Two books for your Christmas list

        "When you publish on the Web nobody takes you seriously," said Hoagland last night on Coast to Coast AM. "To be taken seriously, you need to publish A BOOK." Accordingly, he announced The Heritage of Mars: Remembering Forever—his latest collection of overused italics, upper-case typography and self-reference, due later this year. The funny part is, of course, that nobody took Dark Mission seriously despite it being A BOOK. Yes, it came extremely close to being a New York Times best seller, but it was reviewed by precisely nobody unless you count Amazon reader reviews as reviews. In The Space Review, James Oberg not so much reviewed it as tore its guts out.

       Hoagland was, in fact, pre-empted by his former co-author Mike Bara, who had announced his own new book—on Blog, Facebook and Twitter, in the modern way—just hours earlier. This is how it goes in the non-fiction paperback world: Sign in March, deliver final copy and art in October, publish in time for Christmas. Yesterday morning, Mike went one better than RCH by actually having cover art to display.

Art credit: Adventures Unlimited Press

        I look forward to reviewing both works, although I don't count my own reviews as "professional." I did at one time write book reviews for money, but those days are long past. Pending release of these works of unintended fiction I will, as they say, "keep an open mind."

        Hoagland reckons to spend the advance money on a trip to the Giza plateau during the Venus transit on 6th June. If that doesn't work out he seriously threatened to "pass the hat" round his radio audience—Hmmm, hard to know how that's going to work. In any case, I think his publisher is going to see to it that he's too busy writing to go galivanting around pyramids, accutron watch in one hand and wife in the other.

A Sputnik Moment

        On the steam radio last night, Hoagland took an optimistic line on the state of the national space program, which others have lately described as virtual carrion. His logic, as usual, tortured the mind, but I think it went like this: ExoMars and Mars Astrobiology Explorer were cancelled as part of a master plan by the Obama administration. The Powers That Be already know that Curiosity will find unmistakable signs of life when it lands in Gale crater in August, and they require nothing to compete for funds with what will then become a crash program to send men (and women) to investigate. "This will be another Sputnik moment," Hoagland said several times, referring to the nation's horror on discovering, in 1957, that the Sovs already knew what we were struggling to understand. Nobody asked why, if the Gale crater result is already known, we aren't getting the manned (and womanned) mission together already.

        Later, in answer to a caller interested in cities on the back side of the Moon, he repeated his mis-information about the atmospheric pressure on the Moon, first trotted out at the Amsterdam conference in April last year. He stated that the atmospheric pressure has risen by a factor of 100 since it was measured by the Apollo ALSEPs in 1969-72, thus demonstrating that a) He doesn't understand the difference between day and night atmospheric pressures, and b) He doesn't read this blog. I'm mortified, of course.

        There were moments of high comedy last night. He claimed the distinction of being the recipient of a decapitation threat by none other than Zahi Hawass. He shouted down a caller with the words "I NEVER SAID ELENIN WAS A SPACESHIP." If George Noory had been on the ball,he might perhaps have said "So if Elenin was just a Big Dumb Rock, how come it could raise a tetrahedral shield to protect it from CMEs?" No hope of that, however.

Barsoom or bust

        Hoagland's major message last night, however—taking almost all of his first hour—was to ruthlessly plug some science fiction movie he's seen twice. I'm not going to help his cause by mentioning its name, even—he said over and over and over that the faithful have a duty to go see this film. The point was, apparently, that there's a conspiracy to make this work of fiction fail because it's really a coded version of the TRUTH about Mars. If it succeeds, there are two followups in the pipeline, and Hoagland says they must be made.

        He has an unshakeable faith, apparently, in the ability of his followers to make things like this happen. Just like they forced BP to release the mud logs of the Macondo oil well because he, Richard C. Hoagland, believed they would reveal yet another conspiracy. Wait, though... where are those mud logs again?

Update: 

I just came across this highly interesting quote from Coast to Coast AM:

STARTQUOTE The model that I am most comfortable with now is that the human race is a lot older -- a lot more extraordinary -- than we have ever been told. And the fact [is] that we once used to live all over the solar system -- that the extraterrestrials are our  guys. We're  the guys that built the stuff on Mars . . . and the stuff that we think we are now seeing on [our own moon and on] the moons of Jupiter. . . . There is so much that we are now getting glimmers of. . . . [My next book] is going to be called The Heritage of Mars: Remembering Forever,  because my thesis now, based on almost 20 years of doing this [research] . . . is "history is not as we've been told." . . . It has been carefully manipulated so we are not allowed to see this breathtaking heritage, because it would not benefit a few who are in control . . . and who want us to live this diminished existence not knowing who we really are because, frankly, it would threaten the power structure.ENDQUOTE

 The date of that broadcast? November 17/18, 2000.

ref: http://www.gpposner.com/Hoagland_follow-up.html