Hoagland says this is conspiracy month

"We're in the midst of an interplanetary war".

        That was Richard Hoagland, early in last Saturday/Sunday's Other Side of Midnight blogradio show. His guest was Christopher Knowles, who calls himself a symbologist — and having such an anti-science person around seemed to encourage Hoagland himself to stray far, far away from anything to do with verifiable fact.

        The first of many ridiculous connections he made was between the US Navy's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, revealed by the New York Times on 16th December 2017, and the recent fire on USS Bonhomme Richard in the Navy Yard at San Diego.

26:06 "The US Navy is almost at the center of a real awakening, and a deepening of the whole idea of Unidentified Flying Objects being intelligently controlled by somebody. And then a ship of the line — another aircraft carrier — based in San Diego suddenly catches on fire, and there's an explosion that is heard 13 miles away, after the fire starts. If that doesn't spell sabotage I don't know what does."

        So an explosion during an extremely hot fire is taken as evidence of sabotage? Right, Richard, got it. What was that you were saying about your science credentials?

Everything's a symbol, apparently
        In case you were wondering what a "symbologist" is and does (and certainly I was), Knowles then proceeded to illustrate it by constructing a tottering edifice of symbolic meaning out of completely random events. I didn't follow it all but it went something like this:

        First, Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested on 2nd July, "World UFO Day" and an anniversary of the Roswell crash. Then, the following day, Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Executive Director Jan Harzan was arrested in Newport Beach, California, for allegedly soliciting sexual activity from a detective who was posing online as a 13-year-old girl. Then on 18th July the cathedral of Nantes caught fire, causing extensive damage. Meanwhile, a comet was in the sky and we all know that comets are harbingers of bad luck. There's another San Diego connection there, since the last easily visible comet — Hale-Bopp — was the occasion of the mass suicide of a San Diego cult, "Heaven's Gate".

38:52 RCH "These are thoughts on a chain that is incredibly meaningful to only a certain few. And everybody else just dismisses it as a .. as..Oh! Coincidence!"
CK: "Yeah, that's what I'm saying. This has been a very strange month."

        Seems to me that this chain of events is only meaningful to people who don't require any evidence in order to draw a conclusion. To say that Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested on 2nd July, and Nantes cathedral had a fire 16 days later is not coincidence, IT'S NOT ANYTHING.^{note 1}

        So now we know what symbologists do — they make stuff up. Fans of nonsense like this got a chance to hear it all over again 24 hours later, when Hoagland re-ran it owing to yet another power outage in New Mexico. That's been happening an awful lot lately.

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[1] If Harzan had been arrested on World UFO Day that would certainly have been an ironic coincidence, but that's not what happened. Pull Me Under, the blog of UFO Watchdog, just published a useful guide to all the legal problems MUFON leaders have suffered.

Richard Hoagland and Sharry Edwards™

        Last night on his blogtalk chatshow, Hoagland tackled a highly topical subject, with the help of some people who were not just "fringe science" figures, but well beyond the fringe. This was his sell:

"Amid all the fear and misinformation currently swirling around the rapidly worsening global "coronavirus situation," tonight we present new scientific hope for those most vulnerable to the disease.
A few weeks ago, as a means of amplifying their demonstrably positive medical effects, I suggested that Sharry Edwards' revolutionary "bio-acoustic resonance" protocols -- using specific sound frequencies to eliminate harmful viruses and bacteria in humans and their pets -- be carried out inside one of Charlie Ziese's "torsion-field amplifying" modern pyramids.^{note 1}
The first of a series of such "pyramid resonance experiments" has now been carried out -- with some truly remarkable results ... and global implications." [emph. added]

        I missed the show, but I was intrigued to know more about these "demonstrably positive medical effects". Here's what an internet search revealed.

Institute of Bioacoustic Biology and Sound Health

        Sharry Edwards™ runs an outfit called 'The Institute of Bioacoustic Biology and Sound Health" in Albany, Ohio. Among the claims on the Institute's website I found these:

" the sounds of the voice can act as a holographic representation of health and wellness."

" is it now possible to reverse diseases and traumas previously thought to be incurable."

"The effects of BioAcoustic Biology ... have unlimited health and wellness potential."

"The research being conducted by the Institute of BioAcoustic Biology is on the forefront of energy medicine; creating the doorway to our next dimension of health revolution. In addition, the techniques hold promise in answering questions about how our universe was formed."

Remarkable talent, she says
        Sharry Edwards herself (who inexplicably appends a ™ to her own name) makes no claim of academic achievment, but writes that she has a remarkable talent.

"My sacred story eludes me because my unusual talent was present before my memory begins, hence I don’t know how my ability to make history by creating the future, will evolve."
"I can hear and duplicate the sounds/frequencies that people need to balance and become well.  My mission is to provide the tools and solutions to the public in the hopes of making a difference and selfishly hope my time on the planet will leave it a better place."

        This is, apparently, a "talent" that can be learned. The Institute of Bioacoustic Biology and Sound Health offers several training courses, for example:

BioAcoustic Basics Technician Course, 2 days
$300, plus yearly renewal fee $300

BioAcoustic Professional, 5 days
$5600 inc. equipment, plus yearly renewal fee $400

..but it's NOT medical
        Applicants for these courses are required to sign a "Confidentiality agreement," from which they learn:

• this technique is not a medical treatment and ... it is not presented, either expressly or implied, as a medical treatment.
• Sharry Edwards is not a licensed physician and is not holding herself out as a licensed physician nor as practicing medicine.

        So, OK, Ms. Edwards™ is running a business. Nothing wrong with that, but what seems to be missing here is any of that "demonstrably positive medical effect" or "elimination of harmful viruses and bacteria" that Hoagland wrote about. It looks very much as if he was making claims for Edwards™ that she herself couldn't deliver.

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[1] Here's Charlie Ziese's web page."All pyramids are passive torsion generators, and therefore producers of chi/prana/orgone/aetheric energy" — see what I mean about "beyond the fringe"??

Is Richard Hoagland chanelling someone else?

        Just yesterday I was transcribing Richard Hoagland saying this:

"I have sources.I know there's technology to manipulate hurricanes. I know there's technology to provide unlimited energy with no pollution. I know there's technology to provide anti-gravity lift so we can take giga-tons into space."

        It reminded me of somebody else, and when I'd finished the (long) transcript, it came to me.

"They don't want you to know we have anti-gravity.
They don't want you to know we have unlimited power.
They don't want you to know that we have bases on the Moon and possibly bases on Mars.
They don't want you to know they're using HAARP to control the weather.
They don't want you to know what's in Area 51.
They don't want you to know  that there's a small cartel of about 750 people that own everything."

        Who is that a quote from? It's none other than Sean David Morton, speaking on the notorious 2016 Conspira-Sea cruise. You can still see him on YouTube, right at the beginning of Annie Georgia Greenberg's excellent parody video.

         Morton and his wife were arrested as soon as the ship docked in San Pedro and, as I'm sure most readers of this blog are aware, Morton is now rotting away in the SHU of a Texas jail.

Adolescent rage
        In my opinion, these delusions are a symptom of something that's an analogy of the rage and rebellion adolescents experience when they come to realize that the parents have all the power in the family, and own all the toys. I've written about that before, in connection with David Wilcock. In the case of adolescents, their perceptions are generally the truth, but in the case of Hoagland, Morton, Wilcock and all the other conspiradroids, the all-powerful cartels who own all the toys are simply imaginary.

Richard Hoagland, statistics dunce

James Concannon writes...

        Richard Hoagland, the former museum curator who hasn't had a job since 1972, appears to be (metaphorically) frothing at the mouth over the way Hurricane Dorian pummeled the Bahamas this month. Promoting his blogtalk show The Other Side of Midnight yesterday, he wrote:

« Dorian was -- beyond any reasonable doubt, now -- a "controlled weather, genocide event."
The evidence is overwhelming; just look at the horrifying ground images of the Bahamas ... and the bizarre track of Hurricane Dorian itself--
A Category 5 ... sitting -- MOTIONLESS -- over ONE tiny Atlantic island ... for over two full DAYS!
UNPRECEDENTED -- according to the National Weather Service -- in all the annals of over a century of meteorological science!
Join me -- and my guest "geo-engineering analyst," Dane Wigington -- as we continue to explore, and document-- with striking NASA evidence (!) -- the vicious genocidal agenda being played out right before our eyes ... to kill a LOT of human beings ... if not planet Earth itself! »

        Well, look. Yes, it was a catastrophe by any measure, and I hope richer nations (you know who you are) will step up with some dollar help. But "just looking at the horrifying images" and "the bizarre track of [the hurricane]" does not constitute overwhelming evidence of attempted genocide.

