#176: Richard C. Hoagland

Up next is one of the main entries of our Encyclopedia of Loons, Richard Hoagland. He is, according the Enterprise Mission (Hoagland’s own organization), a former space museum curator, NASA advisor, and science adviser to Walter Cronkite and CBS news. Some window-dressing of facts is evidently going on here, as it is with respect to the claim that the Enterprise Mission is supported by many NASA senior officials, and has visited NASA centers multiple times.

Thing is, Richard Hoagland is ravingly insane. It is presumably in virtue of this qualification that he is also on the Board of Directors for American Antigravity.

Among other things, Hoagland is one of the most active promoters of Däniken-like theories in the States, and was the first to procure the ultimate evidence for the existence of a high-tech civilization period prior to the known Egyptian civilization, namely the infamous Abydo helicopter.

He is perhaps most famous, however, for his theory that the Face on Mars in Cydonia Mensae was made by aliens. He offers as proof many coincidences about ratios of angles formed by structures in Cydonia Mensae, most of which are made up. The rest is pure numerology. Apparently (according to Hoagland) it has something to do with crop circles.

But even that is only a start. Among his other claims is that Iapetus (one of Saturn’s moons) is artificial, and that there are semi-transparent glass structures on the moon. Now, you might ask: if these claims were true, why are they not better known?

Ahh … you don’t really need to ask, do you?

You see, NASA has covered up nearly every discovery they’ve made through space exploration (it is a little unclear why), and the conspiracy that the moon-landing was a hoax (common enough in Hoagland’s natural habitat) was set forth by NASA itself to divert attention from the real issues. NASA also murdered the Apollo 13 astronauts. And 9/11 was a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy with the US government. The 12 moon-walkers, who would be qualified to confirm the existence of lunar artifacts and glass structures, have of course had their memories selectively edited via hypnosis so that they no longer remember seeing evidence of a lunar civilization. Furthermore, interplanetary warfare is currently being waged right now in Earth orbit, conducted by factions of a secret supra-national World Government.

To give you a taster of Hoagland’s deranged mind, he claims that The Norwegian Spiral was more than a Russian missile test failing; rather, a torsion field weapon intercepted the missile
in mid-flight. Who was behind it? Well, most probably one of many "Nazi-derived off-world colonies". For what purpose? To intimidate Obama (who was accepting his Nobel Peace prize in Oslo at that time) – and it was successful, Hoagland claims, since Obama subsequently cancelled the Constellation program. Hence, Obama was "blackmailed (...) Into "imprisoning" Humanity on Earth ....". Oh, those darn Jewish-Masonic Nazi Muslim Aliens terrorizing the stratosphere, always causing trouble.

He has also proposed a form of physics he calls 'hyperdimensional physics' based on the work of pseudoscientific overunity claimant Thomas E. Bearden (briefly discussed here), who might be a notch more delusionally cranky than even Hoagland, thus proving to be an irresistible magnet for the latter.

Hoagland is discussed in some detail here, and there is more food for thought in the wikipedia article (he is, among other things, a global warming denialist, though for interesting and unusual reasons).

Diagnosis: Astronomy’s answer to Ken Ham – with conspiracy theories attached (every conceivable one) – who thinks X-files is a documentary and apparently believes every single random claim that enters his head (entertaining a hypothesis without accepting it is apparently not a skill he has managed to develop). It is unclear how harmful he is, but he has achieved some notoriety and fame. Well deserved.