Properly Designing an Experiment to Measure Richard Hoagland’s Torsion Field, If It Were Real

Introduction

Warning: This is a long post, and it’s a rough draft for a future podcast episode. But it’s something I’ve wanted to write about for a long time.

Richard C. Hoagland has claimed now for at least a decade that there exists a “hyperdimensional torsion physics” which is based partly on spinning stuff. In his mind, the greater black governmental forces know about this and use it and keep it secret from us. It’s the key to “free energy” and anti-gravity and many other things.

Some of his strongest evidence is based on the frequency of a tuning fork inside a 40+ year-old watch. The purpose of this post is to assume Richard is correct, examine how an experiment using such a watch would need to be designed to provide evidence for his claim, and then to examine the evidence from it that Richard has provided.

Predictions

Richard has often stated, “Science is nothing if not predictions.” He’s also stated, “Science is nothing if not numbers” or sometimes “… data.” He is fairly correct in this statement, or at least the first and the last: For any hypothesis to be useful, it must be testable. It must make a prediction and that prediction must be tested.

Over the years, he has made innumerable claims about what his hyperdimensional or torsion physics “does” and predicts, though most of his predictions have come after the observation which invalidates them as predictions, or at least it renders them useless.

In particular, for this experiment we’re going to design, Hoagland has claimed that when a mass (such as a ball or planet) spins, it creates a “torsion field” that changes the inertia of other objects; he generally equates inertia with masss. Inertia isn’t actually mass, it’s the resistance of any object to a change in its motion. For our purposes here, we’ll even give him the benefit of the doubt, as either one is hypothetically testable with his tuning fork -based watch.

So, his specific claim, as I have seen it, is that the mass of an object will change based on its orientation relative to a massive spinning object. In other words, if you are oriented along the axis of spin of, say, Earth, then your mass will change one way (increase or decrease), and if you are oriented perpendicular to that axis of spin, your mass will change the other way.

Let’s simplify things even further from this more specific claim that complicates things: An object will change its mass in some direction in some orientation relative to a spinning object. This is part of the prediction we need to test.

According to Richard, the other part of this prediction is that to actually see this change, big spinning objects have to align in order to increase or decrease the mass from what we normally see. So, for example, if your baseball is on Earth, it has its mass based on it being on Earth as Earth is spinning the way it does. But, if, say, Venus aligns with the sun and transits (as it did back in July 2012), then the mass will change from what it normally is. Or, like during a solar eclipse. This is the other part of the prediction we need to test.

Hoagland also has other claims, like you have to be at sacred or “high energy” sites or somewhere “near” ±N·19.5° on Earth (where N is an integer multiple, and “near” means you can be ±8° or so from that multiple … so much for a specific prediction). For example, this apparently justifies his begging for people to pay for him and his significant other to go to Egypt last year during that Venus transit. Or taking his equipment on December 21, 2012 (when there wasn’t anything special alignment-wise…) to Chichen Itza, or going at some random time to Stonehenge. Yes, this is beginning to sound even more like magic, but for the purposes of our experimental design, let’s leave this part alone, at least for now.

Designing an Experiment: Equipment

“Expat” goes into much more detail on the specifics of Hoagland’s equipment, here.

To put it briefly, Richard uses a >40-year-old Accutron watch which has a small tuning fork in it that provides the basic unit of time for the watch. A tuning fork’s vibration rate (the frequency) is dependent on several things, including the length of the prongs, material used, and its moment of inertia. So, if mass changes, or its moment of inertia changes, then the tuning fork will change frequency. Meaning that the watch will run either fast or slow.

The second piece of equipment is a laptop computer, with diagnostic software that can read the frequency of the watch, and a connection to the watch.

So, we have the basic setup with a basic premise: During an astronomical alignment event, Hoagland’s Accutron watch should deviate from its expected frequency.

Designing an Experiment: Baseline

After we have designed an experiment and obtained equipment, usually the bulk of time is spent testing and calibrating that equipment. That’s what would need to be done in our hypothetical experiment here.

What this means is that we need to look up when there are no alignments that should affect our results, and then hook the watch up to the computer and measure the frequency. For a long time. Much longer than you expect to use the watch during the actual experiment.

You need to do this to understand how the equipment acts under normal circumstances. Without that, you can’t know if it acts differently – which is what your prediction is – during your time when you think it should. For example, let’s say that I only turn on a special fancy light over my special table when I have important people over for dinner. I notice that it flickers every time. I conclude that the light only flickers when there are important people there. Unfortunately, without the baseline measurement (turning on the light when there AREN’T important people there and seeing if it flickers), then my conclusion is invalidated.

So, in our hypothetical experiment, we test the watch. If it deviates at all from the manufacturer’s specifications during our baseline measurements (say, a 24-hour test), then we need to get a new one. Or we need to, say, make sure that the cables connecting the watch to the computer are connected properly and aren’t prone to surges or something else that could throw off the measurement. Make sure the software is working properly. Maybe try using a different computer.

