More kudos to Irene Gardner, for a very daring raid on Hoagland's smug arrogance yesterday, which included these words:
"You are a liar Hoagland. YES THAT IS LIBEL. Take me to court you bastard."
I <3 it. I've preserved the entire text plus the 67 comments it attracted. It even brought the notorious Max Kiejzik out of the psychiatric hospital to peddle his ridiculous pseudo-geometry for the 5,000th time. Hoagland himself must be in one of his periodic attention-lapses, because Irene's bold challenge has been allowed to remain for nearly 24 hours now.
Then today, courtesy of Esteban Navarro Galán, we got this treat:
image credit: icanhazcheeseburger
Well, not that exactly, but something related. You know how Richard Hoagland never tires of reminding us that he and Carl Sagan were such good buddies they were practically a mutual admiration society? Well, Esteban dug up a quote from Sagan which cast some doubt on that. Sagan gave a keynote address at the CSICOP Conference in Seattle, Washington, June 23—26, 1994. This was just three weeks after Hoagland's lecture at Ohio State, which this blog
has referred to. He took questions, and this was one of them:
Richard Hoagland has recently got hold of some pictures, Hasselblad
pictures from NASA, which were taken some twenty years ago of the moon,
and he has been describing those in great detail. He gave a talk at Ohio
State University a couple of weeks ago and he had video cameras on and
they were supposed to have videos available. I wonder if you’ve heard
about this and had previous knowledge of...
Sagan responded:
Richard Hoagland is a fabulist. By the way, it’s not difficult
getting hold of the hand-held Hasselblad camera pictures; NASA freely
releases them to everybody. ...The aspect of this story I know best has to do with the
so-called Face on Mars. There is a place on Mars called Cydonia, which
was photographed in a mission I was deeply involved in, the Viking
mission to Mars in 1976. And there is one picture in which along a range
of hulking mesas and hillocks, there is
what looks very much like a face, about three kilometers across at the
base and a kilometer high. It’s flat on the ground, looking up. It has a
helmet or a hair-do, depending on how you look at it, it has a nose, a
forehead, one eye—the other half is in shadow—pretty eerie looking. You
could almost imagine it was done by Praxiteles on a monumental scale.
And this gentleman deduces from this that there was a race of ancient
Martians. He has dated them, he purports to have deduced when they were
around, and it was 500,000 years ago or something like that, when our
ancestors were certainly not able to do space flights, and then all
sorts of wonderful conclusions are deduced and “we came from Mars”or
“guys from other star systems came here and left a statue on Mars and
left some of them on Earth.” By the way, all of which fails to explain
how it is that humans share 99.6 percent of their active genes with
chimpanzees. If we were just dropped here, how come we’re so closely
related to them? What is the basis of the argument? How good is it? My
standard way of approaching this is to point out that there is an
eggplant that looks exactly like former President Richard Nixon. The
eggplant has this ski nose and, “that’s Richard Nixon, I’d know him
anywhere.”
What shall we deduce from this eggplant phenomenon? Extraterrestrials
messing with our eggplants? A miracle? God is talking to us through the
eggplant? Or, that there have been tens, hundreds of thousands,
millions of eggplants in history, and they all have funny little knobs,
and every now and then there is going to be one that by accident looks
like a human face. ... I
think clearly the latter. Now let’s go to Mars. Thousands of low, hilly
mesas have all sorts of features. Here’s one that looks a little like a
human face. When you bring out the contrast in the shadowed area it
doesn’t look as good. Now, we’re very good at picking out human faces.
We have so many of these blocky mesas. Is it really a compelling sign of
extraterrestrial intelligence that there’s one that looks a little like
a human face? I think not. But I don’t blame people who are going into
the NASA archives and trying to find things there; that is in the
scientific spirit. I don’t blame people who are trying to find signs of
extraterrestrial intelligence—I think it’s a good idea, in fact. But I
do object to people who consider shoddy and insufficient evidence as
compelling.
Bravo, Sagan. As clear and convincing as ever. And Gracias, Esteban, for finding it.
A Hoagland disciple called Val Williams, evidently outraged, posted
"Don't bother reading......SMEAR CAMPAIGN!!! aka 'INFLAMING' 'BAITING'". It's not clear who Val thought was doing the smearing —Sagan or Galán. If any more similarly craven or intolerant comments turn up, I'll add them.
Update:
I think we're done with the thread. It's still there but so far down the scroll-mountain that nobody's going to find it. Here's the final comment, from Max Kiejzik—not so much craven as all too self-revealing:
Is it the ~crazy train~
Or the *LOGIC TRAIN*
Decide for YOURSELF.
ALL ABOARD!!!!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaa! Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay...
:)
