Oh, and the part where the authors of Dark Mission promised to show us photographs and an in-depth analysis of certain alien artefacts retrieved by Apollo astronauts as final proof of the grand NASA conspiracy? Yeah, well, it's not it the book.
Typical...
A few years ago, in part two of this little review, I mentioned that there was one particular bit of H.O.G.W.A.S.H. that I would address in some detail as we got closer to the subject. Unfortunately I was diverted by some badly rendered photographs with inaccurate documentation and, as you know, got sidetracked. One of the reasons this term wasn't more fully addressed earlier on has more to do with the fact that it wasn't as irritatingly ubiquitous in Dark Mission as it was in Monuments of Mars, or in other writings from the Enterprise Mission. So here is the promised look at the other Hoaglandism which, in the immortal words of Frank Burns, gripes my cookies.
H.O.G.W.A.S.H. version: Circumscribed Tetrahedral Geometry.
Oh. My. God. I hate this phrase. I hate it all over the place. It pisses me off more than 'stunning' or 'striking' or 'highly' or 'arcology', or just about any other Hoagland adjectival insipidity or catch-phrase with the possible exception of 'rectilinear.' It's another one of those over-worked, over-used, rarely (if ever) defined terms which just demands that you simply bow down an accept that Hoagland is better than you because where an ignorant and worthless fop such as yourself would dare to suggest 'You mean a triangle inside of a circle?' the Master Mind of Mars would scoff at your stunted and minuscule vocabulary and clearly inept elocution.
What it means:
At the risk of sounding like an ignorant and worthless fop with a stunted and minuscule vocabulary and clearly inept elocution, this is best described as 'A triangle inside of a circle.' Really. That's it. At its most fundamental level, that is what it means: a triangle inside of a circle. Obviously it lacks the epic scale and grandiloquent punch of Circumscribed Tetrahedral Geometry, but that is the core definition.
In the interest of fairness and completeness, it should be noted that the triangle in question is of course an equilateral triangle.
Advancing outwards from the core idea to better understand the overall concept of the circumscription of (or circle going round) the equilateral triangle, it helps to have a little knowledge of basic geometry. Perhaps you will recall this from a maths or science class in your early school years. I know I don't. I remember Theresa Webster from my science class. And I remember very little else other than nearly not passing because of certain firmly in place obstacles subverting the learning process and making it very hard.
Anyway, the triangle, like the circle, is a two dimensional form. Unlike the circle, however, the triangle, when represented as a three-dimensional form, is known as a polyhedron or tetrahedron. It is one of the Platonic Solids. If you do not remember your Platonic Solids, here is a quick refresher which you mind find helpful:
The tetrahedron is, as you can see, shaped somewhat like a pyramid with three of its four sides meeting in points called 'vertices.'
A circle, conversely, is represented in three dimensional space as a sphere, which still quite remarkably resembles a circle. When a tetrahedron is placed inside of the sphere (for whatever peculiar reason one might have for doing such a thing) with one of the vertices touching a point inside the sphere (for example a point we might call 'south') the remaining vertices generally tend to point to regions of the sphere which reside at approximately 19.5 degrees above the equator of the sphere.
Like this:
Isn't that fun?
Undoubtedly the next question is 'So what?' and it is a question I often share. In effort to answer that query one must step far out of the mundane world of boring old Euclidean Geometry and, according to Richard C Hoagland, founder of The Enterprise Mission, recipient of an Angstrom Medal, former science advisor to CBS News and Walter Cronkite, author of The Monuments of Mars, co-creator of the Pioneer Plaque, originator of the Europa Proposal, and principal investigator of The Enterprise Mission, into the 'lost work' of James Clerk Maxwell and the somewhat fascinating realm of Hyperdimensional Physics.
A discussion and dissection of this particular 'model' is simply well past the parameters of both this blog and my attention span, especially since it was only my point to explain the basic meaning of Circumscribed Tetrahedral Geometry. As I've said, I really only remember a couple of pertinent points from science class and, the fact is, the related subject of Hyperdimensional Physics-- though interesting --starts to become deeply technical and is often bogged down with arcane arithmetical equations of sines and cosines and loads of squiggly bits which rapidly cease to have meaning to me.
Suffice to say that the 19.5 position (either North or South of the equator) seems to have a fair number of curiosities attached to it-- in that it is the relative position of Olympus Mons on Mars, the Red Spot on Jupiter, the Dark Spot on Neptune, Mauna Kea (Hawaii) here on Earth --and it is definitely worth reading about at your leisure.
But not here.
The fundamental issue I have with the term Circumscribed Tetrahedral Geometry is the same issue I have with every other Hoaglandism-- it is used as a verbal or written Jedi Mind Trick to inflate a point of discussion into an unnecessarily obscure and mythic domain where Hoagland is The Great and Powerful and we are, for want of a better term, 'some insects called the human race' who need not-- and dare not --be allowed a quick glimpse behind the curtain. To deign to define the idiom is to erase its mystical nature, to break the magick spell of a potent talisman, and stoop to the unwanted level of those of us 'crawling on the planet's face.'
The second issue I have with discussions of Circumscribed Tetrahedral Geometry is that the application of it as a useful methodology or its function as a tool for deciphering impenetrable mathematical relationships is almost never divulged: How is it used? What does it mean exactly? How does it relate? What is the significance of it?
We are left virtually in the dark about how this model predicts or resolves anything, but are reliably informed that it is clearly referenced in not only the complex internal geometry of scattered structures on the Cydonia mesa, but throughout the vastness of the cosmos.
There is a point in Bram Stoker's Dracula when the eponymous Count states, 'There is reason that all things are as they are, and did you see with my eyes and know with my knowledge, you would perhaps better understand.'
I believe that if Hoagland were writing that quote it would be followed by, 'But you don't. Ha ha. Sucks to be you!'
In the final pages of Dark Mission, after having slogged our way through a dozen chapters that were almost somehow related to the subject and title of the book a little bit, we arrive, at last, at the Epilogue, rather unusually subtitled 'Richard C Hoagland', wherein Richard C Hoagland, founder of The Enterprise Mission, recipient of an Angstrom Medal, former science advisor to CBS News and Walter Cronkite, author of The Monuments of Mars, co-creator of the 'Pioneer Plaque,' originator of the 'Europa Proposal,' and principal investigator of The Enterprise Mission explains to us that he understands that the big picture he has illustrated in the preceding 508 pages of manuscript is imperfect.
This is much like saying hurricane Katrina was a spot of bad weather.
Part of the reason for the inadequate nature of the material, he confides, is that many of the astronauts involved in this intricate web of intrigue have had 'their own memories deliberately altered after seeing first-hand the wonders we have laid out here.'
Strange. I wish I could wipe this ponderous load of shit from my memory as well. Lucky astronauts...
The other blame goes to the fact that the investigation for this book, such as is it, conducted by The Enterprise Mission (et al) 'lacks the force of law' and does not offer the authors legal authority to fully deduce the truth. Of course, how this also stops them doing proper research as well is not at all addressed.
Once he's done pointing fingers at everyone but himself for The Enterprise Mission's inability to conduct proper research or to provide adequate documentation or to helpfully explain the methodology so that others can easily replicate the 'striking' discoveries (as we are so often told we can), Hoagland explains that, as work on Dark Mission was coming to a close, the focus of Enterprise began shifting to
...several major "creeping breakthroughs" in our quiet, ten-year investigation of the moon
the first of which was the reported 2006 disappearance of the original Apollo 11 tapes. How, exactly, this incident constitutes a breakthrough-- 'creeping' or otherwise --is, of course, not fully addressed. In classic Hoagland fashion the subject is introduced, spelt out over some 22 additional paragraphs in excruciating detail, and summarily dropped with the vague notion that his argument has somehow been solidified.
I felt like Steve Martin in what would sadly be one of the last truly great John Hughes films, yelling at John Candy: 'And by the way, you know, when you're telling these little stories? Here's a good idea-- have a point. It makes it so much more interesting for the listener!'
In brief, the mystery of the missing Apollo 11 tapes is cunningly linked to the belief of Hoagland and Bara that all of the Apollo astronauts were sent on lunar recon missions to 'find the lost power of the gods that may have been left lying around... in the form of instrumentalities from eons past.'
You have no idea how hard it was to type that sentence with my eyes rolling all over the place.
Hoagland believes that NASA were up to something because, although colour television was readily available in the 60s, we sent 'crappy, low resolution black and white' cameras to record our historic first step on another world because NASA didn't want colour cameras anywhere near the surface of the moon to accidentally capture images of the 'glass-like lunar domes' and Obvious Mechanical Debris.
Apparently it is a little-known fact that black and white cameras cannot see giant glass domes or broken machinery. Only colour cameras can.
Whilst I largely agree with the assessment that we ought to have sent better quality cameras (since we had them), it is the reasoning I have trouble with. I do not doubt for a moment that there are things NASA haven't told the public, but I do not think that they sent black and white cameras on Apollo 11 because a secret cabal inside the administration was 'pulling strings.' It's all conjecture with very little proof. Hoagland goes on to say that this decision by NASA only makes sense in light of the Enterprise Mission arguments that NASA is, for want of a better term, a black ops organisation operating beyond the pale of their ostensibly civilian charter. Of course all of this talk of video quality or lack thereof flatly contradicts Hoagland's previous argument that the video images taken on the lunar surface were superior quality to what we have been lead to believe.
'All of the transmissions,' he writes, 'were run through a bandwidth limiting "low-pass" filter which dramatically reduced the image quality.'
Not a terribly convincing argument for your previous statement, Dick. In the end it is NASA who were responsible for the loss of the Apollo 11 tapes and surely the originals will never be seen again because the secret cabal operating inside NASA won't let them out.
The second breakthrough was the 'sudden, public availability of a veritable flood' of lunar photographs. Hoagland claims that moments before they went to press, NASA began flooding their various official web sites with amazing new Apollo imagery. Obviously, due to their secret Masonic network of covert operatives, NASA are deeply aware of the Feral House publishing timetable and have so very little on their plate that they exist solely to taunt and tease with their damned 'last minute' releases so that the information will just have to wait for Dark Mission II. Damn that NASA. Damn them and their public sharing of information.
'This immense amount of data, suddenly "dumped" on the web...' Hoagland insists, 'abruptly made possible Enterprise analyses never before practical-- starting with a one-to-one "calibration" of the validity of the entire database,' which sounds like it means something all very fascinating and scientific but ultimately says virtually nothing of any substance.
It is specifically mentioned, with regards to this wealth of information, that the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal was one of the recipients to benefit from these new-- 'literally thousands...' Hoagland emotes --of images from as far back as 2006 (which may hardly be defined as 'last minute'). This assertion seems to be entirely disproved, however, by the list of corrections and additions entitled the Journal Update File available at the Surface Journal itself, for those knowing where to look. (You need to scroll down past the 'Nail Soup' bit at the top of the linked page to get to the list of changes).
According to the Surface Journal Update File there were approximately 1o, maybe 11, updates made in 2007 prior to Dark Mission going to press (if one supposes that the book, available October 2007, went to press even as late as September 2007) and one of these updates included, on 16 September 2007, 'more than 30 new pan assemblies.' Beyond that, there are no updates listed in either 2007 or 2006 indicating a 'flood' of any kind, let alone a 'last minute' flood consisting of 'thousands of images.'
This niggling little detail aside, however, Hoagland points to these 'thousands' of photographs being, in his words, 'quietly leaked' by NASA-- without any fanfare, mind you --onto public places like the Surface Journal, (because, you know, quiet leaks of information are so often done with fanfare) allowed him to 'quantitatively test the information' in the so-called 'newly released scans' against the information he gleaned from Ken Johnston's 'pristine' 30 year old photos.
And if you sense the sound of a riding crop slowly being drawn into the air in aid of soon beating yet another dead horse, well...
Hoagland plunges us immediately back into the agonising morass which made 'Chapter Four: The Crystal Towers of the Moon' such a joyless odyssey through the Bog of Eternal Stench as he once again focusses our attention on the idiotic 'Mitchell Under Glass' image (it will be at the bottom of the left-side column on the linked page, because the direct link doesn't want to play nice for some reason).
I will not bother to repeat my previous assessment of this obtuse Enterprise 'enhancement' and why I feel it is spurious at best, as I believe I gave a full and reasoned counter argument, including a contextual visual record of crucial ancillary images conspicuously absent from the Enterprise data. Suffice to say that it is my considered opinion that the Enterprise version of NASA frame AS14-66-9301, the laughable 'Mitchell Under Glass,' represents a deliberate and nescient misrepresentation of common optical aberrations inherent in bright sun photography and an astonishing deficiency in essential deductive reasoning and critical thinking.
As if somehow believing he is providing indisputable validity to the ridiculous original Enterprise assessment of this image, Hoagland states that one of the so-called 'new' high resolution scans from the 'veritable flood' of photographs 'suddenly' available for public viewing was none other than AS14-66-9279. This is the very frame I used, you might recall, in Part 5 of Do You See What I See to illustrate that precisely the same lens flare and hazing seen in 'Mitchell Under Glass' was also seen in a number of other Apollo 14 images and that this evidence was largely ignored by Hoagland-- despite his assertion of having 'downloaded and microscopically examined' so many images --because it instantly negates his claims.
It is not my intention to belabour the the point or continue to dignify the lunacy of these imperceptive and demonstrably flawed suppositions, though I would like you to read the following quote very carefully, in light of the counter-arguments and photographic evidence I have previously provided, and consider what is being said:
Though, again, nowhere near as detailed as Ken’s pristine 30-year-old version, the correspondence of the major sky features in the two separate Apollo 14 images definitively, scientifically proves that the deep blue, ancient lunar glass dome-- seen arching over the Edgar Mitchell on frame 9301 --is not a photographic "fluke."
I’m sorry-- 'Scientifically proves?' That is the single most ludicrous and unsupported statement I have ever read. And, yes, it's not just Edgar Mitchell, but the Edgar Mitchell...
The authors of Dark Mission seem content to cast stones at others who wish to challenge the veracity of their 'image enhancements,' but frankly the only
thing the references to these photographs prove is that they clearly don’t
have any knowledge of the fundamentals of photography.
Pressing the boundaries of logic and reason even further, Hoagland states that 'after going through the entire newly-released ALSJ Archive for Apollo 14--' you know, the one for which there seems to be no clearly defined evidence '--I ultimately found four independent Hasselblad scans-- all showing the same general "towering glass geometry" visible on Ken Johnston’s original print. You can’t get much better scientific validation for a controversial optical phenomenon that four independent photographic confirmations!"
Wow. Four? Really? I found hundreds. All showing lens flare. And of course in typical Enterprise fashion there is no reference to just what the other two found images might be.
One example I found can be seen to the left in Fun Quiz #3. I specifically pulled this photograph for two reasons: One because it ought to (by now) be somewhat familiar-- it is a companion photograph seen in a pan sequence from which Hoagland isolated his preposterous 'LM-Butt' image (the Lunar Module 'parked' beside a 'giant glass buttress') --and; Two, the identical lens flare to both 9301 and 9279, right down to the shape, style and relative positioning, is seen in the upper left corner-- not because it is photographic confirmation of giant lunar domes, but because it is light similarly bouncing round inside the same style Hasselblad EL camera.
The next casualty of common sense in the purported 'image dump' is AS15-88-12013 in which we are lead to believe that we can clearly see the full scale of the glass-like lunar domes. Hoagland flips it over, as I have done below, and directs our attention to the 'glow' encircling the lunar surface. This, he tells us, is some of the best evidence yet of miles-high glass structures because the moon-- which, according to Hoagland, has no atmosphere --would not glow round the perimeter like it is in this image and, quid pro quo, we have clear proof of ancient lunar domes.
Obviously he fails to mention that this image was taken, not by an astronaut hanging out the window of the rapidly departing Command Module, but rather taken through the window-- through two panes of glass each roughly a quarter-inch-thick --and with the sun at such an angle (look at the shadows, or lack thereof, in the craters) that the albedo was at its greatest.
Strangely he also does not reference frame 11987 (an up-sun image showing similarly diffused light), or any of the other approximately 28 remaining frames at the end of this magazine which, to varying degrees, show some sort of diffusion, lens flare, or numerous window reflections, even the same sort of bluish dots which Hoagland so firmly believes denotes light reflecting off the giant lunar domes.
And, of course, the other dead horse beaten with the zealous glee of a drooling simpleton is 'The Spar'-- yes, again --and the surrounding 'glass-like matrix' which, of course, NASA knew were there all along but the astronauts couldn't see because the gold Mylar-coated visors on their helmets were especially 'tuned' by NASA to filter out the invisible glass.
Did I type that correctly? My eyes were rolling again.
And, anyway, even if they did see the glass and the Obvious Mechanical Debris (because they did not have their visors down all the time), their memory was erased of it later. I cannot begin to describe how I won't even bother with this imbecilic subject again...
Lurching clumsily to the next topic like a cocaine-fuelled Robin Williams monologue from a 1980s HBO special, we are told that another 'late development' (though clearly one not important enough to qualify as a 'breakthrough' it seems) was the 'sudden acquisition' by NASA of another image of the Face on Mars.
Just as they were 'closing out the book,' Hoagland says, NASA-- oh damn them and their efficacious nature! --finally got the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, equipped with the HiRISE camera, to fly over the Face and-- 'quietly,' you can’t forget 'quietly' --acquire new images, this time at a resolution of approximately 11 inches per pixel. With this higher resolution imaging, Hoagland says, it is now possible to prove the Face is an artificial construction because you can see rooms, and walls, and girders and well...
Oh, come on! You see them, don't you?
I admit that, if you squint a little, you can see what sort of looks like structures, but there is simply no way of knowing, given the nature of this picture, just what it is you are looking at.
Hoagland states unequivocally that 'The key to proper interpretation of aerial or satellite imagery of man-made ruins on Earth lies in noting the multiple examples of "parallel walls" and redundant rectilinear geometry,' virtually none of which is present in this image with the exception of a few squarish areas which could simply be pixels at this particular resolution.
Without the benefit of knowing how the original image was processed and manipulated, or which version of the image was used as the primary source material-- or if The Enterprise Mission used the imaging software available from the University of Arizona or if they just used Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro or a trial of Picasa --it is impossible to claim that these are ancient ruins.
It's untenable, I believe, to claim that at the current resolution and quality (such as it is) one can see with perfectly recognisable clarity such fine structural details as beams and girders.
Hoagland's addresses the limited quality of this image in Dark Mission, explaining, as one might suspect, that the Evil Puppet Masters at NASA (and their henchmen at UA who maintain the HiRISE site) have deliberately diminished the quality of Face acquisition so that adequate processing is impossible.
I often get the feeling that, in grade school, little Richie Hoagland was frequently explaining to his teachers in exhaustive and tangential narratives that his dog ate his homework.
