....one of your most persistent and confident predictions for 2010 crashes and burns? If you're Richard Hoagland, you just declare that it happened anyway, but nobody noticed.
That was the official Hoagland line on Coast to Coast AM last night, confronted with the undeniable fact that "The Year We Make Contact" just ended with a distinct lack of contact unless you count the contact of Lindsay Lohan's hand on a Betty Ford Center technician in December. In a discursive three-hour chat with George Noory, Hoagland said several times that "contact has happened. You just have to look."
The announced topic for last night was astrobiology, but as it turned out arsenic-tolerant bacteria weren't on the menu—Hoagland having perhaps realized that it's not a topic upon which he can hope to shine. Instead we got about an hour of what jolly good buddies Arthur C. Clarke and Richard C. Hoagland once were, then a tour of his favorite bits of nonsense including the robot head on the Moon and the Nazis in space. "Somebody," he said, is preparing us for "something," by coming up with all these science fiction movies (Transformers et al.) This was perhaps a bit of a slip-up, since if contact has already happened what need is there for preparation?
It was a sleep-inducing three hours, ending with guess what? Oh yes, the 800 number.
Of course.
6 comments:
"contact has happened. You just have to look."
LLLLOL
Yeah, he kind of telegraphed that one after the ESA conference in September went tango umbrella for him. Disclosure suddenly became a "subtle" thing, and what Michael Bay was doing became more important than what NASA was doing.
As to the original the really topic of the program, no one should be surprised at Hoagland's reluctance to cover it in detail. Basically, it doesn't help support his theories much (beyond the "subtle disclosure" idea), and neither he nor his faithful really understand the details in any case. So from his perspective, it's easier to just get to the old reliable material of his act, and skip anything involving real science.
Chris, not many people would understand "tango umbrella." I, however, am one of the few ;-)
Expat, I meant to ask you what your thoughts were to the whole spy satellite as orbital telescope meme he was pushing in that interview. His full claim involved the spy sat taking pictures of the Moon (thus finding the "artifacts" we all know are there), Kennedy seeing the pictures and suddenly wanting to go to the Moon, Kennedy then deciding to let the Russians in on it, and finally the forces of evil killing him before he could.
According to Hoagland, he was approached at the Greer conference by a guy who had the film. He talked about this briefly after the conference on his FB page, then the subject disappeared from mention until the C2C interview.
I don't find it credible that images of the Moon from a KeyHole sat would show convincing enough detail to set JFK off on Apollo. The political background of the decision to shoot for the Moon is already very well known.
I think JFK was serious about teaming with the Sovs -- when he understood how difficult the Moonshot was going to be he very likely had second thoughts -- but I'm as sure as I can be that LBJ would have found a way of aborting that idea.
So a guy comes up to RCH after a conference presentation and says "Psst! Got some film you might like". That kind of stuff is so easy to fake. I don't buy it.
Oh I didn't believe it for a second either. Those satellites were designed to take photos from something like a couple hundred miles up. I wouldn't think they would make for very good orbital observatories. The part about the guy actually having the film also smells kind of bad. If he does, he's guilty of espionage.
As you said, Kennedy's motives for Apollo were well known. While he may have wanted to join up with the Russians on this one (I didn't know that), I don't think he could have sold that idea to Congress or the American people. Not in the middle of the cold war anyway.
The supposedly existing images from this supposedly stolen film have yet to actually make it beyond Hoagland's imagination. They were supposed to be the basis of a (yet another promised) new paper on his website. That was some time ago. Put it all together and you get yet another Hoagland fairytale.
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