by Mike Bara
Or was I?
See, in hunting for Ancient Alien artifacts on the Moon, or anywhere else for that matter, there is always the crucial factor of context in evaluating images. If the famous Face on Mars were an isolated landform, it would never have sparked the interest it has for over 30 years. The same concept applied here. If the Ziggurat were the only object that was unusual on AS11-38-5564, then we could safely assume that it was a prank or misinformation put out by professionals, and that the rather plain looking official version of the photo was genuine. But if even the sanitized NASA version had other anomalies on it, then the chances that the Ziggurat was real and had been (perhaps hastily) removed from AS11-38-5564 went way up.
The Crane.
Close-up of the “Crane.”
So I started looking. And wow. Just wow!
AS11-38-5564íS covered with machinery, structures, buildings, artifacts and Ancient Alien ruins of all types. The hardest task for this book is to cut it down to just the weirdest and most obvious ones.
The first thing to understand about AS11-38-5564 is where the light is coming from. On this image, the sun is coming from the right at an almost 90° angle to the camera. This means that tall objects sticking up in the sunlight will cast shadows to the left at something less than (but pretty close to) 90 degrees to the frame of reference (the camera).
The “Falcon” compared to artistic rendering of the spacecraft from the film Planet of the Apes.
The first object I noted was something I decided to call the Crane. It was just sitting there, on a ridge to the west of and not far from the area of the Ziggurat. The crane overlooked a deep, dark hole in the ground which had some very geometric looking “platforms” extending over the opening below.
The crane appeared to have some sort of extension (or cannon) raised and turned toward the right, and the shadow cast by the extension and the lower base part of the vehicle were consistent with the lighting. It looked as if somebody had simply parked it at the top of the hill above the opening below.
Close-up of the “Falcon.”
The Daedalus Spire and shadow.
Not far from the Crane is another object that is sitting atop a ridge and looks distinctly artificial. The “Flacon” looks similar to the spacecraft seen in the original Planet of the Apes movies in the 1960’s. It has a pointed nose, a raised main body on the top and two dark, recessed areas that might be the cockpit area. It is pronounced in its symmetry and is sitting atop what might be a hanger or launch platform.
Whatever the Falcon is; a sled, a cable car or some type of launch vehicle, it absolutely does not belong on the Moon in any kind of natural model.
Further down in the image on the edge of one of the largest craters in the photo, is yet another spire. Like its namesake in Sinus Medii, this one is sticking straight up out of the lunar surface and casting a shadow across the sunlit regolith below.
What exactly this particular spire might be is unknown, but again it appears to be made of a semi-translucent material and part of a larger construct around it that is stretching down into the darkness of the crater. At the scale of the photograph, it would have to be several hundred feet tall at least and again completely contradicts the Standard models of lunar geology.
The “gun emplacement.” Note recessed area around object.
The Gun Emplacement
The Gun Emplacement is a geometric object consisting of two cylindrical footpads, a central spherical housing (which is casting a shadow on the ground behind it), and a long extension which looks something like a gun or a cannon extruding from the front. It is emplaced in a recessed bunker or foxhole and sits adjacent to another geometrically square area behind it.
Artificial sub-structure of lunar surface near Daedalus.
Farther away, there is more strange stuff. If you look closely, you can see extensive areas where the surface appears to be peeled back and an underlying substructure is exposed.
There are numerous areas like this all over AS11-38-5564, but my eye was drawn to the hills above the Ziggurat, where I saw stranger and stranger evidence of Ancient Alien ruins on the Moon. The first area had four main features that interested me. They all looked artificial.
Hillside from AS11-38-5564 showing at least 4 artificial structures/objects.
The first was a distinct cross formation on a hillside near the top of the image. It looked like almost like a flattened jack and had four nodes at the end points. The arms of the jack crossed at 90 degrees to each other. But then things got really weird.
The “Jack.”
Directly above the “jack” was what looked to be an open hangar door with nothing less than a domed, disk shaped craft parked in it. It appears to have crab-like landing “legs”, a couple of evenly spaced dark “vents” or windows of some kind, and a disk shaped body not unlike the Jupiter 2 from Lost in Space.
There is also a possible cylindrical attachment of some kind on the left side of the Saucer just above the strut. What its function is I can only guess. There appears to be a great deal of debris in the hangar underneath the saucer, meaning it is likely the area has been abandoned for a long time. But it sure would be fun to land there and look around.
On the hillside right next to the flying saucer hanger is another completely anomalous area that can’t be explained by natural processes. Sticking out of the mountainside is across hatched pattern of girders and support struts jutting into the air a right angles to the mountainside. It appears to be a series of platforms or terraces constructed to overlook the valley below. What might be beyond the shadows and under the mountain is anybody’s guess, but there are several tantalizing clues in the details of this structure. There also look to be pylons below the terraces dug into the mountain to support the dug-in bunker, similar to support pylons at beach houses in places like Malibu, California. The shadows confirm that these platforms are sticking out horizontally, overhanging the mountainside.
The “Jupiter 2” in a mountainside hanger?