At the HiRISE web site you can download a few variations of PSP_003234_2210 (oh surely you didn't expect Hoagland to tell you that, did you?), one of which is a fairly large (about 32MB) colour version of the Face and see for yourself the amount of detail available. On the right is a section of that colour image, at 100% resolution, from roughly the same 'chin' area seen in the Enterprise black and white. (I included the scale from the image so you can gauge the size of the area).
Honestly, though I would still like to believe that the Face may ultimately turn out to be an artificially carved landform, similar to the Sphinx at Giza, I cannot accept (without unimpeachable evidence) that it is an artificially constructed landform or an entirely artificial building complete with hotel rooms, office suites, and observation decks. I just don't see it.
The much-discussed (on the internet and amongst the anomalists) Inca City image from 2002, even at an area of some 14000 metres larger than the Face, is far more compelling evidence of artificial internal structures (especially when compared as it inevitably is with Qoy Qirilg'an, the 'Khorezmian Fortress') than the ultra close-up and over-pixellated Enterprise images of Cydonia.
Perhaps one of the more humorous bits in the epilogue, though certainly unintentionally, is a quote from Hoagland stating '...we at
Unfortunately they are not able to apply this same reasoning used for the Face to the 'miles-high glass-like lunar domes.'
Another (presumably) unintentionally hilarious quote is 'We have been proposing for over 15 years that the Face is, in fact, just such a massive assemblage of ancient, high-tech buildings,' which astute readers of this blog (both of you) will realise utterly contradicts the earlier assertion (originally referenced in Part 3 of this review) which tells us in no uncertain terms that 'No one, not even Hoagland, had expressed a specific belief that the Face or any of the other objects at Cydonia were artificial.'
Before Pandora's Box was opened by the misinformation provided in one almost insignificant image and I was forced to delve deeper into the background only to have my eyes opened to the painful truth that I was holding 548 pages of mostly elaborate faerie tales, I was-- by my own admission --stupid enough to look at a vast majority of the work of Richard C Hoagland and think that he was truly uncovering some marvellous things. To some considerably smaller degree, now, I still believe that, though I have always had my share of skepticism, particularly with regards to the lunar anomalies. But the truth is I was gullible, and someone's gullibility is, in my opinion, exactly what Hoagland is (and has been) banking on.
I think Hoagland likes to present the illusion of this ultra-sleek scientific research facility staffed by people running hither and thither, poring over the microscopic details of NASA photographs, sifting through reams of dense and profoundly occult data, consulting a vast dark library of material, when in reality it's a guy in bad shorts at a cluttered desk.
(I found this image at UFOwatchdog.com by the way.)
Do the circumstances make the research any less credible? Not especially. What it does do, however, is put into perspective, I think, the manner by which much of this type of research is conducted.
Everything I have presented in this review (if it can be called that) has been done from the relative comfort of my laptop (and mostly part time because I have another job). Does it mean that my research is flawed? I don't think so. I believe I have presented, to the best of my ability, valid counter arguments and solid photographic documentation which ought to make one stop and think before blindly accepting Hoagland's often extravagant claims.
Besides, to quote Hoagland as his words were transcribed in the IRC log of his 1996 National Press Club meeting: 'You only have to have a home office computer and image software to scan and enhance the data.'
If that is the criteria established by The Master, then I have done exactly what was expected.
Having uncovered over the last few months just how fundamentally wanting and obtuse most of The Enterprise Mission's 'research' seems to be, I feel that my distant theory that Hoagland is an agent of disinformation for the very system he proclaims to rally against is coming into sharper focus. Horribly flawed research, inaccurate information, incomplete documentation, effusive H.O.G.W.A.S.H. and, more than anything, just plain bad science tends to cast all anomaly hunters in a bad light. It runs the risk of making anyone look like a crackpot if they claim to see something in the photographs from NASA, or the ESA, or whomever.
It seems to me that someone like Hoagland, who insists that he be an indispensable and integral part of 'the conversation' can do far more irreparable harm than good to the anomalist community with these outrageous and unsupportable claims.
The arrogance to believe that fallible 'research' and equivocal 'analysis' is somehow flawless or impervious to question and should be wilfully accepted or fully endorsed not only by the public but by the scientific community, or demanding that fallacious 'evidence' be peer reviewed without providing the specific means to do so strikes me as saying:
If I went round saying I was Emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!
Don't ever for a moment think that I am saying Hoagland is a crackpot. I'm not. I think that, for the most part, he's a pretty smart guy. What I am strenuously criticising is bad evidence and bad science. A fairly massive chunk of Dark Mission is barely representative of acceptable Scientific Method. It's little more than observation and hypothesis with the other critical steps in the essential process completely missed out. That's not science. And if you ever want to be taken seriously and not be laughed out of the room, you have to present better science.
Think of this as a performance review. If I am expected to believe, then I want better performance. There is potential there. It just needs to be used and used correctly.
On Wednesday, 13 December 1972 at approximately 3:58 GMT on a balmy 102 degree afternoon, the sun burnt down from the unrelenting obsidian sky, casting the lunar landscape in hard shadow. Approaching from a South-Easterly direction across the rolling achromatic hills of Taurus-Littrow, Apollo 17 Mission Commander Eugene Andrew Cernan and Harrison Hagen (Jack) Schmitt finally arrived at their 'collision course with an even more unbelievable and mysterious destiny'-- a spot lying in the shadow of the Lincoln Scarp and the North Massif officially labelled Geology Station 4 but soon to enter the popular vernacular as Shorty Crater.
Clambering from the Lunar Rover, Cernan and Schmitt quickly set about tending to a few essential 'housecleaning' chores, as their rover ride over some of the more hummocky portions of the valley had kicked up a considerable bit of dust which needed to be wiped off their equipment before their truly remarkable Rendezvous With Drama could begin.
Having neither seen nor adequately photographed (nor even bothered to comment at all upon) the dizzyingly vast invisible entrance that didn't lead into the absolutely imaginary gigantic artificiality of the South Massif 'arcology,' these two intrepid explorers were definitely fully prepared for what was to come.
As they finalised their station prep, Jack Schmitt, still near the rover, promptly noted that, close to an enormous boulder on the rim of Shorty there was a large section of orange-coloured soil.
Excited by this find, as any professional geologist naturally would be, Schmitt began taking numerous samples-- digging a trench to determine the depth of the colouration and to contrast the surface discovery with the deeper and undisturbed layers of regolith --as Gene Cernan took a series of colour photographs to document the find.
It would later be determined, once the samples had been returned to Earth and fully analysed, that the soil was 'of basaltic debris' mixed with fine-grained orange and black volcanic glass containing approximately 8% titanium-- or, more specifically, TiO2, or Titanium Dioxide. As a comprehensive analysis of the lunar regolith material falls beyond the pale of this discussion, I might recommend some light reading directly from NASA itself or (if you don't trust such a clearly biased organisation) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison course notes for the Fusion Technology Institute or perhaps the more breezy Feldspathic Mare Basalts paper from Cardiff University which tell you everything you could possibly ever need or want to know about lunar samples. At present it is only pertinent that we understand the basics.
In the richly periphrastic pages of Dark Mission, Richard C Hoagland, founder of The Enterprise Mission, recipient of an Angstrom Medal, former science advisor to CBS News and Walter Cronkite, author of The Monuments of Mars, co-creator of the Pioneer Plaque, originator of the Europa Proposal, and principal investigator of The Enterprise Mission implores us to believe that
...there was plenty of evidence all around these two obviously awe-inspired astronauts that areas in the vicinity of the Lander were artificial…but now in ruins.
And though it is not overtly stated in the text, the inference is that the so called 'totally melted and oxidized titanium' was (or is) somehow directly linked not only to all of the Obvious Mechanical Debris scattered hither and thither everywhere the 'obviously awe-inspired astronauts' went but also to the composition of all of the 'artificial buildings,' and of course to the doll's head.
Yes the orange soil contained Titanium. However, the tiniest, barest minimum of cross-referencing shows us that titanium is a corrosion-resistant element. So the idea that this is 'heavily' oxidised (that is rusted or corroded) titanium is a bit of a reach. If you followed the link you will note that the most common form of titanium is titanium dioxide (and for you chemically minded individuals that means it has two atoms of oxygen), which is what was discovered in the lunar soil samples, and it is sometimes used in the production of white pigments. It is also used in cat litter to remove odour.
I feel that in Dark Mission we are being asked to believe that this area was some ancient lunar smelting station, or that everything in sight is made of titanium. At the very least it seems we are being given the idea, albeit indirectly, that along with all of the other Obvious Mechanical Debris there is a vast field, one would guess, of unalloyed titanium fragments spread rusting in the smouldering sunlight on the desolate (and airless, by the way) lunar plains-- the last vestiges of a devastating explosion or some other cataclysmic event.
The truth is, as previously noted, titanium dioxide is a relatively common element-- the seventh most abundant element known, so I've read --and often found in many rocks or even beach sand. The fine-grained orange and black 'titanium-rich' glass was formed, as most geological analysis agree, through standard volcanic activity some 3 to 4 billion years ago and was then dug out and deposited in its current position when Shorty Crater was formed (later) during a meteoric impact.
If, however, the orange and black glass discovered by Jack Schmitt were indeed little bits of metal scattered widely from the presumably apocalyptic devastation visited upon a prior civilisation, then one would have to start examining everything around for some form of context. Remember that discussion?
Thankfully nothing changes very rapidly on the lunar surface. No air, no wind, no rain to wash away and make new-- just the periodic meteor impact to scoop out new holes and splatter regolith everywhere.
So where is the context? This isn't like driving along a highway and seeing a blown tyre or a single tennis shoe cast forlornly onto the berm. And if it was, one would still expect there to be-- barring further massive impacts on the lunar surface --some sort of context; there would still be bits of road, perhaps an old mile-marker, some vague indication that there was once intelligent design at work. There would be something to elevate the nature of the region-- the essential form --from the randomness of chance.
There would be, to use a HOGWASH term, a 'rectilinear arrangement.' Rather, there is a giant crater with a rock that looks like a doll's head and mile after mile of rolling grey and desolate valley floor.
Hoagland wants us to believe that there
is artificiality, but there is no context to support such an argument. From the air, we can
determine that a place like Machu Picchu was an artificial construct because it stands out-- even after hundreds of years of sitting unoccupied--as being thoroughly unlike its
natural surroundings.
It looks more and more artificial the closer one gets to it, and, as a result, the more
context it begins to have when compared against its surroundings. One can determine the shapes of buildings, homes, temples, streets and passages. In the midst of the lush and thriving environment of the Peruvian highlands (which often tend to reclaim with alarming rapidity the fastidious labours of humankind) it continues to maintain a sense of artificiality.
Not so Taurus-Littrow.
Floating above this enormous mountain-ringed valley one sees it as flat and grey with hundreds of craters spotting the landscape. But once you begin to get closer to the surface, it begins to look amazingly flat and grey with hundreds of craters spotting the landscape. Except that at surface level your sense of scale and distance is thrown off by the generally colourless expanse of regolith. And it certainly doesn't help one's sense of disorientation that the sun is shining brightly in an ink black sky.
As an example of this disorienting nature so often commented upon by Apollo astronauts, compare an image of Shorty Crater taken on approach to an assembled panorama where its full scale can be judged. I believe you can get a good sense of just how terribly your depth perception is effected on the moon.
In Dark Mission, we are told, however, that the published images (and the available television footage) of the lunar landscape taken during the Apollo 17 mission do not match the descriptions provided by Schmitt and Cernan. In proof of this, Hoagland points to a comment from Command Module pilot Ron Evans (the third member of the team who is virtually ignored) where it is stated that, 'You know, to me the Moon's got a lot more colour than I'd been led to believe.'
How this statement is supposed to justify Hoagland's thesis escapes me. The discussion in the text of Dark Mission where this quote is used specifically deals with the 'crenulations' commented upon by the astronauts on the surface and how we can't see them very well-- or at all --in the photographs or in the televised footage which, therefore, constitutes conspiracy. The fact that Ron Evans' colour comment has nothing whatever to do with the crenulations and thus no relevance to Hoagland's argument doesn't stop him making it seem as though these features were at the forefront of every conversation Schmitt and Cernan had, when it reality they mention it roughly twice during one EVA.
Though the 'crenulations' were discussed in the previous segment, it is worth noting that in July of this year a story appeared in Nature which indicates that the early moon may have had generous amounts of water, but the volcanic glass mentioned in this report (as well as the orange glass of our present discussion) is still consistent with the formation of the moon and not with later vanished civilisation or colonisation. Water on the moon would thrill Hoagland and give credence to his 'layering model' for the crenulations and of the 'completely artificial' South Massif, but even the Nature article suggests that the water boiled off fairly quickly. And the process by which the moon gained this water is still largely debatable.
Clumsily clinging to the Ron Evans statement, Hoagland expects us to believe that the television footage of Apollo 17 was better quality than the 70mm still photography, explaining this conundrum by saying that NASA have aired substantially improved video footage in recent years on NASA Select TV that then proves his 'arcology model.' The supposed rationale behind this argument is that the 'new footage,' as Hoagland calls it, now 'tends to strongly imply' that the massifs are 'in fact "hollow, titanium-glass truss structures."'
There is again no explanation as to precisely how he was able to ascertain-- from a television image --that a mountain roughly eight miles away from the camera was made of 'titanium-glass truss structures,' but I would wager that, if he had one, it would be spectacular. Nay, stunning.
I shouldn't even need to point out that broadcast television itself has vastly improved from 1972 and Mister Obvious wins the 'Oh Really?' Award for this nonsensical line of 'reasoning.' Yet he goes on to say that he and Bara were now certain that Apollo 17 had some mysterious connection to Bush's 'Space Initiative' and hypothesises that James Garvin (Chief Scientist at NASA, who clearly has nothing better to do with his time) was exhibiting the 'real data' on late night NASA TV to see if anyone would notice the 'tremendous difference in quality' or to signal to the so-called 'in-crowd' that NASA had other intentions behind 'suddenly' returning to the Moon.
Go ahead. Laugh. I did.
Hoagland confidently concludes that
If the Mission of Apollo 17 was to secretly confirm the artificial nature of the Taurus-Littrow Valley, it overwhelmingly accomplished its "hidden mission."
Just how this 'hidden mission' was accomplished isn't exactly explained, strangely enough, though it all seems to centre on the doll's head.
As Schmitt and Cernan went about busying themselves with collecting and documenting the orange volcanic soil, staring up at them from the abyss of Shorty Crater-- I mean just sitting there in the middle of the hole in perfectly plain view along with all of the various bits of blatantly Obvious Mechanical Debris, seeming to taunt the two Apollo astronauts with its total fakeness -- sat this 'artefact.'
To the authors of the beloved American classic Dark Mission, this discovery is tantamount to something like the Holy Grail, or at least one of the other relics Brother Maynard carried with him.
Hoagland states that upon this discovery, 'As his mind grappled with that incredible possibility' (that this was a head), he thought back to 'the kind of "unbelievable" things' the astronauts had seen during EVA-2, like, you know... well, like all the 'unbelievable' things.
As evidence of the 'unbelievable' artificial objects 'all around these two obviously awe-inspired astronauts,' Hoagland points to two of Gene Cernan's comments: the first, made at Nansen Crater (143:22:08 in the Apollo Surface Journal), as he photographed the South Massif-- 'You know, I look out there, I'm not sure I really believe it all' --and the other-- (nearly 29 minutes later at 143:50:54) 'Isn't that something? Man, you talk about a mysterious looking place' --made during the traverse to Station 3 (an area seen in AS17-138-21077 and in the next 15 photographs immediately thereafter).
As we have already addressed these statements more fully in Part Five of this review, suffice to say here that they have clearly been taken wildly out of context and have nothing whatever to do with Shorty Crater-- nor any other 'unbelievable thing' seen by the astronauts.
Immediately ignoring this minor difficulty, Hoagland suddenly lunges headlong into the idea, grasped as if by magick from thin air (much like the superhuman ability to see 'titanium-glass truss structures' miles from a television camera in a thirty-six year old video), that this must be a robot head. And not just any old robot head, mind you. Oh no. This is just like C3P0!
And, frankly, by now we have caromed so far off of the
So how is it that we actually arrive at this image described in Dark Mission as having--
indented, stereoscopic, rounded inset eyes.
Camera lenses.
Just like...C3P0
--as Hoagland insists? And how does he determine that the 'indented' and 'inset' (the same thing, by the way-- redundant much?) 'eyes' are in fact 'Camera lenses?' By taking 'Composits of other frames,' of course. Though no explanation is provided as to why a 'composite' needed to be done, what purpose it serves, or anything mentioned about how it was accomplished, Hoagland was able to produce an image of just exactly what this object isn't.
As an experiment to prove that this 'enhancement technique' serves virtually no quantifiable or justifiable purpose in studying the object in question (given the fact that there at least seven other images of it available for research), I chose a random neighbouring rock not too terribly far from the doll's head, overlaid the same image from four different photographs (AS17-137-20993, 20994, 20995 & 20996, just so you know) and adjusted the opacity and colour balance of the various layers and quickly learnt that Spaceballs was a much bigger and more popular hit that I had previously been lead to believe.
In proving this to be an actual artefact, though, and not something just totally made up through pointless 'enhancement,' Hoagland says he soon determined that the doll's head was roughly the same size as a human
head by 'looking at the context panoramas,' images which, just so we understand, are composited or pieced together to make a whole image out of fragments.
Though this observation
regarding the size of the doll's head is more or less accurate, I was able to figure out the same thing by simply
comparing a shot of the head taken from frame
AS17-137-21000 and one of Jack Schmitt from AS17-137-21010 . Although it diminishes the
importance to say 'I compared two different photographs' as opposed to saying 'I looked at
the context panoramas to confirm the correlation' which is much more effluent and
sounds way cooler.
And then of course we advance to the wild supposition that, because the head was roughly human sized, 'Cernan and Schmitt could have brought it back.' Of course I don't know about you, but when travelling anywhere, I always leave room in my luggage for the occasional severed head. Surely NASA are smart enough to think ahead too.
Ha! 'Ahead.' Think ahe-- never mind...
You may have noticed by now that the doll's head (or even the Barf-rock) images I've used throughout this review do not look very much like those used by (or borrowed, where indicated, from) the Enterprise Mission. Apart from the periodic need to re-size an image to have them fit better in the smallish blog space, I have not tampered with the original frames (other than adjusting the colour balance of the aforementioned Barf-rock) because they are already in colour and I see no solid point, other than for purposes of clarity, to manipulate or 'enhance' the data beyond reasonable means.
Though previously addressed, it is worth briefly repeating that the Apollo 17 astronauts-- and in this particular instance regarding the head photography, Gene Cernan --used modified Hasselblad EL cameras and specially made 70mm Kodak Ektachrome MS SO-368 exterior colour reversal (i.e slide) film, ISO/ASA 64. In case you don't believe me, feel free to check the Apollo 17 Index for yourself. The reason it was specially formulated was so that the traditional emulsion-- typically silver halide salts and sometimes even titanium dioxide for special usages --would not boil off in the vacuum of space.
