Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Expat strikes back

        I was a little miffed when Richard Hoagland said on Art Bell's radio show last Thursday "I am sick to death of my stupid critics saying I'm nuts because they won't look at the data.

        OK, I was a lot miffed. I sent a rather comprehensive message to Hoagland, rebutting the accusation. If he replies to my e-mails at all it's generally the same day, so I guess he has nothing to say. Therefore I'm now making it public.

        It's important to understand that this is not an attack on RCH. The attack was his original statement, heard by millions of Art Bell fans and Einstein-only-knows how many more on Youtube. This is a defensive riposte, and I'll be lucky if 1,000 people ever see it.

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

To: Richard Hoagland
Date: 9/22/13
Subj: "I am sick to death of my stupid critics saying I'm nuts because they won't look at the data."
From: Expat

Greetings...

I'm one of your critics, but I'm not stupid. I have more education than you, I've authored or co-authored more than twice as many books as you, plus I've produced, written and directed fourfive major broadcast TV documentaries about spaceflight.

Dr Stuart Robbins is another of your critics and he is not stupid either. He is an actual working scientist, which is more than either you or I have ever achieved. Dr Robbins' specialty is lunar and planetary surfaces, do you understand that? He's an expert and he knows a lot more than you do.

Dr Derek Eunson is not stupid either. He's a highly educated working design engineer.

Now to your data...

I have looked at your data on the skull-like rock in crater Shorty and I have shown that your image is fraudulent.

I have looked at your data on the orbit of Explorer 1 and I have shown that your calculation is so catastrophically wrong that there is no hope of resurrecting your proposition. IT'S DEAD. Please withdraw it. Dr Derek Eunson also concurs.

I have looked at your data on the Ritual Alignment Model. Many times. I have told you that I would like to try and confirm or falsify this idea. I asked you two key questions and you refuse to answer.

I have looked at your data on glass domes on the Moon. As you know, I falsified your proposition yesterday. Other similar claims of yours are easily attributable to contamination of your scanner glass.

I have looked at your data on what you call prisms showing in Apollo 17 images. I have already told you you are mistaken. The gnomon patches are not red/green/blue but orange/green/blue.

I have looked at your statement about the latitude of the Port-au-Prince earthquake, and I have shown that it was a lie.

I have looked at your data on the Gulf Oil tragedy of 2010 and I have shown that you lied again.

I have looked at your data on the artificiality of Phobos and I showed that your proposition was highly improbable. People with much more expertise than either of us then falsified it.

I have looked at your data on the artificiality of comet Hartley-2 and found it has no credibility.

Likewise Tempel-1.

I have looked at what you humorously call your "data" (actually Judy Wood's "data") on the dustification of the WTC and found it is so far from credible it wouldn't even make a decent Sci-Fi story. It's pathetic, Richard.

I have looked at your data on the artificiality of Vesta and I showed that your proposition was highly improbable.

I have looked at your pseudo-statistical analysis of C/2010 X1 (Elenin) and showed beyond doubt that your analysis was seriously flawed, leading to divide-by-zero errors and other absurdities. Dr Stuart Robbins has also falsified your reasoning. Dr Derek Eunson also concurs.

I have looked at your data on YU55 and shown that it is mistaken.

I have reviewed your prediction for Phobos-Grunt and found it to be worthless.

I have looked at your data on lunar atmospheric pressure and found that you totally misunderstood your sources.

I have looked at your data on the 40-year-old Accutron. Many times. Seeking to confirm or falsify your "results," I have asked you a number of questions about this. You have refused to answer. Dr Robbins has also reviewed your protocol critically.

I have looked at your data (such as it is) on the so-called ziggurat on the Moon and I find your proposition has no credibility. Dr Robbins has criticized your work and that of Mike Bara in exhaustive detail.

I have looked at your data on the strength of lunar construction glass, and found that you committed the cardinal sin of citing a paper in a science journal that does not in fact support your proposition. THIS IS SOMETHING YOU SHOULD REALLY BE ASHAMED OF, RICHARD.