In other words, we need to make sure that all of our equipment behaves as expected during our baseline measurements when nothing that our hypothesis predicts should affect it is going on.

Lots of statistical analyses would then be run to characterize the baseline behavior to compare with the later experiment and determine if it is statistically different.

Designing an Experiment: Running It

After we have working equipment, verified equipment, and a well documented and analyzed baseline, we then perform our actual measurements. Say, turn on our experiment during a solar eclipse. Or, if you want to follow the claim that we need to do this at some “high energy site,” then you’d need to take your equipment there and also get a baseline just to make sure that you haven’t broken your equipment in transit or messed up the setup.

Then, you gather your data. You run the experiment in the exact same way as you ran it before when doing your baseline.

Data Analysis

In our basic experiment, with our basic premise, the data analysis should be fairly easy.

Remember that the prediction is that, during the alignment event, the inertia of the tuning fork changes. Maybe it’s just me, but based on this premise, here’s what I would expect to see during the transit of Venus across the sun (if the hypothesis were true): The computer would record data identical to the baseline while Venus is away from the sun. When Venus makes contact with the sun’s disk, you would start to see a deviation that would increase until Venus’ disk is fully within the sun’s. Then, it would be at a steady, different value from the baseline for the duration of the transit. Or perhaps increase slowly until Venus is most inside the sun’s disk, then decreasing slightly until Venus’ limb makes contact with the sun’s. Then you’d get a rapid return to baseline as Venus’ disk exits the sun’s and you’d have a steady baseline thereafter.

If the change is very slight, this is where the statistics come in: You need to determine whether the variation you see is different enough from baseline to be considered a real effect. Let’s say, for example, during baseline measurements the average frequency is 360 Hz but that it deviates between 357 and 363 fairly often. So your range is 360±3 Hz (we’re simplifying things here). You do this for a very long time, getting, say, 24 hrs of data and you take a reading every 0.1 seconds, so you have 864,000 data points — a fairly large number from which to get a robust statistical average.

Now let’s say that from your location, the Venus transit lasted only 1 minute (they last many hours, but I’m using this as an example; bear with me). You have 600 data points. You get results that vary around 360 Hz, but it may trend to 365, or have a spike down to 300, and then flatten around 358. Do you have enough data points (only 600) to get a meaningful average? To get a meaningful average that you can say is statistically different enough from 360±3 Hz that this is a meaningful result?

In physics, we usually use a 5-sigma significance, meaning that, if 360±3 Hz represents our average ± 1 standard deviation (1 standard deviation means that about 68% of the datapoints will be in that range), then 5-sigma is 360±15 Hz. 5-sigma means that 99.999927% of the data will be in that range. This means that, to be a significant difference, we have to have an average during the Venus transit of, say, 400±10 Hz (where 1-sigma = 2 here, so 5-sigma = 10 Hz).

Instead, in the scenario I described two paragraphs ago, you’d probably get an average around 362 with a 5-sigma of ±50 Hz. This is NOT statistically significant. That means the null hypothesis – that there is no hyperdimensional physics -driven torsion field – must be concluded.

How could you get better statistics? You’d need different equipment. A turning fork that is more consistently 360 Hz (so better manufacturing = more expensive). A longer event. Maybe a faster reader so instead of reading the turning fork’s frequency every 0.1 seconds, you can read it every 0.01 seconds. Those are the only ways I can think of.

Repeat!

Despite what one may think or want, regardless of how extraordinary one’s results are, you have to repeat them. Over and over again. Preferably other, independent groups with independent equipment does the repetition. One experiment by one person does not a radical change in physics make.

What Does Richard Hoagland’s Data Look Like?

I’ve spent an excruciating >1700 words above explaining how you’d need to design and conduct an experiment with Richard’s apparatus and the basic form of his hypothesis. And why you have to do some of those more boring steps (like baseline measurements and statistical analysis).

To-date, Richard claims to have conducted about ten trials. One was at Coral Castle in Florida back I think during the 2004 Venus transit, another was outside Alburqueque in New Mexico during the 2012 Venus transit. Another in Hawai’i during a solar eclipse, another at Stonehenge during something, another in Mexico during December 21, 2012, etc., etc.

For all of these, he has neither stated that he has performed baseline measurements, nor has he presented any such baseline data. So, right off the bat, his results – whatever they are – are meaningless because we don’t know how his equipment behaves under normal circumstances … I don’t know if the light above my special table flickers at all times or just when those important people are over.

He also has not shown all his data, despite promises to do so.

Here’s one plot that he says was taken at Coral Castle during the Venus transit back in 2004, and it’s typical of the kinds of graphs he shows, though this one has a bit more wiggling going on:

My reading of this figure shows that his watch appears to have a baseline frequency of around 360 Hz, as it should. The average, however, states to be 361.611 Hz, though we don’t know how long that’s an average. The instability is 12.3 minutes per day, meaning it’s not a great watch.

