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Anatomy of a "Bamf"
James Burk
Oct 1 - It is still an open issue whether the officially released image of Cydonia (2002072A) from NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, available on this official NASA website at Arizona State University, is the best image available.
The news that another image was available first broke during an August 29th interview on the controversial radio program Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell with longtime Mars anomaly researcher Richard C Hoagland. Hoagland (whose website is known as The Enterprise Mission) stated that he had found two versions of the July 24th IR image taken of Cydonia, the official one released on July 24th, and a "better" version downloaded from the same THEMIS website on the very next day (July 25th). Comparing the two, he stated on the program, "it looks like somebody had backed up a semi, a big dump truck, and dumped 'noise' on the bottom [official] image!"
Hoagland claimed to be getting a "heads-up" from "certain people" at ASU to disregard the July 24th official image, and focus his study on the "real" July 25th image. Doing so, he later was able to process and release extraordinary images showing apparent city-like terrain in the region of Cydonia, matching up with terrain previously seen during the 1989 Phobos 2 mission, as documented in our previous exposé on the mission: Whither Phobos 2? Hoagland called the evidence of city-like terrain "the breakthrough for the last 20 years" in his investigation of Martian artifacts.
NASA's official response, given by the principal investigator of THEMIS, Dr. Phil Christensen, was that Hoagland's July 25th image was "clearly doctored" and therefore a fraud. Their claim was that he made the "real" July 25th image from the "official" July 24th image. We'll come back to that later...
So how did Hoagland acquire the July 25th image?
Hoagland received the image from Keith Laney, an independent image analyst and an (unpaid) NASA/AMES contractor for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers mission. On July 25th, Laney, expecting to download the official THEMIS release of July 24th, went to the THEMIS site and downloaded the high-resolution TIFF image provided there. Not being familiar with IR images, He originally took one look at image and proclaimed "It sucks!", but later came to an opposite conclusion after some prodding from an individual posting on the Enterprise Mission message board with the pseudonym "Bamf".
"Bamf" told Laney not to discount the new data, to analyze it as it was a significant release from NASA/ASU. Laney undertook a study of image processing in general and the best ways to process IR images in particular. After experimenting with translating the separate IR bands of the image into true colors of the spectrum, Laney then was able to process the July 25th image correctly. What he found was something extraordinary. Something Hoagland later claimed on Coast to Coast AM as the city-like terrain that was "conclusive proof" for what he'd been researching for years.
At first, Laney was unclear on what he had found, and went online to find the same person who told him to scrutinize the image, namely "Bamf". In this document written by Laney, he documents the IRC chat conversation which ensued.
"Bamf" then claimed that the effect was due to "spacecraft motion" and "if all the bands acquired the same spot at the same time, you'd never see this effect." Yet this effect had already been filtered out of the "official" July 24th image. Laney replied in his piece that:
"Bamf" had apparently been caught in a lie, and not the first in this episode...
Who is "Bamf"? This individual is obviously well-versed in image processing and seems to have some inside knowledge of the inner workings on the THEMIS team.
Looking at the forum profile of "Bamf" on the Enterprise Mission, a person would find this information:
A simple Google search for that name will return as the very first result the manual for "Vanilla" - a database query tool for storage and retrieval of data, which (by coincidence) was originally developed for the NASA/ASU THEMIS mission. One of the authors of the software is a "Noel Gorelick". A search on Google Groups will return Usenet articles written by a "Noel Gorelick" as far back as 1995 from email addresses at Arizona State University (asu.edu). As if this wasn't enough evidence (maybe there is more than one Noel Gorelick at ASU?), we have further proof: In a phone call with Enterprise Mission investigator Mike Bara, Gorelick admitted that he is "Bamf". He also admitted it privately to Hoagland, Laney, and several participants in the Enterprise mission IRC chat room. Noel Gorelick, the individual known as "Bamf", posted over a hundred articles to the Enterprise Mission forums, and (according to Mike Bara) spent close to a thousand hours on the Enterprise Mission website. In fact, Gorelick is the person who maintains the THEMIS website. He is the same person who posts daily images from the THEMIS camera. He may even be the person who writes the photo captions accompanying each image. As we found last week, those captions can mysteriously change! So why would this straight-laced NASA/ASU engineer spend so much time on the Enterprise Mission website if NASA thinks this is all a waste of time? When asked about this fact, Gorelick stated that he was only there to contact Holger Isenberg, a German image analyst. Isenberg has a public website and easily can be contacted there. Most people surrounding this issue don't believe this statement by Gorelick and feel he is there "for other purposes."
