Richard Hoagland, Judy Wood, and Adam Parfrey

        Latest victim of Hoagland's contempt for copyright[1] appears to be Dr Judy Wood of Where Did the Towers Go? pseudo-fame.

        I don't propose to get into analysis of the startling case that Dr Wood has made and Hoagland has now latched onto, hoping to make a buck out of it. Others have already pointed out some absurdities.

Two planes not enough
        We all saw two fully loaded Boeing 767s fly into the World Trade Center on 11th September 2001. In a nutshell, Wood and Hoagland say that this was not what caused the towers to collapse. I can't help giggling over Hoagland stating, last night on Coast to Coast AM, that the WTC towers collapsed "at escape velocity" — but OK, let's assume that was just a slip of the tongue.

        Andrew Johnson, another fringe investigator, is pretty annoyed with Hoagland for hijacking Dr Wood's research, lecturing on the subject for a couple of hours, and preparing to sell an edited DVD of that lecture, all without having contacted Dr Wood. In my opinion, although it was outrageously unprofessional of Hoagland, in the end Wood will have little to complain of, since she's going to be invited to C2C-AM pretty soon. As we know, that sells books rather efficiently.

Dangerous and stingy
        It was the story of the publication of her book that got my attention. According to Johnson's page, Wood signed a publisher's contract in early 2009 and accepted "a small advance." Two years of acrimony then followed, with the publisher refusing to publish 540 pages and protesting that he couldn't afford color illustrations. Eventually Judy Wood bought out her contract and self-published.

        So who was this intransigent publisher? Step forward Adam Parfrey, Univ. Calif. dropout and possibly the most dangerous publisher in America according to a HuffPo piece from last December.

        Others have wondered if Parfrey is the stingiest publisher in the world, since he published Hoagland & Bara's Dark Mission without an index and with totally inadequate photo reproduction, despite making a very large pile of $$$ with the first edition (55,000 copies sold.)

        In comments on an Amazon user's review titled "Where Did the Book Go?" a few of Judy Wood's fans took Parfrey to task over his handling of the contract.

Kim Greenhouse wrote:

Let me tell you this: You have no interest in this book becoming known or in the 10 years of her courageous work being fulfilled. Your comments are totally inappropriate about how you desperately wanted the book published, about how you were working to get high resolution images, about how Dr. Wood was upset about the idea of this and that.

She left you people because you are unprofessional, you refused to publish the book and you air your issues in a way that stinks. Stop urinating on her book launch.

As for saying that the book was quite stressful for Dr. Wood, you are simply condescending and so out of touch with the nature of the project that if you had an ounce of class and professional decorum, you would take yourselves off of the amazon page falsely representing that you are her publisher, since you are not.

Parfrey replied:

The commentary here has no relation at all to the reality of the situation, which would not reflect well on Ms. Wood. That said, I willingly relinquished rights to Ms. Wood after she disappeared from communication with me for months at a time. I'm glad the book finally appeared.

False book promo
        I'm on Kim Greenhouse's side on the question of Parfrey's lack of professionalism. Even now, 18 months later, the Product Description of Dark Mission 2nd Edn on both Amazon and Borders includes this:

Authors Richard C. Hoagland and Mike Bara include a new chapter about the discoveries made by ex-Nazi scientist and NASA stalwart Wernher von Braun regarding what he termed "alternate gravitational solutions," or the rewriting of Newtonian physics into hyperdimensional spheres.

Buyers of the new edition will be provided a code that will enable them to log on to DarkMission.net to download hundreds of images discussed within the book.

        The interesting thing about those two statements is that NEITHER IS TRUE. Adam Parfrey knows this, it has been brought to his attention, and he takes no action. It's even possible that commentary right here on The Emoluments of Mars in August 2008 was the reason the Von Braun chapter was killed.

        About the only good thing I can think of to say about Parfrey is that he refused to publish Mike Bara's God-awful book The Choice. Deo Gratias.

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[1] Other notable victims are Keith Laney and Walter Myers.