On the actual graph, we see an apparent steady rate at around that 360 Hz, but we see spikes in the left half that deviate up to around ±0.3 Hz, and then we see a series of deviations during the time Venus is leaving the disk of the sun. But we see that the effect continues AFTER Venus is no longer in front of the sun. We see that it continues even more-so than during that change from Venus’ disk leaving the sun’s and more than when Venus was in front of the sun. We also see that the rough steady rate when Venus is in front of the sun is the same Hz as the apparent steady rate when Venus is off the sun’s disk.

From the scroll bar at the bottom, we can also see he’s not showing us all the data he collected, that he DID run it after Venus exited the sun’s disk, but we’re only seeing a 1.4-hr window.

Interestingly, we also have this:

Same location, same Accutron, some of the same time, same number of samples, same average rate, same last reading.

But DIFFERENT traces that are supposed to be happening at the same time! Maybe he mislabeled something. I’d prefer not to say that he faked his data. At the very least, this calls into question A LOT of his work in this.

What Conclusions Can Be Drawn from Richard’s Public Data?

None.

As I stated above, the lack of any baseline measurements automatically mean his data is useless because we don’t know how the watch acts under “normal” circumstances.

That aside, looking at his data that he has released in picture form (as in, we don’t have something like a time-series text file we can graph and run statistics on), it does not behave as one would predict from Richard’s hypothesis.

Other plots he presents from other events show even more steady state readings and then spikes up to 465 Hz at random times during or near when his special times are supposed to be. None of those are what one would predict from his hypothesis.

What Conclusions does Richard Draw from His Data?

“stunning ‘physics anomalies’”

“staggering technological implications of these simple torsion measurements — for REAL ‘free energy’ … for REAL ‘anti-gravity’ … for REAL ‘civilian inheritance of the riches of an entire solar system …’”

“These Enterprise Accutron results, painstakingly recorded in 2004, now overwhelmingly confirm– We DO live in a Hyperdimensional Solar System … with ALL those attendant implications.”

Et cetera.

Final Thoughts

First, as with all scientific endeavors, please let me know if I’ve left anything out or if I’ve made a mistake.

With that said, I’ll repeat that this is something I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time, and I finally had the three hours to do it (with some breaks). The craziness of claiming significant results from what – by all honest appearances – looks like a broken watch is the height of gall, ignorance, or some other words that I won’t say.

With Richard, I know he knows better because it’s been pointed out many times that what he needs to do to make his experiment valid.

But this also gets to a broader issue of a so-called “amateur scientist” who may wish to conduct an experiment to try to “prove” their non-mainstream idea: They have to do this extra stuff. Doing your experiment and getting weird results does not prove anything. This is also why doing science is hard and why maybe <5% of it is the glamorous press release and cool results. So much of it is testing, data gathering, and data reduction and then repeating over and over again.

Richard (and others) seem to think they can do a quick experiment and then that magically overturns centuries of "established" science. It doesn't.

Podcast #74: The True Color of Mars

Conspiracy strikes!
But Stuart says, “Mars’ color
Is natur’ly red.”

This episode is hopefully the last for a few months on image processing gone horribly wrong. I swear.

This one is an episode I’ve been wanting to do for awhile — at least since last year — but I had been putting off because I didn’t want to listen to Richard Hoagland again and take detailed, dense notes. And I’d covered Richard a lot recently. And I’d done a lot of image analysis episodes. The claim is that the color of Mars is fake, that it really should look like Earth. And since no space agency’s photos look that way, they’re all fake color.

The episode includes has two Coast to Coast clips (both Hoagland), Q&A, feedback, and a puzzler! The episode is around 40 minutes long.

Podcast #68: Expat in Hoaglandia – A Fantasia of NASA Conspiracies

This episode is just 6 seconds short of a full hour. I interview Expat – who was my first guest ever back in Episode 10 – about numerous political and technological conspiracies of Richard Hoagland as generally applied to NASA. I learned quite a bit during this interview, and I hope that you do, too, and find it interesting as well.

There’s a quick New News item at the end, but all the other segments are skipped so as not to detract from Expat.

Upcoming episodes that I mentioned at the end include: the True Color of Mars, the Ringmakers of Saturn, 2012 Doomsday Revisited, a Young-Earth Creationist suing NASA, and a Nancy Leider clip show.

Podcast #67: Russian Meteor Conspiracies

I first said I wouldn’t do it, then I did it: Chelyabinsk meteor conspiracies! The episode is just a tad longer than the last one at a bit under 25 minutes.

The topics covered, besides setting the scene and what’s really known about the meteor, I talk about the coincidence of time; the coincidence of location; the conspiracies of missiles, UFOs, and Planet X; whether it was sent by some p—ed off deity; and the unfortunate scam that’s cropped up.