The Beach House.
As if all this wasn’t enough, I saved the weirdest for last.
If you let your eyes keep travelling along this frame from left to right at the same level as the beach house, they will come upon something that simply is too weird to even contemplate, but yet it is there. It’s another head.
Sitting on what may be an artificial shelf at roughly the same level as the Saucer and the Malibu beach house is this enormous, human looking head. A metal shelf or platform extends to the left and a huge portion of it is exposed and casting a shadow down the mountainside. The “head” looks much like “Data’s Head” from Shorty crater, but is more on a scale of the statues at Easter Island. Whether it’s truly an artifact of some kind or simply an oddly symmetrical boulder with 2 eyes, brow ridges, a nose and what may be mouth is, I suppose, debatable. But after what you’ve already seen on this photo do you really have any doubts? Also, just behind the “Head” are a series of regularly spaced “struts” emerging from the ground.
Head shaped object sitting on mountainside next to an artificial platform. Note Stonehenge-like, evenly spaced struts just behind the “Head.”
The Drill.
The last object I’ll make note of, and the one I’m most fascinated with (because it’s the most obviously artificial) I call the “Drill.”
Sweeping across the terrain and connecting to a mountainside, this long tubular object terminates in a bright white head that looks like something out of a Roto-rooter commercial. The shadow cast by the tube extends from right to left until it is partially buried under some raised ground. The raised ground has a very block like, industrial look to it, and it is probably some kind of maintenance facility for whatever is inside the tube structure. The tube then emerges on the other side and connects to the mountain with what look to be a complex series of tubes and straps. A close-up of the head of the drill shows it is extremely complex—and undeniably artificial.
The only question is what exactly, it’s doi
ng there, and what exactly the Ancient Aliens were drilling for.
The Drill head. Note multiple attachment points to the mountain.
Which brings us, finally, back to the Ziggurat. I could go on and on showing you more astounding structures in this and accompanying images, but I think the point is made: There once was a massive, Ancient Alien base on the far side of the Moon near the crater Daedalus. But I still can’t get past the Ziggurat. So I started playing with the official NASA version of AS11-38-5564. In looking closely at the side-by-side comparisons, I just couldn’t shake the idea that something was wrong. Given everything else on this image, I was now convinced that someone at NASA had fooled around with the image. But how?
Then I saw it. And I understood.
In close-up I couldn’t see it except for the V-shaped ramps in front. The walls, the central temple and the dome shaped top simply weren’t there. But as I loaded different versions of the image through my windows browser, I began to notice something odd. In the thumbnails of the area, I could see the Ziggurat, almost fully formed. Huh?
Then I figured out why this made sense. The human eye, especially when dealing with grayscale images like these, needs contrast to ascertain detail. Without it, we are virtually powerless to make sense of visual images.
Comparison of the original Ziggurat and contrast stretched version of NASA data.
So was that it then? Was the Ziggurat after all just a contrast artifact of the enhancement process caused by an overzealous anomaly hunter?
No. No way.
Comparison of the original Ziggurat and contrast stretched version of NASA data.
For one thing, the original source file just had too much detail. After working with the “official” version of AS11-38-5564,1 had to reduce it very significantly to get it to look anything at all like the Ziggurat. Even then, there were several things out of place on the official version, features in different positions, which led me to conclude that it had been altered to obscure the details of the Ziggurat.
What probably happened is that when this image hit the web, somebody at NASA said “Holy crap! There’s a pyramid on this photo!” and proceeded to add shadows, reduce contrast, introduce noise and generally futz with the picture. This is certainly not unprecedented. Anyone who has read Dark Mission knows about the skullduggery that went along with images of the Face on Mars. Satisfied I had found something quite special, I passed the Ziggurat on to my co-author on Dark Mission, Richard C. Hoagland. He quickly recognized the importance of the data and went on George Noory’s Coast to Coast AM program with it on the night of July 20th, 2012 (yeah, that date) and talked about it in the news segment. The reaction from our critics was typical and predictable.
The usual suspects immediately claimed that Hoagland had “hoaxed” the image or that it was a “fraud,” and if it wasn’t a fraud, then his inability to see it as a fraud was proof he was either a “liar” or “incompetent.” The chief purveyor of this nonsense was somebody named Stuart Robbins, on his blog. Robbins has a long history of false and utterly silly accusations against me and Mr. Hoagland, and frequently teams up with someone calling himself “Expat” to attack us within hours of anything we post. “Expat” in fact has made a habit of stalking my radio appearances to ask me in-depth questions along the lines of “are you still beating your wife?”
Now in terms of Mr. Robbins “analysis” of the images, I will simply say that it leaves a lot to be desired. Let me also state that I am no Photoshop expert, like he claims to be, and lack the artistic talent to create anything like Daedalus Ziggurat. I found the image, posted by someone else, period. I enhanced it as best I could and passed it on to Richard for his opinion. I had no idea he would talk about it on Coast.
