can anyone calling themselves a journalist do so little research that they actually believe this?

A few problems with this story
       Just for a start, those missions could not have been launched from anywhere without the rockets and spacecraft they would have needed. As a matter of fact, quite a lot of the hardware for 18/19/20 was actually manufactured, but we know what became of it. For example, the second stage of the launcher intended for A18 became Skylab. Various parts of surplus rocketry are on display as a complete Saturn V stack, at the Cape. The CSM for Apollo 18 was used for the Apollo-Soyuz linkup. The LM for Apollo 18 was never quite finished and was used in the mini-series From the Earth to the Moon. The full story of the unused hardware is here.

        Launches from Vandenburg are generally southwards, into polar or near-polar orbits. They cannot be eastward for safety reasons, and so cannot benefit from the free eastward velocity of the Earth's rotation. The site is therefore very unsuitable for Moon launches. And then, there are no facilities at Vandenburg for stacking and launching a Saturn V rocket, and never have been.

        Unbelievably, LMH swallowed "Jon Lavine"'s story even to the point of re-telling the totally false story of Apollo 20 visiting a crashed spaceship on the far side of the Moon, and retrieving a beautiful-ish woman who was one of its pilots. God save us, that 3 mile long "crashed spaceship" is the lunar feature this blog has shown many times already. Here it is once again, first on Apollo 15's pan camera...

...then as seen by LRO's narrow-angle cameras at 8m/px.

        Note, once again, that the feature (actually a trench about 7km long) is cratered to the same density as its surroundings.

Trekker proves it's a depression not an object

Latest high-def view from Chinese orbiter, provided by One Big Monkey

        This baby is centered at 117.68°E, 18.66°S, well round the back side, out of radio contact with Mother Earth. It's unthinkable that NASA would land at a place from which they couldn't get any data or voice. Exploration of the back side will have to wait until we've established a data relay satellite in lunar orbit (as the Chinese plan to do very soon).
Update: They've done it! Chang'e 4 landed in Von Kármán crater on 2 Januaty 2019. Congratulations.

         The producers of Coast to Coast AM have to share some blame for foisting this caca on their audience of millions, but it's LMH herself I want to excoriate. I'm disgusted, actually...

End-of-year acrostic

        After the hurly-burly of six serious posts in November, relax now with the first annual "Emoluments" acrostic puzzle. Click here, print it, and go find a sharp pencil and a functioning eraser. No prizes. Solution will be posted on 1/1/19.

INSTRUCTIONS
An acrostic comes in two parts—a diagram and a word list. The cells in the diagram are numbered sequentially from 1 to (in this case) 206, reading left-to-right line by line just like a book. When solved, the diagram and the word list will contain exactly the same set of 206 letters, but arranged differently.

The diagram will contain a quote from a certain book, with black cells delineating the words. The first letters of the words in the word list, reading top-to-bottom, will spell out the author and title of the book quoted.

TIPS
Write in what words you can from the clues given. Transfer each letter into the diagram, using the number under each letter as the cell number. Make a few guesses, such as that plural words end in S (usually), and single-letter words are either A or I (again, usually). After a while, you should start to guess at words in the diagram. Complete these words and transfer the new letters backwards into the word list, using the letter in each cell as a guide to the word they belong to.

Success at acrostics depends on inspired guesswork, and liberal use of the eraser. Have fun.

In case of problems linking to dropbox, here's the link on its own:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9znevp8qmax7kqh/blogacrostic.pdf?dl=0

Mike Bara tweaks the color of Mars

        The question of the authentic color of the Martian sky raised its ugly head once more as soon as the first image from the InSight lander was available two days ago. I argued a bit with a blog commenter just yesterday on that very question. Adrian asserted that "They [nasa] actually for years used filters in order to create the illusion that on Mars everything looks a bit red/orange," and I denied it, citing the page made by space artist Don Davis on the question. Don makes the point that the color of a scene is highly dependent on the color of the light that is illuminating it. He shows this photo-pair from a Viking lander:

        On the right is the best rendering of the scene actually on Mars. On the left is the scene as it would look if lit by a sunlit sky on Earth. Don is making the point that the sunlight on Mars is filtered by the rust-colored dust that's always in the atmosphere of Mars.

