Just when you thought it couldn’t get any weirder.

While reading my favorite weekly column by James Randi, I happened upon a discussion where certain individuals were taking some of the Mars orbital photographs, magnifying them past all levels of sanity, washing them through photoshop several times so that all the JPG compression anomalies stood out bright and shiny, and then pointing to these anomalies and going “LOOK! BUILDINGS! IT’S A COVERUP!”

Now, this -must- be a characterization out of line of what these people were saying. Right? Mustn’t it?

Sadly, no, it isn’t.

I direct you, for your own entertainment, to the… comments of one Joseph P. Skipper, of MarsAnomalyResearch.com. Mister Skipper goes on for many many pages about how there is this vast coverup by scientists about existing advanced civilizations right here in our solar system.

Now, sure, give a guy some slack. The tin-hat folks can say “But, how do we KNOW? They’re feeding us bad information!”

But, for argument, let me present Skipper’s commentary on banding on the moon as presented by the Deep Space Program Science Experiment, aka Clementine. Skipper comments on this ‘banding’…

Note that these poorly seen rows of artificial structures of some kind do not give the impression of buildings so much as of giant solid, sectional, possibly contoured, appearing reinforced alternating clamping system structures. Note how precisely horizontally distance separated one vertical row is from the other forming a clear definitive rigidly uniform south/north north/south orientation and precisely spaced apart pattern. So, not only does each of the individual bands speak clearly of artificiality, so to does the over all pattern of the many bands. It is very difficult to regard this as anything less than conclusive definitive proof of massive scale artificiality present on the Moon and on a colossal scale.

Now, it’s quite easy to dismiss this fellows rantings as the standard woo-woo “The aliens are there!” twaddle, and that “the public is simply being deceived about the reality” and other bits, but Skipper tries to back up his rantings with ‘facts’ pulled from known sources.

But here’s where it gets fun. The images that Skipper posts are pulled directly from the Clementine Lunar Image Browser, an online database of all the images from the survey. Skipper himself says how to retrieve the images, and he states that you should set the query to “1 pixel = 1 kilometer”. His sample images are 768 pixels wide, which would make the pictures he’s viewing 476 miles across. The moon has a diameter of 3,476 miles, so the pictures he’s looking at would be about 1/7th of the diameter as we see it here from earth (not taking into account parallax errors due to curvature, etc). So, given those numbers, don’t you think we could see those bands just standing out in a field and looking?

No? Lets go closer. A $100 pair of binoculars would give you a 10x resolution. Heck, lets go nuts – spend that $99 and get a 420x resolution telescope, and take a look at the moon. At that resolution, you should be able to discern objects down to something about 100′ across. According to Skippers page, there is apparently a building that, according to his scale, is about 40km across. Should be pretty easy to see it, don’t you think?

Alas, Skipper spends no time even considering the inanity of his arguments, and continues with the ‘obvious cover-up’ chatter and the declaration of deliberate obfuscation by the government.

Because the entire Clementine Moon imaging is visually a sea of a great many different types and levels of image tampering applications and obfuscation techniques covering and hiding evidence and creating false illusions as to terrain detail in the process and essentially covering and obscuring most of the Moon’s entire surface as well as these bands.

It’s amazing how people will persist in their delusions when all they have to do is walk outside and look up to see that what they’re proposing is so ludicrous it defies explanation.

By the way, the ‘banding’ that Skipper goes on about was due to the fact that the Clementine probe was inserted into a polar orbit around the moon. When you take interlocked pictures of a globe while orbiting it, and piece them together to attempt to display them on a flat surface, there is interference where they overlap. That, combined with the fact that the CLIB database consists of JPEG images – compressed versions of the original imagery, which introduces ‘square’ and ‘noisy’ artifacts into an image, resulted in the ‘bands’ and ‘buildings’ that Skipper latches onto with such tenacity.