Besides all that, there’s a bit of feedback that lends itself to one of the (yes, of the two!!) puzzlers. And a quick announcement or two (depending on how you count ‘em) rounds out the episode. One of those announcements is that I will only be doing two episodes this month. Somehow I managed to put out 4 last month despite writing 3 grants, but this month is just insane along with 8 days of travel in the latter half. Sorry.

Remember that Expat will be on the next episode talking about some of the conspiracies related to politics, secrets, and engineering of Richard C. Hoagland. If you have something you really want me to ask him, feel free to send it in (or comment below).

Podcast #60: The Face on Mars, Part 2

Face on Mars – from Mars Global Surveyor

This episode is the second of two about the Face on Mars. In this second episode, I start out with a discussion revisiting the basic idea of pareidolia and why this feature is best explained by that psychological phenomenon. I then get into Mark Carlotto’s image analysis, other faces, and finally spend quite a bit of time on various conspiracies surrounding it.

I also have a very brief New News segment and a short carry-over puzzler. The next episode is going to be about whether or not claiming that “asteroids did it” is special pleading for explaining various anomalies in the solar system. If you have ideas for a puzzler, please let me know (e-mail) BEFORE Friday the 11th — I have to record the episode on Saturday because of travel.

Podcast #59: The Face on Mars, Part 1

Face on Mars – from Mars Global Surveyor

This episode is the first of two about the Face on Mars. In this first episode, I discuss a lot of the history of imaging the Face, the context of it and its location on Mars, and many of the claims related to the imaging of it. Get ready for some Coast to Coast clips — there are eight of them. This episode goes into significantly more detail than my post four years ago on the subject.

Part 2 will be about some of the more conspiratorial and related claims along with a few other faces thrown in. This episode as it was was already 40 minutes long, so I decided to split into two parts.

I also have a very brief New News segment, a short puzzler, and two announcements.

2012 Year in Review for “Exposing PseudoAstronomy”

Introduction

I haven’t done one of these before, but I thought that since everybody’s doing it, of course I should, too. I’m not going to talk about overall stats or stuff like that except in specific cases. More, I’m going to talk about content on here and my podcast.

Podcast

I’ll start with this first to get it out of the way. This year saw me start by changing my podcast from two to four promised episodes per month, which I then had to drop down in September to two again. January should see me go back up to four.

Topic-wise, I covered a vast variety, with Planet X and image processing, age modeling / dating and pyramid-star correlations (claimed). I also produced my first video, and while promising a second, I still have yet to deliver it.

On with the blog topics …

Psychics (and related)

The year started out with my first actual blog post on scoring psychic predictions for 2011. I posted it January 5 and it failed to reach the page views I had hoped, despite Phil Plait tweeting about it mid-February. I’m working on getting 2012′s out much sooner (next few days … by Jan. 1).

Anyone who has suggestions about places I can post/link/send my 2012 psychic predictions run-down to (I’ll be grading over 300 predictions by about 15 “pros”), let me know.

2012 / Planet X

I really didn’t have too many posts on this until “the end” – the last few days leading up to December 21, 2012. Obviously this was the major topic for “pseudoastronomy”-related topics this year, at least in terms of public consciousness. As such, it was by far the most common search term that got people to the blog, and my page views rose steadily in the weeks up to 12/21/2012. They then doubled in the two days before and on that date, and now dropped down to about 10-15% that level.

I’ve been approached by the admin of the 2012hoax.org website to get involved with his next project — I’ve agreed as my time allows, so you may hear more on that later.

Lawsuits

I wrote a post about this but never actually posted it. I’m still not going to mention specifics because I don’t see a huge need to at the moment, but I can talk about it without using names nor subject matter. I may also screen comments that make specific allegations about it — just FYI on that — and I will not respond to requests for more specifics.

I was (peripherally) threatened with a lawsuit in September over a series of posts I had written relating to what is considered by the vast majority of scientifically literate people to be a pseudoscience. The person in question said I had lied about them, that I had made false allegations about them, and that I seemed fixated on them and it made them uncomfortable (despite having written one blog post referencing their material in the 2012 calendar year). And there were many others in this person’s field-of-choice whom I could pick on.

I say that I was “peripherally” threatened with a lawsuit because I was never contacted directly by this person nor an agent acting on their behalf with regards to this matter. Rather, I found out about this when my boss e-mailed me telling me that this person had written to him about me and talking about suing me. And then I found out that this person had written to my university saying that they may try to sue the university, as well, because of what I had written.

And then within about two days, it all disappeared. The posts on this person’s website about me were taken down, the person’s Twitter feed went private, and even the Cyber Security ad that this person or this person’s agent had posted went unfulfilled.

My guess – and this is not a statement of fact, it is my own musing based on the evidence that I have – is that this person actually did contact a lawyer as they had threatened. And the lawyer told this person that not only did this person have zero case against me (not only because the case was without merit but also because of the statute of limitations on libel in the US), but now I would have a fairly good case against this person for libel, harassment, and employer (attempted) intimidation.