Will you please consider going on the radio and apologizing for your slur?

Regards,
[expat]

15 comments:

Bill said...

I think that sums it up, but Would it be cheeky to throw in ' cydonia' the city complex, 19.5, face on mars, then Mars path finder' machinery' , Mars rover , Phoenix, and now the icing on the cake..now curiosity sees' city blocks'...actually everything that RCH has said since and including the United Nations speech has been fiction..I always wondered how RCH ever managed to do a briefing to the UN.
Regards
Bill

Gavin said...

Richard C. Hoagland's credibility is shot.

expat said...

>>I always wondered how RCH ever managed to do a briefing to the UN.<<

I think it was in the canteen or something. Certainly not in the plenary chamber.

Graham said...

Slightly off topic...

As you were posting this I was doing some digging into Hoaglands Pre-Face writings and managed to locate a copy of the December 1974 'Focus on Mars' issue of Analog magazine in which Hogland has an article arguing that Viking is not going to find life on Mars and that this will cause the entire NASA budget to be diverted "...to clean up the mess technology has made of this planet."

It also implies that the only reasons Mariner 8 & 9 flew was that they were too close to launch for the money to be diverted to 'more worthy' goals and that Viking was only being launched because of the Mariner 9 images.

But best of all it preserves an earlier version of Hoaglands Biography which reads as follows:

"Before becoming a full-time writer, Ricard C. Hoagland was Coordinator of Public Affairs and Special Events at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. Prior to that, he worked closely with Walter Cronkite as Science Advisor to CBS during the Apollo Program." ("Why We Won't Find Life On Mars, Richard C. Hoagland, Analog, December 1974, Issue: XCIV, No. 4, pg 70)

Dee said...

Graham, in what way you think it presents a different picture from what is already known? Is it the irony that he was so negative about life on Mars at that stage? He seems to have followed a rather mainstream outlook at the time but still critical of the NASA agenda, even then.

He also rejected the first images of the Face like everyone else as being tricks light and shadows in the press room in 1976 at JPL, as he tells in his own work.

Only in 1981 when seeing DiPietro and Molenaar's work he started to become interested and at some point later hired by SRI to look into it further. Also I think it was 1980 when he wrote about possible life on Europa, Jupiter's moon.

And the biography doesn't contain anything new, does it? Unless you want to suggest there's a difference between curator, specialist and coordinator as function (there's not really that I know of).

Still, interesting find nevertheless, don't get me wrong :)

James Concannon said...

I would have added Hoagland's "data" justifying his disgusting accusation that NASA murdered the Apollo 1 astronauts. The "data" is just astrology, really.

Still, excellent defense expat. Loved it.

Graham said...

Dee,

To my mind it was interesting to see someone who is currently peddling what amounts to 1950's sci-fi (eg Humans came from Mars) was almost 40 years previously telling his audience that NASAs proposed lander will not find life on Mars because the microbes that survived the last Martian warm period (When the poles more directly faced the Sun.) are encysted over 30m below the suface and thus out of reach of the Viking sampler arm.

Chris Lopes said...

Graham,
That was back when Hoagie was trying to be a real science writer. According to Don Davis, something happened (he won't say what) sometime on the early 1980's that changed the direction of Hoagland's work. Take this second hand info for what it's worth.

Dee said...

Expat blogged: "...heard by millions of Art Bell fans and Einstein-only-knows how many more on Youtube."

There are around 10,000 views on all Youtube copies combined. It seems it was put there officially (?) as well ("Dark Matter Archive") to get some traction I suppose. Facebook has 5,530 likes & 2,266 "talking about" (www.artbell.com).

Don't forget that C2C's millions are caused by using 500+ AM free radio stations around the continent plus various streams. For many serving as background fodder as the large majority just tunes in as some mild form of entertainment and distraction, in my experience.

While Sirius XM is big, it's still subscription based and hard to say how many end up listening at this early stage. C2C is still there too!

My guess would be your 1000 page views against certainly not more than 50,000 listeners to that particular broadcast. Never underestimate your own count! With your current output you might get even bigger than TEM in terms of actual interest :-)

Graham said...