        The accusation that NASA/JPL deliberately reddens Martian skies derives, I believe, from the very first image from Viking Lander 1 that included the sky. What that image did NOT include was the color reference chart, so the color graders at JPL had to guess. The first-released version had a creamy sky, as I recall. Later, when the color chart was included in some frames, they went back and regraded that first image, and issued a corrected version that was noticeably redder.

        In his book "Postcards from Mars," Jim Bell explains all this, explains that the color of Martian skies varies according to how much dust is up there, and settles on "butterscotch" as the color of a "normal" Martian sky when just an average amount of dust is in the atmosphere.

See--NASA is lying!!!!
        NASA haters love to show this image, from a press conference at JPL on 10 January 2004. That day, the brand new rover was Spirit, and a frame from Spirit's pancam (designed by Jim Bell, by the way) was back-projected behind the speaker panel.

         The haters say this absolutely proves the point. But, you see, it doesn't. The fact that there are human faces in front of this frame makes any discussion of color balance on the original useless. The scene was lit by artificial light—most likely fluorescent, that casts a greenish spectrum on everything—and the whole composite picture was color-balanced to make the flesh tones look natural. Basically, this photo may be the only example of a red herring that is actually blue.

        Now to the interesting part. Mike Bara, in his latest "Tell the Truth Wednesday" vlog, makes exactly the same mistake. He shows this version of the first frame from InSight:

Then he shows us this:

Ta-DAAAAA!!!! SEE, NASA IS LYING!!!!!! BLUE SKY!!!!!!!!!!

        .....but once again, there is human flesh in the foreground, just as there was at the Spirit press conference. This cannot be the truest representation of the Martian sky, for that reason.

Forcing the whites
        Bara went on to even more dishonesty and misunderstanding. He shows us this InSight frame, as an example of what he says is NASA flim-flammery.

        Bara then gets out his favorite image editing software—Microsoft Office Paint, for Gods's sake—and proceeds to show us how he goes about "correcting" JPL's deceptions. He says that Instrument Deployment Arm, over on the right, should be white. The fact that it doesn't appear to be white is proof, to him, that this image is all wrong. So he uses the white balance feature of MS Paint to click on the arm and damn well force it to go white. Behold, the sky goes white too!!

        Well, yes, of course it does. But it's this result that's deceptive, not the one Bara showed before he corrupted it with his little MS Paint click-me thingy. He simply doesn't understand the point that Don Davis explained so well—the subjective color of objects is highly influenced by the color of the light that is illuminating them.

         It seems obvious to me that the objective of planetary color graders should be to show us, as close as possible, what the scene would look like if we were actually standing there looking at it. And that inevitably means taking into account the color of the ambient light. Mike Bara's white sky is just a ridiculous joke.

        Quite apart from all this photographic logic, would somebody please tell me what possible motive NASA/JPL would have for pushing the Martian sky red-wards more than is justified?

Update 20 December: Chris Lawrence reports:
        Bara returned to this topic in his "Tell the Truth Wednesday" vlog yesterday. At 15:50, after spending a few minutes calling NASA liars, he popped up an image of Mars. He says:

15:50 "By the way this is the only Hubble image of Mars ever taken, and as you can see from the limb around the planet the sky quite clearly... this is the airglow limb... is blue and not red, in fact the red is grossly exagerrated in this image, and although Mars is kinda red it's not really really super red, so I think we can kinda pretty much settle on that."

        The image in question is this one taken by Hubble when Mars was near Opposition in May 2016. Far from being the only image ever taken it's one of many images of Mars taken by Hubble going back to 1991, a year after Hubble launched.