I’ve maintained all my documentation about this, including what this person had posted, and perhaps at a later date I will post it (after the statute of limitations, perhaps?).

Lunar Ziggurat

Probably one of my more interesting topics – not for its actual subject matter, but more for what ensued as a result – was the whole shindig with Richard Hoagland’s claim of Mike Bara’s claim that there is a ziggurat on the far side of the Moon.

A lot of stuff went into this, and that link provides an itemized and in-order contents of all the blog posts I wrote about it as well as three podcasts (including one video).

It also resulted in Mike slamming me in his new book and going on at least a half-dozen radio programs and speaking out against my analysis. In the process, Mike continued to make numerous mistakes and conspiracy claims (such as he trusts no new images from NASA, or that he hasn’t trusted the Japanese (and so their lunar images) since Pearl Harbor).

I’ve written and submitted an article for Skeptical Inquirer summarizing “what went down” and if it’s accepted, I’ll let y’all know. I’d consider this perhaps one of the more interesting things I did related to skepticism in 2012.

Not So Much Creationism, More Richard Hoagland (and related)

In the past few years, some of my bread-and-butter was young-Earth creationist claims and going through them and showing why they’re wrong. This year, though I still have a dozen articles open that I plan to (eventually) write about, I definitely migrated to write more about other things. A larger theme this year was related to Richard C. Hoagland’s claims.

Some have been just so crazy that I’m not sure I could even write about them. The fall into a category that I recently learned: Not even wrong. As in, it’s just so “out there” that there’s no place to even start to debunk it. It’s so wrong that saying it’s wrong is under-stating the wrongness of it. It’s off the charts on the Wrongitude® meter. Such as his phone-in to Coast to Coast AM on December 21, 2012, stating that HAARP was finally fulfilling its purpose and had been active all day, preventing the world from tipping over. I mean, how do you even start to address that?

Some Philosophy

It was related to the lunar ziggurat stuff, but I don’t normally dip into many deep, personal feelings nor thoughts nor philosophy on this blog. I’m opinionated, definitely, but I don’t normally get into much detail.

Probably the post that best exemplified philosophy this year was my post, “Do Skeptics Hate the People They Debunk?” I wish it had gotten more reads ’cause I considered it a pretty good post. Oh, and then I did a, “What’s a Skeptic?” post a month later.

How Science Is Done

I also had a few posts this year on the basic scientific process. From grant reviews to how scientists are funded, to the fact that a presentation at a science conference doesn’t mean it’s not pseudoscience.

TAM Conference

This was also my first year at TAM. I wrote two blog posts about it, the first one on that page being quite lengthy and describing my experience, and the second one on that page being about errors in some of the talks. Looking back, 6 months later, I’d like to say that my views have mellowed somewhat, and that chances are >50% that I’ll go back in 2013. I’m also still attempting to convince D.J. Grothe to book me in some sort of speaking role (panel, workshop, maybe even talk?), but as you can likely imagine, doing so can be difficult.

Unfinished Posts

I also started to write a few blog posts this year that I never finished … but will, as soon as I get unbusy. I swear .

Well, some perhaps not. But the ones that I do plan on finishing are, “How To (and Not To) Give an Oral and/or Poster Presentation,” “How Is Science Vetted and Reviewed?” and ““John Carter” Movie Was Historical/Science Faction, According to Richard Hoagland.” That last one should be fun.

Year Ahead

Obviously, as I’ve shown with my 2010 and 2011 psychic predictions, no one can predict the future. But, we can make some educated guesses.

On the podcast front, I do plan on getting back to 4 per month. I may have to cut back again, but that’s the plan at least for the near future. I also want to get more into making some videos related to these topics.

I have so many topics to write about in the queue that I’m not hurting for them, but finding time to do it will be interesting, at least for the first half of the year. I just heard back this morning from a large grant I had submitted that I thought had a very good chance of getting funded, but it did not. So, come July, I may have a heck of a lot more free time forced upon me. Anyone know the cheapest place to buy ramen?

Conference-wise, I discussed TAM above. I will also be giving a reprise of my moon hoax talk at the Colorado School of Mines’ Yuri’s Night celebration in April, and I’ll be at the Denver Skeptics’ SkeptiCamp this May(?) giving some TBD talk — maybe about image processing gone wrong, maybe about UFOs.

I’m also still trying to get on Coast to Coast AM. George Noory (the host) did state twice in the episode that Mike ranted about me that he would have me on. My last e-mail to George, about two months ago, did get a response, but it was very non-commital. Recently, I was fortunate and a recurring guest on the show who has followed some of my work suggested to Lisa (the executive producer) that I be on. So, we’ll see. I’m hesitant to nag, but if I go a year without mentioning it, chances are it’ll never happen.

I will still post announcements for podcast episode releases to the blog. I realize for some people that may be annoying, but just stick the RSS feed in your reader and ignore those if you don’t want to read them. I’m not the best at marketing, but this is one outlet I can use.