And for another helpful photography tip it is good to know that the 'Film speed required for most general weather photography (clouds, sunset, halos etc) is generally 100 ISO. This is a good trade-off between film speed (slowness, actually), high-resolution, and practical use (fast enough for most daytime photography without tripod, if you don't have one with you).'
This way you understand that ISO 64 is a reasonably 'slow' film which, though probably not the best option for lunar photographs in retrospect, does have the trade-off of being a fairly high resolution film. That being said, one must wonder why, if the ISO 64 Kodak slide film provides acceptable high resolution images, was it necessary for Hoagland to composite multiple images of the doll's head to create such a convoluted result? The 'details' are not improved by this technique. All this manipulation creates is false data. Of course we must recall that we have been told the actual surface photography was apparently crap compared to the superior television quality, so perhaps this is the justification.
The details of how one of the Enterprise Mission doll's head images was radically and wrongly manipulated is explored very well and very fully by Expat at The Emoluments of Mars, and I encourage you to read it. For purposes of our discussion, it is sufficient to explain that Hoagland says in Dark Mission that:
Color enhancements… showed that the "head" had a distinctive red strip around the area where the upper lip should be, a feature that clearly appeared to be painted or anodized on the object.
Okay. So let's play along. As the title of this series dares to enquire, is that lipstick on the doll's head? If so, then why, in these 'enhancements,' does the
rest of the surrounding regolith suddenly have red bits in it as well? Is that lipstick too? Is
this C3P0 or is it a lunar love doll? Seems a little weird for a robot-- especially a protocol droid --to be ornamented with red lips. Actually, come to think of it, that's kind of creepy.
Reminds me a little bit of The Master's fruit-punch mouth (What? No link?) If this is supposed to be a remnant from a vanished civilization, why is this doll's head the only thing around other than the Energiser Bunny plush toy and the probable hippo mask? What the hell kind of civilisation was this and just what exactly went wrong?
And how has the colour managed to survive for however many thousands of years after the impact that created Shorty Crater? Surely whatever sort of devastation that was visited upon the moon and violently gouged out such a massive crater would have burnt off or stripped away a mere paint job. It was searing enough to create volcanic glass and it clearly left Obvious Mechanical Debris and made the OMD virtually indistinguishable from other rocks. Yet it left virtually unscathed a supposed titanium alloy head with vestiges of red lipstick painted on it.
When one compares the original NASA images against the Enterprise Mission and/or the Dark Mission 'enhanced' versions of (one would imagine) the very same photographs, more than anything you have to question not only the purpose behind such image manipulation but the veracity of the end product as well. In the Emoluments of Mars link, Expat states that he directly asked Mike Bara twice for some guidance on how to achieve the same end result (which Bara says anyone can duplicate) as those seen in Dark Mission, relating
On the first occasion Bara replied that he was "not prepared to do your homework for you", and on the second occasion he replied "you don't know anything about how images are processed." Mr. Bara is neither polite nor helpful.
As I have stated, the practical nature of such radical manipulation makes very little sense. Except for the part where Hoagland and Bara are laughing all the way to the bank with this nonsense and I just have a stupid blog that nobody really cares about, so what do I know-- even though I have now written the equivalent of my own book on the topic by now? Clearly this does not constitute 'informed criticism' though.
Taking from frame AS17-137-21000 an area that is roughly the same region seen in the EM/DM 'enhanced' image and enlarging it to approximately the same size as that (600 pixels from the original 300 pixels) you can see there still appears to be a head-shaped rock in it but, just beginning to stand out, if you look closely, are the actual pixels of colour making up the image. Remember, despite the fact that the original photograph is from Kodak high resolution slide film, all of the 'enhancement' work is done with a digital reproduction.
Though I can hear you sighing from here, colour photo paper is generally made of three layers of emulsion-- yellow, cyan and magenta (and there are 'supporting' layers as well) --and the images we see are made up of little dots of colour. Go look at an old photograph with a magnifying glass. Go ahead. I'll wait.
And whilst the fabulous world of Kodak Ekachrome processing differs slightly from traditional print making, the end result is the same. So when you take that photograph and digitise it, you make a copy of those little dots of colours-- which is one of many reasons why some scanned images look complete shite and you have to fix them. Your new digital image is now pixellated, a discussion we have already had.
And the larger you make the image, the more colours start to pop out. In this case, red. And of course in you can also see pretty greens and blues in that sinister 'day for night' Enterprise version as well. Does that automatically mean that the lipstick on the doll's head is, in fact, lipstick? Hoagland very specifically states in Dark Mission (wherein the doll's head is highlighted as 'Color Fig. 28' that the 'Red stripe is not an artifact of image processing.'
I beg to differ.
A lot.
At the resolution being worked with, even when using high resolution images available from the Apollo Surface Journal or from prints ordered directly from NASA, and given the type of savage over-enhancement being done, the red stripe absolutely is an artefact of image processing.
Once you have ramped up the pixels to absurd proportions-- and well before you can even start tampering with the hue and contrast or colour saturation --the image is degenerating into so many blobs. Red in particular is splashed about like some Whatever Happened To Baby Jane freak show.
Of course I'm sure that I 'don't know anything about how images are processed' either.
Concluding that this object could not be a human or humanoid skull-- because any type of organic material would have either incinerated in the cataclysmic event that created Shorty or broken down after prolonged exposure to hard vacuum (although paint would have, of course, survived) --leads Hoagland to the assertion that it must, therefore, be a robot.
Yet within two paragraphs of suggesting that this artefact is a titanium replica of something akin to C3P0, replete with indented-- and inset --camera eyes and painted lips, Hoagland abruptly shies back from this idea, apparently realising that it was probably a bit too science fictiony-- a little too 'out there' --for more moderate tastes of the anomalist community, and quickly replaces this 'theory' with something vastly more palatable to the mainstream:
He begins to extrapolate, from the 'ground truth' available at Taurus-Littrow, that this is no mere protocol droid, but an object much like Commander Data's head as seen in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode entitled Time's Arrow-- right down to the Type R Phase Discriminating Amplifier, one imagines --in which the information stored in the android's positronic brain helps save the world. (By the way, he says of this episode that the characters are shown Data's 'disassembled' head, when in fact they are shown a disembodied head. I'm just sayin.)
He promptly returns to the 'And Therefore Because of Its Size, the Astronauts "Could Have Brought It Back"' scenario, once more pointing to the ample 'off-camera' time (yes, again) which Schmitt and Cernan seemed to have had during their time at Shorty Crater. Although there is no evidence for the assertion, he seems to believe that they 'could have' jumped down into the crater and absconded with the head, despite the 'tight time table' they were on. Taking this completely unfounded hypothetical suggestion at face value for a moment, let's examine very quickly the so called 'ground truth' for ourselves:
If you watch the available video (clip 145:23:48) or read through some of the transcripts, it's fairly clear that Schmitt and Cernan are at Shorty for some thirty minutes. All you need to do is add up the time charted on the Surface Journal entries (for example 145:23:48 is mission hour, minute, and second) and you can determine with reasonable certainty that there wasn’t much time for shenanigans.
Most of the time you can see the astronauts doing their work.
Periodically we can see Cernan or Schmitt 'disappear' from view as the television camera investigates the region, but you hear them
constantly-- absolutely everything. Ed Fendell does spend a lot of time panning across Shorty Crater and into
some of the shadows at the rear of the crater. I'll admit that.
(Maybe he was trying to see what the curious looking object pictured here was, something I spotted on the far rim.) Eventually, though, he pans back to the
astronauts.
There is no time during these few minutes when the camera is panning about that the astronauts could have jumped down into the crater to pick up the 'head.' Not without being either incredibly fast or amazingly stealthy, or being able to predict every movement the camera (guided off-world by Ed) would make. And if they did dip down into Shorty, where are all the footprints? The camera gets a pretty clear shot down into the target area of the crater just minutes before the astronauts move on, so where is the evidence that the 'head' was collected?
Towards the end of video clip 145:27:50 (or at approximately 5 minutes and 41 seconds in the longer clip), Gene Cernan asks 'What’s wrong with the TV? Aren't you watching this?' as the camera he has just cleaned and adjusted for a pan has become stuck viewing the front end of the Rover. Hardly sounds like the actions or concerns of someone about to sneak off for clandestine activity. And you can still see Jack Schmitt collecting samples behind him.
NASA admin are chattering in the background, in the meantime, about time constraints and not paying much attention it seems. They are concerned that, due to the length of time spent at Nansen and Ballet Crater, the astronauts are pressing the limits of their walk-back constraints-- meaning that if they spend too much more time at Shorty and don’t get a move on and keep to the schedule, they might not be able to walk safely back to the LM in case of emergency like the Rover breaking down.
I find it strange that the desire to have the reader believe that Schmitt and Cernan (or 'Schmidt' and 'Cerman' as they are sometimes referred to because, you know, the research and documentation is so thoughtfully prepared) were quite clearly on a clandestine reconnaissance mission born in absolute secrecy behind the closed doors of NASA and funded by an unknowing American public, or that the idea of artificiality on a massive lunar scale simply fails to stand up to even modest scrutiny.
Clearly there is no solid evidence of artificiality, either in the Taurus-Littrow valley, in the neighbourhood of Shorty Crater, or at Nansen. Hoagland desires to point us to such 'anomalous' item as 'the Spar1' (the object said to be leaning against the East Massif or Mons Vitruvius) or bad photography riddled with lens flare to indicate artificiality yet produces nothing of substance. His proof is, at best, as ethereal and surreal as the stream of consciousness externalisation of his internal monologue which, at the sufferance of the reader (and of his own credibility), leads Hoagland to speculate that obviously Apollo 17 had some 'mysterious connection' to Bush's 2004 'Space Initiative' plan and the doll's head was likely the key.
Could the data stored deep inside of the doll's head have been exactly like the world-saving time travel information that was found in Commander Data's positronic brain!? Moreover, could this be the whole reason we abruptly stopped going to the moon after 1972? And was this information--
why Gene Cernan...
scowled at President Bush!?
A NOTE:
1) Listed below are some more random photos of the East massif found whilst conducting research for this segment. Notice the complete lack of a 'Spar' or any other anomalous feature in the region of Mons Vitruvius, especially the utter lack of the huge lunar domes. Once again I ask, why would someone spend so much quality time not only painstakingly editing out something in these photos (especially with 1970s technology) but taking such an extraordinary amount of time to actually sift through absolutely every single image captured during the totality of the Apollo 17 mission that might contain any sign of this massif? Seems a daunting and, frankly, absurd task given the option of simply saying that on a voyage of discovery to the moon we might have actually discovered something...
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a17/AS17-133-20353.jpg
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a17/AS17-133-20354.jpg
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a17/AS17-146-22445.jpg
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a17/AS17-146-22446.jpg
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a17/AS17-146-22447.jpg
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a17/AS17-147-22580HR.jpg
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a17/AS17-147-22604.jpg
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a17/AS17-147-22605.jpg
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a17/AS17-147-22606HR.jpg
Often times when talking to children, what you have said and what they have heard are generally two entirely different things. Parents like I'm not will recognise this immediately. My experience is more with employees who perform remarkably similar aural tasks and then stand in doe-eyed innocence, but the end result is essentially the same: they didn't hear precisely what was said or how you said it. For example, you might say...
'You kids need to march upstairs and clean your room and then help me with the other chores around the house before you go outside and play, because I'm not going to have time to get all of this stuff finished before we have dinner!'
And what they heard was...
'You kids need to... go outside and play... before we have dinner!'
Selective hearing, selective listening, is to often times radically misunderstand and misinterpret the facts. It's like saying that, based on the content of several commercials, it can be stated that all women suffer from an overpowering vaginal odour and must eat yoghurt to go poo whilst all men shout product information in military cadence when they cook on a grill and have strange green creatures with New York accents living in their sinuses. Or that According to Jim is funny. It's patently ridiculous.
In the sprawling epic that is Dark Mission, Richard C Hoagland, founder of The Enterprise Mission, recipient of an Angstrom Medal, former science advisor to CBS News and Walter Cronkite, author of The Monuments of Mars, co-creator of the 'Pioneer Plaque,' originator of the 'Europa Proposal,' and principal investigator of The Enterprise Mission presents, with his co-author Mike Bara, his belief that the Apollo 17 mission (the last time anyone of whom we are aware has ever set foot upon the moon) was a not-so-thinly disguised reconnaissance mission to examine and retrieve ancient alien technology-- like giant glass domes and big blue smears of ancient alien lens flare as seen in the high resolution version of AS17-146-22440.
Though much of this evidence is presented through photographic 'enhancement', there is also critical audio and video evidence of this hidden agenda-- this dark mission (ah! see, it's all becoming clearer now) --from none other than the astronauts themselves. And a vast majority of this 'damning evidence' has been compiled and transcribed and can now be browsed through at one's leisure at the oft-alluded to Apollo Lunar Surface Journal wherein the very cryptic words and clandestine actions from this final expedition to the moon are laid bare in all their clandestine crypticness.
Or so one is lead to believe.
Hoagland is so determined, it seems, to make the case for conspiracy that specific details are quite often either glossed over by simply referring to them only once, in passing, and then never mentioning them again-- which is a convenient method to later claim that 'all the information is there' (as in the example of Jack Schmitt’s Station 4 pan being carefully tombstoned in and around other extraneous material in the hopes that no-one will notice it) --or by being left out entirely, such as the contradictory photographic evidence from Jack Schmitt’s Station 4 pan.
In listening to the Apollo 17 tapes, reading the transcripts, or watching the videos, one could easily make the case for conspiracy on any variety of things providing you narrow your focus to merely excerpts and radically misinterpret or thoroughly misunderstand the remaining facts. The truth is, it just wasn't all that fascinating. I mean, yes, obviously they are on the moon, which is amazingly cool, but what they are doing are all fairly mundane, routine tasks.
Realistically speaking, when you sift through this material (in light of Hoagland's assertions) you must ask yourself; 'So when exactly did the astronauts have time for these clandestine operations?' Yes, records can be (and are sometimes) altered but these guys were on the moon, inside big clumsy suits, with only so much time available to them before their portable environments ran out, being recorded or monitored virtually every step of the way-- when the hell would they have had the time for all this hidden agenda stuff? Seriously? This isn't naivete, it's a simple point of logic. Unless there's something colossal going on that just left vapour trails-- or even chem-trails --over my painfully malfunctioning head, I see a couple of guys driving around on the moon collecting dirt.
But let's start at the beginning so this is all in perspective...
In Chapter Twelve, 'Where Titans Slept...' (or, if you prefer, 'Where the Titans Slept...'), in a sub-section curiously entitled 'Where the Titans Slept...,' Hoagland introduces us to The Strange Case of Apollo 17. We arrive at this mysterious mission primarily because of what Hoagland appears to have read into the events surrounding George Bush's January 2004 speech at NASA headquarters in Washington wherein it was proffered that we, as a Nation, return to the moon... well... eventually, though certainly not within the same sort of time-line JFK desired or demanded in 1962 (when we didn't even have the technology in place yet), and to go to Mars maybe when we can get around to it. Sometime. A lot of this was to start seeing fruition in the then far away mystical year of 2008 and which, as we all know, hasn't.
Big surprise there.
On hand for this 'Hey Kids Let's Forget About This Silly Little Iraqi Boondoggle For Now And Divert Our National Attention To Other Things We Won't Be Successful At Either' speech was the commander of the final Apollo mission and the last person on the moon, Eugene Cernan. According to Hoagland, when singled out by George Bush, Cernan basically sat and scowled at him-- apparently a clear indication that Cernan was trying to 'tell us something;' not that he didn't like George Bush, but that something wasn't exactly as it seemed, and that Apollo 17 wasn't all just rover rides and holiday snaps of 'obvious mechanical debris.'
The other somewhat circuitous venue by which we, via Hoagland, come to
the Super Secret Mission of Apollo 17 is through a gentleman by the
name of Keith Laney, whom we shall visit later-- and, again, yes, that does mean there's more. I can hear the squeals of glee from here...
Anyway, Hoagland, suddenly quite suspicious of the very motives behind the Apollo 17 mission, plunges into action, recounting that even as far back as 1998 he had felt that the Taurus-Littrow valley (lavishly illustrated to your right and helpfully indicated for your convenience) looked 'incredibly dangerous' for a landing site. Not only was it dangerous looking, it was also 'positioned at 19.5 degrees North' which, of course, falls neatly into line with his 'ritual alignment model.' In fact the actual landing site, according to published data from the National Air and Space Museum, shows that it was at 20.19080 degrees North and 30.77168 degrees East, but who am I to quibble?
So Hoagland turned to the work of his periodic associate and 'NASA/Ames consultant,' Keith Laney, who, we are told, 'had been looking at Apollo 17 data for some time' with another associate of The Enterprise Mission, Steve Troy.
Laney had posted on his web site
an 'extensive analysis' of the Apollo 17 mission-- 'and all its anomalism'
--including his (and eventually Hoagland's) assertion that the South
Massif appears to be not only quite mysteriously and clearly hexagonal but also very likely to be an ancient
artificial structure-- sorry, arcology --with a super secret entrance plainly visible at the base cleverly disguised as a giant 'crater' called Nansen.
In Dark Mission the 'science' behind this assertion of artificiality comes from the observation that the light coloured material seen spreading away from the massif in the right side of the photo appears to have been forced out from beneath the 'structure' when the 'back side' collapsed in upon itself. And because, as the theory goes, solid rock mountains do not collapse inward like this and shoot out stuff from below, the South Massif must then be, logically speaking, hollow. We are then told that the current geological theory behind this structure-- that it was formed as a result of volcanic uplift --cannot be true because all cinder cones are uniformly circular and this one obviously isn't.
What is casually sidestepped in this scathing scientific indictment is that volcanic uplift does not automatically equate to cinder cones. Cinder cones are built up around volcanic vents by erupting magma which quickly cools (Shorty crater was originally presumed to be such a vent); volcanic uplift is magma flowing under the surface and lifting or deforming sometimes vast areas, like parts of entire continental shelves.
The Geologic Investigation of the Taurus-Littrow Valley: Apollo 17 Landing Site (found here), however, has this to say regarding the formation of the region:
Briefly, we envision the massifs as the upper part of thick ejecta deposited on the rim of the transient cavity of the large southern Serenitatis basin, which was formed about 3.9 to 4.0 b.y. ago by the impact of a planetesimal. The ring structure and the approximately radial grabens that give the massif blocks definition were imposed on the ejecta blanket before deposition of the knobby-textured Sculptured Hills material. The mountainous terrain thus formed was partly flooded by the subfloor basalt, and the general region was mantled by a thin volcanic ash unit.
Huh. Doesn't sound like a cinder cone to me. Sounds more like an impact basin later filled in by volcanic flow and ash deposit.