        My learned friend Mr. Google tells me that the death toll is currently 43. The normal deathrate is 7.2/1000, in a total population of 403,337. So 16 deaths are to be expected in any two-day period. To call a death toll only two-and-a-half times the expected norm "vicious genocide" marks this man Hoagland as an alarmist nincompoop with no flair for statistics.

        Moreover, the meaning of the word genocide is the deliberate extinction of a race or sub-race. Bahamas is racially 92% African, but are all the deaths African? I don't know the answer to that and I bet Richard Hoagland doesn't either. There would certainly have been a lot of visitors on the islands in early September. And then, there are about one and a half billion people with African ethnicity in the world. The race isn't even going to notice 43 fewer members.

        As for an "agenda to kill planet Earth itself", LMFAO. Richard, go to your room.

Hoagland's numerology

        Richard Hoagland was interviewed by some dude called Robert Stanley—he calls himself a "Jedi journalist"—for two hours on Unicus radio, 12th July. Hoagland made me giggle a bit by declaring that 2019 is "the year of disclosure" (wasn't that 2017?), and even more by taking personal credit for President Trump's directive to send American men and women back to the Moon by 2024. Hoagland, you see, has created a three-hour video titled The Presidential Briefing and had it "personally delivered".^{note 1}  It includes, naturally, Hoagland's well-known fantasies about alien ruins on the Moon and Mars.

        Yes, I'm sure we all believe that Trump sat down for three hours, digested this message, then sent immediately for the NASA Adminstrator telling him to get moving Moon-wards.

Two megatons under China Lake
        At the time of the Unicus interview, the sequence of earthquakes at Ridgecrest and China Lake was still fresh on everyone's minds. Mag 4.6 on July 4th, 5.4 on the 5th, finally 7.1 on the 6th. Depths were 1.9km, 7km and 8km respectively. Hoagland declared that the energy of the big one was equivalent to a 2-megaton nuclear weapon, and it could only have been achieved by creating a huge void at 8km depth, which then collapsed. This, he said, was done the same way as the World Trade Center was "dustified"—with a torsion field weapon.

1:33:32 RCH: Where's my proof that this is what was done? Look at when it was done. 20:19. Take those two numbers, take [...] 20:19 military time. Add those two numbers together. What do you get?
RS: 39.
RCH: Divide by two. 19.5!!!. The signature of hyperdimensional torsion field physics! Whoever did this communicated the message of how it was done.

        I swear, from the tone of voice and the way he made this statement, he was not just having a joke. He really believes some evil galactic warlord worked through the reverse numerology and planned this event for 8:19 pm. Only he, Richard C. Hoagland, is smart enough to figure it out. Since the other two major seismic events in the series were not at that time, I guess he'll have to work out a different numerology for them.

        What I don't quite get is how a weapon can create a huge void at a depth of 8km. Even if the ground is "dustified", as he puts it (quoting JudyWood), surely the amount of material would be unchanged. It's not like the World Trade Center, where 80% of the towers can simply blow away on the breeze, as Judy Wood claims.

        Hoagland next drew attention to the fact that there wasn't much structural damage, and only one death (some unfortunate guy was fixing a jeep, which then fell on him).

1:34:55 Somebody went to great lengths to make sure there was no collateral damage. Now what does that tell you? It tells me someone was trying to be benign... was trying to raise the threat level without killing people but showing overwhelming technological supremacy, because in the [.?.] we have nothing that can match this.
1:35:29 Here's the capper. I have a report from one of my contacts on the East Coast ... One of her students reported that among other bizarre stories coming out of Ridgecrest was that the bees—ordinary honey bees—were observed on the ground, dazed, writhing around, and dying. Now bees do not respond to earthquakes in this way. But bees ... this would have been a side effect of the detonation of a torsion weapon, the bees would have been discombobulated and/or killed, 'cause bees resonate to those frequencies.^{note 2}
Dazed and dying bees right after the Ridgecrest earthquake to me was a "ding-ding-ding" that this was a technical torsion field weapon being demonstrated to our guys, basically saying "stop doing whatever you're doing or it'll get a lot worse."

        So far I haven't noticed the U.S. Navy stopping anything, unless you count an Iranian patrol boat in the Strait of Hormuz. Either they're foolhardy for brushing off this dire threat, or perhaps Richard Hoagland is a nincompoop who lives in the fantasy land of sci-fi comics, and nothing he says or writes is true.

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[1] The video starts with a caption that will go down in the annals of brown-nosing:

« The President who finally ends NASA's 60 years of 'deep state' cover-up of its real solar system discoveries — beginning with 'ancient ET ruins on the Moon and Mars' — will inevitably go down in history as 'the greatest President of the United States ...'  "If not the World...." »
[punctuation exactly as in the orig.]

[2] Hoagland is bullshitting here. Bees have chordotonal organs that allow them to respond to ultrasonic fequencies, but these would have a range of a few metres only. There's not a shred of evidence that they can detect or react to high-frequency transmission of any kind.

He made the same bullshit allegation in his 2007 web page The Bees' Needs—writing that torsion waves were responsible for Colony Collapse Disorder. Neonicotinoids are now generally accepted as the main cause of CCD, which hit its peak in 2006 and is now perceived as less of a problem than was thought then.

Part 2 of "The Bees' Needs" never appeared.

Hoagland resurfaces, Part 2

        The "Other Side of Midnight" web page features the following hyperbolic mini-bio of the Man himself:

His vision has inspired a whole new generation of pioneers of thought and form and opened the way for Citizen Scientists around the Globe. His work is emulated by cutting edge thinkers around the world. He is a thought leader and pioneer, breaking the bonds of stagnant archaic scientific models. His willingness to challenge the accepted norm has blazed a path for thousands of citizen explorers. He has a way of drilling down to the fundamental question that provokes the unexpected revelation.

        "Stagnant archaic scientific models" — such as that the Moon is lifeless and always has been? Such as that numerology is worthless poppycock?

        Hour 2 of Hoagland's "welcome back" interview on OSOM, hosted by the fragrant but prolix Laura London, was quite a mixture. The first topic was methane on Mars, and here Hoagland gave a decent and straightforward account of what it would mean if methane were found to be abundant, and what's been discovered so far. Then it was on to an assortment of speculations about solar system civilizations and similar non-facts. Hoagland kept promising us some dramatic revelations in an Apollo 11 anniversary show he's planning. As experience shows, Hoagland's promises and Hoagland's deliveries are horses of two different colors.

Jules Bergman was hung over
         Almost all of the the second half of the hour was anecdotal, about his experiences with CBS News as a consultant/researcher with the Apollo production team. He re-told a story I've heard before, and it's seminal to an understanding of the origins of his hatred of NASA. Since he gave an over-discursive version (surprise, surprise) I'm going to paraphrase it rather than transcribe his exact words.

        He says, correctly, that the general rule during Apollo was that the only person at Mission Control who could actually speak to the astronauts was the Capcom, who was himself an active-duty astronaut. However, as a PR stunt, an exception was planned for Apollo 15 at a time when the astronauts were not particularly busy, on the way back from Moon to Earth. It was arranged that they would conduct an actual press conference from space, and senior correspondents from the major TV networks, news agencies and newspapers would be allowed to ask questions directly, just as in a normal press conference. Hoagland was with the CBS-TV group as they waited for this event to begin. There was delay after delay, and finally their producer got on to NASA public affairs asking what the problem was. The answer they got was that the spacecraft was not yet visible from Goldstone.

        Hoagland says he made a swift calculation with pencil and paper, and concluded that this could not be true because the mountains obstructing the view would have to have been 5,000 miles high. Much later he discovered that the true reason the press conference was held was that Jules Bergman, correspondent for ABC TV, was struggling with a killer hangover and was not in place. Hoagland says this was "a wake-up call" for him personally, being the first time that he realized NASA was not always honest.