        If you click "Fast Facts" on the Mars image you can see details about its construction. It's a colour-composite:

This image is a composite of separate exposures acquired by the WFC3/UVIS instrument. Several filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter. In this case, the assigned colors are:

- Purple: F275W (275nm)
- Blue: F410M (410nm)
- Green: F502N (502nm)
- Red: F673N (673nm)

        This page explains what you're seeing in these images. Mars' atmosphere does scatter blue light and this gives the blue limb in the composite. Stuart Robbins covered this exact topic in his Exposing Pseudo Astronomy Podcast #113 in June 2014.

Perhaps Bara can move his vlog to the weekend and rebrand it "Making Shit Up Saturday".

Sean David Morton takes his best shot

Which is the odd man out?

• Lloret de Mar
• Tossa de Mar
• Estoril
• Estoppel
• L'Estartit
• Benidorm
• Cambrils

The answer is Estoppel—all the others are Iberian beach resorts.

         Estoppel is the legal doctrine holding that a respondent in court cannot make a proclamation or statement that conflicts with a statement he/she made earlier in the same case. The doctrine extends to the court itself—in other words, a judge may not contradict himself or herself in court.

        Sean David Morton is using the doctrine of judicial estoppel as the cornerstone of his appeal against his conviction, in September 2017, on 28 counts of fraud. Morton, who has claimed to be "a legal scholar," produced an 18-page affidavit from his prison cell (and according to him, got so stressed in the process that he had a heart attack.)

        I make no claim to legal scholarship, in fact my only contact with the law was an arraignment on a charge of "drunk and disorderly" fifty years ago, after I had barked at a police dog in Kentish Town, London. But, reading Morton's tortured prose, I can't see he has the ghost of a chance with this. Stripped down to essentials, his claim is that the court trying his case made a statement that was in conflict with a statement made by a different court in a different case. I don't think that works as judicial estoppel, but I may be corrected.

        The prior case was against a man called Gordon Hall, who was apparently the original theorist of scamming investors out of $millions. Morton testifies that he paid Hall $6,000 for that information. He now says, in the affidavit, that he is as much a victim of Hall as are the investors whose savings he stole, and that accusing him of fraud is in conflict with the earlier accusation of fraud against Hall. He writes:

"Sean testified he felt he was defrauded by Hall. If Sean is considered culpable and not defrauded in this case then Hall's ... conviction in the other case is invalid because the clients are not defrauded by Hall like the government and judges agreed. This case is barred by the doctrine of absurdity, issue preclusion and judicial or equitable estoppel. Sean contends that this manipulation of the evidence deprived him of due process and rendered his trial fundamentally unfair." (Motion for summary disposition, 21 November 2018, pp. 3-4)

        It stands to reason that there's no explicit or implicit conflict in stating that both Hall and Morton are guilty. We may not have to wait too long for the appeals court to tell Morton "Get back to your jail cell, STFU, and serve out your time" (or words very much to that effect).

Insight on Mars

        Congratulations to the crack teams at JPL. InSight landed dead on time in Elysium Planitia and appears healthy so far. It's the first Mars lander equipped to monitor heat flow from the planet's interior.

        I wonder what Maurice Cotterell thinks about it. He's the crackpot who maintains that Earth-based engineers and scientists can't design a successful Mars landing sequence because they don't understand the influence of centrifugal force. He says he can prove it, but when I looked at his data, guess what? It was outrageously faked.

Update: What we have here is a failure of communication
        Meanwhile, over at Keith Laney's Hidden Mission Forum, the rednecks were predictably peddling their sourest of sour grapes. After congratulating JPL for a brilliant landing, "Vianova" set finger to keyboard and produced this piece of trash text:

"From there the research scientists that have cornered the funding, fail the NASA Good Guys and the public, with bullshit science research,
ie,
they aren't looking for -- Current Life -- they are looking only for ancient indicators of life.Those scientists, are NASA UNDERWORLD vampires, they monopolize the funding into nonsense science, geared only to facilitate Planetary Protection Guidelines."