The facts, though, do not deter our intrepid authors from stating that 'recent enhancements done by Laney and Hoagland... show "boxy-looking patterns" on the faces of virtually all the "hills" and "mountains" in the landing vicinity' and that other 'enhancements done by Hoagland show that the still-standing sidewalls of the "vented" massif--' [that would be the South Massif, by the way] '--are actually overhanging the empty space inside--...!'
Of course we don't ever get to see these 'enhancements,' we just get to read about them. Apparently there wasn't enough room in the book for any more shitty photographs with little or no (or totally misleading) documentation so these magnificent gems are left purely to our fervent imaginations.
In the next section of the tale, EVA-2--a "Valley of Surprises," we follow astronauts Cernan and Schmitt on their rendezvous to the South Massif and Nansen crater (also called Station 2 in the Surface Journal) where their occasional comments about linear wrinkles and crenulations seen in areas of the surrounding mountains are taken by Hoagland as evidence to shore up his artificiality model. In fact, just to underscore the artificiality of the South Massif and all of the surrounding mountains and to make sure we understand that they are of '"honeycomb" construction,' Hoagland points to AS16-112-18231, which shows a 'Striking example of "geologic layering" (on a waterless Moon…)'
Just so we are clear, this image was taken from the Apollo Sixteen mission, though in the text it is seemingly attributed at first to Apollo Fifteen in another famously circuitous and convoluted paragraph of irrelevant and misdirecting information. So it is another mountain, in another region on the moon, taken on another mission, and used because it is similar to what Hoagland says was seen by the astronauts of Apollo 17 at Taurus-Littrow: Not because it's from the actual Apollo 17 mission, which has no real hard photographic evidence of this 'geologic layering' on the type of scale we are lead to believe, but because it is similar to what Hoagland wants you to see.
The reason one might initially imagine that we are offered the Apollo 16 photograph is because Hoagland states that Jack Schmitt 'inexplicably stops taking pictures' as he and Cernan reach the 'shelf that overhangs Nansen.' There is, however, nothing 'inexplicable' about it. Nor is there a 'shelf that overhangs Nansen.' In transcript segment 141:56:08 through 141:56:29 of the Surface Journal it is very clear that Jack Schmitt realises he has been taking an unusually high number of photographs and says, 'Holy cow! I'd better slow down my picture taking!' They couldn't exactly run to the store for more film if they out so their use was monitored quite closely.
Also, we are told that 'such "geologic layering" is almost always associated with sedimentary deposition, caused by standing water.' But, in a parenthetical afterthought, it is stated that 'the other, more infrequent cause, is "successive lava flows"...' Leaping the logic gap, Hoagland explains that all of this evidence makes it clear that the massifs are of different origin than the surrounding valley because...
The only viable alternative is that this mysterious "layering"-- repeatedly seen (and photographed) by the Apollo 17 crew --is only a surface manifestation of some kind of now heavily eroded, repeating, artificial, 3-D "cell-like" construction.
Really? The only viable alternative is that these mountains are artificial when it was just explained that they were created through impact, deposition, and lava flow? Lava flow being one of the other methods by which geologic layering occurs?
Really? Repeatedly photographed by Apollo 17? This flatly contradicts the earlier statement that Jack Schmitt 'inexplicably stops taking pictures.' But if they did repeatedly take photos then why show us a frame from the Apollo 16 mission? In fact, AS17-144-22003 through 22015, 22020 – 22032, 22051 – 22071, 22080 – 22104 are all various close up shots covering a substantial surface area of the South Massif (taken directly at its base) and clearly show none of the so-called 'honeycomb' artificial construction.
We are shown a 'Hasselblad photographic (film)--' [and thank the gods Hoagland clarified that point of confusion, huh? For a minute I was thinking it might have been a daguerreotype] '--image of Mons Vitruvius 'arcology,' taken by Apollo 17 astronauts from Lunar Rover.'
But, in classic Hoagland form, he provides no frame number, no EVA information, no name of an astronaut-- absolutely nothing to help you find it and check the results for yourself. It is easy enough to guess that it was probably taken by Jack Schmitt because Gene Cernan was busy driving the rover but that still leaves literally hundreds of photographs to sift through. Not only are there descriptions of photographs that we never get to see (like some of the 'recent enhancements') but there are at least a dozen or more photos used in Dark Mission which are not properly (let alone correctly) documented with frame numbers or reference material of any kind, severely limiting a follow up investigation.
For someone who so frequently appears to want to cast himself in the role of the Rodney Dangerfield of the
Anomalist Community-- someone who gets no respect, I tell ya, and clamours endlessly for that ever-elusive adequate peer review and mainstream scientific acceptance and validation
--Hoagland certainly seems to have made very little attempt through the shoddy research and lack of attention to documentation in the pages of Dark Mission to alter that
perception. Though I grant that perhaps some of the blame for this lack of proper documentation may rest
on the publisher, one would think that a simple proof-reading of the final galleys by the authors before the manuscript went to press would have (or should have) corrected these mistakes. That they have not speaks volumes. And I have yet to see Hoagland (or Bara) address or
correct any of these mistakes on their web site or blog.
Citing 'evidence' from the Surface Journal and available Apollo 17 video clips, Hoagland tells us that the astronauts can hardly contain their excitement and wonder, that it was increasingly difficult for them to 'disguise their shock' at the artificiality of everything, not to mention their unvarnished surprise at the painfully 'obvious mechanical debris' littering the lunar surface. But amidst all this 'shock' they couldn't get one photo of the 'geologic layering' as they stood right in front of it?And if it was all such a big secret mission to be hidden from the public, why didn't the cameras and audio equipment just get switched off?
Another classic misdirection manoeuvre in Dark Mission-- that of inaccurate and mixed information --has actually allowed me to correct an inadvertent error I made in Part Four Chapter Four. In that section I referenced a photograph on page 504 as not being of Shorty crater and not being frame AS17-137-20996 (as it is stated to be in the text), and that I had neither any idea what it was nor did I have any intention of searching for it because I didn't (and still don't) feel that it is my job to provide Hoagland with his godsdamned documentation.
As it turns out, a careful re-reading of page 485 points to this image-- 'Fig. 12-11'--as evidence that Gene Cernan had 'parked the rover on the shelf above the entrance to the South Massif, and all we had was a view looking back toward the light mantle,' which means that the television camera was supposedly turned away from Nansen crater and 'we,' the viewers, could not see into the crater as a result.
There are various problems with this bit of boo-hooing. One, is that the image above turns out to be a fairly bad cut and paste job of what seems to be AS17-138-21058 and -21059 showing the very thing Hoagland tells us we don't get a chance to see-- the interior of Nansen. Two is that, unlike what is implied in Dark Mission, Cernan did not park the rover with its back to Nansen. That much is clear in the final three frames of Jack Schmitt's 'Station traverse' (ending with frame AS17-135-20675) which puts Nansen just to the left.
In this mosaic I put together, taken from the area of Boulder 1, you can see that the lunar rover is parked with its left side facing the interior of Nansen, meaning that the camera-- mounted on the front end --only had to pan to one side to capture an interior view. In case the rover isn't visible enough in the mosaic, you can see for yourself that it is not facing backwards
as the text implies by going to the larger AS17-137-20955 and determining for yourself. (And yes, my mosaic is also a bad cut and paste job; it was purposely
done this way to make it obvious that I did not 'enhance' anything or
adversely manipulate the data other than to put the images together in
their correct sequence.)
A nice 'reverse' image, taken from the other direction when the astronauts where out along the opposite side of trough, AS17-137-20977, not only shows the rover sitting triangulated between Boulders 1 & 2 (at the two- and one o'clock positions respectively) but also gives some idea of how steep the slope of this enormous trough is-- because we are actually staring up the slope of the South Massif. And how steep is this slope? Judging by the angle Jack Schmitt is standing on at Boulder 1, I'd wager fairly steep. This also illustrates beautifully just how difficult it is to accurately determine distance and scale on the lunar surface.
One reads again and again in Dark Mission that we never see the full extent of Nansen nor does the size of it-- in photographs --match the astronaut's description of its enormity. (In 144:10:20 of the Surface Journal, Gene Cernan offers an insightful explanation as to the inability to accurately judge size and distance on the moon). Strangely, the Surface Journal once more shows us that Jack Schmitt, the civilian professional geologist, describes the area quite well (found at 142:35:59) and in later commentary included beneath that heading he states, 'Nansen isn't actually an impact crater but, rather, is an anomalously-deep, elongated depression that is part of the trough.'
And of course Hoagland, pointing to the pictures and saying they don't appear 'anomalously deep,' is either not bothering to look at the full scale of the area around Nansen (almost a mile long by some estimations) or refusing to understand that the astronauts are already down inside the trough, as they mention frequently in the Surface Journal. I find it very strange that someone who claims to have downloaded and pored over every single frame from the Apollo 17 mission could have so easily missed these obvious clues. It only took me a matter of hours and some careful observation to draw a correlation between the content of the images (spread out over several film magazines) and what is transcribed in the Surface Journal. The powers of observation and deductive reasoning are amazing when properly applied.
The other problem with the bemoaning of the rover's position is that, as I mentioned, Hoagland says the television camera was pointed away from Nansen and all 'we' get to see is the light mantle. The truth is, Nansen-- the Super Secret Entrance to the big fake mountain --is laying directly inside of this area of light mantle, as is seen in the previously inserted images (AS17-M-1218), and thus it follows that if all we get to see is the light mantle we also get to look right at Nansen.
And we do. A lot.
Granted Ed Fendell (remotely operating the camera from Houston) does seem to do a great deal of useless and occasionally irritating nonsense with the television camera, but it's clear that he his generally panning the landscape and zooming in on interesting features as the astronauts (who we can hear constantly) are taking their geological samples. In one video towards the end of their time at Station 2, the astronauts even take the television camera and point it directly into Nansen so that the people back on Earth can see a particular rock which caught the attention of Jack Schmitt. You can also hear Gene Cernan, I believe, say that one must think on an order of magnitude bigger when it comes to looking at things on the lunar surface: Very true, for one must stop to consider that what appears to be a few hills in the background are, in reality, amazingly steep mountains nearly six miles away, many of which shoot up to almost 8000 feet above the surface.
Hoagland also states that towards the end of their visit to Nansen, 'Cernan stops (off camera) to take some pans from the base of the massif' where he then declares, 'You know, I look out there, I'm not sure I really believe it all.'
In truth, when you watch the video which corresponds to this comment (at 143:22:08) you can see Gene Cernan perfectly well. Ed Fendell zooms in on him as he tries to position himself on a slope to take photographs. You can hear Bob Parker (back on Earth at NASA Mission Control who is the link between the astronauts and the 'back room' at NASA) caution Cernan not to fall into the crater directly behind him. How could he do that if Cernan wasn't visible? And about halfway through the video, we see Cernan tilt back ever so slightly (probably to get another photograph) and then say, 'I'm not sure I really believe it all.'
One might posit, given the fact that Cernan was on an alien landscape, literally staring up the dizzying slope of a 7500 ft mountain rising sharply from the lunar floor, that perhaps-- just perhaps --there might be a moment of awe; a moment to stop and reflect that he was actually standing on another world-- something only a tiny handful of extraordinarily well trained people had ever done. I don't think it was like saying, 'Wow, where's the Taco Bell?' I'm pretty certain even the astronauts had to stop once in a while to reflect on the magnitude of their situation. And if you read down through section 142:39:11, Cernan discusses the fact that the massifs were an overpowering sight. Actually, back in an earlier part of the transcript-- found in italics below 140:45:08 --Cernan explains just exactly how it felt for him to be on the moon. I think a comment about not being able to believe it all seems a perfectly reasonable thing to say, given the circumstances.
Almost immediately after Cernan's theoretically cryptic comment, Hoagland points to another bit of 'conspiranoia' when he states that
A bit later, completely out of context, Schmitt seems to address their "off-camera" time to mission control:
143:27:11, Schmitt: "We haven't had a chance to look around any more than you've heard."
Of course the only thing 'out of context' about this quote is the manner in which Hoagland frames and uses it. The truth is, when going over the Surface Journal and watching the corresponding video, it is absolutely abundantly clear that Jack Schmitt is answering a direct question. As a matter of fact, throughout this EVA, Schmitt appears to be having a difficult time-- and there is a sense of occasional sparing --with Bob Parker. It is something directly addressed in a number of comments interspersed throughout the text of EVA-2 in the Surface Journal-- comments too numerous to link to because linking to the Surface Journal fairly well sucks (and there is no method for line-specific linking) and quoting the whole thing here takes up far too much room. One such statement says, 'Jack is a little frustrated with Bob's interruptions. Both Jack and Bob, once they start talking, tend to charge ahead and, consequently, talk over each other…'
When Bob asks
143:27:00 Parker: Okay. And guys, do you see any more different blocks up there that are worth sampling before you go on down on to the flats (down near the Rover, below the break in slope) and sample the light mantle?
Schmitt can be seen to just slightly turn towards the camera on the lunar rover and, as if wishing to respond directly and personally to Bob, says with perhaps a touch of exasperation, 'We haven't had a chance to look around any more than you've heard.'
Hoagland makes much of the so-called 'off-camera' time of Schmitt and Cernan and theorises that they might have even sneaked away to investigate the giant secret opening-- the 'overhang' --leading into the big 'artificial, 3-D "cell-like" construction.' One of the problems is that, apart from the fact that you can clearly hear the astronauts and catch glimpses of them during the time they're not supposed to be there, the much-spoken-of 'overhang', which Hoagland claims is visible in orbital images and in such photo as the Apollo 17 Traverse Map (in detail below) isn't really an overhang.
As it seems even the publishers of Dark Mission are afraid to pull back the curtain on Hoagland's ugly little Nosferatu and let the sun blaze down upon it, allow me to point out that, given the nature of this photograph (used as 'Fig 12-12' in the book), if we are to believe that Nansen is an overhanging shelf, then we must equally believe that all the craters seen on the right half of the image must be mounds towering hundreds of feet into the inky black sky. It's blatantly obvious that the terrain on this map hasn't exactly been rendered with the utmost of concern for proper relief and that items which are clearly craters-- or troughs --end up looking like hills.
And after poring over the Surface Journal and who knows how many hundreds of photographs from the Station 2 stop at Nansen, it becomes amazingly obvious that the 'overhang' we hear the astronauts discussing and hoping to get some samples from isn't some imaginary alien car park sticking out in mid air and hiding in plain sight but is part of a rock called Boulder 2.
It's also obvious when you read the text-- or you can watch the video as well, if you don't mind Ed Fendell panning through the sky for a few seconds trying to find a shot of Earth --that Jack Schmitt is concerned about contaminating a potential sample when he asks, at 143:18:19, 'Did we kick any dirt in under there?'
Hardly a question anyone would be concerned with if they were discussing a massive entrance.
Their interest was in getting a sample of the regolith from beneath an overhanging segment of rock-- regolith which might possibly never have been exposed to solar winds from the time the Nansen trough had been created some 3 or 4 billion years earlier --and not with finding their way into 'some kind of now heavily eroded, repeating, artificial, 3-D "cell-like" construction.'
Although it is possible that they were interested in the rest of Boulder 2 because, from one angle, it looks eerily like some ancient alien sculpture...
But, like Buddy Bizarre, Hoagland throws himself wildly into the fray, metaphorically flinging a pointed Ah-HA! at virtually everything the astronauts did and said, telling us that, 'As you read back through these sequences, it's clear from the comments of the astronauts that something is amiss.'
He speculates that Cernan purposely parked the rover in such a manner that the camera could not see into Nansen (which is a complete fabrication as the photographs seen here show); he points to Schmitt exclaiming upon approach to the station, 'Look at Nansen!' as if somehow a professional geologist can't be thrilled to be looking down into a mile long trench on an alien world where no other geologist has been before or since-- it's not like they were driving through the stinking grey industrial wastes of Gary, Indiana; and probably the most ludicrous claim is the suggestion of Jack Schmitt's so-called 'nervous talk' about trimming frames from one of his pans.
I've listened to the audio clip and read through this section (found at 143:51:03) of the Surface Journal half a dozen times and I still don't hear anything that sounds even remotely like 'nervous talk.' Schmitt took a series of images from his seat on the lunar rover as he and Cernan drove to Geology Station 2A. What he is referring to, in suggesting someone will have to trim the photographs, is the fact that the television camera on the rover and the maps the astronauts used to guide them to their next stop are visible in many, if not all, of his images (AS17-138-21075 through -21095). In order for anyone to create a mosaic or Station Panorama later, they will have to cut out the obstructions.
Doesn't really sound all that mysterious and clandestine to me.
Hoagland continues to lament about the astronauts not photographing the inside of Nansen (although it's abundantly clear that they did) when they obviously had so much time to sneak away and do so (although it's abundantly clear that they didn't have) and then beats this dead horse a while longer once Cernan and Schmitt reach Station 2A (a few hundred yards away from Station 2) where Hoagland claims they didn't image Nansen form the opposite end to show the giant entrance-- or if they did, how those images were likely 'lifted' from the official records.
I just can't imagine how something so obvious could be so readily missed.
But the speculation must wait, for our intrepid astronauts are on a 'tight timetable' we are told-- though apparently not tight enough that they couldn't have bothered to sneak away and take secret pictures of the giant entrance --and are 'on a collision course with an even more unbelievable and mysterious destiny' which awaits them...
(Note: In the previous chapter I stated that, to the best of my knowledge, the black and white film used on Apollo 17 was Kodak Panatomic X 80ASA. Shortly thereafter, in doing research for this instalment, I came across the Apollo 17 Index JSC-08641 which lists the black and white film as '3401 High Speed Black and White (HBW), plus XX, ASA 80–125.' It really doesn't change anything, it was still a slow 80 ASA/ISO which could be 'pushed' to 125, but I just wanted to offer the correction because I thought it was best to be accurate.)
FIVE
Forced perspective is an interesting thing, and something with which I'm sure almost everyone is familiar in some fashion whether through photos of someone appearing to hold up the leaning tower of Piza or maybe seeming to pinch the setting sun in between their fingers.
Perhaps an even more well known example would be one in which a certain Carnivorous Vulgaris, attempting to capture an equally well known Accelleratti Incredibus, takes a trusty can of Acme Company paint and, perhaps on a large boulder carefully muscled into place, renders an exact replica of the road, creating the illusion of the road continuing well into the distance when in fact it does not. This will presumably trick the unsuspecting A. Incredibus into smashing into the boulder at enormous velocity and, one would imagine, dying quite spectacularly.
As most anyone knows, however, the Road Runner simply speeds undeterred through the cartoon tunnel in astonishing validation of Cartoon Physics Law VII and the Coyote falls victim to his own trap when attempting to give chase.
We, like the Road Runner, are about to dimensionally shift through the cartoon portal provided for us in the pages of Dark Mission.