Edited to Add (12/27/2012): I’m also thinking I may finally try to do an eBook of some sort. Perhaps on Planet X and various peoples’ ideas for it and why NONE of them work.

Final Thoughts

And with that all said, I think that about sums up 2012 for my Exposing PseudoAstronomy® franchise. To those who’ve made it this far, perhaps you’d like to Comment on what your favorite and/or least favorite topic(s) have been over the last year, and what you’d like to see different in the future.

New Blog Added to Blogroll — Interpose Mission

Quick post to mention that I’ve added a new blog to my fairly short “blogroll” list off to the side of every page, if you scroll down far enough past the monthly archive links. For those who like my Richard C. Hoagland -related posts, this blog’s for you: Interpose Mission.

The blog is different from Expat’s Dork Mission: The Emoluments of Mars, in that (a) Julian gives his real name, (b) it’s less snarky (so far … but we all end up deteriorating after awhile), and (c) it goes into a bit more detail about why ol’ Richard’s yarns are poorly spun and fraying throughout.

So far, he’s only done three posts. The first was an introductory post, similar to most peoples’, and then the next two were about Richard’s long-standing claim that Mars’ moon Phobos is an artificial spaceship and that Curiosity has found the ruins of apartment buildings on Mars.

I’ve added it to my RSS feed, and if you “like” more of Hoagland’s “ideas,” I suggest you do the same.

When You Worry that Any Bone Tossed Will Set Off Conspiracists: NASA Video on Fomalhaut b

Intro

Sorry the blog’s been a bit bare lately. As mentioned in my podcast, I’ve been very busy the last two months. Hopefully things will die down a bit in mid- to late-November after most of my stuff is due, such as three faculty applications.

Anyway, this is just a short, fun, and scary post ’bout a video that NASA’s animation group recently posted: “Zombie Fomalhaut b: Study of Hubble Data Revives a ‘Dead’ Exoplanet.”

Halloween

For those of you who live outside of normal society, three days from today is October 30, my father’s birthday, and the day after that is October 31, the Big Candy holiday of Halloween. The dead and scary and related are celebrated and ultra-conservative Christians protest it as worshipping a guy named Stan. Or maybe they left out the “a” and meant Satan. Anyway …

Fomalhaut b

Fomalhaut is a star – a rather bright star as seen from Earth that’s about 25 light-years away. It made headlines in 2008 with the potential discovery of an actually imaged planet around the star. Following convention, the planet was termed Fomalhaut b.

Fomalhaut b

However, controversy came earlier this year when, despite the apparent solid observations in visible light, it was difficult if not impossible to be seen in infrared light. It should have been prominent in IR light (which is where most people actually go for direct-exoplanet imaging) because planets are “warm” and so glow relatively brightly in the IR while stars are much brighter in the visible. Hence, the lack of an IR detection raised some significant issues.

But, a recent reanalysis shows that it probably is real, it’s just smaller than previously thought. And follow-up observations are being made. That’s what you can get from the neat-o 2 min 08 sec video I linked to.

Conspiracy

If you watch the video, it’s obviously meant to be humorous and in the spirit common to Halloween in the US. But, if you watch the last 10 seconds, they show a disk-shaped 1950s-style UFO passing by Earth.

Yes, obviously it’s meant to be Halloween-y. But I guess when you’ve been listening to and watching conspiracy people for any length of time, you worry that ANY sort of thing like this from any “official” government body, especially NASA, is going to be latched onto and taken as an admission or a leak or whatever to support their ideas.

Take John Glenn. He appeared on an episode of Frasier and he stated:

“Back in those glory days, I was very uncomfortable when they asked us to say things we didn’t want to say and deny other things. Some people asked, you know, were you alone out there? We never gave the real answer, and yet we see things out there, strange things, but we know what we saw out there. And we couldn’t really say anything. The bosses were really afraid of this, they were afraid of the War of the Worlds type stuff, and about panic in the streets. So, we had to keep quiet. And now we only see these things in our nightmares or maybe in the movies, and some of them are pretty close to being the truth.”

Richard C. Hoagland, Face-on-Mars-guy extraordinaire, has used this many times to support his conspiracy claims. And yet, if you actually WATCH the episode, the entire point was to show the comedy of an argument between two of the show’s main characters, Roz and Frasier, that they are so self-absorbed in their own squabbling that they miss the sensational statement by John Glenn.

Conspiracists such as Hoagland, Mike Bara, or David Wilcock miss the entire point that this was a scripted show and not an off-the-cuff admission of ET life. Expat over at the Dork Mission blog has a good summary and goes into a bit more detail about this than I do above.

Final Thoughts

To return to my point, the NASA video is funny, and it shows how science works: This is a process of finding evidence to support a claim, testing it, and trying to figure out what’s really going on. The video was released just a few days ago obviously in the spirit of a US holiday. But just as the Frasier show was clearly scripted comedy but was used by UFO nuts, I worry that a few animation guys having fun may also be used by conspiracy / UFO folks to support their own claims.

