Is Richard C. Hoagland insane or do hs arguments have merit?

Question

Is Richard C. Hoagland insane or do hs arguments have merit?

Answer 1

i do not believe he is insane, just courageous in his attempts to give his opinion openly. i have not yet read his new book "Dark Missions" about the moon, but i can not wait to read it!!!

Answer 2

He believes Masons are behind the 9/11 attacks.

He believes all who have walked on the moon have had their memories selectively edited to eliminated memories of seeing traces of a Lunar civilization.

I think those beliefs speak for themselves.

Answer 3

I don't know about insane but the man's not got a shred of scientific backing or proof, nor qualifcations in science or a related discipline for example:

Hoagland claims to be responsible for the theory concerning the presence of life in the subsurface water on Jupiter's moon Europa, a claim which is disputed by Ralph Greenberg, a professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington . Further, Hoagland's website claims that he is the originator of the idea that Europa has a subsurface ocean, referring to a 1980 article of his published in Star and Sky magazine. However, in that same article, reproduced on his website, he references the work of "Cassen, Peale, and Reynolds."Their computer modeling work looked at the possibility that tidal heating could maintain an ocean beneath the icy surface.  Other work on the subject, including speculation concerning life, had been published throughout the 1970s, going as far back as 1971.

The claim that Hoagland is most famous - or infamous - for is that of the Face on Mars that appears in a Viking Orbiter image taken of the Cydonia region on Mars. This discovery was made independently by two computer engineers named Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar, at the time working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, while searching through NASA archives. They discovered two images misfiled, in Viking frames 35A72 and 70A13. At the time the images were acquired back in 1976, Viking chief scientist Gerry Soffen dismissed the "face" image 35A72 as "a trick of light and shadow" which he said, "disappeared several hours later." In fact, DiPietro and Molenaar discovered the second "face" image 70A13, which was acquired 35 Viking orbits later and at a different "sun-angle" than the 35A72 image, thereby indicating that there might have been more to the story. DiPietro and Molenaar asserted that there was more detail in the 70A13 frame than the original 35A72 image. Subsequently, DiPietro and Molenaar developed the "Starburst Pixel Interleaving Technique", or SPIT, which allowed for far greater resolution than the original images provided. This technique was verified by DiPietro and Molenaar using several Landsat images. Hoagland claimed at the time that this 'face' was actually half hominid (left side) and half feline (right side) using computer enhancements of the original Viking imagery. Also, he claims that this is evidence that an advanced civilization existed on Mars, and that NASA is suppressing the evidence for reasons explained in a Brookings Institution Report titled Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs, specifically on page 216 of the report which stated that any evidence of extraterrestrial life found in the solar system should be withheld from the public because it was believed such information would destabilise society. In 1997, the Mars Global Surveyor probe sent back high resolution images of the Cydonia region that seemed to suggest that the 'face' was nothing more than an irregular shaped mountain. While the new images did not fully disprove his claim, Hoagland contends these images were deliberately downgraded (run through multiple filters that degraded the original image) in quality to give a "catbox" appearance in order to hide what is really on Mars. Even when, on 21 Sept 2006, several new 3D views derived from the high-resolution stereo camera on the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter were released, Hoagland was unconvinced. "Science is not about what you can see. It's about what you can measure", he remarked. Hoagland has no qualification or standing in any branch of science.

The claim that the Galileo Probe caused a "mysterious black spot" has since been debunked by both NASA and several independent astronomers. There is photographic proof that similar "black spots" were present in imagery of Jupiter for several years prior to Hoagland's "discovery".

Fruitcake or not, you be the judge.  I think he needs a few more raisins to qualify as a fully fledged member of the Erich von Daninken socitey of loonies.

Answer 4

Your question assumes a premise that if a person is insane his arguments can't have merit. I believe that Galileo, Copernicus, and Socrates (the raving lunatics of their day) all had arguments with merit.

Thus, Hoaglands arguments need to be addressed on their merit (if any) and not on any personal traits.