- Hoagland, Richard C. and Mike Bara.
Dark Mission.
Los Angeles: Feral House, 2007.
ISBN 1-932595-26-0.
-
Author
Richard C. Hoagland
first came to prominence as an “independent researcher”
and advocate that
“the
face on Mars” was an artificially-constructed
monument built by an ancient extraterrestrial civilisation. Hoagland
has established himself as one of the most indefatigable and
imaginative pseudoscientific crackpots on the contemporary scene,
and this œuvre pulls it all together into a side-splittingly
zany compendium of conspiracy theories, wacky physics, imaginative
image interpretation, and feuds within the “anomalist”
community—a tempest in a crackpot, if you like.
Hoagland seems to possess a visual system which endows him with a
preternatural ability, undoubtedly valuable for an anomalist, of seeing
things that aren't there. Now you may look at a print of a
picture taken on the lunar surface by an astronaut with a Hasselblad
camera and see, in the black lunar sky, negative scratches, film
smudges, lens flare, and, in contrast-stretched and otherwise
manipulated digitally scanned images, artefacts of the image
processing filters applied, but Hoagland immediately perceives
“multiple layers of breathtaking ‘structural
construction’ embedded in the NASA frame; multiple surviving
‘cell-like rooms,’ three-dimensional
‘cross-bracing,’ angled ‘stringers,’
etc… all following logical structural patterns for a
massive work of shattered, but once coherent, glass-like
mega-engineering” (p. 153, emphasis in the
original). You can
see these wonders
for yourself on Hoagland's site,
The
Enterprise Mission. From other Apollo images
Hoagland has come to believe that much of the near side of the Moon is
covered by the ruins of glass and titanium domes, some which still
reach kilometres into the lunar sky and towered over some of the
Apollo landing sites.
Now, you might ask, why did the Apollo astronauts not remark upon
these prodigies, either while presumably dodging them when
landing and flying back to orbit, nor on the surface,
nor afterward. Well, you see, they must have been sworn to
secrecy at the time and later (p. 176) hypnotised to
cause them to forget the obvious evidence of a super-civilisation
they were tripping over on the lunar surface. Yeah, that'll
work.
Now, Occam's
razor advises us not to unnecessarily multiply assumptions
when formulating our hypotheses. On the one hand, we have the
mainstream view that NASA missions have honestly reported the
data they obtained to the public, and that these data, to date,
include no evidence (apart from the ambiguous Viking biology
tests on Mars) for extraterrestrial life nor artefacts of another
civilisation. On the other, Hoagland argues:
- NASA has been, from inception, ruled by three contending
secret societies, all of which trace their roots to the
gods of ancient Egypt: the Freemasons, unrepentant Nazi SS,
and occult disciples of
Aleister
Crowley.
- These cults have arranged key NASA mission events to
occur at “ritual” times, locations, and
celestial alignments. The Apollo 16 lunar landing
was delayed due to a faked problem with the SPS engine
so as to occur on Hitler's birthday.
- John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy including
Lyndon Johnson and Congressman Albert Thomas of Texas
because Kennedy was about to endorse a joint Moon mission
with the Soviets, revealing to them the occult reasons
behind the Apollo project.
- There are two factions within NASA: the “owls”,
who want to hide the evidence from the public, and the
“roosters”, who are trying to get it out by
covert data releases and cleverly coded clues.
But wait, there's more!
- The energy of the Sun comes, at least in part, from
a “hyperdimensional plane” which couples
to rotating objects through gravitational torsion (you
knew that was going to come in sooner or
later!) This energy expresses itself through a tetrahedral
geometry, and explains, among other mysteries, the Great
Red Spot of Jupiter, the Great Dark Spot of Neptune,
Olympus Mons on Mars, Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and the
precession of isolated pulsars.
- The secrets of this hyperdimensional physics, glimpsed
by James Clerk Maxwell in his quaternion (check off another
crackpot checklist item) formulation of classical
electrodynamics, were found by Hoagland to be encoded in
the geometry of the “monuments” of Cydonia
on Mars.
- Mars was once the moon of a “Planet V”, which
exploded (p. 362).
And that's not all!
- NASA's Mars rover Opportunity
imaged
a fossil in a Martian rock and then promptly ground it
to dust.
- The terrain surrounding the rover Spirit
is littered with
artificial
objects.
- Mars Pathfinder
imaged
a Sphinx on Mars.
And if that weren't enough!
- Apollo 17 astronauts photographed the
head of an
anthropomorphic robot resembling C-3PO lying in Shorty
Crater on the Moon (p. 487).
It's like Velikovsky meets
The Illuminatus! Trilogy,
with some of the darker themes of “Millennium”
thrown in for good measure.
Now, I'm sure, as always happens when I post a review like this,
the usual suspects are going to write to demand
whatever possessed me to read something like this and/or berate me
for giving publicity to such hyperdimensional hogwash. Lighten up!
I read for enjoyment, and to anybody with a grounding in the
Actual Universe™, this stuff is absolutely hilarious: there's
a chortle every few pages and a hearty guffaw or two in each chapter.
The authors actually write quite well: this is not your usual
semi-literate crank-case sludge, although like many on the far
fringes of rationality they seem to be unduly challenged by the
humble apostrophe. Hoagland is inordinately fond of the word
“infamous”, but this becomes rather charming after the
first hundred or so, kind of like the verbal tics of your crazy
uncle, who Hoagland rather resembles. It's particularly amusing
to read the accounts of Hoagland's assorted fallings out and
feuds with other “anomalists”; when
Tom
Van Flandern concludes you're a kook, then you know
you're out there, and I don't mean hanging with the truth.
December 2007 