Dynamic Range and Shadows

Introduction

Part three of four posts in response to Michael Bara’s five-part post that allegedly destroys my arguments that the ziggurat on the moon is not real. Next post is already written (mostly) and will come out shortly, wrapping things up.

Dynamic Range

I really think I’ve covered this enough by this point, but I’ll do it briefly again.

Below is the “original” ziggurat image that Mike has linked to. Below that is a histogram of its pixel values. Note that this looks slightly different from what Photoshop will show the histogram to be. That’s because Photoshop fakes it a teensy bit. This histogram was created using very rigorous data analysis software (Igor Pro) and shows a few spikes and a few gaps in the greyscale coverage:

Original Lunar Ziggurat Image from Call of Duty Zombies Forum

Histogram of Pixel Values in Original Ziggurat Image

The dynamic range available for this image is 8-bit, or 0 through 2^8-1, or 256 shades of grey (or 254 plus black plus white — semantics). The actual dynamic range the image covers is less than this — its range is only 12 through 169, or 157 shades of grey — just a little over 7-bit.

Compare that with the NASA image (whether you think the NASA image has been tampered with or not, that’s unimportant for this explanation), shown below. Its histogram spans values from 0 through 255, showing that it takes up the entire 8-bit range.

“Ziggurat” Area in NASA Photo AS11-38-5564

Histogram of Pixel Values in Original NASA Image of Ziggurat Location

The immediate implication is that the ziggurat version has LOST roughly half of its information, its dynamic range. Or, if you’re of the conspiracy mindset, then the NASA version has been stretched to give it 2x the range.

Another thing we can look at is those spikes in the dark end and the gaps in the bright ends. I was honestly surprised that these were present in the NASA one because what this shows is that the curves (or levels) have been adjusted (and I say that with full realization of its ability to be quote-mined). The way you get the spikes are when you compress a wide range of shades into a narrower range. Because pixels must have an integer (whole number) value, rounding effects mean that you’ll get some shades with more than others.

Similarly, the bright end has been expanded. This means the opposite – you had a narrow range of shades and those were re-mapped to a wider range. Again, due to rounding, you can get some values with no pixels in it.

This can be done manually in software, or it can also be done automatically. Given the spacing of them, it looks like a relatively basic adjustment has been made rather than any more complicated mapping, for both the Call of Duty Zombies image with the ziggurat and NASA’s.

The fact that BOTH the ziggurat one and the NASA one have these gaps and spikes is evidence that both have been adjusted brightness-wise in software. But, taken with the noise in the ziggurat one, the smaller dynamic range, and the reduced detail, these all combine to make the case for the ziggurat version being a later generation image that’s been modified more than the NASA one (see previous post on noise and detail — this section was originally written for that post but I decided to move it to this one).

Dark Pixels, Shadow, and Light

What is also readily apparent in the NASA version is that there are many more black pixels in the region of interest. This could mean several very non-conspiracy things (as opposed to the “only” answer being that NASA took a black paintbrush to it).

One is what I have stated before and I think is a likely contributor: The image was put through an automatic processing code either during or after scanning, before being placed online. As a default in most scanning software, a histogram of the pixel values is created and anything darker than 0.1% is made to be shade 0, and anything brighter than 0.1% of the pixels is made to be shade 255. Sometimes, for some reason, this default is set to 1% instead, though it is also manually variable (usually).

Another part of this that I think is most likely is that, as I’ve said before, shadows on the moon are very dark. A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation is that earthshine, the only “direct” light into some sun-shadowed regions on the near side, is around 1000x fainter than sunlight would be. On the far side – and these photos are from the far side – there is no earthshine to contribute.

Which means the only other way to get light into the shadowed region would be scattering from the lunar surface itself. Mike misreads several things and calls me out where I admitted to making a mistake in my first video (Mike, how many mistakes have you made in this discussion? I’ve called you out on two very obvious ones in previous posts, and I call you out on another, below). Yes, you can get scattered light onto objects that are in shadow. If you have a small object casting a small shadow (such as a lunar module), then you have a very large surface surrounding it that will scatter relatively a lot of light into it. That’s why the Apollo astronauts are lit even when they are in the shadow of an object.

However, if you have a very large object – such as a 3-km-high crater rim – that casts a shadow – such as into the crater – then there is much less surrounding surface available to scatter light into the shadowed region. Also, remember that the moon reflects (on average) only about 10% of the light it receives*. So already any lunar surface that’s lit only by scattered light would be 10x fainter than the sun-lit part, and that’s assuming that ALL light scattered off the sun-lit lunar surface scatters into the shadowed parts to be reflected back into the camera lens, as opposed to the vast majority of it that just gets scattered into space.

*As opposed to Mike’s claim: “Since the lunar surface is made mostly of glass, titanium and aluminum, it tends to be very highly reflective.” Um, no (source 1, source 2).

