  Barnard's star is among the most studied stars given its proximity to the
Sun. It is often considered $the$ Radial Velocity (RV) standard for fully
convective stars due to its RV stability and equatorial declination. Recently,
an $M \sin i = 3.3 M_{\oplus}$ super-Earth planet candidate with a 233 day
orbital period was announced by Ribas et al. (2018). New observations from the
near-infrared Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF) Doppler spectrometer do not
show this planetary signal. We ran a suite of experiments on both the original
data and a combined original + HPF data set. These experiments include model
comparisons, periodogram analyses, and sampling sensitivity, all of which show
the signal at the proposed period of 233 days is transitory in nature. The
power in the signal is largely contained within 211 RVs that were taken within
a 1000 day span of observing. Our preferred model of the system is one which
features stellar activity without a planet. We propose that the candidate
planetary signal is an alias of the 145 day rotation period. This result
highlights the challenge of analyzing long-term, quasi-periodic activity
signals over multi-year and multi-instrument observing campaigns.