         I find that story a bit suspect, for a couple of reasons. First, the calculation he claims to have done on the back of an envelope is not at all an easy one to do. You'd need a great deal of information about the spacecraft's trajectory and a very good knowledge of geography (add to that the fact that Hoagland's incompetence at math is fairly well-known). Second, perhaps more telling, every Apollo mission timeline was planned and controlled to the second. If such a press conference was planned—and I have no reason to doubt that—it would have been approved by a whole bunch of people, written into the Flight Plan, and implemented like any other planned event. It's extremely hard to imagine that the Apollo 15 astronauts' time budget had enough slop to allow a significant delay.

        So, to go back to the puffery I quoted at the top, perhaps Hoagland's "way of drilling down to the fundamental question" is better expressed as "a way of drilling down through the truth to a story that makes him look good."

Update: Hoagland's story falls apart
        Thanks to very useful research by James Oberg (thanks Jim) we can see how well Hoagland's story syncs up with the documented facts. The answer is, not at all.

        The Press conference, of course, appears in the flight plan. It shows that TV is acquired at M.E.T. 270:20 (very likely through Goldstone)^{note 1}, and the conference is scheduled in the window 270:20-270:50. The annotated transcript shows that TV was acquired at 270:22:31, the conference actually began at 270:23:15 and ended 270:50:12. There is no extraordinary delay at all.

        Moreover, it is not true that media correspondents spoke directly to the Apollo 15 astronauts. The questions were written and Capcom Karl Henize read them in order. Henize explained:

"The questions you will be asked in this news conference have been submitted by newsmen here at the Manned Spacecraft Center who've been covering the flight. Some of the questions they raised have been answered in your communications with - with Mission Control, but the public-at-large has not necessarily heard them. The questions are being read to you exactly as submitted by the newsmen, and in an order of priority specified by them."

        The only open question is whether Jules Bergman had a hangover that day. Bergman's been dead for 32 years so we can't ask him. It's more than possible—the bar at the Nassau Bay Hotel was responsible for endless naughtiness in the Apollo years. I know whereof I speak, or write, believe me.

        I'm e-mailing this information to Hoagland, requesting his comments. Don't hold your breath.

Update 2: Wrong mission?
        Just in case Hoagland's error was simply mis-remembering which mission this story relates to, I checked the records for Apollo 16 & 17 (there was no transearth presser on earlier missions)

Apollo 16: Planned M.E.T. 243:30-50 / Actual 243:25:30 Capcom Hank Hartsfield
Apollo 17: Planned M.E.T. 284:07-37 / Actual 281:27:19 Capcom Gordo Fullerton

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[1] CORRECTION: Not Goldstone but Madrid. If TV had been coming from Goldstone the vertical dashed line indicating TV coverage would have been to the left of the MSFN solid line. So Hoagland's story is wrong in another detail.

Richard Hoagland resurfaces, Part 1

        Richard Hoagland has been in private mourning ever since his companion's death from cancer on 3rd March, and nobody could possibly fault him for that. As a 74-year-old, he surely must have expected Robin Falkov to outlive him. Sad.

        Well, he obviously thinks it's now time to emerge from his grief, because he appeared as a guest on his own blogtalk show last Saturday night. Hosting was the ineffably glam Laura London. Laura talked too much but at least they didn't interrupt each other, which was a blessing.

Laura London, from Facebook

        There was much chat about the commercialization of space, and the prospects for Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin enterprise, that may be Moon-bound before you know it. Hoagland opined that Blue Origin must have been forced to sign an agreement to censor any close-up photos of the Moon, as NASA has always done, so as not to "give the game away" about the... you know, the alien ruins. He forgets that the thousands of excellent images at a resolution of half a metre per pixel from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have already blown it. The "game" is that there is no game.

19.5
        The only notable thing about the number 19.5 (19.47277 if you want to be picky) is that it's the angle whose sine is 1/3, or 0.3333333 etc. It is not some mystical, transcendental property of the Universe, as 3.141596 and 2.7182818 are. It was mere human beings who decided to divide a circle into 360 things called degrees, after all. A corollary of that trigonometric fact is that if a tetrahedron is inscribed in a sphere with one vertex at the north pole, the other three vertices will be at latitude 19.5°S (I proved this geometrically back in 2015, doing Hoagland's math for him since he has no talent for it.)

        So, let's be clear. There is no justification whatsoever for attaching significance to this number when it's a longitude, the rotation period of an asteroid, the magnitude of a comet, or the time (either 19h50 or 19h30) of some event. Hoagland has made all those associations in the past, and even once famously drew attention to the fact that shirts at Old Navy were on sale for $19.50.

        On the show last Saturday night, he excelled himself in irrational flim-flam, discussing "disclosure."

50:35 RCH "Let me tell you something else that I think is interesting [for] symbolic pathways ... This is 2019, right?"
LL: "Mmm-hmmm"
RCH "OK. So... 2019... If you ...If you multiply 19.5 by two you get 39, right? So... so the July month of this year ... actually it's June ...er, is the...is the half-way point in 2019. Scrambled all together, June is the beginning, in this model, of more and more and more overt disclosure."

        I had to run that three times before I even got a feel for what he was trying to allege. Here's what I think. First of all, forget the 19.5 x 2 = 39. That was just random neurons firing in Hoagland's tiny brain. Now, he's saying that since June is half-way through the year, we're now at the year 2019-and-a-half. Then just discard the 2000 and call that insanity a "model."

        Phew... If there's one thing more invalid than numerology, it's botched numerology.

Brookings, again
        Another perennial source of error in Hoaglandia is that damned Brookings report. Hoagland insists that the report pretty much required NASA to keep quiet if it ever found solid evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. On saturday night he was even wronger than that.

52:42 RCH "If you read Brookings, there are sections particularly in the footnotes, where it is specifically recommended to Congress that the people were not ready. [...] This is how they could be made ready. So in 1959, this document [...] they basically laid out a prescription for how to get people ready. And they recommended in this footnote, which again you can read on the Enterprise Mission website, a series of things that had to be done. Production of radio, television, commercials, movies, all acculturating people to accept the idea that we are not alone. And then you have, if you look at mainstream pop culture, you've got Startrek, you've got The Outer Limits, you've got Twilight Zone, you've got Star Wars, you've got an infinite number of movies now, Marvel Comics Universe. People are so ready."

        It's true that he's put up pictures of selected pages from the report on Enterprise Mission—check 'em out. But you aren't going to find what he says you are. The footnotes from pp.225-6 make no mention of  mass media. I can do better than that, too. Here's a searchable pdf of the entire thing. The footnotes occupy pp.218-227. Within those pages the occurrences of the strings "movies" and "television" are both ZERO. There is ONE occurrence of "radio"—in the expression "National Radio Astronomy Observatory" (p.225). Hoagland was in fantasy-land.

        Well, there are two little gems from hour 1. I hope to get back to this tomorrow, with clips from hour 2.

Richard Hoagland and numerology

        I'm getting a bit bored with pseudoscientists who begin their sentences with "What if..." What follows is invariably the grossest speculation without any supporting evidence, but somehow the whole sentence acquires some sense of authority—or at least, that is what is hoped. I guess my standard reply is "What if you're totally wrong about that?"

        We have a brilliant example before us, in Richard Hoagland's reaction to the recent announcement by Orosei et al, in "Science" 25 July 2018 of an extensive underground "lake" (probably more like a sludgy deposit, in reality) 1.6km under the Planum Australe region of Mars. On his Other Side of Midnight web page Hoagland writes:

What if, in fact, the Europeans actually have detected the radar signature of an ancient, buried, long-abandoned Martian city … the last surviving one … before “the Martians” were forced to come to Earth?

Richard, what if that's a load of bollocks?

        For extra hilarity, Hoagland has again totally distorted his own theory about the number 19.5. According to his writings, it has significance as a latitude (either N or S) on a spinning sphere.  But he's had no hesitation about drawing attention to the number when it's a longitude, a time, the apparent magnitude of a comet, the inclination of an orbit, the NASA budget in $billion, or the price of a shirt at Old Navy. He also apparently can't perceive any difference between 19.5, 195, 1950 and the times 19h30min and 19h50min.