        Vianova clearly didn't think it was worth his time to actually read about the science objectives of InSight. If he had—for example, by reading the press kit (see p.40), he would have understood (if that thing between his ears is capable of understanding) that the science objectives of this mission are

1. To understand the formation and evolution of terrestrial planets through investigation of the interior structure and processes of Mars.
2. To determine the present levels of tectonic activity and meteorite-impact activity on Mars.

This mission is not intended or equipped to look for life, either contemporary or ancient.

More on the craziness of Mike Bara

        Well, this is interesting. Following on from my post of 2nd November, it now turns out that the timeline given by Spaceflight Now may have been wrong on a technical point, but not in the way Mike Bara thinks.

Recap: The issue is that a small parachute was seen floating back to the ocean within a minute of the break-up of Space Shuttle Challenger. What was that parachute carrying? Bara says it was the entire crew cabin; that the crew survived and are now living new lives.

        In my 2nd November piece, I showed this timeline from Spaceflight Now, as refutation of Bara's theory.

        Somebody obviously showed Bara that timeline, because he read it out during yesterday's "Tell The Truth Wednesday" vlog. At 15:34 Bara continued:

"They're saying then that there's a separate system where both the cap and the SRB had a... had a drogue parachute. I question that, because I don't remember that ever being in the design. I'll have to go back and look at the design of the Space Shuttle, um.. Challenger.. the Shuttle SRBs, find out if that was the case. I kind-of don't think that was the case. Logically it doesn't make a lot of sense, because, you  know, the cap is much smaller—the SRBs land in the ocean, and are recovered. They're much easier to find... I don't know how you find... The SRB caps were only about...Oh, six feet across, maybe,  no more than that. Maybe ten feet, I'll have to look that up again, but they weren't very big, and, y'know, finding a cap, a metal cap or something like that, they'd be real cheap and probably easy to replace. Actually it would really surprise me if there was a recovery system for them."

Frustum
        I decided to dig a little deeper, and went looking for a technical paper on SRB design. What I found was a NASA technical news reference, including this nice exploded view of the SRB components.

        Immediately below the nose cap is a section called the frustum (that's just the word for a truncated cone in solid geometry). The frustum contains instrumentation in addition to all the gubbins required to pull the pilot 'chute, the drogue 'chute, and finally the main parachutes, out of their stowed configuration. Immediately below the frustum is a ring containing the Frustum Location Aids. The text of this technical paper, edited, with emphasis added, reads as follows:

"After burnout, the forward assembly initiates the release of the nose cap and frustum and turns on the recovery aids. ... Location aids are provided for each SRB, frustum/ drogue chutes and main parachutes. These include a transmitter, antenna, strobe/ converter, battery and salt water switch electronics. The location aids are designed for a minimum operating life of 72 hours and when refurbished are considered usable up to 20 times. ...The SRB nose caps and nozzle extensions are not recovered. The recovery crew retrieves the SRBs, frustum/ drogue chutes, and main parachutes."

        So there you have it. The baby parachute was carrying, not the nose cone but the frustum. Bara was right on one point—that the nose caps were not worth recovering. But there's the answer to his question "I don't know how you find [something like that]." By the way, the diameter of the SRBs was 12.17 feet (3.7m.)

Bottom line—it wasn't the crew cabin. The crew all died.

Bara was wrong, but was Spaceflight Now also wrong?
        Maybe, maybe not. That's certainly the implication of that paragraph at T+76.437. But read it again. It says that the nose cap separates and the drogue parachute deploys, which is correct. Then it says "A lone parachute seen emerging from the plume of a SRB." You immediately assume it's the nose cap under that 'chute. But the timeline doesn't actually say that. I think Spaceflight Now is off the hook. Bara is still very much on it.

Update 20 November:
        Just to ram home the point, here's a photo of the actual frustum of STS-51L, after recovery. And here's the undamaged frustum from STS-87, on its way to refurb/re-use.