I had, obviously, lost track of Dick Hoagland quite a while back. I'd been following his EnterpriseMission.com web site through the 90's, but even when I reviewed his Monuments of Mars six and half years ago, I was wondering “what happened” to him, and he'd sort of dropped off my radar. I'd picked up Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA by him and Mike Bara a few years back, but only got around to reading it last month (it kept getting passed over due to being nearly 600 pages). If you're unfamiliar with Hoagland, he's the guy who glommed onto “the face on Mars” and ran with it. I don't really want to re-hash a lot of the stuff from my previous review, however, but there's a lot about this book which has pretty much the same issues I had with the earlier one.Getting ready to write this, I popped over to his site, and was surprised to find that he's updated it over the past couple of years (it had been static for so long, I never got over there unless I was looking to background something on “hyperdimensional physics”), plus having developed a new radio show. One interesting thing there was coverage of China's lunar lander program, which I'd, frankly, missed when it happened a couple of years back.
Now, Hoagland is “an acquired taste”, and is easy for most folks to brush off as an obsessed eccentric. Honestly, he brings this on himself, “leading with his chin”, as it were, with picture after picture after picture of extremely ambiguous stuff on the Moon or Mars which he claims “clearly” shows artificiality. I have been following this guy's material for what at this point is decades, and I have yet to see a picture from, for instance, the Moon where the “structures” he insists are self-evident in these grainy, digitally processed images, are even vaguely suggested. Not a single shot of the “lunar domes”, which take up a lot of this (and are the focus of his info on the Chinese mission on his site) looks to me as anything other than random “noise”. And, like Fox Mulder, I do “want to believe”, but time after time what he's pitching as being in these pictures are less convincing than seeing Jimmy Durante in a cloud formation. Oh, and as an editorial note, a lot of Dark Mission is set up as a 3rd person presentation with Hoagland being a character in the telling, rather than being the “speaker”, and those “Hoagland found ...” bits get irritating fast – unless, of course, Mike Bara was the primary author of this.
However …
I really hate that this evidently arose from his measurements of angles of stuff in the “Cydonia” area on Mars. There are a couple of numbers that come out of this which keep appearing (especially the latitude of 19.5°) in various energetic phenomena across the solar system. This led him to develop/uncover a “hyperdimensional/torsion physics” which is both the subject of quite a lot of Russian research, and goes (according to this book) back to James Clerk Maxwell's original equations, which reflect his argument that “the only way to solve certain problems in physics was to account for some phenomena as 3D 'reflections' of objects existing in higher spatial dimensions”, but this “scalar” component was, after Maxwell's death, stripped out of his original equations by Oliver Heaviside, resulting with the “normal space” classic Maxwell equations which underlie much of modern physics. I have found this material fascinating, and I suspect that Hoagland has stumbled onto something that is quite important, but he goes back to it so frequently, it's like finding “hidden Mickeys” at Disney World … albeit even more so.
As one might guess, a nearly-600-page book (set in fairly small type), has a massive amount of detail crammed in, and I'd love to go on-and-on about the physics stuff, but it would take way too much space to give it justice in even the broad strokes, so I'm just going to note my enthusiasm for that material, and suggest that if it sounds like something you might find of equal interest (check out the bits on his site to get a sense of it), pick up the books … you can focus on those parts without having to swallow the rest.
And the rest is a lot to swallow. As should not be surprising given the sub-title, this book is largely a history of NASA … but not so much in the mundane, this mission did this, that mission did that, mode, but a “way over the edge” version which tracks the space program back to the early days. Now, pretty much everybody knows that the US and USSR were is a race to see how many German rocket scientists they could sweep up in the final days of the Third Reich, and that we ended up with Wernher von Braun (and some of his assistants) who was the leading light of NASA in the post-war years. Hoagland puts forth information that suggests that not only was von Braun an enthusiastic Nazi (in contact with the top echelons the Reich), but he was somewhat of an unrepentant Nazi, even after being mainstreamed in the US. There was also a very strong Masonic element involved. Now, I've never quite understood the paranoia around the Masons … while I've never been personally involved, both my maternal grandfather and my father-in-law were 33rd Degree Masons, and I never saw anything creepy in either family related to that (well, unless you count the very large and garish “logo” flower arrangement that the Eastern Star organization sent to my mother-in-law's funeral). Hoagland, however, does the cable-ready “oooh – Secret Society!” thing here, and notes how many NASA administrators and astronauts were quite active Masons (and, I will admit, some of the material here – astronauts posing in official photos symbolically exhibiting their Masonic rings, and having Masonic organizational flags being included in their personal effects brought with them to the Moon ... which is sort of suggested by the obviously photoshopped cover image – is awfully suggestive of more than just individual expressions of "Masonic pride"). And, of course there is Jack Parsons, a devotee of Aleister Crowley, and O.T.O. member, whose work with Theodore von Karman in developing rockets, is used by Hoagland to paint the senior scientist with the same occult brush (although I was unable to dig up anything more than just the JPL connection).