        The sub-surface sludge on Mars is centered at 193°E, 81°S, and that's apparently close enough for Hoagland, since he also wrote that this was another 19.5 "hit."

Hoagland needs to be reminded that:
* 193 is not the same number as 195
* 195 is not the same number as 19.5
* A longitude is not the same as a latitude

Jeez....

A Hoagland anniversary

"Gorgeous"
"Pioneering"
"Groundbreaking"
 "Vitally important new discoveries"
"Revelations"
"New insights"
"New information"
"The Ultimate Game Changer"

        Those words were spoken exactly one year ago today, by former museum curator Richard Hoagland, in praise of his own work,^{note 1} The Hidden History of Mars: A War In Heaven. He was on Howard Hughes' radio show on talkradio.co.uk specifically to plug this book, but as I reported at the time he simply reiterated well-worn claims such as that NASA is really an adjunct of the Department of Defense, and that he personally coined the phrase "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" (neither of which is true.)

        Back in November 2016 he had described the book as "just recently completed," and promised to hand out free copies to the loyal Club 19.5 members who had kept on giving despite that fact that the radio show had been off the air for a month.

One week ago, this announcement appeared on the OSOM web site:

LOOKING FOR BOOK DESIGN HELP 

Some of you know that we, the Enterprise Mission team, are working hard to release an amazing compilation of our research. We are now at the process where we have to convert our Indesign Print Layout to a Kindle/ebook format. This is a complex book, rich with imagery. 

If you are a savvy graphic designer who KNOWS how to do that efficiently and would like to be part of the Enterprise Mission volunteer team, please contact Kynthea, our producer, using the contact form on this website.  Thank you.^{note 2}

        It seems to me that Kindle is not the right format for a richly illustrated book, and it also seems to me that Hoagland is royally abusing his "members" by not only failing to live up to his promises but then coming to them with a plea for uncompensated labor.

        So in 16 months we've gone from "just recently completed" to "HE-E-E-E-LP!" That's not what I call working hard, Kynthea.

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[1] Actually, if I read it right, the majority of the content is not even Hoagland's own work but that of his so-called "Imaging Team" of Keith Laney, Keith Morgan, Andrew Currie, The Morgan Curve, Tim Saunders and Robert Harrison. Possibly Kynthea herself, too. Her picture puts me in mind of one of Noel Coward's most famous stage directions: "Enter Madame Arcati, in barbaric jewellery."

[2] Hilariously, the same announcement included a plea for help in redesigning the web site itself. Something that badly needs doing, yes indeed.

Richard Hoagland has so much to learn

        We already know that Richard Hoagland is utterly incompetent at math, but now it seems he's about equally incompetent as a chat radio interviewer. I've "come across" an .mp3 file of the 30th July edition of The Other Side of Midnight, and it's pretty amusing. This is a two-hour show, five (theoretically!) nights a week, that he's been hosting for over a year now, and he still hasn't learned some basic interview skills such as NOT asking a question then cutting your guest off after he's spoken only ten words in reply. Here's a verbatim transcript:

 25:30 Intervieweee: "This election is a cartoon. It's unbelievable. Erm... You have this guy who's a ... a well-known blowhard, you know, celebrity narcissist character. And then you have this woman who, ah, basically if you understand certain insider testimony she already was president for eight years. She ran the country --  Bill was off signing greeting cards and, you know, messing around with staffers, and Hillary was in there actually making all the decisions. She was really the President."

Hoagland: "Hang on David, Hang on. How the hell do you know that?"

Intervieweee: "Multiple insiders have spoken to me, and have said that, ah..."

Hoagland: "Hang on, let me stop you..."

        The interviewee was in fact David Wilcock, a delusional author specializing in apocalyptic predictions. His bio claims, in part, that "Multiple insiders with access to highly classified information have shared what they know with David." He throws the expression "quantum physics" around almost as capriciously as Hoagland himself tosses out "hyperdimensional physics" and "torsion field." It's quite evident that neither of them has any actual understanding of physics. About half-way through this interview Wilcock informed us that if you look in a microscope anywhere in the universe, and you zoom down to the sub-atomic level, you'll arrive at the exact same point, the "seed." This is, er... not exactly correct.

It's paranoia time
         If one single word could encapsulate this extravaganza, it would be PARANOIA -- on the part of both Wilcock and Hoagland. Paranoia at an almost Kerry Cassidy level of intensity. Both of them seem totally convinced that  the Illuminati are enslaving all of us. Even the Alex Jones-inspired term "prison planet" came up without anybody's tongue in his cheek. Numerology also gets wrapped in to their thinking, as when Wilcock commented on the fact that Stanley Kubrick died of a heart attack on the exact same day (7 March 1999) that Richard Hoagland had his own infarct^{note 1}.

18:41 Wilcock: "When we hear about something like people trying to ice you and actually icing Kubrick 666 days before January 1st 2001, it's not only not a coincidence, and it's not only a deliberate thing that was done. It is actually a black magic attempt to create energy through these human sacrifices."

        Hoagland himself keeps insisting -- without evidence -- that his cardiac emergency was a deliberate attempt on his life, rather than a natural phenomenon of a mid-50s man in a stressful situation. Kubrick was 70 when he died, and most people would look no further than his age and his highly stressful occupation for a causus morti. Wilcock didn't think to let us know whether this "attempt to create energy" was successful or, if so, what exact form the energy took.

        The bullshit was laid down thick and fast. Hoagland spoke of "psychotronic energy," which he explained as the use of hyperdimensional physics (of course!) to control human beings. Wilcock alluded to some "intention experiment" conducted by Maharishi Mahesh in the 60s, whereat meditation by a large number of people succeeded in reducing strife in the world by 72%.

47:36 Wilcock: "Look, there's no war strategy, there's no B2 bomber, there's nothing that they've ever spent money on that could even begin to accomplish a 72% reduction in terrorism. This technology -- and it is a technology -- has overwhelming significance and if you think about how threatening that would be to the power elite... They need us to stay depressed -- they need us to stay locked up in a world of weaponized food and alcohol and drug addictions to prescription drugs or all kinds of different things they're pushing on us. They don't want us to be happy, they don't want us to be empowered, they don't want us to be healthy, and they need us to stay depressed because if too many people get happy it changes the physics and they will not be able to maintain power."

        "Weaponized food" -- what a perfect description of that chicken vindaloo I had last Friday night. To me, there's something adolescent about this "THEY are controlling us" mindset. It's so reminiscent of children getting enraged when they discover that their parents have all the power in the family. There too, food -- the provision or withholding of it -- is often a symbol of power, or perceived as such. And what is teenage angst but the denial of happiness by a cruel world? When Wilcock says "if too many people get happy it changes the physics..." I become convinced that not only does he not understand physics, but he doesn't even know what physics is.

        At one point, discussing the mighty changes sweeping through the whole solar system^{note 2}, Hoagland came up with a wonderful ploy. Pluto, he said, was not only a planet but an artificial body, "an archive." He said "I predicted that -- months before they got there." So here's the Hoagland formula for self-defined success:

1. Make a nonsense prediction.
2. Claim that it came true.
3. Pat yourself on the back.

Brilliant.


===================/ \=================
[1] Actually, according to his own notes, Hoagland's event was a day earlier.

[2] It's brightening, according to Hoagland and Wilcock. Strange that astronomers with access to actual instruments haven't noticed that.

Mike Bara, utterly delusional on Mars water

        As every reader of this outpost of the blogosphere surely knows, NASA staged a major announcement yesterday confirming that recurring slope lineae (RSLs) on the walls of Martian craters, and the slopes of some Martian  mountains, are indeed caused by recent flows of brine, as has long been thought. The visual evidence has been apparent at least since 1999. The difference now is that the CRISM spectrometer on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has added solid chemistry to dynamic seasonal morphology. Craters where RSLs were studied included Gari, Horowitz and Newton.

Time-lapse animated gif of RSLs in crater Newton (released Aug.2011)

        A couple of days before the formal announcement, when inspection of the list of speakers was an obvious spoiler, Mike Bara was already screaming on Twitter: "NASA is trying to steal my work ... from 15 years ago!"


        Last night, on Jimmy Church's internet radio show Fade to Black, Bara went into full delusional hypermind. Church asked him "how did you feel about the way that it was presented?"