Like any good illusion, forced perspective begs that you not look too closely and spoil the fun. The sad truth is, in a world of David Blaines and Criss Angels, the authors of Dark Mission appear to want to present much of their 'evidence'-- for reasons which defy logic --with all the fumbling ineptitude of a minimum wage birthday party clown. As such Dark Mission, as I believe I have shown, has some serious flaws in its research and fallacious gaps in its 'hard science' large enough to drive through in a Wagon Queen Family Truckster.
When first reading through Chapter Twelve, 'Where Titans Slept...' (or 'Where the Titans Slept...' depending upon where in the book you look) it seems that a fairly solid case for conspiracy can be made, beginning with the mysterious circumstances of the January 2004 speech by President Bush in which he announced a return to space, specifically to the moon and Mars.
Unfortunately, in effort to get to that conspiratorial material, the reader is dragged through approximately eighteen pages of rather nettlesome Horshacking in the shape of Richard C Hoagland's A Brief History of the United States in the Last Ten Years In Case You Were in a Coma and This Is the First Book You Just Happened To Pick Up Since Waking. Part of that history deals with some of the 'problems' of former Apollo astronauts like Alan Bean who, through his artwork, is either admitting to or reliving 'suppressed memories' of having seen 'miles-high glass-like structures' on the moon because his paintings don't show the moon with a black sky.
Also included in this overview of all things politically covert is a rehash of Hoagland's Enterprise Mission analysis of former Astronaut John Glenn's appearance on an episode of 'Frasier' in March of 2001 in which Glenn apparently admits, in a manner of disclosure prescribed by The Brookings Report, that NASA are hiding The Truth.
Strangely he neither mentions nor revisits the May 2003 episode of The West Wing. Perhaps this is being reserved for the pages of Dark Mission II, a work whose assured arrival I await with great anticipation...
We do, however, revisit in a meandering and roundabout sort of fashion the infamous and ridiculous 'Mitchell Under Glass' photograph (seen amongst the Press Conference Photos on the bottom left and top right, second image down) which Hoagland touted in 1996 (and continues to tout) as critical evidence of his Crystal Towers of The Moon 'model.'
Why do I call the Mitchell image ridiculous?
For purposes of comparison, here is the original NASA version of the Enterprise Mission 'enhanced' photo. I have only resized the image for easier loading. If you want to see it in its high resolution glory, it is at the Apollo 14 Image Library for your browsing pleasure.
This is what Hoagland wrote about the image in 1996:
The incredibly complex, 3-D architecture of this ancient, meteorite-smashed canopy is evident when any section of the full 360-degree color panorama, taken at Fra Mauro by Apollo 14 Commander, Alan Shepard, is enlarged.
Fair enough.
Needless to say this is not an enlargement. It is four consecutive frames from a sequence of many images taken on the first Apollo 14 EVA. My question is, how much bigger does the image need to be-- even when it isn't seen in context to other frames--before even the dumbest fucking idiot on the planet could comprehend that what we are seeing is... what? Oh, that's right: lens flare.
Virtually all of magazine 66 is spent on photographs of the immediate vicinity of the Lunar Modual (more than 100 images) and lens flare and hazing from ambient or reflected light is seen in at least half of the pictures. One image in particular-- frame 9279 --which precedes the infamous Mitchell Under Glass photo is almost identical in every respect to 9301 with the exception of the fact that it was taken from the opposite side of the LM and Mitchell is not in the frame. Mysteriously, it has nearly all of the very same lens flare as 9301 except for the giant blue smear. Theories like this strike me as Elk Theories. To build a case for artificiality based only on one frame isolated out of one panorama from a collection of over 100 photographs which are clearly littered with lens flare is not just incredibly bad investigation, it is incredibly bad 'science.'
It's almost a joke if it weren't so pathetic.
The bluish dots and smears, by the way, are not stars or planets. They are also lens flare or, more likely, filter flare (an example of which can be seen on the right). Often times dust on the camera lens, which was quite a problem during the Apollo missions, will reflect light as well. As we learned in the last segment, much of the lunar soil is made up of volcanic glass and, as a result, an enigma known as 'zero-phase' would happen when facing cross- or down-sun (turned away from direct or up-sun lighting) when the blazing, unhindered light would reflect back at the astronauts (and thus their cameras) from areas of the lunar surface itself or off of the astronaut's own blindingly white space suits or shiny equipment.
Here in this pop-up window is an annotated version of frame 9301 highlighting the various bits of filter flare. Although it is not widely found information (as it is really of specialised interest) a bit of investigative research reveals that many-- not all, but many --of the Apollo mission Hasselblad cameras used Tiffen Photar and Kodak Wratten filters. These were standard polarising, colour correction, and UV filters and, for black and white imaging, red optical gels for contrast.
It is, however, for precisely the very same reasons that we cannot see stars in lunar landscape photography (a war which continues to rage on between the We Faked The Moon Landing crowd and the Oh No We Di'nt voices of reason) that these reflections cannot be from an 'ancient meteorite-smashed canopy.' And honestly, what kind of amazing properties would glass (upper left), miles away from the camera, need to have in order to bounce a single tiny pinpoint of light inside the shadowed edge of a crater (lower centre) without illuminating the entire landscape and washing out everything in sight?
The type of film most commonly employed throughout the Apollo missions was specially-made Estar thin-base Eastman Kodak SO-368 and SO-121 Ektachrome MS ASA 64 daylight colour slide film, a medium speed, general purpose film. Anyone with any photographic experience at all can tell you that ASA 64 (ISO 64 in more recent times) is a relatively 'slow' film in contrast to the 400 - 1600 ISO films more popular today (unless you have gone digital) and a far cry from the 6000 ISO of some of the black and white film sent to the moon. One of the reasons that so many Apollo photographs seem washed out is because of the amount of light the slow colour film lets in even at high shutter speeds. And some of the 160 ISO colour films they used were no better. Dropping the f-stop to 16, which is closing the iris all the way down to a pinpoint to minimise the allowable light, also has the side effect of keeping everything in focus-- some people call this the 'infinity' setting because everything from the camera to infinity is clear. And this is consistent with a great deal of the lunar images. Conversely, if you open the aperture all the way to f/2, only the foreground images remain clear. Due to the severity of the sun angle most, if not all, lunar photos would have to have been taken at f/16-- 'Sunny 16' as it is often called --and the Hasselblad cameras actually closed down even further to, I believe, f/22. The combination of medium or slow speed film, small f-stops, high shutter speeds and the vast amount of harsh lighting conditions, does not allow enough time for light reflected by stars-- or 'miles-high glass-like ruins' --to register on the film stock. The lunar surface lighting washes out the background and renders the sky black.
Feel free to go to the moon and prove me wrong though. I'll wait.
Even in his 1996 appearance on Coast To Coast AM Hoagland states:
There is supposed to be no air on the moon, you know, except for maybe light scattered in the lens, from the surface or the spacesuits - which would cause a kind of a greying-out. That sky should be beautiful, velvet black; as black as the blackest night you can imagine...
Of course I wouldn't want anyone to think I was taking something out of context and forcing my own perspective on it for purposes of deception, so let me explain briefly that, if you never followed the previously provided link to the transcript of the Hoagland interview on Coast To Coast, he is talking about the colours seen in the Ken Johnston photographs of the moon. Colour plays a key role in some of Hoagland's claims-- especially with regards to the moon and the 'glass towers.' This quote illustrates that he understands scattered light and lens flare, regardless of the pointless comment about no air on the moon, as air or its absence has nothing whatever to do with lens flare: lens flare is an entirely optical issue having to do with the quality of the lens glass and unwanted light reacting with the lens diaphragm. The colour, though, is another issue. And just prior to the above comment, Hoagland says that:
Well, if you take a reversal film, and you expose it - if the moon was as advertised, alright? Even if you stop - if you open the lens wide and you had a time exposure of let's say, several seconds - the sky should still be absolutely black.
A vacuum is a vacuum is a vacuum.
Actually, regardless of whether it's reversal film or not, if you opened the aperture wide and did a time exposure for 'several seconds' on 64 ISO film as you stood on the brightly lighted moon, you would more than likely have a spectacular photo of a white square. Maybe grey. Though it is not clear, one would have to imagine that the 'vacuum' comment is in reference to the fact that the moon apparently has no air (something I was not aware of) and that without an atmosphere the blackness of space looks black. Like Nigel Tufnel explains: 'It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.'
Hoagland goes on to say, then, that:
In fact, when you start looking at Ken's prints - which, now remember - are third generation from the originals, taken on the moon - there is a beautiful, very slight, bluish haze in the sky.
He also explains that Johnston's photos have been sitting in an archive for 30 years. We are also told, second hand, that Johnston was ordered by 'NASA Headquarters' to destroy all copies of lunar photography and that in violation of these orders he saved a set for himself and eventually gave some of that set to Oklahoma City University. What we are not privy to, of course, are the specific details of the photos themselves-- essential questions any investigator ought to ask or ought to provide. Instead, we get nothing. To the point, however, bluish tint, especially in colour slide film, is due to many factors in the development process including the amount of time negatives spent in fixing and washing-- and Kodak slide film is notorious for tinting to the blues and purples. Even the most experienced professional photographer will, every so often, arrive at blue-tinted negatives despite their best efforts.
Here, though, the question is of the photographs themselves, and it sounds to me like lack of colour correction for a reciprocity error common to daylight photography-- and an especially known problem with slow Kodak slide films. And you have to take into account that the pictures were 30 years old. Without knowing all the factors-- such as how the slide (a positive image) was developed, how it was printed to the photographic paper, how that photo was developed, what kind of paper or filtering was used in the production of the photo, how the photos were fixed, washed, and later stored, used, or handled long before they ever went into an archive --to claim that a bluish tint on a series of third generation photos is inescapable proof of artificial glass structures on the moon is just flatly stupid.
Once again, the law of best evidence says that you don't use a copy of something if the original is available.
For example, as I am drifting ever so slightly from my initial direction, Hoagland points in Dark Mission to the image on the right as incontrovertibly evidence of a 'spar' or support beam from the 'ancient glass-like structures' seen to be laying against what is called the East Massif.
For reasons neither entirely well nor fully explained in the book, he has taken this image from a site called SpaceArchive.net, and-- as you can see in the included reduced version for the purposes of illustration --I indicate that source.
What is not clear is why he did not use the NASA version (pictured and indicated as such to the left) available from the most helpful Apollo 17 Image Library rather than a version that has been clearly and fairly badly altered from the original. When comparing the two images side by side it becomes obvious, apart from the fact that the Space Archive version is horribly contrasty, that the NASA version does not appear to include what Hoagland claims is the 'thousands of feet long' object leaning up against the massif which, rather unfortunately, tends to shoot his 'proof' in the head. In the text of Dark Mission he mentions that the Space Archive version is from an Italian site. I find it strange that he would go to the Italian version of the site when the English version, which is quite readily available, provides precisely the same image. Or is it that saying you had to track something down at an Italian site lends a certain mysterious perspective to your work and leads people to believe that this is more proof that NASA are engaged in deception and fraud?
In this closer detailed inspection of the pertinent area of the Hoagland-preferred version, you can see the so-called 'spar' (indicated as A) resting against the massif. It appears to cut diagonally down across the image with perhaps a slight bend to it somewhere in the middle. The other area, indicated by B, is pointed out for reasons which will soon be more apparent.
In the original NASA version, shown to the left in a similarly detailed image to the Space Archive version, you can plainly see (indicated again by A) that the 'spar' is quite notoriously absent. Also, there are subtle changes to the area indicated by B. The upper region, here indicated as C, is brought to your attention because, though it is not directly evident in this copy of the Hoagland-preferred version, he goes on to claim, later, that what we are seeing in the grey speckly bits are the remnants of the 'high-eroded glass-like domes arching high overhead.' On the airless moon.
As you may already have suspected, being the astute individual you clearly are, the reason I indicated region B on both copies of NASA frame AS17-136-20767 is because it is the tiniest vestiges of what...?
Oh that's right: LENS FLARE.
Just so we are clear on this, pictured to the right is a smallish montage of three frames taken from astronaut Harrison 'Jack' Schmitt's black and white pan of the East Massif area, or Station 1, during EVA-1. Following the law of best evidence, these frames are taken from the the Apollo 17 Image Library and not from the Space Archive site-- English or Italian. Besides, these images are not currently available from Space Archive even if you wanted to use them. Used here are AS17-136-20764 (top), AS17-136-20766 (centre), and of course 20767 itself (on the bottom).
Residual lens flare is also largely responsible for the hazy area seen in the shadowed front region of the massif. That would be the area Hoagland claims is made of a 'glass-like' substance. And I have not forgotten a frame. I skipped using 20765 in this illustration because, for the purposes of this example, it is an unecessary duplication, though at a lower angle, of frame 20766.
Even without the benefit of the additional surrounding photographs to confirm the existence of the lens flare, it should be clear to anyone with eyes and a brain that the direction of the shadows unmistakably indicates that the image was taken up-sun. That's was my very first conclusion (and I don't even do this stuff for a living) and then I went to the NASA catalogue to confirm or deny my suspicions. That, kids, is what is called 'investigation' and 'research.'
Of course there is another wee tiny niggling problem regarding the East Massif-- or Mons Vitruvius --'spar' image...
Later, on EVA-3, Jack
Schmitt took another series of images, one of which-- labelled
AS17-140-21374 (available in full high resolution
at the now well-visited Apollo 17 Image Library (if the inserted image doesn't do it for
you) --shows the East Massif under different lighting conditions and in breathtaking Eastman Kodak colour. And, just to be sure, you can see it again at Space Archive, lest you think NASA are pulling a fast one. As
you can see here, a spectacular lack of anything even remotely
anomalous can be seen in the full sunlight. Unless of course we are to
believe that, under cover of darkness, the astronauts crept from the
lunar module, giggling at their own clever ruse, and carefully hid the 'thousands of feet long spar' that was
leaning up against the East Massif. And, before you come unglued, the hazy lines and semi-circle are not indications of 'glass-like' domes. They are what...?
Returning to EVA-1, however, Jack Schmitt, as mentioned, took a black and white pan of Station 1 which included amongst the many frames a total of four images of the supposed 'anomalous' area of Mons Vitruvius. These are indicated to the right. And, no, before you ask or think that I have purposely forgotten a link, these alternative frames are also not presently available from the treasure trove at Space Archive.
In these close-up shots, taken from each of the four frames from the EVA-1 pan, it is fairly evident that there is no spar, no giant 'thousands of feet long' anything-- of any kind --resting on or collapsed against the side of the East Massif.
Neither is there any clear indication of image tampering, particularly in the upper left-hand image where the 'spar,' had it in fact been there at all, would have been seen cutting through the Reseau mark. One can only imagine the skill level needed by an airbrush artist in 1972 (long before the days of Photoshop or other imaging software) to not only 'erase' an object from this image, but to erase that object four different times in an absolutely identical and perfectly flawless manner on four different photographic negatives (which were, to the best of my ability to ascertain, Kodak Panatomic X 80ASA black & white) and then, later, perform the same function on the colour images from EVA-3 as well.
Try as I might, I could not adequately reproduce the Dark Mission version of frame
20767 with the type of clarity I had hoped to do because it is so irritatingly and uselessly small, and
of such poor resolution in the printed manuscript, that I could not fathom spending
much time attempting to rectify the (intentionally?) wrethed nature of it. Instead I reproduced a slightly better 'close-up.' Not wanting to leave it at that, I went back and linked again to this story at the Enterprise Mission where you can see, about half way down the page, a nice 800 pixel wide and fully annotated version that is even worse than the Space Archive 'original.' Plus there is a nice close-up, so you can really see how bad it is, and Hoagland's own assessment of the image.
Another Italian site I found whilst searching dares to ask 'What do you thing about this images??' and, honestly, I thing very little.
I think it's far more likely, without sufficient confirming photographic evidence to the contrary, that the so-called 'spar' is probably a hair or some other common printing abnormality and the mystical 'overreaching lunar dome' and corresponding 'matrix' is a marvellous example of someone who has no clear concept of how to correctly print a photograph-- the type of amateurish mistake someone might make in their first photography class as a high school student.
As a basic exercise in critical thinking, though, let's say the 'spar' really is there: Why, given the obvious lighting conditions present in the photo, is the 'spar' not casting a shadow anywhere? Why do we see only the single 'spar' and not any of the other portions of the theoretical superstructure which, by necessity, would be holding up the 'overreaching lunar dome?' I mean, glass, like a good Scientologist, is perfectly clear, right? So why don't we see the skeletal remains of other 'spars' absolutely everywhere in plain sight? Even a geodesic dome has visible supporting members. Is this 'spar' and other things similar to it, like on Star Trek, made of 'Transparent Aluminum?' If so, then how are we able to see it? If not, why don't we see others like it? What type of properties must this object possess which make it invisible whilst holding up a clear 'lunar dome' but plainly visible when lying down? Why didn't the lunar lander ever smash into the invisible 'lunar dome' on its descent? Why didn't the astronauts (who apparently couldn't see these 'lunar domes' because at no time in all the recorded history of the Apollo missions do we ever hear an astronaut say 'Holy shit! Just look at the size of that invisible "lunar dome" will ya!?') smash into these objects or find pieces of glass and steel littering the lunar surface in great abundance? Why, if these things are 'miles high' haven't they ever been seen reflecting even the tiniest fraction of light by anyone-- anywhere-- at any time-- ever-- in the long history of human civilisation or by any spacecraft or by any astronaut or by any telescope either ameteur or professional-- ever?
The list goes on...
Once the distractions of 'Where the Titans Slept...' are set side, we come to the central thesis upon which the entire chapter seems to rest: that Apollo 17 was apparently a thinly-veiled reconnaissance mission to gather evidence of... well, it's not exactly made clear. Best guess is that it was to prove the moon had once been inhabited.
Hoagland states specifically on two separate occasions in Chapter Twelve and in less than three pages that, regarding the 'anomalies' seen throughout the 1972 visit to the Taurus-Littrow valley (and specifically to Shorty Crater), he 'downloaded the highest resolution versions available from the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal website' and that later he 'continued to download and microscopically examine every available image from the Apollo 17 mission.'
I added the emphasis to that last bit. I wanted it to be manifestly clear and unequivocal because this information-- this disclosure --seems to not only shamelessly contradict the proffered 'evidence' but it also seems to indicate that, although Hoagland asserts to have 'microscopically' examined 'every available image,' he apparently ignored or cast aside those images which did not conform to his 'model' and chose only those that did, such as using a Space Archive image over a NASA image because it better suits his needs even though it exists in absolute isolation and there is not a shred of valid evidence to support it.
That is not science. In fact it barely passes for research.
Again and again, not only in Dark Mission but throughout his 'Now Hear This' special reports and 'papers' published on the Enterprise Mission, Hoagland proudly claims that 'Science is nothing if not prediction.' By definition, prediction is 'to foretell on the basis of observation, experience, or scientific reason.' And simple observation-- particularly after a microscopic examination of 'every available image' --would have shown that Hoagland's perspective is largely invalidated by the photographic evidence.