So, Hoagland feels that there is a Nazi/Mason/Occult (he even presents an “organizational chart” for this) theme to NASA, and constantly returns to “ritual timing” of various elements in the program. I would normally dismiss this, but the timing/orientation of key events (at least as Hoagland describes them) does seem to hew to a very specific line … a line that seems to be rooted in ancient Egyptian religion. This goes down a rather convoluted rabbit-hole, but, like much in Hoagland's world, there's just enough “real stuff” that keeps one from totally saying he's simply nuts. In this case, there is a lot of “symbolic” elements in the naming, iconography, etc. of NASA programs that relate to the Osiris/Isis/Horus deity matrix, and Hoagland keeps pointing to “ritual alignments” time/location-wise that are quite suggestive that this sort of thing could be happening. He even identifies a key Egyptian scientist who was brought in for the Apollo program, and suggests that he is the one setting out the plans for those enactments. Again, there is a lot here that sounds like so much hooey, especially the “lion”/sphinx stuff (mainly on Mars), as well as the rather convoluted “evidence” of Sirius or some star of Orion's belt being above/below/on a horizon at a particular time. There's a lot in the genre of “more ancient cultures than generally accepted” that I totally believe (like the Giza Sphinx aligning to an event that happened several thousand years prior to when Zahi Hawass and the like would hold to be possible), but deciding, when less-obvious pictures of “the face” came in, that it was “half-lion, half-man” (which Hoagland enthusiastically does here) is more than a bit “out there”.
The other main theme here is the “conspiracy to hide stuff” which, while certainly plausible given the track record that Hoagland outlines of endless promises of releases, only to be followed by evidently intentionally degraded images, or no images at all (or even, at one point, an order to destroy all existing images from a program). Why would NASA do this? I guess it goes back to the notorious “Brookings report”, which noted that much turmoil could be expected were the public to hear that we had contacted or found evidence of extraterrestrial cultures/races, which included quotes such as “How might such information, under what circumstances be presented to or withheld from the public for what ends?” and:
Hoagland, perhaps more than anybody, believes that we have evidence of these sorts of artifacts (and, again, as much as I might like to see indisputable proof of this, the vast majority of the photos require a very active imagination to “see” what Hoagland and his associates “see” in them). However, the concept that the overriding “model” for both NASA and other space programs is that were evidence of ETs made public, that human society would break down into chaos, is at least a point to explain a lot of what Hoagland notes would otherwise have to be due to massive incompetence in the handling of space imaging.While face-to-face meetings with it will not occur within the next twenty years (unless its technology is more advanced than ours, qualifying it to visit Earth), artifacts left at some point in time by these life forms might possibly be discovered through our space activities on the Moon, Mars, or Venus.
As noted, Dark Mission is a very long book in fairly small type, and ends up a quite a slog through a lot of theorizing that isn't necessarily all that “evidence based” – but that's my call on the evidence, the authors here certainly seem to have a much lower bar for what's “convincing proof”. There is also a good deal of paranoia exhibited in these pages, again, perhaps not erroneous, as Hoagland has certainly made himself a target of at least ridicule by the “mundane explanation” forces, and if even a third of what he's raising here is true, there must be a substantial conspiracy to keep the “official line” being the only one that gets serious consideration (but, as we've seen in the 2016 election cycle, the press is perfectly capable of defending an orthodoxy in the face of overwhelming evidence against it, if stonewalling against that evidence suits their agenda).
Can I recommend this book? Probably not. I'd suggest you dig through the EnterpriseMission.com web site first to get a sense of where Hoagland is coming from, and if you want to delve deeply into the more paranoid and conspiratorially-inclined aspects of that, then this book's for you. If not, you've been spared a very long strange read. I really wish that Hoagland (or somebody) would do a solid look at the hyperdimensional/tetrahedral/torsion physics that was separate from all the “oh, look, it's a pyramid … oh, look, it's a robot head … oh, look, it's a city!” stuff and put that out as a sane, serious book. Needless to say, despite having some very interesting material covered, this is not that.
