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.

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[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."