[grundle]

This is a great article. I read all of it at the link.

[Maynerd]

Is Hoagland one of those Art Bell nuts? Or is he a legitimate scientist?

[Defiant]

Maybe this is what happened to Tugunska--some idiots from a nearby star sent a probe and then it crashed into the Siberian forest. Then they wrote about it later and said "oops".

Or maybe it was a meteor.

[Wayne07]

Entertaining article, as you'd expect from a kook like Hoagland. Some of his other theories (cited from wikipedia):

• The Face on Mars is an artificial construct
• There is a Martian City at Cydonia
• (Adapted with acknowledgment from Tom Van Flandern) Mars was once the moon of a larger planet, that then exploded, leaving Mars isolated.
• The advanced civilisation on Mars had prior warning of the cataclysm and so escaped via migration to planet Earth, eventually adapting to the environment and becoming the present human race.
• Numerous rocks surrounding the landing sites of the Mars Exploration Rovers are in fact pieces of Martian machinery.
• Rocks on Mars containing biological fossils were purposely destroyed by NASA's rover.
• The true color of Mars is salmon red with patches of greenish plant life and a light blue sky.
• Hyperdimensional physics
• The United States government has covered up the presence of extraterrestrials
• The many historical failures of Mars-bound spacecraft were due to deliberate sabotage by a 'cabal' of powerful people who were desperate to conceal the 'truth' of Martian civilisation.
• The Space Agency murdered the Apollo 1 astronauts
• The Saturnian moon Iapetus is an artificial world.
• The Galileo spacecraft, which burnt up in Jupiter's atmosphere, caused a mysterious black spot due to its nuclear payload
• NASA Missions to Mars are a "well documented interest of the Bush family".
• The Face on Mars is an indication of a Human/Feline hybrid design found in ancient Earth civilization, and knowledge of its existence is being suppressed by NASA.
• NASA is also suppressing knowledge of an ancient civilization on the Moon. The advanced technology of this civilization is "lying around on the Moon's surface."
• Additionally, that NASA denies there are large semi-transparent structures constructed of glass on the lunar surface discovered during the Apollo missions.
• The Arecibo message was intentionally altered by author Carl Sagan.
• The 9/11 attacks were part of a Masonic conspiracy.
• Federal agencies such as FEMA, NASA, and the US government are linked to Freemasonry.
• That the Old Navy Stores are tied in with secret societies and coverups. Hoagland stated this on a Coast to Coast AM show one evening.

[pollyannaish]

Well, as conspiracy theories go...this one is kind of cool.

[NMR Guy]

At this ultra-slow “terminal velocity,” it takes the Galileo plutonium-238 capsules on the order of 700 hours – a month! to fall to a depth inside Jupiter (~700 miles below the visible clouds) where the outside pressure of the surrounding liquid hydrogen literally crushes the plutonium capsules into a supercritical state—

BS, I suspect. Realistically, the pellets end up critical, not supercritical. They then slowly heat up, expand, and fall apart over the course of a few hours or days.

[Dallas59]

September 21, 2003.....

My gawd....Bush was president!

[Billthedrill]

We had to save Europa. All the other worlds are ours, except Europa. We are to attempt no landings there.

[ASOC]

My, my, my. Where to begin?

[VeniVidiVici]

Jupiter has a fever ...

[I see my hands]

Ask any guy.. that is how exploration begins. You see something, you throw a rock at it.

[Fairview]

Damn, now the Jovians are going to take us to court and sue us for damages. Then the ACLU will ask for reparations. Some liberal judge will award them a big settlement and court costs. This sucks.

[Goldwater and Gingrich]

I see you guys are posting a lot of Art Bell stuff lately.

Do you think it’s a good idea to post speculation that is wrong 99.9% of the time? I call that lying.

Richard Hoagland has never been right about anything. The last sure thing I heard him telling us all about was that a “major event” was going to happen the space shuttle and only he knew what but he could never tell. Hours later he told making him a liar again.

He said it a top inside NASA engineer had discovered a plan to shut the shuttles engines off early and heavily damage the shuttle. The plan was by NASA insiders so they could scrap the shuttle and make a new craft for the moon landings.

This was of course a total lie just like the rest.

Why post lies on FR?

If we can’t call Hoagland a liar that what does the word mean?

[Zeon Cowboy]

Do you know how huge the planet Jupiter is? It would take a hundred thousand nuclear bombs detonated at once to have any kind of significant effect.

[GreenOgre]

Just in case some young skull full of mush is reading this and decides Hoagland deserves some credibility.

1) The spaceship gets ripped into thousands of little pieces as it enters the Jovian atmosphere.

2) The pellets will be separated by hundreds if not thousands of miles before they get to the liquid hydrogen portion of Jupiter's "interior".
3) The pellets would be mangled and melted into dust/vapor as they rapidly slow down from their 100K + MPH velocity.

[Names Ash Housewares]

Hoagland is about as great a source for science information as Mike Tyson is for etiquette at a tea party.

[Pro-Bush]

No wonder Jupiter seems brighter than usual.

[burzum]

This is silly. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of nuclear physics knows that only odd number nuclides can have the possibility to fission at thermal energies (which is the case here). Pu-239 is good, but Pu-238 is not.

[ozzymandus]

Good conspiracy theories make good reading. Even Von Daniken’s first book was fun. The bad thing is when people believe this nonsense.

[Wonder Warthog]

Gigantic steaming pile. The plutonium used in Galileo is the 238 isomer, not the 239 isomer. Pu-238 IS NOT FISSIONABLE!!!!

[Captain Rhino]

Ah, yes. The mysterious dark splotch.

That had been troubling me for sometime.

(No, the OTHER mysterious dark splotch!)