I wouldn't rate Hoagland as a science writer back in the 70s (Too much ego tripping.) and a little too strident for my taste.

But as an apocalypticist(sic), well here's the final paragraph of the 1974 Analog article:

"The Martian spring arrives and with it the pulse of life awakens once again. In the midst of this activity an artifact stands silently upon the plain, rising water swirling about its half-hidden alien shape. It is an ancient emissary from another world and time. In the cosmic scale of such events it came a breath too early to fulfill its mission and because of that its successors never came at all. They, like their creators, perished shortly after the rejection of the Solar System by the inhabitants of planet Earth, millenia before this newborn Martian spring.

Thus life on Mars awakes - alone - and thus it will remain."

("Why We Won't Find Life On Mars, Richard C. Hoagland, Analog, December 1974, Issue: XCIV, No. 4, pg 70)

Long may Curiosity roll...

expat said...

I just threw up in my mouth. But thanks anyway, Graham.

Graham said...

expat,

Please accept my apologies for the Martian microbes, my interest in Hoagland is trying to figure out from documents he cannot alter (eg offline ones) how an overly strident & cleary unscrupulous space activist (Which is what the 3 articles I've found, dating from 1974, 1975, 1977 indicates he was.) into a peddler of 1950's SciFi-as-fact during the 1980s.

Attempts to find out just whose ideas he has ripped off in the 1974 & 1977 articles has not got as far as I would like.

By way of compensation here is a link to the archive.org page of "Marsman meets the Almighty" a 1975 tale of how NASA computer geeks try to drum up support for Mars exploration in a way that should be very familiar to the Photoshop Generation.

http://archive.org/details/MarsmanMeetsTheAlmighty

Dee said...

Graham: " my interest in Hoagland is trying to figure out from documents he cannot alter (eg offline ones) how an overly strident & cleary unscrupulous space activist into a peddler of 1950's SciFi-as-fact during the 1980s".

The question is in my opinion not asked in the right way. You have to look at the whole subculture Hoagland stepped into as well as some of the money streams.

Carl Sagan got after the Viking mission a NASA grant to search for signs of intelligent life in the Viking photos which he did with Damon Simonelli, naturally without finding any. In many ways you can see Sagan as some example Hoagland badly emulated in more than one way but in Sagan's footsteps and very badly executed.

The changes in Hoagland seem to appear when a couple characters appeared on the scene: Brandenburg, DiPietre and Lambert Dolphin (who also worked at SRI, Arpanet etc) and the polical rise of George A. Keyworth who was a close friend of SRI's boss Miller who ended up supplying a research grand to the "Independent Mars Investigation". Keyworth remained connected to Hoagland for a long while for a to me unclear reason.

One has to understand the SRI was into "remote viewing" and various forms alternative archeology at "touchy" places like Giza and Jerusalem. And there were all kinds of competing semi-religious wealthy organizations pushing for all types or research. Some scientists were all too willing to present tantalizing findings and suggestions.

There's way more to tell but it quickly can become speculation. But the desire for recognition, the hope to become a pioneer of something and possibly just the potential for a variety of money donors with cloud might have done it.

Hoagland developed in my opinion into something far more weird during the '90's with the birth of the Internet and Talk Radio shows, the resurge of interest in all these topics, etc. Science sobered up while he went to the fringe.

Dee

Chris Lopes said...

Dee,
One factor that can be added to the equation is Hoagland's inability to really compete with the professional level of science writers who had entered the field by the time of Viking. When Hoagland first started out (the late 1950's to the early 1960's), this space stuff was very new and anyone who was a space geek could sound like an expert. Once people with real credentials entered the fray, Hoagland's enthusiasm just wasn't enough. There really isn't a way for a guy like him to compeye with the likes of Carl Sagan or Neil Degrasse Tyson.

Agent Smith said...

"Will you please consider going on the radio and apologizing for your slur?"

Nah, he'll just go quiet like he always does when he's held to account for his rambling conspiracy rubbish.