Through A Mission Darkly
I'm skip-reading the book, "Dark Mission: The Secret History Of NASA," (2007) by Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara.
What do I mean by skip-reading? I jump around and read chapters or sections in my own sequence. For eXample, I'll read the last few chapters and then the first ones.
So while I haven't read the whole book, I've read enough to give some initial impressions. And I suspect if I ever finish the book, these impressions won't change.
Hoagland is known for fantastic claims about NASA and the great conspiracy to keep secret from the public at large the existence of ET ruins on the moon and Mars. He and other like-minded researchers take images from various space missions and then with special filtering processes -- plus highly subjective interpretations -- find the hidden details.
The detailed tech talk generally sounds reasonable but what makes his POV dubious are the photo examples of his research. A high contrast photo taken by an Apollo astronaut has some indistinct shapes in the background, probably lens flare or magnified scratches or some other defect. But to Hoagland those odd marking are evidence of an enormous glass dome on the moon.
Hoagland hasn't convinced me with any of his evidence in this book or at his website. Some of the images are so fuzzy that it's easy to find superficial similarities with man-made structures on Earth. It's like looking at clouds in the sky and seeing in the various shapes a bird or whale or even a flying saucer.
Hoagland goes on about dates and their "ritual" meanings related to Freemasons, Orion/Osiris and Nazis. He mentions different NASA missions that occurred on Hitler's birthday (pages 253 & 303).
Well, pick a date and you'll find all sorts of coincidences. Take January 30th. That's the birth date of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and former vice-president Dick Cheney. It's also the same day that Gandhi was assassinated. The "ritual" connection with this triad of historical figures is obvious.
I really have a problem with Hoagland's beliefs regarding some recent historical events. On page 463 he talks about President George W. Bush declaring a war on terror, why the primary target was Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Hoagland states: "...Saddam had sponsored and financed several attacks against the United States, including the first World Trade Center bombing. He was also strongly implicated in the Oklahoma City bombing of the Murrah Federal Building."
Where's the evidence? Did Timothy McVeigh -- who was linked to white supremacists -- work for Saddam?
Maybe. And maybe the Apollo 17 lunar module -- as mentioned on page 518 of "Dark Mission" -- had to carefully land and depart, avoiding the shattered remains of a gigantic glass dome built by aliens.
[ Revised, typos fixed: 3/8/10 ]
Comments
If you can find some of Hoagland's and Bara's comments regarding each other over the past year, it's clear, reading between the lines, that they've had something of a falling out and it seems unlikely they'll be collaborating closely again (in my opinion).
You might want to look over that penultimate paragraph too.
Interesting. I remember being new to ufology, and taking great interest in Hoagland, simply because it was new, exciting, and seemed about as plausible as anything else. It doesn't take long, though, to really see him kinda grasping at straws. I've always seen the "face" on Mars as just a natural formation. There are tons of similar natural formations on Earth that approximate the human face. We can also see random human likenesses on tortillas, pancakes, and the infamous "Nun Bun."
Just on G.P., I don't really cotton to these sorts of connections, unless they have some sort of evidentiary base. In other words, when you line other ducks in a row, some strange connections do make sense and indicate some sort of significance on the part of the agent taking the action. Otherwise, people selectively choose the similarities and differencs between two things.
ThanX for the info. I was unaware of any disagreement possibly between Hoagland and Bara. I appreciate it when readers add details to a story. So much stuff to research, so little time, for this blogger...
X. Dell:
ThanX for catching those mistakes. They've been corrected and noted.
When I first looked at Hoagland's website, he was going on about a Tom Corbett space adventure offered through View-Master (the 3-D toy binocular viewer) back in the 1950s/60s. The adventure was photographed with clay models standing in for the TV actors. In the story Tom and friends go to Mars when they find an ancient pyramid built by a vanished alien race. Now a pyramid isn't that unusual of a shape but Hoagland insisted that The Shadowy Powers That Be already knew about the "pyramid" on Mars way back then. Another conspiracy thinker who was into symbols hidden in plain sight - like pyramids - was William Cooper.