Richard Hoagland

Richard Charles Hoagland (born 25 April 1945) is an American author, broadcaster, and self-described former NASA consultant best known for his analyses of alleged anomalous structures on Mars (notably the Cydonia "Face on Mars") and the Moon, and for his contention that NASA has systematically concealed evidence of ancient extraterrestrial civilizations from the public. He has stated that he served as science advisor to CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite during the Apollo program, founded the Enterprise Mission research organisation, and is the co-author of Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA (2007, with Mike Bara). Hoagland has no education beyond the high-school level and no advanced training, schooling, or degrees in any scientific field. Astronomer Phil Plait has described him as a "pseudoscientist" whose claims are "ridiculous", and the scientific consensus regards the "Face on Mars" as an optical illusion arising from pareidolia.

Early life

Hoagland was born on 25 April 1945 in Morristown, New Jersey. He received no formal education beyond the high-school level and has no academic training in any scientific field. Beginning in 1964 he worked as a curator of astronomy at the Springfield Science Museum in Springfield, Massachusetts, where in 1965 he created the planetarium program "Mars: Infinity to 1965" timed to coincide with the Mariner 4 flyby of Mars and co-hosted a related radio program on WTIC. Between 1967 and 1968 he served as assistant director of the Gengras Science Center in West Hartford, Connecticut.

Early career and NASA connections

Hoagland worked as an astronomy and space science museum curator and a science centre assistant director before serving as science advisor to Walter Cronkite and CBS News for the full Apollo programme. He describes standing beside Robert Heinlein — whom he had personally invited as a guest commentator — at CBS's Apollo 11 broadcast facility the night of the July 20, 1969 lunar landing.

In the early 1970s, together with Eric Burgess, Hoagland proposed to Carl Sagan the placement of a message-to-mankind plaque aboard Pioneer 10 — the first artefact to successfully escape the Solar System into interstellar space. Hoagland has frequently stated that he co-designed the plaque, but Sagan and his collaborators have disputed this claim: the Pioneer plaque was designed in its entirety by Sagan, Linda Salzman Sagan, and Frank Drake, and Sagan's correspondence states that Hoagland "did not contribute one bit of data towards the message design". In 1976, as a committed Star Trek fan, he campaigned successfully to persuade President Ford to name the first Space Shuttle prototype the Enterprise. He was nominated for a Peabody Award for journalism and in 1993 received the International Ångström Medal for Excellence in Science. The Ångström-medal organisation was, however, not authorized by Uppsala University or the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to issue such an award; the medal's founder later described its issuance as "a mistake". In 1997 Hoagland received an Ig Nobel Prize in astronomy "for identifying artificial features on the moon and on Mars, including a human face on Mars and ten-mile high buildings on the far side of the moon".

He also worked alongside Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History; their discussions, he states, directly informed his later analysis of the Brookings Report and its recommendations concerning the suppression of discovered extraterrestrial intelligence.

Research areas

Hoagland's research spans several interconnected subjects:

• Cydonia: His most influential work, beginning in the mid-1980s, analyzed the mile-wide Face on Mars and adjacent geometric structures photographed by Viking 1, leading to his 1987 book The Monuments of Mars and the formation of the Independent Mars Investigation Team.

Main article:

Cydonia

• Hyperdimensional physics: A model positing a higher-dimensional energy substrate manifesting at 19.5° latitude on rotating bodies, citing Jupiter's Great Red Spot, Hawaii's volcanic chain, and solar sunspot belts as confirmatory evidence.

Main article:

Hyperdimensional physics

• Brookings Report and NASA secrecy: Hoagland argues that the 1960 Brookings Institution report constitutes institutional licence for NASA to conceal extraterrestrial evidence, and that the NASA charter gives the National Security Advisor final veto over all data the agency releases.

Main article:

Brookings Report

• NASA and occult architecture: His 2007 book Dark Mission, co-authored with Mike Bara, argued that NASA was founded by and remained under the influence of Freemasons, Egyptian religion practitioners, and former Operation Paperclip Nazis organised as three overlapping ideological factions.

• Origins of humanity: A narrative in which proto-humans were abducted from Earth, genetically engineered into Homo sapiens on Mars, and repatriated to Earth after a catastrophic war approximately 66 million years ago that also destroyed a former inner planet, producing the asteroid belt.

Main article:

Extraterrestrial genetic engineering of humanity

The Enterprise Mission

The Enterprise Mission (EnterpriseMission.com) is Hoagland's primary public platform, archiving his image analyses and hosting the full text of the Brookings Report. The site has been active since 1996. Hoagland also hosted the weekly radio programme The Other Side of Midnight, and has appeared extensively on Coast to Coast AM. His personal connections include Walter Cronkite, Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian De Palma, and Gene Roddenberry.

Citation by other researchers

Laura Eisenhower called Hoagland "a hero to exopolitics" and "one of those people I call ultimate doers," crediting him with having assembled a genuine world-class team of imaging scientists.

Critical reception

Mainstream astronomers and science writers have repeatedly identified Hoagland as a pseudoscientist. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy has documented multiple instances in which Hoagland's mathematical "geometry" of Cydonia rests on selective measurement and on errors that, when corrected, dissolve the alleged geometric coincidences. Mathematician Ralph Greenberg has likewise concluded that "the logic of Hoagland's deductions from the geometry of Cydonia Mensae is flawed." Gary P. Posner has chronicled the failure of repeated higher-resolution imaging by Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to confirm any of Hoagland's purported artificial features, and has tied each successive imaging release to a corresponding shift in Hoagland's geometric claims. Mars Global Surveyor principal investigator Michael Malin published 1995 imagery of the Cydonia "Face" demonstrating eroded mesa morphology consistent with surrounding terrain, undermining the artificiality claim. Hoagland was replaced as Coast to Coast AMTemplate:'s science advisor by space historian Robert Zimmerman in July 2015.

Publications

• The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever (1987; multiple editions, North Atlantic Books)
• Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA (2007, with Mike Bara; ranked 21st on the New York Times Best Seller list in November 2007)

See also

• Cydonia (region of Mars)
• Face on Mars
• Pareidolia
• Monuments of Mars
• Brookings Report
• Hyperdimensional physics

References