127:45 Bara: "They're telling us now what people like me, and people that listen to shows like this, knew 15 years ago. Which is that that there's water on Mars -- these dark slope streaks that you see coming down the insides of craters, and off mountain tops and stuff, are liquid water. Quite honestly, I was I think the first person in the world that said that's what it was, and this is the reasons why, and basically it was really gratifying on the one hand to read these articles on space.com and stuff basically confirming everything that I published along with my co-workers.. you know, 15 years ago. There's a certain gratification in being confirmed like that but... on the other hand it's really aggravating. Because, you realize that you're going to be swept aside or swept under the rug with "NASA now says this is true so now you can believe it" It's really kind of annoying. I'm trying not to let my ego get the better of me here, but it's really annoying sometimes to read my Facebook, and all thse people "Ooohhh, there's water on Mars!" They're my FB friends and I'm like "Do you folks not read my books? Why are we FB friends if you don't know what I do and why do we constantly have to fight? Why do we have to fight for the spotlight when we were first?"


131:28 Bara: "..the alternative researchers, the people on the outside, have been right all along. Tonight we should stick a feather in our cap and say "We won this one. Because we've turned out to be right and all of the NASA supporters really have turned out to be wrong." Because NASA's finally come around to the truth doesn't mean they were ever right about this -- they've been wrong all along.

  Yes, folks, you read that right.

     

      He didn't exactly specify when and in what medium he made this historic announcement, but since he named the date as 2001, and since he also mentioned Effrain Palermo as a co-worker, it's a safe bet that he was referring to the long web page authored by Richard Hoagland and himself, A New Model of Mars as a Captured Satellite -- often referred to as "The Mars Tidal Model" and reviewed by this blog passim.

The real history
        Well, let's see. The dark streaking on Martian slopes shown by the camera of Mars Global Surveyor was noticed by authors Lori K. Fenton et al. in September 1998, just short of a year after MGS arrived at Mars. They published in Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 30, p.1054 a paper beginning:

"The narrow angle MOC images from MGS show dozens of examples of dark streaks on Martian hillsides that may be indicative of fluid flow."

        Fenton et al. allowed that water was not the only possible explanation for what they observed. The most formal proposal that slope streaks were likely to be caused by recent running water was announced on 22 June 2000, and published in the 30 June issue of Science. The features of interest in that study were at Terra Sirenum and Centauri Montes — and the authors had waited a whole Martian year before making the announcement, so they could compare the terrain through the seasonal cycle and establish that the appearance of streaks coincided with warm weather. In other words, they had been tracking this phenomenon since March 1999. This was NASA,^{note 1} and the data was from Mars Global Surveyor.

        On 19 July 2000, a month after the NASA announcement, Richard Hoagland issued a press release on slope streaks he had observed in Frame SP2-33806 from MGS. The location was the Eastern edge of Terra Arabia. Hoagland also claimed prior work in social media yesterday, proclaiming "I saw it first!" on the basis of this web page, although the fact that, in the press release,  he specifically refers to the previous month's announcement by NASA makes him into a liar out of his own keyboard.^{note 2}

        The Mars Tidal Model essay is not precisely dated but it seems to be from almost a year later. It does include images of slope streaks  (not at all the same thing as RSLs, as Stuart Robbins has pointed out on his blog), but it does not describe the formation of brine and does not, of course, include the chemical data from CRISM which has only very recently become available.

       I don't mean to imply that Bara & Hoagland should be somehow prevented from telling these horrible self-serving lies. I believe in freedom of speech. I just think they deserve to be mocked for it. As long and as hard as possible.

==============================
[1] Although actually the authors of record were Michael Malin and Kenneth Edgett of Malin Space Science Systems. The paper was "Evidence for Recent Groundwater Seepage and Surface Runoff on Mars" Science 288 (5475): 2330–2335. 

[2] I'm told he also stated on his own digital radio show last night "There are no craters on Mars." 

Review of Hoagland on C2C Friday 19 June

        The starting point for this night's Hoaglathon was an article in Izvestiya, translated by the online Moscow Times, that gave rise to some notably inaccurate headlines. I can't now find the exact headline from The Washington Post, but it was something like RUSSIA QUESTIONS US LUNAR LANDINGS. Richard Hoagland pointed out that that was grossly misleading — and it was the last true statement he made that night.

        There followed three hours of near-hysterical hyperbole, as Hoagland latched onto that phrase "scientific — or perhaps cultural — artifacts" and ran with it, and ran, and ran, and ran. Naturally, his interpretation was that the Russians know all about the stuff that Apollo astronauts SECRETLY brought back from the Moon. You know, the head from C3PO that somebody carelessly left at the bottom of a crater called Shorty. Such highly advanced technology (from a civilization that wasn't clever enough to survive, please note) as could usher in a Golden Age here on Earth. Hoagland spent a good ten minutes explaining that reverse engineered Lunar technology could act as a total nuclear shield, preventing any nuclear reactions — be they bombs or out-of-control reactors — from functioning. He pulled this one entirely out of his imagination. It hasn't got the slightest basis in anything real at all. Amazing.

        Hoagland, as usual, didn't mince words. "The Russians have driven a dagger into the heart of the NASA cover-up." "This will not go away." Etc., etc. Well, as one who has had to negotiate with Russians three times in my life, I think I recognize this as something very different from Hoagland's interpretation. For a start, Hoagland missed entirely the reference in the original article to allegations of corruption surrounding Russia's status as host for the 2018 World Cup of Soccer. Then, he doesn't have enough experience to interpret the Russian reaction. In my view, this is "So, my fine friend, you question our right to host the World Cup? Let's have a look at your missing Moon rocks, too. Come, let us open another bottle of vodka and discuss these important questions." In other words, just a bit of semi-serious joshing.^{note 1} It is, by the way, true, that some Moon rocks are unaccounted for. Wikipedia has an inventory. The robot heads are all missing, too. In the sense that they never existed in the first place. The thing to remember about the SECRET artifacts from the Moon is that Hoagland has never produced one single shred of evidence that they exist.

        Hoagland had some images to show. Starting with the Chinese images from the Jade Rabbit Lunar rover that this blog discussed in April last year. Once Hoagland runs these images through Photoshop, they clearly show CCD detector noise that he says is glass structures, confirming his manipulations of Apollo photography. This blog actually got an oblique reference, as Hoagland said that critics (that's us) claim his images of glass skyscrapers  over the Moon are just scratches or contamination on his scanner glass. "Give me a break," he said, "as if I don't recognize scratches or don't know to clean my scanner glass." Well, Richard, here's the evidence.

credit: NASA, with Hoagland contamination

        Next, he turned to the intriguing images of the asteroid Ceres that have been coming in from the Dawn spacecraft. He tried to tell us that this is a city:

credit: NASA/JPL

        A fucking city, on an asteroid? An asteroid whose mass is only 0.00015 that of Earth, and whose gravity at the surface is 0.029g? Very funny, Hoagland.

        Well, the talk then ranged far and wide, through some familiar territory. How the Apollo astronauts had their memories "adjusted" so they don't remember seeing the glass skyscrapers. How JPL totally faked the color of the first Viking images from the surface of Mars. All poppycock. George Noory's attitude ran the gamut from worship to fury. At one point he said "You're amazing, Richard. Everything you say comes true in the end" (you could almost hear rationalists across the nation screaming "ELENIN!!!! GULF OIL SPILL!!!!"). But near the end, when talk turned to plans for Hoagland to guest-host in July on the occasion of the Pluto encounter, it got a little ugly. Hoagland tried to sandbag Noory on the air by arguing for a five-hour extended show. This was obviously something that had already been discussed and rejected, so Noory shut him down in no uncertain terms. Thanks to a Coastgab member using the name Georgie for President 2016, you can hear the audio. Good fun—arrogance squashed.

===============
[1] For a brilliant rendering of this aspect of the Russian character, see the portrayal of Col. Stok by Oskar Homolka in the 1967 movie Billion Dollar Brain (at 45:40)

See also the Rational Wikipedia article on "Whataboutism."

