Here's another copyrighted excerpt from my UFO book. As always please post a comment. Enjoy!
Speaking of things I’d love to see sealed in a crate and stored in a vast warehouse, I now come to Richard C. Hoagland, but first, I need to tell you about Wendy, a girlfriend of mine many years ago. Wendy—not her real name—was a delightful woman, a Southern gal with three obnoxious kids. Suffice it to say I liked her better than I liked her kids. A few years later I would be dating a woman whose kids I liked better than I liked her. Go figure. I no longer get involved with women who have kids, unless the kids are at least my age. Wendy was possessed of a simply delightful predilection that involved a certain part of the male anatomy, which I have to clean up for this book. She liked penises. We’d be driving along and she’d point to a cloud in the sky and say, “That looks like a penis!” She would doodle penises. She would fold a piece of paper into the shape of a penis. Suffice it to say she was a wildcat in bed. “Why do rockets look like penises?” she would wonder. Beats me. Go ask Werner von Strangelove. The best was her seeing clouds that looked like penises. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they didn’t, but she thought they did. Back in 1976, Richard C. Hoagland thought he saw a human face on Mars, and the man hasn’t shut up since.
Viking I was Carl Sagan’s baby, the first unmanned probe to land on Mars and conduct experiments to determine if microbial life was there. Viking found no evidence of life on the red planet•, but prior to landing it snapped a few pictures of the surface and beamed them back to Earth. One of them, taken over the Cydonia plain, showed what appeared to be at first glance a human face beneath some ancient Egyptian-style headdress. I remember seeing the picture in the paper and being intrigued, but Erich von Daniken had left a bad taste in my mouth. I also remembered Percival Lowell’s fanciful interpretations of what he thought he saw on Mars through his telescope, namely canals and the ruins of an ancient civilization, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which ran the Viking mission, was the first to concede that the photographs were not of the highest quality. Enter Richard Hoagland, who was soon off and running at the mouth about the Face on Mars, a Martian Odyssey which got him a very profitable second career which continues to this day, and no I am not going to give you the name of his website. His earlier career was not without merit. He had worked for NASA and was Walter Cronkite’s space consultant during the Apollo program. Later he would team with Sagan and receive credit for the “calling card” on the Pioneer 10 probe which would eventually leave our solar system, a gold plaque which showed Earth in relation to the other planets and the sun, along with a nude man and woman, with the man holding a hand up as a gesture of friendship. One could only hope that an alien examining the plaque would not race over to incinerate the Earth, having been grievously offended by a hand gesture quite obscene and contemptuous to its culture. Still later Sir Arthur C. Clarke would credit Hoagland with the idea of teeming life beneath the frozen ice of one of Jupiter’s moons, which Clarke used in one of his 2001 sequels. As comedian Don Rickles would say, “Very good. You get a cookie.”
Hoagland just wouldn’t let go of the Face on Mars. NASA was covering up evidence of extraterrestrial life, he screamed to anyone who would listen, and many did and still do. His book on the subject has done very well—that’s okay, Richard, this one is too!—and when the Internet came along and it was time to set up a website and make some money, well, Richard was more than ready. In 2001, one of outgoing NASA Administrator Dan Goldin’s final orders was to have the Mars Global Surveyor probe re-shoot the Cydonia region, and as expected, the Face was gone, revealed to be nothing more than natural mesa-like foundations, which, when shadows cover them in a certain way and they are viewed from just the right angle, do look like a human face. Percival Lowell’s canals had been nothing more than optical illusions as well, though unlike Hoagland, better photographs vindicated him to a certain point: surface features indicate the presence of flowing water a very long time ago, albeit not in canals. Hoagland and his crowd were of course not satisfied, claiming that NASA doctored the photographs. Today Hoagland is Georgre Noory’s science consultant on Coast to Coast AM, and he has yet to meet a conspiracy theory he doesn’t like. There is something sinister behind everything, in his view. Hurricanes hitting the U.S. mainland are the result of Chinese weather modification experiments, there are alien ruins on the moon as well, the “mysterious” Coral Castle in Homestead, Florida—which I have visited—was built by a man with help from aliens, human error caused the loss of the Mars Global Surveyor probe which was busy mapping Mars but Hoagland suspects sabotage, and earlier this year, when a lovesick NASA astronaut drove 950 miles from Texas to Florida—wearing a diaper—to confront a woman she was jealous of—resulting in her very public arrest and grist for late night comics—Hoagland was suspicious. NASA, he claimed, wants nothing more to do with the International Space Station. They want to go back to the moon and on to Mars, but first they need a replacement for the space shuttle, which they also want nothing further to do with, so suppose, just suppose that this was a set up job by the space agency to self-destruct the remainder of the shuttle program and with it any further responsibility for the space station, and no I am not making that up. I’ll plug George Noory’s show, but not Hoagland’s website. Listen to him on George’s show a couple of times then decide for yourself.
In January of 2004, Mars was the featured cover story in National Geographic magazine. President Bush had called for a return to the moon, to be followed by a manned expedition to Mars, though curiously that was absent from his State of the Union address. Nonetheless, National Geographic’s readers made themselves heard on Mars, and the editors noted that one reader spotted Mickey Mouse on the surface of the planet, while another saw Homer Simpson’s head. I wonder if Hoagland had a “D’oh!” moment when he read that? In a December 2003 piece on the Hubble Space Telescope, National Geographic readers saw a woman’s face and the profile of Jesus in a nebula. And Wendy saw clouds that looked like penises. Okay, Richard. Slap your head and shout “D’Oh!!!”
We’ll understand, and remember, I’m the guy who’s still sticking up for good ol’ Sonny Desvergers, and I’ve never seen a UFO, either.
