Posted on 03/15/2004 7:25:51 PM PST by Simmy2.5
Astronomer Philip Plait is tired of radio personality Richard Hoagland's claims. He's had enough of Hoagland's assertions that NASA is covering up evidence of extraterrestrial life, that the infamous Face on Mars was built by sentient aliens and, of late, that otherworldly machine parts are embedded in the red planet's dirt.
And then there's the mile-long translucent Martian worm.
On Hoagland's web site, there are several images from various space probes said to possibly show evidence for ET. Recent Mars rover photos include not just rocks, Hoagland and other contributors maintain, but common objects that might tell of alien civilization -- a bowl, a stove, a piston.
Hoagland has since 1983, he says, led "an outside scientific team in a critically acclaimed independent analysis of possible intelligently-designed artifacts" on other worlds, using spacecraft data from NASA and other missions.
Plait, author of "Bad Astronomy" (Wiley & Sons, 2002), which debunks space myths and common factual misconceptions, had for years not countered Hoagland directly, because he did not want to give a man he calls a "pseudoscientist" the "air time that he so desperately seeks."
But last week Plait took his intellectual gloves off.
Shapes in the clouds
Plait has two words for the latest claims of alien objects on Mars. The first is "garbage." The second and more scientific word is "pareidolia." This is the same phenomenon that makes us see animals or other familiar objects in clouds.
"It's pretty common," Plait said of pareidolia. "Just a few months ago, a water spot on my shower curtain took on the uncanny form of the face of Vladimir Lenin." Plait took a picture of the liquid Lenin and uses it illustrate his contention that, though objects on the surface of Mars can sometimes take on interesting shapes, they are just a bunch of rocks. "Hoagland's claims irritate me because he is promoting uncritical thinking," Plait told SPACE.com . "He doesn't want you to think about what you're seeing. He's trying to bamboozle you into believing what he's saying."
Critical thinking is the foundation of science, but Plait thinks it's also an important skill for anyone trying to navigate modern society. "Hoagland is eroding away at that ability."
Hoagland says the names given to objects shown on his web site are nicknames, just as the rover scientists came up with "blueberries" to describe small spherical objects on Mars.
"We are not saying there are stoves or pistons on Mars," Hoagland said in a telephone interview. "Absolutely not. When we began looking at these objects, what struck us was how remarkably symmetrical, how remarkably designed-looking, how remarkably manufactured some of these things looked."
Hoagland's web site, however, does not make this distinction with many rover images. A headline on the home page flatly states that some objects on Mars are non-natural: "Spirit Sees (and Still Ignores) More Artificial Junk." And the caption to one reads, plainly, "an Unmistakable Machined Fitting." Another caption reads: "When is a Rock Not a Rock? When They Come in pairs!" And another: "A Collection of Mechanical Bits."
Hoagland said he suggested to scientists on the rover team that they go study the objects up close to determine their composition. "NASA chose not to," he said. "So we have a hanging mystery. We don't know what these things are. We'll never know what these things are."
Hoagland is routinely critical of Stephen Squyres, a Cornell University astronomer who is mission manager for the Mars rover mission. Squyres did not respond to a SPACE.com query regarding Hoagland's claims.
It should be pointed out that NASA is not in the practice of commanding its rovers based on suggestions from people outside the agency or from beyond the Spirit and Opportunity science teams, which together include dozens of leading geologists and other scientists from inside the agency and from universities around the country.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
I excerpted this article because it is a long read. Good read if you are a Hoagland fan. I know there are Hoagland fans out there, well, heres an article all about him and an astronomer who is debunking him!
And more good news...HE WILL BE ON COAST TO COAST TONIGHT! One of the topics...is this article!
Phil's uber-cool site
I'm tending towards the latter... although he was, presumably, the first to suggest life on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, a theory that is now pretty compelling.
NASA secretly blew it up so we couldn't find out the truth.
No, it makes perfect sense. Three month old cottage cheese is revolting, after all.
I have quite a diverse background in college-level physical sciences. If this is just a 'natural formation', I'd be interested to hear someone explain the process that created it. I think any paleontologist worth his rock hammer would like to get a close-up look at this thing. It sure as hell looks like a lot of cephalopod shells we studied in Oceanography 106. It was found in an area that NASA admits was once awash in water - and probably saline water, at that.
Now do I think that outside lights on the buildings going through trees does this??
I keep the light on, cuz it FREAKS me out, man!
Mars Photos
Go to photos #23, 25 and 47.
I'll admit that Hoagland stretches thing too far, but every once in awhile he gets to me.
And if the link didn't work copy and paste this:
http://metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydonia/asom/artifact_html/default.htm
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