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Saturday, December 8, 2007

Reading List: Dark Mission

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.

Posted at December 8, 2007 23:31