Now, yes, there will still be some light scattered into the shadowed region, but it will be very little, relatively speaking, compared with the shadow of a small object, and it will be even less, relatively speaking, when compared with the sun-lit surrounding surface. For example, let’s look at AS11-38-5606:

Apollo Image AS11-38-5606

This image was taken at a low sun angle, and there are a lot of shadows being cast. And look! They’re all very very black. The photographic exposure would need to be much longer in order to capture any of the minuscule amount of light scattered into the shadowed regions that were then scattered into the camera.

Now, before we go back to the ziggurat, let’s look at another part of this claim. Mike states: “I have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of lunar images where the shadows are far from “pitch-black (or almost pitch-black).””

In support of this, Mike points to images such as AS11-44-6609:

NASA Apollo Photo AS11-44-6609

If you go to the full resolution version, you do see that the shadowed regions are not pitch black! WTF is going on!?

First, if you check the levels in photoshop, the 0.1% clip has either already been applied or it was never relevant to this image. So this does not falsify my previous statement of that being a possibility for the black shadows in the “ziggurat” one.

Second, let’s look at a few photos later, AS11-44-6612:

NASA Apollo Photo AS11-44-6612

See that big crater up to the top? That’s the same one that’s near the middle-right in #-6609. Notice that instead of having a greyscale equivalent of around 25%, this time that very same shadow, taken just a few seconds or minutes later but at a different angle and part of the lens has decreased in brightness by over half. Meanwhile, shadows that are in roughly the same position of the frame (as in middle-right versus upper-middle) have a similar brightness as that shadow did in #-6609.

Also, look at the black space above the lunar surface (the right of the frame unless you’ve rotated it). The part of the sky near the top and bottom is ~5% black. The part near the middle is around 13% black. Or, 2-3x as bright, when space should be completely dark in this kind of exposure under ideal optics.

If you’re a photographer, you probably know where I’m going with this: The simplest explanation is that this is either a lens flare from shooting in the general direction of the sun, and/or this is grime on the lens causing some scattering. Less probable but still possible would be a light leak.

And, a closer examination of the shadowed areas does show some very, very faint detail that you can bring out, but only towards the middle of the image where that overall glow is.

Meanwhile, if you look through, say, the Apollo 11 image catalog and look at the B&W images, the shadows in pretty much every orbital photo are completely black. The shadows in the color ones are not.

As a photographer, this is the most likely explanation to me to explain AS11-44-6609 and images like it where Mike points to shadows that are lit:

1. Original Photography:
   • Image was taken in the general direction of the sun so that glare was present.
   • And/Or, there was dirt on the lens or on the window through which the astronauts were shooting.
   • This caused a more brightly lit part of the image to be in a given location, supported by other images on the roll that show the same brightness in the same location of the frame rather than the same geographic location on the moon.
   • Some scattered light from the lunar surface, into the shadowed regions, off the shadowed regions, into the camera, was recorded.
2. Image Scanning:
   • Negative or print was scanned.
   • Auto software does a 0.1% bright/dark clip, making the darkest parts black and brightest parts white. This image shows that effect in its histogram.
   • This causes shadows at the periphery to be black and show no detail.
   • Since the center is brighter, there’s no real effect to the brightness, and the very faint details from the scattered light are visible.

Contrast that with AS11-38-5564 (the ziggurat one), which has even illumination throughout. A simple levels clip would eliminate all or almost all detail in the shadowed regions. And/or, the original exposure was somewhat too short to record any scattered light. And/or the film used was not sensitive enough, which is bolstered as a potential explanation by what I noted above – that orbital B&W photography from the mission shows black shadows while orbital color shows a teensy bit of detail in some of the shadows.

In my opinion, that is a much more likely explanation given the appearance of the other photos in the Apollo magazines than what Mike claims, that NASA painted over it.

Which after long last brings us back to the ziggurat. Even in Mike’s exemplar, the stuff in the brightest shadow are BARELY visible, much less-so than the wall of his ziggurat. I suppose if Mike wants to claim that the ziggurat walls are 100% reflective, plus someone has done a bleep-load of enhancement in the area, then sure, he can come up with a way for the walls to be lit even when they are in shadow.

Do I think that’s the most likely explanation, especially taken in light of everything else? No.

Final Thoughts on This Part

One more part left in this series, and by this point I’ve really addressed the main, relevant points in Mike’s five-part series.

Far from “destroying” my arguments, I think at the very, very most, he’s raised some potential doubt for one or two small parts of my argument that, taken individually if one is conspiracy-minded and already believes in ancient artifacts on the moon, then those individual doubts could be used to make it look like the ziggurat is real.

However, taken as a whole, and taken with less of a conspiratorial mindset and a mindset where you must provide extraordinary evidence for your extraordinary claim, and you must show that the null hypothesis is rejected by a preponderance of indisputable evidence, then the ziggurat is not real.