Richard Hoagland's 70th birthday numerology

        It was Richard Hoagland's seventieth birthday last Saturday, and the occasion was marked publicly by yet another two-hour radio interview. Not on Coast to Coast AM, as I'm sure he would have preferred, but on a two-bit internet podcast associated with that madman David Icke. The interviewer was not Icke, but a bloke with a comedy Irish accent by name of Richie Allen.

        We got into numerology immediately, as Allen asked Hoagland how it felt to be 70, and Hoagland replied that, as 70 = 10 x 7, and seven is an important number in hyperdimensional physics (Eh??? Important how??), that must mean that great things are about to happen in the field he's been researching for 35 years. Oh yes, Great Things About To Happen. Where have we heard that before?

        Then it turned into a name-droppathon, as he reviewed his brilliant career. Walter Cronkite, Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, Isaac Azimov, Margaret Mead and Jules Bergman all got their name-checks. We heard again how he was responsible for naming the first Space Shuttle Enterprise (except he wasn't -- the letter-writing campaign was organized by Betty Trimble) and how he unearthed the Brookings Report and its cautionary message to NASA (except he didn't --  Don Ecker and Lee Clinton did.) Well, I suppose you can't really blame an old man for reminiscing about the far-off days when he actually had a job and was doing something useful.

About the Brookings Report,^{note 1} his wrap-up was as follows:

42:55 "For the next 50 years -- from the time of its inception in 58 -- NASA has steadfastly denied any and all evidence that they've ever detected anything that would even hint at the possibility of living organisms anywhere in the solar system."

        This is to ignore the hundreds of  scientific papers published by NASA scientists on Martian water, organics, and methane. I know it's fashionable to denigrate Wikipedia (often for good reasons, it must be said), but the wiki-article on Life on Mars is pretty good. It includes the sentence "The search for evidence of habitability, taphonomy (related to fossils), and organic carbon on the planet Mars is now a primary NASA objective." Hoagland is simply wrong.

Fantasy-land

"I'm a data-driven guy. I don't make claims -- regardless of what  my acerbic and over-the-top critics say all the time, because it's disinformation. I try to stick to facts -- I try to stick to things which you can independently verify. I try to stick to official sources, and official data. What I don't do is to pay a lot of attention to leaks."

        That was Hoagland, at 1:29:20 into the interview. Oh, how we acerbic critics wish it were true. But at 1:42:00 we got this astounding piece of flim-flam: Absolutely classic Hoagland.

"What's the one thing that would change everything on this planet? If we were to go to the Moon and bring back high technology. Absolutely tons of stuff are preserved underground. Don't look at the cratered surface -- think 200ft, 1000ft, a mile down, two miles down. There's obviously (emph. added) a ton of stuff in perfect preservation, particularly if it's been exposed to a vacuum. You bring that stuff back, you back-engineer it, you create electronics, you create power supplies, you create medicines, you create solutions for all kinds of intractable diseases, like cancer for instance -- that have already been worked on and perfected by the guys who went before us, who are part of the human family. We're not talking about aliens, we're talking about the human race, just a lot older and a lot more incredible than we've been allowed to believe up until just yesterday. And you do all that in the private sector. Not only would Musk make billions and billions and billions more, but he changes the direction of the planet for the better. And that's why Elon Musk must succeed, and all the other private guys must succeed--because they ... are the keys to the kingdom, the keys to the future of the human race, and the keys to the transformation of this planet from the hell it is for most people to the Garden of Eden it could be again if this information was made freely and publicly available."

        Not at all a bad speech, especially as it was totally off-the-cuff. However, it's pure fantasy, of course. I wish I had Hoagland's eloquence, but I'm glad I don't have his self-delusion.

Many happy returns, Richard.

=================================
[1] If any readers don't know what "The Brookings Report" refers to, here's a briefing.

Report on what Richard Hoagland has described as his "new book"

        During Richard Hoagland's"interview" last Friday night with Coast-to-Coast host Richard Syrett, I lost count of the number of times he plugged what he called "my new book", Pluto: New Horizons for a Lost Horizon. (I place "interview" in quotes because Hoagland's obnoxious arrogance was front and center, as he talked over Syrett and basically attempted to take over the whole show.^{note 1})

        Well, I don't usually blame C2C guests for plugging books—they get no other compensation for giving up most of a night's sleep (and by the way, it really works, as I have reported passim.) But in this case the plugging was strident and the problem is that IT'S NOT HOAGLAND'S BOOK. It's Richard Grossinger's book. Grossinger was the original publisher of The Monuments of Mars after Simon & Shuster reverted Hoagland's contract for non-performance. Grossinger wrote at some length about his pal Hoagland in 2010. Here's an excerpt:

"Hoagland is a unique mixture of amateur scientist, genius inventor, scam artist, and performer, blending true, legitimate speculative science with his own extrapolations, tall tales, and inflations. He is a brilliant and glorious myth-maker and a evidence-based scientist at the same time."

New Horizons for a procrastinating author
        The book is 300 pages long and contains 31 essays by a smörgåsbord of writers. None of the names ring a bell with me except Jason Martell and Grossinger himself, who contributes #2 in addition to a 44-page introduction (which is quite well-written, in fact.) Hoagland himself is #3 up, strutting around the book for 64 pages. His chapter title is New Horizon ... for a Lost Horizon, and it's recognizably Hoagland but ever so slightly toned down. We get lots of "extraordinary," "astonishing" and "stunning." There are the unmotivated italics and the bizarre ellipses, but no all-caps overemphasis and no exclamation points. Deo gratias.

        Well, here's a flavor of the sheer mendacity of this material, as Hoagland tries to substantiate his thesis that the solar system is replete with evidence of a now-dead advanced civilization:

"Our research has now revealed that this stunning, new solar system reality first became known to the U.S. Department of Defense under the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s—in part via a pioneering, top-secret JPL (U.S. Army) effort at a first unmanned circumlunar reconnaissance mission, "Project Red Socks." We believe the shocking results of this clandestine mission formed the real reason behind NASA's sudden public emergence after Sputnik, and the rapid congressional authorization, only one year later in 1958, of NASA as the loudly-proclaimed, lead "civilian space agency of the U.S.A."

"This was the perfect cover—in the 1950s world of perpetual Soviet pursuit of any and all technological supremacy over the West—for NASA's real, long-term covert mission:
To secretly ascertain ... from NASA's inception ... the full extent of (potential) military threats (or benefits) of these long-abandoned, ancient ET derelicts ... as well as those ancient surface installations still partially preserved on various planets and moons (Cydonia et al.); the surviving riches of an entire, astonishing Type II Civilization in our own backyard—whose extraordinary legacy and scientific potential was only fully accepted (even within NASA) when Apollo astronauts fulfilled their real Kennedy Mission and clandestinely returned, beginning in 1969, unquestionable intelligently-designed and manufactured ET artifacts to Earth—from the Moon."^note2

Ahem.

        He writes of "the shocking results" of Project Red Socks. The most shocking result was that the project never happened. It was way too ambitious for a group of people who would not even succeed in orbiting a tiny 14kg satellite for another three months. Red Socks was a panic reaction to the Soviet success with Sputnik 1, conceived as a series of nine lunar orbiters which would, at a minimum, return photographs of the far side. It was even suggested that they might deliver a nuclear weapon to the surface, then wait patiently for some of the debris to come flying back to Earth by sheer good luck (I almost added an exclamation point there, tsk tsk.) Some vestiges of Red Socks were folded into the Pioneer 4 mission in 1959, but basically, it was a non-starter.

        As for that utterly daft allegation that Apollo returned the technical artifacts of a lunar civilization—he made the same claim in the introduction to Dark Mission. He did not then, and does not now, produce one scintilla of evidence for that assertion. On the contrary, the evidence is all against him. We know what was brought back from the Moon. It was meticulously catalogued in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, where Hoagland's pal Ken Johnston worked. Surely Ken could set the Hoaxster straight on that. It's all very well him saying "Ah well, that's what they want you to think"—without some evidence, he just looks like a buffoon. In Dark Mission he further alleged that the lunar goodies were then subjected to reverse engineering. Well, where are the results, Richard?

        I love the fact that Amazon categorizes this work as Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Folklore & Mythology. Yes indeed, Amazon.

Update 10th April:
        Oy veh, Coast to Coast saw fit to give Hoagland yet another two hours last night to mention "my book" a dozen times. He talked at some length about private enterprise Moon landings, then added:

"Another reason to buy the book is that part of the proceeds will go toward funding this enterprise."