Now I do know enough about image enhancement to know a few things that are relevant. First, because both “as1120pyramid20smallue2.jpg” and the currently posted NASA image are jpegs, they have quality issues and are not truly ideal as research quality documents. In order to do a proper analysis, anyone accusing Mr. Hoagland or myself of fraud would have to obtain a research quality original of AS11-38-5564 and do a high-resolution scan of it under controlled conditions. Neither Mr. Robbins nor the other self-appointed defenders of true science have done so. In fact, all they are doing is comparing one lossy jpeg document of dubious origin to another. Then, based only on their irrational bias toward NASA and against myself and Mr. Hoagland, they are jumping to the conclusion(s) that we are “frauds” or “incompetents.” As I will soon demonstrate, we are neither.
One of the main arguments that Mr. Robbins made on his blog that he cites as proof that we have “drawn in” the Ziggurat is that the image presented by Hoagland has a lot of “noise” in it. Since he was working with Hoagland’s enhancement of my enhancement, I guess we can cut him some slack on that. Or not.
The reason there is more noise in the original Ziggurat image is that it was probably scanned from an original and then enlarged, processed, and then reduced for publishing on the web. This is easy to see by the fact that it has a 72 Dots Per Inch resolution, which is standard for the web. This has the effect of making it a bit noisier, but also easier to upload and download from the internet. There is nothing nefarious or questionable about this. In fact, the “Save for Web” tool in Photoshop automatically changes the document resolution from say, 300 DPI (the resolution of AS11-38-5564 on the LPI website image) to 72 DPI. This alone will induce noise at deep levels of the image, and contrary to Mr. Robbins assertion, is indicative of nothing except his desire to deceive his readers into thinking there’s something unusual about it. Jpeg’s are always noisy. It’s as simple as that.
One other point here, the Ziggurat, which is miles across in the master image, is way beyond limits of resolution where noise could be a problem. All of the visible features plenty big enough to resolve, even on a lossy jpeg.
Of course, if your intent is to deceive your readers into buying into your own petty biases and jealousy’s against people that are more important than you are, you go the extra mile, don’t you? What Mr. Robbins didn’t tell you is that a large chunk of the “noise” that appears in the image he “processed” was deliberately induced—by him.
On his blog post as he’s describing his method of analyzing the image I gave to Hoagland, he lists this little gem:
For the record, I took the original LPI image and rotated it clockwise 90°. I knew this was the starting point because of the shadows of craters in the image Hoagland presented. After finding the location, I rotated Hoagland’s image by 10.96°, and then I scaled Hoagland’s by 85.28%. [emphasis added]
Now, there is no question that the LPI image contains more total information than “as1120pyramid20smallue2.jpg,” which was the source of the enhancement that I sent to Richard. Given that, why would anyone of fair mind, especially a self-appointed expert in Photoshop who claims that “my work over the past twenty years doing image processing and analysis” qualifies him to pass judgment on myself and Mr. Hoagland as “frauds,” reduce our image by “85.28%?” In fact, anyone who knows anything about image enhancement knows that reducing an image induces more noise and reduces detail by design. In the image enhancement world, it’s known as downsampling. Any competent image enhancement specialist would have enlarged the NASA image instead to bring it in line with the size of the original. This would have the effect of actually making the NASA image better, rather than making the original enhancement worse.
Histogram showing the dynamic visual range of the original Daedalus Ziggurat image, “as1120pyramid20smallue2.jpg”
Given that he claims that we “deliberately added noise and reduced the quality” elsewhere in his blog, this would seem to be kind of a big mistake, wouldn’t it Mr. Robbins? Unless of course, it wasn’t a mistake at all. Unless it was a deliberate act of deception foisted upon his readers.
His use of the word “scaled” is a further indictment of his intentions. He was hoping no one would notice that he had degenerated th
e data, rather than enhanced it. The word “reduced” would have been far more honest. But I already knew I wasn’t dealing with an honest critic anyway…
And of course, as usual, the gang that can’t shoot straight had made another huge error, one that proves that it is the official NASA image, and not ours, that has been manipulated and faked. An error that anyone who claims to have even the most rudimentary knowledge about image enhancement would never make.
You see, Photoshop has a tool called a histogram. What a histogram does is analyze the dynamic range of a given image (or highlighted section of an image). This can act like a digital finger print to help us determine if an image or a part of an image has been manipulated changed, altered or enhanced. In a grayscale image such as “as1120pyramid20smallue2.jpg,” or the official AS11-38-5564 image from the NASA/LPI website, the image has a possible range of up to 256 shades of gray. In reading the histogram, absolute black has a value of zero (0), and occupies the spot on the graph at the far left. Pure, bright white would have a value of 256 and occupy the spot on the far right of the histogram graph. When we apply the histogram to the original image, “as1120pyramid20smallue2.jpg,” we can see that it has a fairly wide dynamic range, from color 24 on the left of the graph (meaning something less than black) to color 184 on the right, which is something less than pure white. What this means is that the image has a dynamic range of 160 colors, or shades of gray, and the colors at the extreme dark and light ranges of the spectrum have been lost somewhere along the way. This is not ideal, but it does mean only that my original image has probably lost some shading information at some point.