"If I feel like degrading the data before I post it, I'm certainly free to do so." Now we come to some evidence provided by Mark Easter of Easterfilms.com. Easter also looked at Keith Laney's July 25th image, and made this somewhat startling find. A "face" (which has a striking resemblance to a publicity photo of Richard Hoagland) apparently overlayed in the image in the terrain around Cydonia! We're not talking about the "Face on Mars" here, it's like somebody took Hoagland's face and placed it in the THEMIS image as some type of joke. Easter has provided MarsNews.com this animated gif to illustrate his point. Warning: it's a very large image! (250kb)
If this is a real phenomenon, it would have to have been done by "Bamf" or somebody at NASA/ASU, and therefore would bolster the claim that NASA hoaxed the July 25th image to discredit Hoagland. Update: Keith Laney has provided MarsNews.com with this image (warning: also big!) It is an animated gif of Dr. Phil Christensen's face on the mesa done in the same manner as Mark Easter's images. Apparently Dr. Christensen's face matches up as well. Update: Mark Easter's opinion is elaborated in this statement submitted to MarsNews.com. Update: Richard Hoagland makes the point that this feature is only found in one of the multiple-band composite images that Keith Laney prepared, not any of the IR bands. If this was a hoax, he says, it would have had to be a gamble that Laney would use that specific band radio, because otherwise it wouldn't be seen. Hoagland thinks this is nothing but a distraction from the issue.
"I do know this, somehow I obtained an unaltered tiff image with a different header identifier which produces superior IR multispectrals over and beyond the presently displayed and original July 24th image release...Personally, I think they are fantastic, opening up an entire new era in Mars exploration. " So what conclusions can we make at this point? First of all, every expert we have consulted has said that it would be impossible to produce the high-resolution "real" July 25th image from the low-resolution "official" July 24th image. This signifies that the "real" image CANNOT be a fraud perpetrated by somebody who only had access to the "official" image. (which incidentally is the claim by Phil Christensen as to how Hoagland got his results.) With this information, we can make the assertion that if this is a hoax, it is a hoax being perpetrated from WITHIN NASA. Why would NASA perpetrate a hoax on the American people and the worldwide scientific community? Second, if this is not a hoax, if the July 25th image is "real" data from Mars Odyssey, then why isn't NASA providing this data to the public? What are they hiding? It's obviously something big, and something they are going to great lengths to hide. Could it be what everybody suspects: evidence of artificial structures on Mars, and therefore evidence for extra-terrestrial (read: non-Earth) civilizations on Mars, past or present? July 25th, 2002 also "happens" to be the 31st anniversary of the first ever image taken of Cydonia and the "Face on Mars". See our exposé on the issues surrounding that first image entitled, appropriately enough, Is NASA Capable of Lying? If this is true, it would be the biggest story of the century, or of the millennium. If it's not true, it's evidence of NASA, a taxpayer-funded agency, perpetrating a hoax, which is also a huge story. So either way, it deserves further study. Rest assured that MarsNews.com, as a media outlet covering space science, will endeavor to do so. Other outlets who claim to cover space science should also.
Here are some additional quotes from our friend "Bamf" to put this all into perspective:
"The daily images web site is a service I provide and support entirely because I'm a nice guy. There is no NASA mandate or contractual requirement for me to provide these images to anyone before they're delivered to the PDS. I do so because the public is interested in what's going on with the mission, and it's good for public relations. Accordingly, if I feel like degrading the data before I post it, I'm certainly free to do so. If I want to scribble on the images with a crayon before posting them to my web site, I'm probably free to do that too. The "government data" that the public paid for is being well cared for while it's being prepared for delivery to the PDS."
"The data on the web site does not come with a pedigree. And accordingly, you have no idea what was done to it before you got it, how it was processed, or even that the numbers are in the least bit valid...No one has ever claimed that the data on the web site is valid for scientific purposes. In fact there are disclaimers all over the place stating otherwise."
"I would argue that there is no data currently existing or planned ('05 or '07 included) that can possibly satisfy this debate. It is not possible to disprove a theory of artificiality."
Our Initial Report from Aug 30th
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