        FACEPALM. There are 31 authors to pay. After publishing costs the book might generate as much as $50,000—probably less. How much use does Hoagland think the residuals would be to a manned lunar landing mission?

Liar.

======================================
[1]  Everything in the show is recycled Hoaglandiana, but it's worth following that Youtube link, just to enjoy the mocking comments.

[2] That second half is all one sentence. That's Hoagland for you.

Reflections on the Moon

        In a lecture at the Earth-Keeper 2014 Star-Gate Event in Arizona late last year, Richard Hoagland attempted to deal with a logical objection to his interpretation of this lunar image:

image credit: China National Space Administration, corrupted by RCH

        The image is from the Chinese Chang'e 3 lunar lander that touched down in Mare Imbrium on 14th December 2013. Hoagland loaded it into Photoshop™ and used the EQUALIZE tool. I commented on the technique a year ago when Hoagland first explained it, and astronomer Stuart Robbins did his typically rigorous job on it, on 1st May 2014. Hoagland tells his fans that the CCD detector noise in the sky is not noise but part of a vast glass dome over Mare Imbrium.

        The logical objection (other than the simple fact that the whole idea is crazy) is that the same noise pattern can be seen everywhere else in the left half of the image where there is black. Specifically, in the deep shadow under the spacecraft. In the Arizona lecture, Hoagland pre-empted this objection  (at 1:27:00 in the Youtube vid) by reminding us that the lunar regolith is rich in micro-particles of glass, and that therefore it's not surprising that we see that pattern down there. It's simply a reflection of the sky.

Proposition: Lunar regolith is reflective.

Corollary: From chest height, standing on the Moon, the all-black sky will be seen, reflected, in the lunar surface.

Experiment: Go to the Moon, take a good quality photograph from chest height.

Result:

 image credit: NASA/JSC

The proposition is falsified.

Jolly good show, NASA

        Today's first test flight of the Orion spacecraft, launched by a Delta IV heavy, was a complete success in every respect. Well done, chaps.

        Richard Hoagland, guesting on his girlfriend's awful internet radio show, went into hyperbole mode even before the flight was over. "This changes everything," he gushed. "It will save the world." Just as I was thinking his narration of the test flight -- officially designated  EFT-1 -- was reasonably accurate, however, he revealed his ignorance once again by looking forward to the days when Orion will take men to the Moon to rediscover the technology of that ancient Lunar civilization he dreams about. The one destination Orion does not have is the surface of the Moon -- the Augustine Commission plus President Obama (well, his advisers, anyway) nixed that.

        Orion is all that we have left of the cancelled Constellation Project, and it will eventually be launched on the all-new Space Launch System toward asteroids and the planet Mars.

        I'm just bummed that we'll have to wait until September 2018 for the next Orion flight -- a trip around the Moon and back designated EM-1. Even then, it will not be manned. The manned asteroid rendezvous is projected for 2021-ish. But, you never know -- if the Chinese start doing very visible things with men (and women) on the Moon, the US Congress might have an epiphany.

Update 12/6:
        Hoagland took it up a notch by appearing in the news segment of Coast to Coast AM last night. Evidently the slight feud between Hoagland and Noory is over, and we can look forward to more bullshit^{note 1}. Last night he took most of his allotted time recounting how a 22-year-old  Hoagland attended a NASA press conference in January 1967 and got to ask The Great Von Braun a question. Just as he had earlier on the freedomslips show, he misinformed the audience about Orion's mission, and made the crazy statement that Orion was the technology of the 22nd century. Dear Richard: The 22nd century is 86 years away. Nothing will be left to show for Orion by 2100. I promise you.

        Since I'm annoyed that he got back on the air, I'll nit-pick by saying that his reference to the mighty Saturn V rocket was wrong, too. A January 1967 press conference at the Cape would have been about AS-204, later designated Apollo 1 -- the tragic mission that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee in an oxygen fire^{note 2}. The rocket was a Saturn 1B, not a V.

================================================
[1] Specifically, bullshit about comet 67P Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Hoagland said he would blow Noory's mind with his revelations about what Rosetta's cameras revealed. Here we go again -- Nike sneakers, apartment blocks, motels....

[2] Hoagland himself would, many years later, make the inexcusable claim that the AS-204 fire was no accident, but something contrived by NASA management. His evidence? Astrology.

Hoagland: They come in threes

        Reports of Richard Hoagland's eternal silence, it seems, were grossly exaggerated. The self-described "Big Man" was back yesterday, for two hours on John Wells's Caravan to Midnight internet radio show^{note 1}. This makes it even more surprising that he hasn't been on Coast to Coast AM since late April. Speculative explanations such as mortal illness are now down in flames, so maybe there really is some bad blood around.

        Anyway, back he was, and as crazy as ever. He reported progress on his new book, The Heritage of Mars: Remembering Forever, which he first announced back in November 2000, then announced again in April 2012. The progress -- "I'm working on it, hoping to have it out by 2016"^{note 2}. Not exactly a fast worker, our Richard.

        The conversation was very wide-ranging, taking in world politics as well as the "face" on Mars, the "glass" on the Moon, and other silliness. Hoagland proclaimed, as he has on several previous occasions, that we are in a "pre-disclosure" situation. His main thesis was that three separate space agencies are "leaking like crazy," and that must mean something. Here are his data points.

1. NASA - the femur on Mars

2. ESA - Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. "Not a comet but an ancient space station."

3. Chinese National - "glass towers" on the Moon


        John Wells just rolled over and played Noory. In other words, he lapped up this nonsense as if it were true. He didn't remark, for instance, that there is no contextual support for the "femur." Sure, it looks a bit like a human femur, but if it were, wouldn't there be other bones lying around as well? Wouldn't the house this human once lived in, the place where he went to work, be visible?

        Wells didn't so much as ask how Hoagland thought he knew that 67P was a space station. Nor how publication of an image exactly as had been long anticipated could amount to "disclosure." He didn't understand image processing well enough to understand how Hoagland had manipulated the Chang'e picture to make the "glass" appear (this blog explained it back in April).

Isis
        So then we moved on to world politics. Hoagland made some very strong statements about the apocalyptic threat posed by the Islamic Caliphate Army, currently rampaging through the Middle East making the heads of infidels roll.

        Hard to disagree with that. But then he went off into cloud-cuckoo land over the name ISIS^{note 3}. It won't surprise readers of this blog to know that he instantly connected it with the Egyptian god Isis. Neither he nor Wells stopped to think that a) an acronym is not a name, or b) that ISIS is only a transliteration of whatever is the arabic equivalent of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or c) that more recently these thugs have been referring to themselves as just the "Islamic State", implying that their brutal ambitions may stretch beyond the I and the S^{note 4}. Hoagland misunderstood everything to the point of saying this:

"My colleague Stan Tenen, who's been doing for 30 years amazing language studies ... he is of the opinion that what you name something is very close to its intrinsic hyperdimensional torsion field wave packet."

To me, that  sentence has no conceivable meaning. Hoagland added:

"I know this sounds like mumbo-jumbo to most people, because they haven't studied it."

        He's right about that. It does sound like mumbo-jumbo. Actually it is mumbo-jumbo. Where would I study hyperdimensional torsion field wave packets, assuming I wished to?



========================
[1] That link may not work for long, since the show is supposed to be pay-per-view.

[2] According to Hoagland, 2016 is the "key year" when all the things that didn't happen in December 2012 will really happen. He didn't say how he knows that. And I guess he forgot that he claimed that 2010 was "the year of disclosure."

[3] At one point he was playing the same game with the International Space Station, calling it IS(i)S.

[4] The original arabic is ad-Dawlah l-'Isla-miyyah .

Hoagland 2-1/2 years later -- Big Talk vs. reality

The Big Talk

Coast to Coast AM, 20 February 2012 (Vimeo)

GN: "Let me ask you this before we take calls. How many Facebook followers do you have now?"

RCH: "Over 30,000."

GN: "Good for you."

RCH: "That's not counting my friends -- I have 5,000 friends."

GN: "How d'they find you?"