In the last segment, if you recall, I may have briefly mentioned
something about the 'obvious mechanical debris' or OMD (and, no, not that OMD)
and the 'mangled reflective debris' which is claimed, in the pages of
Dark Mission, to be scattered about the region of Shorty Crater in
great profusion. In fact the entire area of the Taurus-Littrow valley is
supposedly so thoroughly littered with this debris that the
astronauts not only photographed it repeatedly but stood in awe and
wonder at the very idea of it as they went about their apparently
'clandestine' mission.
From Hoagland's perspective it seems clear that the bottom of Shorty Crater is as close to the Holy Grail as one can possibly achieve in the burgeoning arena of archaeo-astronomy. That is until the police constables stop you attacking the Castle Aaargh and whisk you away. In the right-hand image, you will note that there is yellow line drawn between the edge of a rock near the 'shattered mechanical housing' and the doll's head. The purpose of this line is to act as a locator. Using this specific angle and the corresponding shadow as a landmark, you can begin to orient yourself from Jack Schmitt's perspective.
The knowledgeable reader will recall that, in last week's episode, astronaut Harrison 'Jack' Schmitt was last seen on the far left-hand side of a hastily-made mosaic (taken from a number of images) standing beside the lunar rover on the rim of Shorty Crater. One of the images (AS17-137-21010) taken from the same pan assembled to create the mosaic is reproduced here to illustrate where Jack Schmitt was in relation to Eugene Cernan who took the photographs for the aforementioned pan. Schmitt, a trained geologist, was quite enthralled by Shorty Crater and with the discovery of orange soil. Hoagland quotes, in his lushly illustrated tale of Data's Head (which the knowledgeable reader will also recall), this exchange between Schmitt and Cernan:
145:26:44 Schmitt: It's orange!
145:26:46 Cernan: Wait a minute, let me put my visor up. It's still orange!
145:26:49 Schmitt: Sure it is! Crazy!
145:26:53 Cernan: Orange!
145:26:54 Schmitt: I've got to dig a trench, Houston.
Sadly, and in retrospect quite strangely, Hoagland does not continue quoting the text but provides a paragraph of description of what the astronauts are doing and then launches into the big reveal of the Buck Rogers Space Ship rock which he implies as being in Shorty Crater but in fact isn't. But read closely the end of that paragraph and you will note that Hoagland writes:
After the scooping and core samples were taken, Schmitt moves off to the side to take numerous images of the interior of the crater. In some of these images, strange objects can be seen which do not resemble the fractured, volcanic rocks which would be expected at this site.
At first glance this is simply a statement made to set up the reveal-- the big 'In your face, NASA!' --because it is followed up with Hoagland's computer 'enhancements' of the various bits and pieces of the 'obvious mechanical debris' which had been photographed. Interested more by the orange soil and wishing to pursue that aspect of the tale a bit further, I went to the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal myself and located the pertinent bits of dialogue and read:
145:26:54 Schmitt: I've got to dig a trench, Houston.
145:27:00 Parker: Copy that. I guess we'd better work fast.
[Gene passes in front of the panning TV, on his way to the SEP receiver. At some point during this exchange, Jack starts his pan.]
And there it was again. 'Jack starts his pan.' I was momentarily taken off guard by this comment in the Surface Journal because the numbers I was seeing referred to weren't right: 'AS17-133- 20229 to 20256.' The panoramic shots of Shorty Crater referred to throughout Dark Mission were from magazine 137 and clearly show Jack Schmitt near the lunar rover at the edge of the crater... at the edge of the crater in Eugene Cernan's photographs!
I returned to the 'Data's Head' story and looked again at the paragraph in question to make sure I hadn't simply misread it. I hadn't. Turning then to the version of this episode related in Dark Mission I read carefully the bit of misdirection which made me miss the information the first time through. The interpolation is mine :
Unfortunately, when the camera (on the lunar rover) started up, it was pointed at the Rover and the distant South Massif. It stayed positioned there as Schmitt [it's Cernan who moves off to take the pan--because the "reflections" Schmidt (sic) is talking about in a minute come from the Rover's gold mylar--which is where we see Schmidt (sic) imaged... on Cernan's images.] moved away to take a panorama of the crater.
Take out the bracketed sleight of hand cunningly placed to divert your attention and that second sentence reads 'It stayed positioned there as Schmitt moved away to take a panorama of the crater.' This information is so badly intermingled with the information about Cernan 'who moves off to take a pan' that the Schmitt panorama reference is completely tombstoned.
Yet a quick re-reading and de-Hoaglandisation of the material opened up an entirely new Pandora's Box of questions regarding the veracity of Hoagland's claims because here, on the right, is a frame from Jack Schmitt's pan of Shorty Crater taken from the black and white film magazine 133. You will note that, for your convenience, I labelled the 'obvious mechanical debris' in this re-oriented angle after using the hard shadow from the edge of the rock I mentioned earlier as a locator.
Suddenly this 'obvious mechanical debris' and in particular the much touted 'Shattered Mechanical Housing' appears to be neither very 'obvious' nor terribly 'mechanical,' let alone a 'housing' of any kind, 'shattered' or otherwise.
Probably the single biggest drawback to the Jack Schmitt station pan at Shorty Crater is that his viewing angle did not allow him to capture a full-on image of the doll's head. My best extrapolation places that 'artefact' just to the right of the yellow locator line seen in the previous image.
Also rather unfortunately, Schmitt had fallen face down at Geology Station 3, named thereafter 'Ballet Crater' in honour of his less than gracefull tumble. The disasterous side effect of that tumble was that a great deal of lunar regolith smeared the lens of his Hasselblad camera and the centre of his frame is blurred fairly badly.
Although he took quite a number of photographs in his 360 degree panorama, only four of those images managed to capture the pertinent region at the bottom of Shorty Crater and only on the sides of those frames is everything reasonably in focus. He was using a telephoto lens which is why everything appears compressed.
To the right are two of the clearest shots of the doll's head I could pull from the Jack Schmitt pan of Station 4. Feel free to browse through the set of images (linked to previously) in their full glory if you should happen to think I am withholding valuable information.
One of the pre-eminent questions which leaps to mind is how could Richard C Hoagland, founder of The Enterprise Mission, recipient of an Angstrom Medal, former science advisor to CBS News and Walter Cronkite, author of The Monuments of Mars, co-creator of the ‘Pioneer Plaque,’ originator of the ‘Europa Proposal,’ and principal investigator of The Enterprise Mission miss out-- or just completely ignore --this entire series of photographs when, by his own admission, he 'downloaded the highest resolution versions available from the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal website' and 'continued to download and microscopically examine every available image from the Apollo 17 mission?'
The answer is none. None more.
Had he, in fact, pored through and 'microscopically' examined these images as he claims to have done, rather than whistling past the graveyard and hoping no-one would notice, he would have immediately seen that these outlandish claims of 'obvious mechanical debris' and 'miles-high glass-like domes' and some aetheric 'matrix' of invisible Emperor's New Construction Techniques are a load of crap. Or perhaps he did examine the information and decided that it was irrelevant to his needs.
Science is not bending or manipulating a data set to fit a bad or misleading theory; it is about testable and repeatable results; it's about confirmation and reconsidering that which does not work in favour of what does; it is about finding the correct answer and abandoning misconceptions and idiotic preconceived notions.
The fact of the matter is, you would think that someone who was awarded 'The International Angstrom Medal for Excellence in Science**' would be light years smarter than this. Frankly if anyone at the Angstrom Foundation had any sense, they would formally rescind the award they gave him in 1993. That they have not, more than anything, is a slap in the face of reason.
But, again, I digress...
**Bad Astronomy examines the credentials and record of Richard Hoagland and Alan G Archer examines the background of the Angstrom Award as does Ralph Greenberg a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington, and a two-part Skeptical Enquirer article is reproduced here just on the outside chance that anyone thinks I am unduly chastising Hoagland for this crap research he is trying to fob off as in-depth analysis...
FOUR
We're an odd lot, humans. We seem to have an innate, almost primordial desire to see patterns in the most common of objects; to interpret the random as the recognisable; to anthropomorphise in any number of peculiar ways just about everything we see, whether it's...
...or whatever else you can conceivably imagine. But despite the occasional odd propensity to imagine inquisitive faces staring up at you from patterns in flooring tiles or thinking of a toilet as the Giant Scary Pee Pee Eating Monster, it's odder still that the well trained eye might easily misconstrue something as common as a rock for a piece of high-tech machinery.
Granted down to a few thousand years ago a fine piece of igneous or sedimentary rock could be as amazingly useful as an iPod (except for the part where the rock wouldn't actually play music, and the commercials probably wouldn't have been very interesting) and even as late as the 1970s many people unaccountably paid money for packaged 'pet' rocks (I found mine free-range), which makes as little sense today as it did then. Of course people now have traded the passée rock for the far more fashionable water in a plastic bottle-- a tangent for another day...
And the ability to see patterns, faces, or functional items in what otherwise would appear to be stone is not wholly without merit. On the contrary, it is through this very desire to create order out of chaos, to make familiar the otherwise unknown, that we can often rather quickly distinguish the useful from the useless or the real from the imaginary.
This skill is particularly useful in areas like archaeology or palaeontology, for example, where it becomes critical to the method of recognising and identifying the remnants of a past civilisation or determining bones and functional every day items such as pottery or tools from items created by natural geological processes.
On a larger scale we can, with our vast wealth of knowledge and understanding amassed over thousands of years, point to items such as, for example, the pyramids at Giza and know immediately that they are manufactured items and did not just naturally occur on the Egyptian plateau. And it is with the understanding of what a manufactured item looks like which makes areas of Cydonia on Mars (compared to Giza in the provided image) so compelling and warrant further exploration.
Unquestionably, however, there are curious things created in nature which can very often fool us into believing they are something else entirely, things seeming to defy all logic and explanation and whose genesis appears extraordinary, but certainly with a bit of well reasoned investigation one can work out that there are enough distinctive differences separating a basic mechanical device from a simple rock that one could not easily get them confused (see Helpful Visual Tip #1).
Of course, the opposite can also be true: there are virtually billions of artefacts littering the surface of the Earth which may go entirely unnoticed at first simply due to the fact that they are almost completely indistinguishable from their surroundings due to size, shape, colour, weathering, or any number of other natural means.
Terrestrially speaking, we have the benefit of being able to see and touch items of unusual circumstance, like the Antikythera Mechanism, to study them up close and, with luck, figure out how they came to be and what practical or useful function they served. And despite the condition of this particular artefact, as an example, it would seem to be reasonable to deduce that it is not merely a really unusual metamorphic rock. Even with the corrosion and various oceanic mineral deposits, it is perfectly clear that this is some form of manufactured equipment.
When it comes to dealing only with photographic evidence, however, trying to determine the nature of an object can prove quite a challenge, especially when the photographs are not only of varied or inferior quality but of objects on other worlds.
There are, without a doubt, some extremely curious things to be seen in some of the photographs taken throughout our unfortunately relatively short history of extra-planetary excursions, whether manned or unmanned, and most especially of Mars-- which we will get to later (why yes, that does mean there's more, thanks for noticing) --but for the moment we'll continue to focus on the moon.
Richard C. Hoagland, founder of The Enterprise Mission, recipient of an Angstrom Medal, former science advisor to CBS News and Walter Cronkite, author of The Monuments of Mars, co-creator of the 'Pioneer Plaque,' originator of the 'Europa Proposal,' and principal investigator of The Enterprise Mission and who desperately needs to update this tediously outdated laurel upon which he seems compelled to rest points out frequently in Dork Mission-- sorry, Dark Mission --that there is clearly defined, obvious evidence of prior habitation of our moon. This startling conclusion is culled from evidence of the 'miles-high glass-like structures' invisibly peppering gigantic areas of the moonscape, the 'rectilinear arrangement' of once great cities like 'Los Angeles,' the 'highly geometric internal grid' so blatant in the 'Tower,' the evident grandiosity of 'The Castle'-- all obviously manufactured items which speak to some form of civilisation. But these marvellous and spectacular things only pale to insignificance against some of the most critical and most damning pieces of evidence presented in Chapter Twelve: Where Titans Slept...
A casual reader may not be fully prepared for one of the most shocking bits of evidence of all-- torn from the pages of Hoagland's scathing disclosure and provided by none other than NASA itself! Well, not torn exactly. I used a scanner. But that sort of diminishes the impact.
I reeled at this image. Later I did the Electric Slide.
Then I began to look very closely. Perhaps you have as well, now the shock's worn off. As usual, the image provided in Dark Mission is just so incredibly (deliberately perhaps?) poor that no amount of magnification or adjustments to the clarity can make it better. I did however take the liberty of clarifying as best as possible the most important bit:
'Obvious mechanical debris.'
My question is this: If NASA know all about the artificial structures on the moon and are somehow intending to quietly leak this information in some sort of innocuous fashion, then why would they not simply (and correctly) illustrate this 'obvious mechanical debris' in such a way that it would actually resemble 'obvious mechanical debris' instead of just looking like a bunch of big rocks? Clearly whomever created the picture understood what a machine looks like-- i.e. the Lunar Lander --so why not render the 'obvious mechanical debris' with equal care and precision? If the artist could not distinguish a piece of 'obvious mechanical debris' from a rock, then he might have simply illustrated the image this way:
If you wish to point to photographic evidence of things that are truly and glaringly obvious, then let's take an prime example from some classic Viking imagery:
At first blush the robot (centre) seems to be almost as large as the Burger Chef sign (frame right) yet simultaneously not quite as large as the boulder (frame left). Careful inspection, however, clearly proves this is photographic 'stacking' produced with a long focus or 'telephoto' lens on the Viking lander. The rock is actually far closer to the lens than it initially appears, giving the illusion that the robot is therefore smaller. Also, the footprints behind the robot unquestionably indicate that it has travelled some distance prior to nearing the rock, which in turn would then place the Burger Chef sign at a considerable point further away from the lander than one would immediately surmise.
But I am getting ahead of myself...
On Earth, ancient, broken, disused or discarded pieces of machinery frequently tend to appear much like what we can see in the images on the left. That being the case, one is forced to ask a myriad of questions regarding the 'obvious mechanical debris' illustrated in the Lunar Lander image Hoagland points to as critical evidence of 'disclosure' and, as such, his theory-- sorry, model --of former lunar colonisation: Why is the stuff just laying there? Clearly, as per the illustration, we have already landed repeatedly at this site-- there are permanent structures, probably habitats or power stations, seen in the background --so why would this 'obvious mechanical debris' still be there? Wouldn't it have been gathered and studied by now? Why would the lander be touching down amongst loads of broken machine parts? Was this a settlement? Was this a crash? Is this a lunar junkyard?
Even a rubbish pile has some type of context and at least some relationship to its surroundings which can not only be seen and understood but which also make it quite clear just what it is (or was) and what function it served. Archaeologically speaking even a midden, whether small pile of waste from a nomadic group or a colossal festering mass used by an entire city (like the one outside Jerusalem which was so completely putrid that the name for it, 'gehenna,' became synonymous with 'hell') has some recognisable frame of reference. So what is this lander image-- and Hoagland --supposed to be illustrating?
Let's take a moment and set the Wayback Machine to a little-visited place called 'logic.'
Perhaps it seems a bit naive, but my understanding of the moon is that it has no atmosphere; no air. I'm pretty sure I read that some place. A lot. Whatever atmosphere it does have is created mostly through out-gassing and is stripped away into space. Although it has been years since I took a chemistry class, I seem to recall that corrosion or oxidation of metals happens when something is exposed to the elements-- like moisture; it needs some type of atmospheric environment. The Antikythera Mechanism, as seen previously, is a perfect example of this. But rather than relying solely on my memory, here is a thirty second crash course in Basic Chemistry 101.
If you want to get really specific, check chapter 19.13 in Chemistry: The Molecular Science which tells you almost everything you could ever want to know about the subject of corrosion-- including, in the Answers To Exercises page A.77 (found immediately after page 1055) section 19.17, where it is explained that 'On the moon... there would be a lack of moisture and oxygen. This would lead to a very low rate of corrosion.'
So how is it, if there is no significantly measurable atmosphere on the the moon-- the airless moon, as we are told so often in Dark Mission --that the 'obvious mechanical debris' looks like rocks? Or at best, why does it all appear to have been under water for thousands of years and is crusted with so much growth that it looks like... oh I don't know--a bunch of rocks?
According to commonly-found data on the subject, the rudimentary geomorphology of the moon indicates that the regolith or fine surface layer, the 'moondust' covering the lunar crust, was (and still is) formed by impact events. As a result, older layers are by necessity (just like here on Earth) buried beneath newer layers. The regolith was said by astronauts to be like walking in wet sand or 'like snow' says a NASA article on the subject. And though it is a subject of much debate, it is theorised that the first footprint on the moon, if it wasn't blasted away by the Apollo 11 ascent module, will remain more or less intact for perhaps 100 years-- possibly longer --because, despite the reported 'talcum powder-like' quality of the regolith, there are no elemental forces on the lunar surface to wash things away. It would follow, then, that there are no elemental forces to create the type of corrosion seen on the 'obvious mechanical debris.' Certainly they might be covered with a fine dust stirred up by continued impacts on the lunar surface or from out-gassing or 'sputtering,' but unless they've been underwater or exposed long term to some sort of atmosphere (which we've been repeatedly told the moon lacks) they would still resemble 'obvious mechanical debris,' albeit slightly dirty 'obvious mechanical debris.'
For some hard-core photographic proof-- incontrovertible evidence --of this 'obvious mechanical debris,' we need only look here:
See?
Yeah, neither do I.
Not only do I not see any mechanical debris, I also do not see AS17-137-20996HR. Clearly this is two separate images put together in a mosaic or panorama and, frankly, I have no idea if this is Shorty Crater or not-- mostly because I refuse to spend another massive chunk of my time sifting through all 31 fucking film magazines shot by Apollo 17 astronauts just to figure out what it is we are being shown because someone can't be bothered to label their stupid images or check that their images are labelled correctly-- or professionally --for review. And lest you feel my animosity towards bad and or misleading research is misplaced, this utterly amateurish 'mistake' is not isolated. It is one of many in Dark Mission-- and also on The Enterprise Mission web site regarding Shorty Crater. For example:
Available in full at Enterprise, in an entry entitled Data's Head is an excerpt from the (at the time still forthcoming) book Dark Mission. This information is, of course, expanded upon more fully in the complete manuscript, but the link makes it easier for you to quickly reference the material and see for yourself-- and it doesn't cost you $25. It also saves me re-posting the Enterprise Mission 'enhanced' versions of the photos in question. Directly after some introductory material regarding astronauts Cernan and Schmitt arriving at Shorty Crater, the first image seen in the excerpt is a much larger version of this...
