Hi Richard,
Would you care to comment on what Carl
Sagan and Andrew Johnson have said about you. I am particularly
astonished at Carl Sagan taking a swipe at you, since I have on many
occasions heard you refer to him as "my dear departed friend."
QUESTION: Richard
Hoagland has recently got hold of some pictures, Hasselblad pictures
from NASA, which were taken some twenty years ago of the moon, and he
has been describing those in great detail. He gave a talk at Ohio State
University a couple of weeks ago and he had video cameras on and they
were supposed to have videos available. I wonder if you’ve heard about
this and had previous knowledge of . . . .
SAGAN: You forgot to mention what is on those videos.
QUESTION: Structures on the moon.
SAGAN: Richard Hoagland is a fabulist. By the way,
it’s not difficult getting hold of the hand-held Hasselblad camera
pictures; NASA freely releases them to everybody. These are in the
public domain, they’re available to anybody. You don’t have to do
something remarkable to get the pictures. The aspect of this story I
know best has to do with the so-called Face on Mars. There is a place on
Mars called Sidonia, which was photographed in a mission I was deeply
involved in, the Viking mission to Mars in 1976. And there is one
picture in which along a range of hulking mesas and hillocks, there is
what looks very much like a face, about three kilometers across at the
base and a kilometer high. It’s flat on the ground, looking up. It has a
helmet or a hair-do, depending on how you look at it, it has a nose, a
forehead, one eye—the other half is in shadow—pretty eerie looking.
You
could almost imagine it was done by Praxiteles on a monumental scale.
And this gentleman deduces from this that there was a race of ancient
Martians. He has dated them, he purports to have deduced when they were
around, and it was 500,000 years ago or something like that, when our
ancestors were certainly not able to do space flights, and then all
sorts of wonderful conclusions are deduced and “we came from Mars”or
“guys from other star systems came here and left a statue on Mars and
left some of them on Earth.” By the way, all of which fails to explain
how it is that humans share 99.6 percent of their active genes with
chimpanzees. If we were just dropped here, how come we’re so closely
related to them? What is the basis of the argument? How good is it? My
standard way of approaching this is to point out that there is an
eggplant that looks exactly like former President Richard Nixon. The
eggplant has this ski nose and, “that’s Richard Nixon, I’d know him
anywhere.”
What shall we deduce from this eggplant phenomenon? Extraterrestrials
messing with our eggplants? A miracle? God is talking to us through the
eggplant? Or, that there have been tens, hundreds of thousands,
millions of eggplants in history, and they all have funny little knobs,
and every now and then there is going to be one that by accident looks
like a human face. Humans are very good at recognizing human faces. I
think clearly the latter.
Now let’s go to Mars. Thousands of low, hilly
mesas have all sorts of features. Here’s one that looks a little like a
human face. When you bring out the contrast in the shadowed area it
doesn’t look as good. Now, we’re very good at picking out human faces.
We have so many of these blocky mesas. Is it really a compelling sign of
extraterrestrial intelligence that there’s one that looks a little like
a human face? I think not. But I don’t blame people who are going into
the NASA archives and trying to find things there; that is in the
scientific spirit. I don’t blame people who are trying to find signs of
extraterrestrial intelligence—I think it’s a good idea, in fact. But I
do object to people who consider shoddy and insufficient evidence as
compelling.
Now we have a link to a page where a fair amount of libel (or is it ?) is being aimed at you.
Check The Evidence.
Incidentally Richard, I heard an interview with Dr Wood, where she
told the audience she doesn't know you, has never met you nor
corresponded with you in any manner. She was also mighty peeved that you
had taken her work and presented it as if you knew what you were
talking about, made an arse of it and misrepresented her findings. She
said you had no permission to do so.
Any comments ?
Kindest Regards
DJE