Speaking of things I’d love to see sealed in a crate and stored in a vast warehouse, I now come to Richard C. Hoagland, but first, I need to tell you about Wendy, a girlfriend of mine many years ago. Wendy—not her real name—was a delightful woman, a Southern gal with three obnoxious kids. Suffice it to say I liked her better than I liked her kids. A few years later I would be dating a woman whose kids I liked better than I liked her. Go figure. I no longer get involved with women who have kids, unless the kids are at least my age. Wendy was possessed of a simply delightful predilection that involved a certain part of the male anatomy, which I have to clean up for this book. She liked penises. We’d be driving along and she’d point to a cloud in the sky and say, “That looks like a penis!” She would doodle penises. She would fold a piece of paper into the shape of a penis. Suffice it to say she was a wildcat in bed. “Why do rockets look like penises?” she would wonder. Beats me. Go ask Werner von Strangelove. The best was her seeing clouds that looked like penises. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they didn’t, but she thought they did. Back in 1976, Richard C. Hoagland thought he saw a human face on Mars, and the man hasn’t shut up since.
Viking I was Carl Sagan’s baby, the first unmanned probe to land on Mars and conduct experiments to determine if microbial life was there. Viking found no evidence of life on the red planet•, but prior to landing it snapped a few pictures of the surface and beamed them back to Earth. One of them, taken over the Cydonia plain, showed what appeared to be at first glance a human face beneath some ancient Egyptian-style headdress. I remember seeing the picture in the paper and being intrigued, but Erich von Daniken had left a bad taste in my mouth. I also remembered Percival Lowell’s fanciful interpretations of what he thought he saw on Mars through his telescope, namely canals and the ruins of an ancient civilization, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which ran the Viking mission, was the first to concede that the photographs were not of the highest quality. Enter Richard Hoagland, who was soon off and running at the mouth about the Face on Mars, a Martian Odyssey which got him a very profitable second career which continues to this day, and no I am not going to give you the name of his website. His earlier career was not without merit. He had worked for NASA and was Walter Cronkite’s space consultant during the Apollo program. Later he would team with Sagan and receive credit for the “calling card” on the Pioneer 10 probe which would eventually leave our solar system, a gold plaque which showed Earth in relation to the other planets and the sun, along with a nude man and woman, with the man holding a hand up as a gesture of friendship. One could only hope that an alien examining the plaque would not race over to incinerate the Earth, having been grievously offended by a hand gesture quite obscene and contemptuous to its culture. Still later Sir Arthur C. Clarke would credit Hoagland with the idea of teeming life beneath the frozen ice of one of Jupiter’s moons, which Clarke used in one of his 2001 sequels. As comedian Don Rickles would say, “Very good. You get a cookie.”
Hoagland just wouldn’t let go of the Face on Mars. NASA was covering up evidence of extraterrestrial life, he screamed to anyone who would listen, and many did and still do. His book on the subject has done very well—that’s okay, Richard, this one is too!—and when the Internet came along and it was time to set up a website and make some money, well, Richard was more than ready. In 2001, one of outgoing NASA Administrator Dan Goldin’s final orders was to have the Mars Global Surveyor probe re-shoot the Cydonia region, and as expected, the Face was gone, revealed to be nothing more than natural mesa-like foundations, which, when shadows cover them in a certain way and they are viewed from just the right angle, do look like a human face. Percival Lowell’s canals had been nothing more than optical illusions as well, though unlike Hoagland, better photographs vindicated him to a certain point: surface features indicate the presence of flowing water a very long time ago, albeit not in canals. Hoagland and his crowd were of course not satisfied, claiming that NASA doctored the photographs. Today Hoagland is Georgre Noory’s science consultant on Coast to Coast AM, and he has yet to meet a conspiracy theory he doesn’t like. There is something sinister behind everything, in his view. Hurricanes hitting the U.S. mainland are the result of Chinese weather modification experiments, there are alien ruins on the moon as well, the “mysterious” Coral Castle in Homestead, Florida—which I have visited—was built by a man with help from aliens, human error caused the loss of the Mars Global Surveyor probe which was busy mapping Mars but Hoagland suspects sabotage, and earlier this year, when a lovesick NASA astronaut drove 950 miles from Texas to Florida—wearing a diaper—to confront a woman she was jealous of—resulting in her very public arrest and grist for late night comics—Hoagland was suspicious. NASA, he claimed, wants nothing more to do with the International Space Station. They want to go back to the moon and on to Mars, but first they need a replacement for the space shuttle, which they also want nothing further to do with, so suppose, just suppose that this was a set up job by the space agency to self-destruct the remainder of the shuttle program and with it any further responsibility for the space station, and no I am not making that up. I’ll plug George Noory’s show, but not Hoagland’s website. Listen to him on George’s show a couple of times then decide for yourself.
In January of 2004, Mars was the featured cover story in National Geographic magazine. President Bush had called for a return to the moon, to be followed by a manned expedition to Mars, though curiously that was absent from his State of the Union address. Nonetheless, National Geographic’s readers made themselves heard on Mars, and the editors noted that one reader spotted Mickey Mouse on the surface of the planet, while another saw Homer Simpson’s head. I wonder if Hoagland had a “D’oh!” moment when he read that? In a December 2003 piece on the Hubble Space Telescope, National Geographic readers saw a woman’s face and the profile of Jesus in a nebula. And Wendy saw clouds that looked like penises. Okay, Richard. Slap your head and shout “D’Oh!!!”
We’ll understand, and remember, I’m the guy who’s still sticking up for good ol’ Sonny Desvergers, and I’ve never seen a UFO, either.
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