This is AS17-140-21409, seen to your left and which is linked to here so that you can, if you wish, browse it in full and in High Resolution at the NASA page from which it was originally downloaded. And as The Enterprise Mission could not be bothered to share this information with anyone, I provided it for them.
Neither could they be bothered, apparently, to tell you that this image is not only not of Shorty Crater but it's not even from the same EVA which took Cernan and Schmitt to Shorty Crater. Of course, as always, and in the interest of fairness, they don't not tell you this information either, though it certainly is suggested by the use of this image and by inference in the segue to the image:
'After the scooping and core samples were taken, Schmitt moves off to the side to take numerous images of the interior of the crater. In some of these images, strange objects can be seen which do not resemble the fractured, volcanic rocks which would be expected at this site.'
To begin with, EVA-2, the one in question, utilised film magazines 133, 135, 137, 138, 144 (also used on EVA-1), and 145. Magazine 137 was used at Station 4, Shorty Crater. Magazine 140-- from which the above included image is taken --is from EVA-3. The astronauts were at Station 6, Tracy's Rock and this image is a 'locator' shot to determine where the Lunar Rover was.
Also, Magazine 133 was loaded with black & white film, so why is this rover (clearly not in the 'interior of the crater') seen in beautiful Eastman colour?
Once more the question arises: why such poor and misleading documentation?
As a short side note: I suppose, if it were important enough, someone could criticise me for primarily referencing web sites (including the apparently anathema 'Wikipedia'). Of course as I am presently writing in the aetheric media it seems ever so much easier for anyone to quickly check the sources by linking to them as opposed to laboriously searching off-line material. And as I am largely addressing an audience of one and am certainly not being paid for my efforts, I have no compunction about citing what I believe to be accurate on-line sources. But at least I offer you, where I can, the opportunity to go to the same source material I have found and see-- and test --for yourself. Besides, easily 75% of the bibliography (or endnotes) in Dark Mission refer to URLs. This is done so in tiny, microfiche-sized print making one wonder, again, if this was perhaps done deliberately to deter follow-up research. Of course many of the notes are self-referential, directing the Inquisitive Mind (that slogged through the entire manuscript) back to Hoagland's own material, almost as if he is metaphorically saying, 'It's the truth because I said so.' Very professional indeed. Joe Nickell of the Skepical Inquirer stated once, in a reference to the so-called MJ-12 documents, that 'The rule of best evidence says that you don't use a copy of something when the original could be available,' so I get as close as I can with what resources I can find. Besides the EM versions are largely crap.
Here is the real Shorty Crater, for comparison, in a rough composite I pieced together. The images came from a number of panoramic shots taken by Gene Cernan starting with AS17-137-20991 and ending with 21024. Not all of them were used, of course, just the ones seeming to fit together best without too much trouble. No adjustments were made to the images other than to their sizes. You may also note that Hoagland says Jack Schmitt was the astronaut to take 'numerous images' inside the crater. Well, he was. In black and white. With film magazine 133. But what are referenced, however, and used as evidence are things taken from Gene Cernan's two panorama shots-- in colour --on Magazine 137.
The image referred to in Dark Mission as AS17-137-20996 is actually the photo on the left (and one of the frames used in the above mosaic). As you can see, though it is an entirely different image from what is wrongly illustrated in the manuscript, it is, as we have been told, absolutely rife with not simply 'obvious mechanical debris' but 'mangled, reflective mechanical debris' as well.
Just exactly the type of 'obvious mechanical debris' or 'mangled, reflective debris' that we didn't see in the image that isn't really 20996-- or from the image that isn't really of Shorty Crater!
I took the liberty of copying the 'obvious mechanical debris' seen in the poorly non-labelled, non-Shorty Crater Hoagland image (AS17-140-21409) and making a side-by-side comparative enhancement of my own.
Is it honestly any real surprise that the EM enhancement-- which almost resembles a Buck Rogers-style rocket ship --is, in fact, more like a rock than a piece of 'obvious mechanical debris?
The detail image is a 900X enlargement from the high resolution original available from the Apollo 17 Image Library with no other enhancements. The indicated section is a copy of the enlarged image with the contrast pushed to +60.
Still looks like a rock to me. Kind of a cool looking rock, but still just a rock.
Something else to consider; if it was, in fact, 'obvious mechanical debris,' then why did the astronauts completely ignore it? Of the last 100 or so images captured at Station 6 before the film magazine was used up, why are almost 80 frames spent on the fine details of Tracy's Rock instead of this 'mangled, reflective mechanical debris?'
Could it be that they were amused and distracted by the rather large phallic representation apparently carved into the Station 6 rock? Or it might have been that the 'obvious mechanical debris' was just so thoroughly commonplace that-- like the 'miles-high ancient glass-like structures' soaring everywhere they looked --it just really didn't warrant any further waste of time, energy, or film because it was just easier to simply say there was all this stuff than expend any effort actually documenting it all on film.
Or perhaps they had seen and photographed so much 'obvious mechanical debris' or 'mangled reflective debris' on their
previous Extra Vehicular Activity at Shorty Crater that they just
didn't think it was that important to gather any more data.
After seeing so many of these breathtaking artefacts just lying everywhere they looked, in plain view-- just sitting there! --so 'obviously' and so 'mangled' and so clearly 'mechanical,' not to mention 'reflective,' at the bottom of Shorty Crater, is it really any wonder they just ignored the Buck Rogers rocket ship that looked like some old rock?
Without a doubt, amongst some of the most monumental discoveries Hoagland points to as having come from the treasure trove so 'blatantly' evident in Shorty Crater would have to be the image on the left. Directly quoted from The Enterprise Mission excerpt on 'Data's Head' is this little diamond in the rough:
'Another shattered mechanical housing from the interior of Shorty Crater ( NASA Frame AS17-132-21000)'
Can I just take a moment and try to explain just how this sort of overwhelmingly rank amateurish 'mistake' smacks of absolutely purposeful deception? Apollo 17 film magazines started at 133-- which ten gruelling seconds of painstaking research on Google (or basic proof-reading) can prove. That same ten second search will also reveal that on the forum at abovetopsecret.com there is a correction offered for this error: AS17-137-21000. It is also indicated on said forum that the 3 and the 7 are not exactly in close proximity to each other on the keyboard, so was this incorrect reference deliberate? If not, why has it never been corrected? To quote Hoagland on his 1996 Coast To Coast AM appearance about these Lunar Anomalies: 'What I find, is a pattern of deception, a pattern of losing information, of mis-labeling...'
Sure this could be an honest mistake. I've inadvertently labelled something incorrectly when dealing with these strings of numerals. Typos are common. But then you (or someone else) proof-reads and the error, one hopes, gets caught and corrected. For someone who claims to be such a powerhouse of knowledge and information regarding all things NASA, you think the guy would not only get his facts straight but check them as well.
Another boot in the groin of common sense is this object, also from the cache of glittering prizes scattered round the bottom of Shorty Crater, which The Enterprise Mission have decided is some sort of a 'pump mechanism or engine housing.' They further claim that 'this object appears to have a series of tubes and mechanical features extending from a geometric, metallic case. There are even what appear to be forged connectors or mounting points on the object.'
Whatever.
I'm reasonably certain that there is a far more accurate answer as to why they refer to this image as 'The Turkey.'
After careful observation and examination of the image, and without the unnecessary visual 'enhancements' made to it by The Enterprise Mission in effort to make it appear more metallic than it already isn't, I have come to the conclusion that, rather than representing an 'engine housing' or 'pump mechanism' which has a 'geometric, metallic case,' this piece of 'obvious mechanical debris' is much more likely to be an Energizer Rabbit plush toy that has been destroyed and cast aside; abandoned long ago and left to gather a fine coat of dust on the airless regolith of the airless moon.
Has it been mentioned yet that the moon has no air?
The penultimate discovery in Shorty Crater, however, was found (if you read the excerpt to which I referred previously) within just a few feet from the 'Turkey,' and it seems the pivotal issue upon which the entire tale of Dark Mission rests. My words only pale to insignificance when compared to the original description:
'It was in studying this particular object more closely that Hoagland first spotted an even more bizarre discovery, laying on the crater wall beyond the "turkey."'
On the wall?
On second thought, let's quote the final re-write in the Dark Mission manuscript where all the power and impact-- that visceral punch of stunning and striking surprise so well and richly deserved--is spelt out in spectacularly declamatory fashion:
'It was while carefully studying this bizarre, apparently blatant piece of lunar junk [which would be the 'turkey'] that Hoagland spotted an even more unusual artifact, obviously lying some distance beyond it on the crater floor.'
The floor this time. Now 'some distance beyond' the 'turkey.' Obviously.
'Even as he suddenly realized what he was seeing, he couldn't bring himself to admit what it appeared to be...
[turning to the next page]
'A human head!
'In a crater--
'On the moon...'
It's pie. And chips. For free.
This object, fascinating as it is, appears in at least seven other frames from the two panorama shots of Shorty Crater taken by Gene Cernan, as seen in the example to the left-- along with the requisite NASA catalogue number so that those of you playing along at home can check and see that I'm not making this up. You will note that for ease of reference, however, the head is already pointed out to save you endless searching through a mass of 'obvious mechanical debris' including the objects previously discussed.
In Dark Mission (and seen in the oft alluded to on-line excerpt) Hoagland explains that, despite his initial assumption, this head cannot be organic in origin because it would not long survive the harsh conditions on the airless Lunar surface, so therefore it must be mechanical in origin. As rational and acceptable as that explanation sounds, it still raises some of the same fundamentally nagging questions as the other 'artefacts,' such as: If it was really a head, surely they would have seen it; If it was reflective, surely they would have seen it; If it stood out against the surroundings as something totally out of place, surely they would have seen it; Cernan took seven pictures of it, surely they must have seen it; It was right there in the middle of everything, surely they must have seen it. They saw the orange soil, but not a head?
According to the details provided in Dark Mission regarding the astronaut's reactions to Shorty Crater and its environs, there is a sense of mystery and amazement at the the 'obvious mechanical debris' and the orange-tinted soil found on the crater rim. This information is not only misleading, but presented in such a manner that it appears to support Hoagland's claim. The problem is, you don't manipulate the data to fit a hypothesis.
Jack Schmitt's reaction to the sight of the Short Crater is indeed 'Whoo, whoo, whoo!' (at 145:22:22 on the Apollo Surface Journal site). And as a geologist, what else would one expect? This crater had presumably been carved down to the very bedrock, deeper than any crater (and was far more interesting than anything) they had seen thus far, and was littered like a geologists dream. Schmitt, who was described as 'a little kid at Christmas time' over the crater, even found bits of volcanic glass which twinkled in the blazing sun. Schmitt's own panoramic shots began with AS17-133-20229 and ended with frame 20259, and seem to have been taken simultaneously to his noticing the orange soil, which tends to conflict with the Hoagland data. The remainder of the stop at Shorty Crater is, apart from the soil samples and vista of this enormous crater, fairly mundane if you both read the Journal entry or browse through the audio and video clips. Even the video isn't that exciting.
Also, Hoagland bends the orange soil discovery to suit his needs to better validate the existence of 'obvious mechanical debris,' telling us first that the soil is simply 'high oxidized' and then later it is 'highly oxidized titanium.' Though this does not conflict with the later geological findings that the orange soil was titanium-rich 'volcanic glass that had been spewed out of some fire-fountain-like eruptions 3.5 billion years ago' (which you can read in the Surface Journal and see in this image for yourself) it does seem to conflict with the visible nature of the 'obvious mechanical debris' which, if made from or contained the titanium oxide, would be unlikely to resemble just some old rocks.
Probably one of the most curious tidbits regarding the Shorty Crater anomalies unearthed in Dark Mission is the fact that Hoagland and Bara seem to want us to blindly except that all of this other 'obvious mechanical debris' is so completely encrusted with corrosion that they are virtually indistinguishable from the surrounding rocks (and that only their well-trained eyes can suss out this information for us mere mortals) whilst at the same time telling us that this theoretically non-organic head is not subject to the same forces even though it is presumably made of the same metallic and obviously 'highly-reflective' materials.
My question to that somewhat skewed assessment is this: Is that lipstick on the doll's head?
Lest ANYONE ever think I am just totally making up any and all 'Hoaglandisms...' I should like to direct your esteemed attention to the latest news at his website so you can see...
-- for YOURSELF...
--Just how important--
--EVERY SINGLE FRAGMENT OF THOUGHT IS!!!
And why I think this sort of bombastic bukkake is as idiotically superfluous as it is annoying and just screams, quite literally, 'I need an editor to make me sound less ridiculous.'
Reminds me of when I was a kid and my neighbour across the street, Murry Sinclair, used to stand outside in his black socks, ugly shorts and wife beater and scream at us:
THREE
Much is made both in the pages of Dark Mission and at one time on The Enterprise Mission web site about a little something called the 'Shard.' Most of the Enterprise information is now relocated at a place called lunaranomolies.com though a more concise version of it exits here if you don't feel like burdening yourself. 
This, according to the story, is a roughly 1.5 mile tall structure or spire sticking off the surface of the moon, much like the stick-shaped thingy found on the Zond 3 photograph. The 'star' floating above the 'Shard' is said to be a camera registration mark. Weird. I have never seen a camera registration mark-- fiducial markings, they are often called --printed anywhere but on the edge of photographs. The distance between these marks are measured when calibrating the camera, so why is just one lone mark floating out in the middle of critical frame real estate?
Sorry, I suppose I ought to show you a better image of the 'Shard.' There. That's better. Now we have a better frame of reference from which to start. Unfortunately I could not upload the original file I have as it is some 20mb. You can view your own copy of it at your leisure here or, if you feel like it, download and peruse it in greater detail at a later date. There are a number of resolutions from which to choose. For the purposes of our discussion, though, the smaller image on the left should suffice well enough for you to see what we are talking about. This was produced by scaling down the pixel dimensions in a digital photo-processing software programme called Adobe Photoshop 7.
So, as I mentioned, the registration marks are usually located on the perimeter of the image frame. Most of the Apollo cameras were fitted with something called a Reseau Plate which contained a grid for determining distances between objects-- which is why you see all the little crosses in so many lunar photographs. The Lunar Orbiters, on the other hand, had:
'A geometric pattern...preexposed on the spacecraft film of Lunar Orbiters II to V at the same time as the edge data. This pattern aided in the detection of and compensation for distortion introduced by the processing, readout, and ground reproduction systems.'
The quote, in its full context in case you feel I am being intentionally vague, is available at the Lunar & Planetary Institute page and is about as comprehensive as it gets for a 40 year old mission.
If you are still having difficulty seeing the 'Shard,' perhaps this image 'enhancement' will be of assistance by giving the subject a bit of much needed perspective, something rather lacking in Dark Mission and in just about every other discussion of this topic I have yet to find.
This is a version of the now-infamous 'Shard' one rarely ever gets to see unless, like me, you go and track it down, and it is known, especially amongst many anomalists, by the cryptic name of LO-III-84M. But you knew that if you had followed the provided link.
I do not-- in any way --dismiss the possibility that there may in fact be a 1.5 mile tall spire on the lunar surface. 'Evidence,' however, seems rather a subjective thing. And though I have often said here that I do not disagree with all of the theories and ideas presented by Richard C. Hoagland, I believe there are much more compelling suggestions of Moon Tower Evidence available elsewhere to researchers that strike me as far more plausible than that which is presented in Dark Mission.
One of the biggest issues I take with the so-called 'Shard' evidence isn't so much the 'Shard' itself-- it's clearly not a photographic abnormality in that it casts a plainly visible shadow on the lunar surface --but with the utterly absurd notion that it has a companion known as the 'Tower' or the 'Cube' rising some seven miles into space.
If you click on the left-hand image and look closely at it, you can see that, as per the topic in the previous chapter, it has been 'enhanced' to the extent that the pixels are beginning to stand out from the background. And of course one of the first things eagerly pointed to in favour of artificiality is the 'geometric structure' seen in both these 'anomalies.' Well of course it's geometric. Pixels-- short for 'picture elements' --are geometric, whether they are rendered as circles, squares, or rectangles. And once you blow something up beyond the limitations and tolerances of the inherent source material, yeah, you're gonna see the pixels. It does not necessarily mean there are structures inside.
The reason I take issue with the existence of the theoretical 'Tower' or 'Cube' and the accompanying 'analysis' is that this so-called 'structure' (when seen in context) quite obviously corresponds to the geometric pattern pre-exposed on the original Orbiter film. Clicking on the right-hand image, you can see the 'grid.' Those are not stars. And for any purists out there, this original 19.4MB file was cropped to show the area in question and then the pixel dimensions were reduced from their original 1157 x 849 to 657 x 465 (maintaining the correct proportions) and the extant 11.43 pixels per inch were left intact. No other processing was involved. Well, except for the addition of the Ubiquitous Helping Hand of Indication and the caption.
No other image is known to exist which confirms the veracity of the
'Shard,' meaning that it could simply (though extraordinarily) be a
photograph of out-gassing or some other natural geological event-- an idea considered highly unlikely by the Enterprise Mission folks because it clearly runs counter to what they seem to believe. But,
according to one of their postings, attributed to Mike Bara,
there is a 'cross-confirming' image of the 'Tower' or 'Cube.'
The Enterprise Mission enhancement of this 'confirmation' photo is provided (as it was found) along with the best possible copy of the untouched (though much smaller) frame-- AS10-32-4856 --I could possibly find. According to the final line in the Bara report:
'These two frames [AS10-32-4856 & LO-III-84M] constitute proof that the "Tower" is a real Lunar feature and not a photographic defect.'
Yeah, okay...
And then there is the mysterious tale of '4822'-- the giant castle structure which floats some nine miles above the surface of the moon, just to the not-too-distant right of what Hoagland calls 'L.A. on the moon.' I believe L.A. probably stands for 'Ludicrous Anomaly' and, frankly, I will not even bother remarking on it further.
I find it quite difficult to write about the subject of '4822' due to the heavy sighs and the fact that my eyes keep rolling. According to the mythology, there are apparently now up to twelve different versions of this image and only two of them show the 'Castle.' All of the other versions have been cunningly doctored to eliminate any sign of this anomaly. That seems perfectly reasonable, doesn't it?
If you recall, in the previous chapter I mentioned the National Press Club briefing on 21 March 1996 (a ritually significant date, as it is customarily the Equinox) and listed the known members of the team assembled by Hoagland. One of the team was the 'properly motivated' Alex Cook. Young Mr Cook, it seems, confirmed the existence of the 'Castle' by discovering it on a copy of '4822' he had obtained from NASA.
What Hoagland tells us (in paraphrase to save you the pointless linguistic gymnastics that only obscure what's really being said) is that his own version, coupled with the version from Alex Cook, shows that the 'Castle' is real because these two images were taken seconds apart and therefore the 'Castle' is offset enough, or seen from a different angle, to prove that it is a real structure.
