Richard Hoagland has written more than once on his FB page that he's unable to post anything to his web site because of a hackathon that's been denying him access since last April.
He repeated that claim last night on Coast to Coast AM, adding that even the talented network admin Keith Rowland had been unable to penetrate the diabolical conspiracy.
James Concannon is in touch with Keith, and checked out the story. Here's Keith's reply:
Keith Rowland November 17 at 10:48am
The site has been operational and available for update all along. I know RCH has had problems on his own computer that may have limited his own access to the site. But the website is and has been functional all this time.
Keith Rowland has a good rep among long-time netizens and it would certainly be a surprise if he was unable to debug a simple web site for seven months. Once again, Hoagland is trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
8 comments:
Yeah, he used that excuse as to why he couldn't publish his "corrections" to the Von Braun papers. I suggested he ask one of his fans to borrow some Web space and bandwidth if that really was an issue. He ignored me of course.
In point of fact, if the website is operational and Hoagland has access to the Web (and he must, since he can post to his FB page), one has to conclude that he isn't because he chooses not to, not because he can't. He is using the dreaded phantom hackers as yet more "stunning confirmation" that he is on to something and dark forces are trying to stop him. In reality, with Bara gone, I suspect the whole writing process isn't all that much fun for him, so he's just not bothering.
The problem with that approach is that the fan base needs tending to. The further behind on promised papers he gets, the more people are likely (and rightly) conclude he is full of it. So I suspect the "hacker" problems will suddenly disappear and Hoagland will produce yet another peer reviewable paper. He's vanished from his FB page in any case, so I suspect that's what he is up to.
I think the average reader will sense that there is no "there" there.
Many people, especially in NASA, have attacked Hoagland for these interpretations. Yet no matter how much they attack Hoagland, they can never explain what it is that he is finding on these Apollo images.
Yes, what about that Scotchlite screen?
"No" is not an answer.
BU, I think you vastly over estimate the average Hoagland reader. The true believers are not really capable of critical thinking.
Well, BU, this blog has explained three of the things Hoagland is finding in Apollo images:
The prism
The robot head
The glass domes
There should be no detail in the enhancements!
There's room for experiments. We should enhance the gamma of pictures taken from the Shuttle or the ISS.
The problem here, of course, is that NASA’s numbers don’t seem to add up. Does it make any sense at all that the three successful Ranger missions, which flew directly to the Moon and immediately crashed, sent back 17,000 images, and yet the five Orbiters, which spent a combined total of fifty-three days orbiting the Moon, sent back just 3,000 images? That’s a capture rate of just over two images per hour. And the Orbiters had multiple cameras on board.
There is little doubt that the Orbiters returned far more images than claimed, of which only a select few (relatively speaking) were released. What then happened to the rest of them? I’m going to go way out on a limb here and guess that NASA needed those images for another, more important project: faking the Apollo Moon landings. All of those glorious shots of Earth from space, and of Earth-rises, and of superimposed spacecraft in lunar orbit were undoubtedly created from unreleased imagery captured by the Orbiters. As were, no doubt, the fake lunar sets and the fake lunar backdrops.
just gossiping ...
The Keith Rowland statement must be a pretty big deal for Hoagland. He spent a bit of time Sunday deleting all posts that mentioned it (the thread was on a possible part 3 of the Von Braun paper) repeatedly. He only stopped when the thread fell below the first page (and was thus harmless), but it got pretty comical before that.
The problem is that he is outright lying this time, and it's obvious. If he had stuck with the "I'm busy doing other things" meme, he'd have left his critics with no place to go. Instead, he couldn't resist being melodramatic by introducing phantom hackers.
It's not like he hasn't been offered a fig leaf on this. Rowland said the site is working, but he knows Richard is having trouble with his system. So all he had to say was that his system is the problem. Of course that isn't a real answer, as getting around that problem is pretty simple (a borrowed laptop and the nearest Starbucks would do it), but it is better than a lie that is easily checked. He left himself no room to maneuver on this one, which explains why he has to crush any mention of it.
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