Alien Chasers Richard Hoagland

TLC ^ | april-14-2003 | tlc.com

[green team 1999]

alien chasers

Richard Hoagland

When a friendly journalist leaked to Richard Hoagland details of the plot of the upcoming film Mission to Mars, he was simultaneously ecstatic and suspicious.

The film apparently depicts the discovery of an immense artificial structure on the martian surface that resembles a face — a touch eerily evocative of Hoagland's belief that the Viking I probe photo from 1976 depicts precisely such a structure in the Cydonia region of Mars' northern hemisphere.

But that unrecognized nod to his theories only gave him pause; he notes that his longtime adversary, NASA — whose officials have sought to debunk Hoagland's Mars face as a photographic glitch — have been conspicuously involved in the film project.

As often is his inclination, Hoagland divines a hidden meaning: A cabal of dissenters within the space agency, he speculates, must be moving to embrace the martian-face theory at last.

"I would say there is a group in NASA using this (film) as a vehicle to run it up the flagpole," he says. "I'm fascinated why now is the time someone would decide to put it out there, in a major motion picture."

Hoagland is an exoarcheologist, a specialist in the study of archeological sites on other worlds. It is a particularly speculative discipline, since, as Joel Achenbach notes in his book Captured By Aliens, it depends upon the yet-unproven assumption that there is extraterrestrial life to create such ruins.

Yet Hoagland, a frequent guest on the Art Bell radio show, is not without some credentials. He earned an undergraduate degree in astronomy, and worked as a curator of a space museum in Springfield, Mass.

As a journalist, he worked as a science consultant for CBS News during the coverage of the race to the moon, and subsequently wrote for publications such as Star and Sky and Science Digest.

According to Achenbach's book, in the 1970s Hoagland gave Carl Sagan the idea of putting a message on the Voyager satellites to greet extraterrestrials, in case other beings someday found the craft.

In 1980, he authored a well-regarded article in Star and Sky speculating about the possibility of life in the oceans beneath the icy outer layer of the Jovian moon Europa.

From those relatively staid beginnings, Hoagland ventured out into the rarefied upper atmosphere of the search for extraterrestrial life, where the molecules of scientific hypotheses start to intermingle and collide with conspiracy theories and mysticism.

In the early 1980s, Hoagland subsequently championed the idea that the martian formation was an immense, artificial object — a humanoid face a mile long. Additionally, he has argued that there are other objects around the face: pyramids, located in relation to one another at angles of 19.5 degrees, remnants of an ancient, seminal interplanetary civilization whose handiwork may also include the Great Pyramid of Giza, Stonehenge and the circular Native American ruins recently discovered in Miami.

A subsequent probe's high-resolution photo, in NASA's view, shows the face to be an illusion; Hoagland suggests that the "new" photo is a fake, part of a government conspiracy to cover up evidence of extraterrestrials.

"We need good reporters to delve behind the propaganda and find out what is going on," he says.

for information and discusion only,not for profit,etc,etc.

[green team 1999]

we must go to mars,a mission was planned by the russians,asking the us to join them,

[green team 1999]

i`m going to be sorry for the title,but was the original and did not wanted to changed.

[Dialup Llama]

>Yet Hoagland, a frequent guest on the Art Bell radio show, is not without some credentials.

Correct, he is without any credentials.

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[Dialup Llama]

He loves those image processing methods which produce geometric artifacts so he can run around pointing to cities under the Martain sands.

[John H K]

Jim Hoagland in relation to Mars is the mental equivalent of a Scott Ritter in relation to Iraq.

For whatever reason, people with "credentials" simply go kaflooey for some reason. They get nutty. Maybe for the attention, maybe for the money, maybe slight mental illness, maybe for some mysterious reason, but it happens.

Same thing happens with the Creationidiots; there's a TINY handful of actual scientists with actual degrees relating to biology or genetics who are Creationidiots for whatever reason. And the same tiny handful of guys get cited over and over and over and over again by Creationidiots, not the hundreds of thousands of guys with similar or better credentials who are evolutionists.

And we WILL see this in Iraq; you can't send 200,000 troops somewhere without a handful of them turning out to be kookjobs; I assure you the Left WILL find one of them that will come home and speak out against the war and claim he saw the US faking WMD sites and whatnot.

[RightWhale]

This article seems to be several years old. M2M was some time ago. Even Art Bell has been retired a while.

[anymouse]

This fluff piece is not worth giving electronic space on FR to further this jerk's fraud. This guy has made a living off of other people's gulibility.

[Lockbar]

CAT: "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!"

[templar]

He loves those image processing methods which produce geometric artifacts so he can run around pointing to cities under the Martain sands.

Didn't Hoagland also discover some cities or spaceports or somthing on the moon as well?

[green team 1999]

some day our first mission to mars will explore the cydonia region,and the face.

[Russell Scott]

Hoagland's ego stretches all the way to Mars. When he wants to make a few bucks, he just puts a UFO seminar on, and the "true believers" show up to hear from Captain Kirk and his Jedi Knights, about life on Mars. I guess it beats making an honest living. At least its not illegal.

[green team 1999]

i noticed the date above ,but yes the movie is now old and art is retired.

[whadizit]

He is just one of the many kooks on former Art Bell and now George Norrie shows. The show is dominated mostly by those who see ghosts and "chemtrails".

It is mostly a silly show, but, occasionally, they have interesting topics, like Bill Tierney on Iraq's wmd. Even then, they are quick to leave a current topic for the "shadow people" and "rods". LOL!!

[John H K]

Thank God the "chemtrail" idiocy seems to have finally died out. I haven't seen them mentioned for 6+ months, I think

[NewMexLurker]

Do you get flamed a lot about that "Creationidiots" phrase?

[green team 1999]

aahh,the image that started it all!,notice the structure at lower right,nature don`t have geometric structures with perfect sides etc.

[green team 1999]

when 9-11 and the airlines were grounded the chemtrails continued,but that is another story,

[green team 1999]

natural geometric formation?,i don`t think so.