I took the Hoagland 4822 & the Cook 4822 and put them side by side. The file size on the Hoagland 4822 JPEG I found posted was larger than that of the Cook 4822 JPEG so, very carefully, little by little, I re-sized Hoagland's 4822 (only by pixel reduction with original proportions left constrained) until the two images were the same relative height and width. I dropped the opacity on the Cook 4822 to 40% of the original (as it was overpoweringly brighter), and overlaid the two images.
Oddly enough, they are about 99% exactly the same. If you look closely at the bottom left-hand frame, you will note that I left the two images offset by just a tiny fraction so that you could see that there are indeed two images. Any abnormality in the other 1% of their differences could be due to anything from how the prints were originally made to just how horribly they have been blown up and 'enhanced.'
Another thing to keep in mind is that if these were actually two images taken 'seconds' apart, both the position of the spacecraft and the position of the moon below would have shifted enough to make these frames significantly different. Even after orbital insertion the ship is moving at something like-- What? Ten thousand miles an hour? And in that these were taken out the window of the Apollo 10 craft by an astronaut holding a bulky Hasselblad 70mm camera with an 80mm lens (or worse a 250mm telephoto lens which would have created even more offset given the probability of human error) they should be more than just a little different.
In the interests of fairness and to be as thorough as I can (because you find this as interesting as I do or you wouldn't still be reading) there is another comparison photo set available, this one dating to the pre-Enterprise mission days when they were still calling themselves The Mars Mission. I chose to work with this incredibly awful set of images as well because, as degraded as they seem to be by the stresses of extreme magnification, I wanted to illustrate that I wasn't altering existing data. In the previous example, the Hoagland 4822 and the Cook 4822 were both presented in the upright positions as I have them depicted.
In this alternative version, you can see that the Hoagland 4822 is tilted slightly anticlockwise whilst the Cook 4822 is shown more upright. I found it helpful to tint the images because they were unimaginably difficult to see as individual frames when composited. I tinted the Cook 4822 blue and, as you can see in the second set, dropped the opacity to 50%. The Hoagland 4822 (on the left) is tinted yellow. Together, in the lower left corner, the 'Castles' don't really match, but they make a cool purple and grey colour scheme. The last image, on the right, shows that, once nudged until the images are in more proper alignment, there is a slight offset to the top and everything else almost lines up. Finally, tilting the Cook 4822 backwards just a wee bit it's clear that the two images fit together uncannily well for what are supposed to be two entirely different images.
I felt that it was fair to tilt the image. Certainly Hoagland-- or someone at The Enterprise Mission --did when putting their 'proof' together. If it was perfectly acceptable for them, then I feel justified in doing it here. As we are not being shown how the two photographs are different, other than this minuscule enhancement, who can say with any certainty just how the originals are or were oriented? Either way, it clarifies my point that these are not two entirely separate images taken 'seconds apart' on some 'power wind' sequence as Hoagland would have us believe. And if they were, it is one of the most remarkable achievements in hand-held aerial photography.
And, a little bit of research shows that, though Hoagland makes a great deal out of these two photos being so-called 'stereo pairs,' the truth is stereoscopic strips were actually taken about 16 miles apart with 60% overlap, meaning that the 'Castle' should have moved more than just a tiny hairsbreadth if these two images are, in fact, 'stereo pairs.' The Lunar Orbiter cameras (the unmanned flights from 1966 to 1968 used to map areas where the upcoming Apollo missions would land) were set up to take stereo images by using two different focal length lenses and simultaneously exposing two 35mm images on to one 70mm frame, but here we are talking about a guy with a big hand held camera taking snaps out the window of a ship flying at breakneck velocity through space. How does one individual with one camera manage to take 'stereo' or twin images in such rapid succession from the window of a fast moving craft that when combined they are virtually identical in every conceivable respect?
Another of the brilliant insights taken from The Neighbourhood of Make-Believe can be seen in its original pre-Dark Mission form at The Enterprise Mission web site under the curiously fitting label of IM Butt, or maybe that's LM Butt. It's not that I'm lazy; I just can't in good faith post this ridiculous image. But go ahead. Take a look. I'll wait...
Was that fun? Well the important bit to take notice of isn't just the repeated pattern of a computer enhancement of a photo of a film of a photo but rather that we are being shown yet another new 'Magic Bullet'-- the second frame in this montage --which shows the Lunar Modual (oh...I guess it is LM Butt, after all; my bad) parked beside an 'inclined multi-level' buttress.
It is images like this that are just a blatant slap in the face of reason.
I look at stuff like this and think Hoagland must be just pissing himself with gales of laughter at the stupidity and gullibility of anyone who thinks this 'inclined multi-level buttress' idea is anything but a stinking load of shit, not to put too fine a point on it.
It's an absolute insult.
And to make it worse, unless it was a mistake on the original NASA film, The Enterprise Mission seems to have published their version backwards from the original Apollo 12 frames (seen in their correct sequence to your left). I'd like to take a moment to explain that, once again as you may notice, there is no frame number provided by Hoagland, only a vague reference that this image was taken by 'an Apollo 12 astronaut.'
Thanks, Dick.
Any researcher of even moderate integrity who is truly interested in discovering anomalies-- the curious, the fascinating, the thought-provoking, the bizarre and the possibly unexplainable --in space mission photography (whether it's from NASA, the ESA, the Russians, the Chinese, or whomever) would openly share every scrap of information they could gather so that other researchers could easily examine and, one would hope, replicate the results for confirmation. That's how science works. Good science, anyway: Repeatable experiments and repeatable outcomes.
Obscuring information with arm waving and bullshit in effort to isolate a mere fragment of data only makes your claims that much more preposterous and worthy of derision when the curtain is finally whisked away, exposing the knobby white and hairless knees supporting such a massive conclusion. And it strikes me as amazingly arrogant to think that anyone would wave such utter rubbish like this before the world-- let alone before other researchers with the expectation of ever having it realistically peer reviewed --and think that no-one would ever bother to check the results.
Five minutes of worth of research-- five minutes --tells us that the photographs in question come from film 'Magazine 49/z (B&W) Frames 7172-7324' and that 'This magazine was initially used by Pete Conrad during EVA-2. Later in the EVA, Al Bean borrowed Pete's camera when his own malfunctioned, and completed the magazine.' We also learn that the frame comes from a panning sequence taken by Pete Conrad (our apparently nameless 'Apollo 12 astronaut') when he and Alan Bean arrived at Sharp Crater.
Though it is entirely probably that this information was difficult to obtain 12 years ago (although somehow I doubt that very much), it certainly wasn't impossible to get and it is clearly quite readily available now, so why not update the research to include all current, accurate, and pertinent information?
It is so incredibly, painfully obvious that this so-called 'multi-level inclined buttress' is nothing but a sliver of absolutely mundane lens flare that whatever else is imagined to be in this photo only pales by comparison. It's almost as bad as looking at something as simple as a rock and thinking it's a complex piece of machinery.
And who would do that?
TWO
Always wanting to beat the pants off of us 'Capitalist Pigs' during a mythical time called 'The Cold War,' the Soviet Union-- a now equally mythical land like Atlantis or Lemuria --made it clear that they were the leaders in yet another mythical thing called 'The Space Race' by launching a little tin machine called Sputnik into the starry void in the early evening hours of 4 October 1957. And two years later, on 7 October 1959, the Soviet-launched Luna 3 spacecraft transmitted to Earth the first ever views of the far side of the moon.
In less than ten years, as we busied ourselves trying to fulfil John F.
Kennedy's 1961-stated dream of 'landing a man on the moon and returning him safely
to the Earth' by tinkering with Pegasus and Saturn V rockets and
blowing things up quite spectacularly on the launch pads, the Soviets
fired into space on the afternoon of 18 July 1965 a Mars 3MV-4A-- more popularly known as Zond 3 --which, rather oddly, resembled a heavily modified Imperial Dalek.
Two days after its launch, Zond 3, equipped with a television system which allowed for on-board film processing capabilities, sent back to the Earth via facsimile transmission an approximately 30-frame sequence also of the far side of the moon and then continued on into space.
In 1987, Jane's Information Group published a book called Solar System Log (now apparently out of print) which catalogued the details of some 100 space-faring vehicles including some of the images they captured. Amongst the missions detailed was that of the Zond 3.
And from a Zond 3 photograph provided in the pages of this publication, Richard C. Hoagland, founder of The Enterprise Mission, recipient of an Angstrom Medal, former science advisor to CBS News and Walter Cronkite, author of The Monuments of Mars, co-creator of the 'Pioneer Plaque,' originator of the 'Europa Proposal,' and principle investigator of The Enterprise Mission shows us even more iron-clad evidence of strangeness on the lunar surface. That would be the indicated bit sticking up on the right-hand side of the frame.
This image, such as it is, aptly labelled 'Image #1' (presumably by Hoagland), was the best version I could find. It originates from a much larger and equally poor image available on The Enterprise Mission website (and found used again at said site here way way down at the bottom of the page if you care to scroll forever to see the full graphic in its more or less original context) and dates from Hoagland's 1996 investigation into lunar anomalies.
One may surmise, as it is not stated directly anywhere in Dark Mission, that this discovery was derived from some of the research he dove into after the Mars Observer 'went dark' on 21 August 1993.
Another image from the Zond 3 mission, here given the title of 'Image #2,' used in the original Hoagland 1996 montage (which you just saw if you followed the link) has been apparently drawn from 'Exploring Space With a Camera,' which a bit of further research reveals was first printed as NASA Special Publication 168 in 1968. You might be able to read the source information on the bottom of the image but I figured I would save you the effort and the eye strain.
I provide the general history of the Zond 3 flight (which you may read more about here or here for a start, if you're interested in learning more) for two reasons: one, it lays out a little helpful background information and, two, it offers a couple of otherwise innocuous clues easily overlooked and certainly not mentioned anywhere that I have been able to find in conjunction with Hoagland's research.
On 21 March 1996 Hoagland, along with a 'team of scientists and engineers,' went before the National Press Club in Washington to present their findings on lunar anomalies. As this event took place more than twelve years ago, the trail is somewhat cold-- which certainly gives one pause to consider if the length of time it took for Dark Mission to be published was intentional --so locating information or sources now is rather scant. This was still in the more 'formative years' of the internet and many of the sites referenced in contemporary reports are no longer extant, relics lost in the darkness and distance of the information superhighway. What does exist is an IRC log (at The Enterprise Mission site) and some scattered blurbs about it afterwards which is about as close to the event as anyone is going to get without investing a vast amount of otherwise useful time. Therefore any inaccuracies supplied here are only due to the limitations of the available source material-- including Dark Mission itself, which tends to frequently side-step specific details.
Later that evening (21 March) Hoagland went on the national late night radio show Coast To Coast AM (then hosted by the masterful and sorely missed Art Bell). With him was Dr Ken Johnston, a former manager at the Data and Photo Control Department at the NASA Lunar Receiving Laboratory and one of the 'team' assembled by Hoagland. (The entire transcript of the broadcast is posted, in four parts, on The Enterprise Mission web site and can be found here if you are on the edge of your seat).
Although Ken Johnston was the only one joining Hoagland for the broadcast, Hoagland was asked by Art who the remaining team were. He never really answered the question. Big surprise. The best I have been able to piece together is that the other individuals involved with the Press Club Briefing were Marvin Czarnik, a retired aerospace engineer whose 'experience goes back all the way to the Mercury program and Gemini;' Ron Nicks, a geologist formerly with the Battelle Institute; Alex Cook, a student and amateur astronomer who represented 'the best and brightest of ordinary folk who are properly motivated;' Brian Moore, PhD, 'lunar construction techniques, Moore space, Inc., worked at Kennedy Space Center for two years;' and Robert Fiertek, 'architect, Fiertek Design' who was interested in anomalies on the Moon and Mars for nine years.
One of the more pertinent bits regarding the present topic, though, is from the transcript of the second half hour in which Hoagland states:
'We now have a second frame from the Zond-3 mission, on July 20, 1965. And remember - the first Zond frame showed this 30-mile high dome-like protrusion of the lunar limb. This second frame shows a twenty-some mile "Tower" - very massive tower -which is farther to the north, on the limb of a photograph taken a few seconds earlier. It's in this 28-frame sequence that we can't get our hands on, out of Moscow.'
Clearly the numbering of these images has changed in that they no longer correspond numerically to his description. Then again this was twelve years ago. You can't always be expected to keep this kind of stuff straight.
It is stated in Dark Mission that Hoagland had, in 1995, visited the National Space Science Data Centre at Maryland and had seen a NASA publication (SP-168) containing an image from Zond 3 which had been sent to NASA headquarters in July 1965. It also states that he was unsuccessful at obtaining 'original versions (negatives or prints)' of Soviet space missions from the National Academy of Sciences at Moscow.
So then... We are apparently looking at two images which were part of a 30-frame sequence (24 seem to be of any practical use) by a camera with a 106mm lens from a distance of roughly 10-12,000 kilometres (or 5500-7400 miles) and whose negatives are presently forever drifting through the vastness of space on a heliocentric orbit, which might explain why Hoagland-- or anyone else --will never see them: Innocuous clue one.
The negatives were processed on the spacecraft and scanned at 67-line resolution (some later were rescanned at 1100-lines) and transmitted to Earth through essentially a fax machine and prints were then struck from these transmissions. Later, two images, both of unknown resolution, generation, or origin, found their way into Jane's 'Solar System Log' and SP-168 respectively, which means that they no doubt had to be imaged again in some fashion to end up in books. They were then 'discovered' by Richard C. Hoagland (in the aforementioned publications) and, one would obviously have to presume, either re-photographed, re-photocopied, re-scanned or re-imaged in some manner once more so that Hoagland could create his 1996 montage. And then probably re-imaged yet again for his press conference: Innocuous clue two.
So here we have before us a copy of a reproduction of a reprint of a photo of a fax and are being told that it's conclusive proof of striking and stunning revelations. Please forgive me if I am skeptical. There can be no definitive 'proof' here because there are no possible means of knowing where these images themselves came from or how they were printed or handled-- or mishandled --prior to being reproduced long before we, or Hoagland, ever saw them.
Here, in a clearly much smaller form, is a version of what is called by Hoagland Image #1.
By the way, Zond 3 images are available currently (with some considerable searching) at a few sites here and there but getting decent, let alone complete, image sets and information can be tricky. It took quite some digging to find these sites which, I think, are probably some of the best currently available, which isn't saying much. The versions now available from the NASA web site, for example, are quite frankly pretty crappy, leading one to speculate about the veracity of some of Hoagland's claims.
Certainly when you blow up a better version of 'Image #1'-- which appears to be otherwise known as Zond 3 Frame 24 to the rest of the interested parties in the world --there is a fairly strange (one might even say anomalous) smudge on the image which really doesn't seem to totally correspond to the other pixels on the image but it's difficult to be sure just precisely what it is. At such high enhancements the image becomes so degraded that it's hard to determine if what you're looking at is part of the actual image or an artefact of the processing.
It's important to remember that when you are dealing with digital imagery you can always take pixels away but you cannot add them. Adding pixels does not add quality-- and certainly does not, in any way, add any detail that wasn't already there to begin with. Pixel addition will make an image larger, yes, but it also makes the image 'softer.' And sharpening the detail afterwards only makes the image worse:
In order to enlarge even a small chunk of the Zond 3 image, I needed to add one thousand pixels to the existing image. Sharpening only degrades the image even more and increases the artefacting as it begins to highlight the individual pixels-- something Hoagland's images are often riddled with and, typically, the very things he points to as frequent 'proof.'
Here, too, is a better quality version of Zond 3 Fame 28 (or Hoagland 'Image #2') in which it is fairly evident that the so-called thirty-mile high dome he alludes to as proof of his glass-like structures model is no longer present. Could it be that the image Hoagland used-- from a book --could have had printing defects from one its numerous copyings? I am sure that the case could be made that the images I have used here, taken from various sources on the internet, could have been doctored or manipulated to eliminate the ancient ruins but, honestly, if you 'enhance' the region Hoagland presents as evidence...
...there seems to be no suggestion of tampering with the photo or of somehow digitally obscuring the thirty-mile high glass dome, so where is it?
One of the bits of arm waving and bullshit seemingly meant to divert attention is the absolute ambiguity with which Hoagland 'explains' the procedure or steps involved in achieving his images.
In the transcript of the 1996 Art Bell broadcast he states:
'...we put these photos under the optical scanner, and used the computer algorithms that we've been working with now for several years.'
Although it is subtle, one can almost imagine him casually passing his hand before the face of a viewer or listener-- 'These are not the driods you're looking for...' --because, really, what has he told us?
He scanned the images into the computer. Saying 'optical scanner' apparently makes it sound more high-tech and flashy, providing that 'Oooo' factor: 'Oooo! See? An optical scanner!' He also mentions 'algorithms' in something of an airy fashion as if to suggest that he is simultaneously discussing concepts far above our heads whilst courteously 'dumbing it down' for the rest of us mere mortals to comprehend. This verbal masturbation seems remarkably self-aggrandising when you consider that an algorithm is basically a method of calculation-- a list of steps taken to reach a result--and the foundation of virtually every piece of computer software ever made. It's all H.O.G.W.A.S.H.
It bears repeating that in Dark Mission, Hoagland states he used 'a 486 personal computer, a 1600dpi scanner and a variety of then state-of-the-art digital photo-processing software' to do his enhancements, specifically he says 'commercially available software.' Even the IRC log mentions Hoagland as saying 'You only have to have a home office computer and image software to scan and enhance the data.' But how it is he produced the images he claims as evidence or what 'algorithms' he used are never hinted at. Perhaps because our brains would merely explode at the vast amount of information we would have to take in just to understand it all. In 1996 I would probably guess that he used Photoshop 3 or 4, maybe CorelDRAW 5 or 6. There were (and still are) hundreds of off-the-rack imaging software products available in a vast array of capabilities and price ranges, so who knows how he produced (or presently produces) his images? That information is never fully divulged. That would destroy the illusion.
I find it interesting that, reading the Art Bell transcript, one finds Hoagland saying:
'And this...is part of the pattern that we have noticed. I have not seen any overt examples, that I could put my finger on, in this lunar work - of outright retouching or air-brushing or faking of pictures, or destruction of data. What I find, is a pattern of deception, a pattern of losing information, of mis-labelling it... In other words I see a pattern of...trying to deter people, trying to dissuade people - from getting access to the data...'
That has an oddly familiar ring to it.
Like a couple of scantily-clad dancers at a David Copperfield show on the Vegas strip, our Dark Mission authors seem to want to distract and obfuscate; to divert our erstwhile attention away from the finer details and minutia behind some of the images being presented as some sort of unassailable truth of The Great Lie Perpetuated By NASA.
It begs two questions, really: Can they honestly believe that we will wilfully except these very often ridiculous bits of photographic nonsense and such easily refuted claims being touted for some inexplicable reason as 'hard science?' and, two; what the hell is in the background over there that they don't want us to see?