RCH: "They just go to Facebook. And... Richard C. Hoagland. And they will take you right to my Facebook page. Or you can go to enterprisemission.com. There's a link to my Facebook page. The public page -- the 'fan page' as they call it. Right at the very top.  I love to have lots of new people because the conversation that I engage in  -- and I engage in a lot of conversation with folks that come on, and want to talk to me. This is important, because if this is going to unfold the way I think it's going to unfold, it will save civilization. It will do all the things that we have to do to put America back at #1, and to set a tone for the planet, so that we, united, as a human species, reach out and figure out who the hell we are by touching ... with a human spaceflight program that will be heir to the Apollo program that John Kennedy gave us because of his vision; that everybody can be proud of, and will lift all boats. We need something as big as a war, but not a war. And this is it. If our scenario projections are accurate."

Now for the reality
Number of FB 'fans' Hoagland blocked for asking questions he didn't care to answer: Unknown, but MANY.

Last time Hoagland posted anything: 22 May 2012.

Did he save civilization? Well, civilization hasn't come to an end -- but I don't think Hoagland can claim any credit for that.

Did he put America back at #1? No.

Did a new Apollo-type space project emerge? Far from it.

Were his projections accurate? Don't make me laugh.

Overall assessment: HOT AIR.

Latitude and longitude

        Biggie congrats to the Chinese Space Agency, that successfully landed Chang'e 3 and deployed the Yutu rover at 44.1143°N, 19.5149°W on the Moon. Here's a permalink to the landing site in the ACT-REACT LRO lunar map.

        Richard Hoagland was torn from his nice warm bed to comment on this event with C2C host John B. Wells last night. He went straight for the least useful aspect of it -- the numerology.

Long, not Lat, Richard dear
        For at least 15 years Hoagland has been telling us (screaming, it seems like) that the 19.5° latitude is extra special. Magic. Ritual. Hyperdimensional. In support of this, he has cited Jupiter's red spot, Olympus Mons, Neptune's dark spot and Mauna Kea. All of which are NOT at 19.5°, but that's perhaps a minor detail. Now suddenly it's the 19.5° longitude that's magic/ritual/hyperdimensional, as Hoagland proclaims that the Chinese know all about the ritual and observed it correctly. Richard Hoagland is confused, you might say. If you were less charitable you might say Hoagland is crazy.

The ETs know, y'know
        It got worse. He went sailing off into a total fantasy about how this was China's message to the extraterrestrial intelligences. Something along the lines of "Look you guys, we're the ones to talk to as representatives of Planet Earth. See how LEET we are -- the Americans are crap, basically"

        I would have collapsed laughing if I hadn't already been collapsed in bed at the next bit. He said the choice of 19.5° longitude would have sealed the deal. The ET high command would be thinking "Hmmm, these Chinese really understand. The magic 19.5, WOW!!" This would require that a) The ETs chose exactly the same point on the Moon to designate as the 0° longitude, b) They count in decimals, and c) They also divide a circle into 360 degrees.

        Richard Hoagland is very confused. My message to the Chinese: WELL DONE. To Coast-to-Coast: GET SOMEONE WHO KNOWS WHAT HE'S TALKING ABOUT, FOR GOD'S SAKE.

Hoagland: Two travesties

Text size: 4
Text color: #ffffff
Font: Times Roman
Background: #000000, plus starfield pattern
Line width: 1540px

        Know what that's called? AN UNREADABLE WEB PAGE, that's what. And that's what Richard Hoagland gave us, as his first website update in nearly nine months, under the title It Only Takes One White Crow. At one time I wrote a couple of books about HTML, so I know a piece-of-shit web page when I see it. Any other HTML hackers reading this might like to know that the W3C validator throws 81 errors and 14 warnings when asked to rate the page markup.

        OK, getting on Hoagland's case about his markup is a bit irrelevant, I hear you say. Never mind the technicalities, what about the content? Well, actually, I was giving you the good news first. The content is WORSE.

        The page was composed as a companion to last night's three-hour Hoagathon on Coast to Coast AM. By way of a preamble, he takes us through his brilliant (and totally false) analysis of the original 'Face' on Mars, his absolutely brilliant (and absolutely false) exposition of the Brookings Report, before getting to the meat of the thing -- namely, what Curiosity has found on Mars. I can do this like a picture book for you. (Actually these images are not from the web page but from the C2C-AM archive).

This is a child's sneaker. Surrounded by toys such as a model glider. ON MARS.

This is a cylinder.

This is an engine. ON MARS.

        I'm bored already, I won't continue with the collapsed motels and apartment blocks. We did those already. But you get the idea. This is bad science. VERY, VERY BAD SCIENCE.

        Then, for heaven's sake, he goes off into a wild and utterly ridiculous fantasy about a Reuleaux tetrahedron in West Candor Chasma -- nowhere near Gale crater, nothing to do with the Curiosity rover, and just about as painful as the HTML it's written in. I could tell you what a Reuleaux tetrahedron is but then I'd have to kill myself for even taking this preposterous idea that seriously. Look it up if you must -- everything's on the net these days. The main thing to understand here is that Richard Hoagland is wrong.

Reuleaux woo-woo
        On the woo-woo radio last night, he didn't venture into Reuleaux territory (imagine having to spell that out for George Noory), settling instead for the above-mentioned fantasy of a Martian child's bedroom complete with toys, and a scamper through the Wacky-Accy^{note 1}. At times there were awkward silences, as if neither Hoagland nor Noory could imagine what kind of bullshit to come up with next.

Here's one quote I particularly loved:

"The Accutron is a really robust portable field sensor that allows me to monitor the changes in the field strength in and around these sacred sites."

STRENGTH. Remember that word.

On 8th June, just a month ago, I wrote this in e-mail to Hoagland:

"You say you measure the torsion field, right?

So here's the simplest possible question:

What was the maximum intensity of the torsion field at Coral Castle during the Venus transit of 2004?"

I was favored with a reply, the very same day:

"I have NEVER stated that we're measuring the "amplitude" ... of ANYTHING.             :)

Frequency ... frequency ... frequency ....

Why don't you try actually READING what we've published (so far ...), before you ask (more) inane questions ..."

"Someone's living on the Moon"
        Good line. I bet the Branch Hoaglandians love it. Sad to say, it isn't true. Hoagland repeated that bit of nonsense last night, which is based on his utter misunderstanding of lunar atmospheric pressure measurements from Apollo vs. Chandrayaan. The story is here. Basically, Apollo was doing its measurement at night-time, Chandrayaan daytime. That's why the atmospheric pressure was different -- not because there are seekrit miltary bases.

Two false claims
        Around the middle of the second hour, Hoagland again claimed to have been the first to publish the hypothesis that Europa, the sixth moon of Jupiter, might have an ocean under its icy crust. This claim has been ridiculed by Phil Plait, Ralph Greenberg and Gary Posner. In response to Posner's rebuttal, Mike Bara wrote a vitriolic web page (also white size 4 Times Roman on starfield, but mercifully not 1540px line width) saying "Hoagland has never claimed any such thing".

This is not just bad science, it's disgraceful.

        Toward the end of that hour, Hoagland referred to the Apollo 15 Hammer & feather drop, in which Dave Scott proved that in the vacuum of the Moon, a hammer and feather dropped from the same height reach the ground together. A truly excellent demo. Almost as a casual throwaway, the pseudoscientist told us that the whole thing was his idea.

That is a falsehood. The demo was conceived by Dave Scott, Jim Irwin and Joe Allen^{note 2}.

Bad science. Disgraceful claims. Unforgivable arrogance and mendacity.

===================================

1. As ever, a backgrounder on this is here.

2. Thanks to  Jourget for pointing me to this note in the Lunar Surface Journal:

[Scott - "The basic idea was Joe Allen's. It was another thing from sitting in the crew quarters at night, trying to figure out interesting things to do - that were useful, too. And I guess we had a lot of ideas. But Joe came up with the hammer and feather idea, and we decided where to get a feather. I had a friend who was a professor at the Air Force Academy. Their mascot's the Falcon. And we had the (LM) Falcon. So that was indeed, a falcon feather from an Air Force Academy bird. In fact, I had two of them. I was going to try it, first, to see if it worked - because of static charge and all that stuff it might have stuck to my glove. Didn't have time (for the trial run), so we just winged it. And it worked!"]