Ancient Aliens on the Moon (36 page)

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 the 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.

The NASA image however, is a different story. It contains the full range of 256 shades of gray, which would seem to mean it is a “better” image and more likely to be the authentic article. But the histogram contains something curious.

Close-up of histogram. Note huge spike at color level zero-Absolute black.

There, at the far left of the graph, is shade zero, or absolute black. What is curious is that by far the most pixels in the NASA image are absolute black. In fact, color zero and the next few colors over (near absolute black) make up more than 33% of the entire image. What that means is that somebody put a lot of black and near black in the NASA image.

Now the truth is, almost nothing in any image is ever absolute black or white. But to find that (by far) the biggest number of pixels is absolute, perfect black is more than a little suspicious. On a properly processed image, the histogram should be pretty much a bell curve, bulging in the middle and then dropping off at both ends. The NASA image doesn’t do this. It spikes on shade zero, absolute black.

So what’s the most likely reason for this? I can think of only one. Somebody took a paintbrush tool, set it to color zero, or absolute black, and went to town on it.

And I can prove it.

As you look at the Ziggurat image, obviously some of the most tell-tale signs of artificiality are in the shadowed areas, particularly the shadow cast by the west wall. In my enhanced version of the original, you can plainly see the wall and how it casts a shadow into the depression below.

Contrast enhanced image of the Daedalus Ziggurat.

But on the NASA version, this shadow is so dark that there is virtually no detail there at all. No wall, no shades of gray in the crater, just pitch-black darkness. Everything you need to see to confirm the wall and the artificiality of the Ziggurat is simply not there. It’s gone.

Adobe, the makers of Photoshop, are crystal clear on the meaning of this: “If many pixels are bunched up at either the shadow or highlight ends of the chart, it may indicate that image detail in the shadows or highlights may be clipped—blocked up as pure black or pure white. There is little you can do to recover this type of image.”

In other words, it’s a deliberate manipulation of the image in question.

Unenhanced image of the NASA version of the Daedalus Ziggurat.

Histogram analysis of the shadowed area of the west wall of the Ziggurat.

What the histograms show us is that while the image produced by NASA has a wide dynamic range, the areas of shadow, where the details that make the Ziggurat stand out reside, have virtually no dynamic range. They’re absolute black. And that can only mean one thing; they were painted over by someone at NASA with a black paintbrush tool.

To test this, all we have to do is select the areas in question, and examine their histograms. The results are conclusive.

In the shadowed area where we can see the wall in the original version, virtually
all
of the pixels are absolute, indisputably black. The same applies to the dark shadowed area just behind the temple section of the Ziggurat. These specific areas of the image—the ones that would provide the smoking gun for the Ziggurat’s artificiality — have been “blocked up as pure black” by NASA.

Case closed.

Histogram analysis of the shadowed area of the west wall of the Ziggurat showing 99% of pixels in area are shade zero; absolute black.

Oh, I’m aware that the deceptive Mr. Robbins has tried to cover his ass by claiming that because of the lighting conditions on the Moon some areas are absolute black. But the fact is that contrary to his fallacious claims that there are “no crater wall nor mountain to scatter light onto it,” there is a very bright, sunlit area just to left of the selection marquee that should be scattering plenty of light into the shadowed area, but isn’t.