There's no Intelligent Life, Beam me up Scotty
Question. What was the name of the first space shuttle? Did you guess Enterprise? You are correct and probably a fan of Star Trek if you did. The Space Shuttle Enterprise (Orbiter Vehicle Designation: OV-101) was the first orbiter of the Space Shuttle system. It rolled out on September 17, 1976, as part of the Space Shuttle program to perform atmospheric test flights after being launched from a modified Boeing 747. It was a harbinger of the new space exploration program for the U.S.
The man who led the campaign to name the new space shuttle Enterprise instead of the Constitution was Richard C. Hoagland. He is the subject of my blog today. Richard is a fascinating man and has an exciting past. Hoagland has no education beyond the high school level, making him a target for ridicule.
You see, Richard is considered a scientist by some and a conspiracy theorist (a word created by the FBI during Kennedy's assassination investigation) by others. Nonetheless, suppose you look at Hoagland's credentials.
What does He Know?
In that case, you see, he has worked as Curator of Astronomy and Space Science at the Springfield Science Museum, Assistant Director at the Gengras Science Center, and a Science Advisor to CBS News during the Apollo program.
Furthermore, Richard was a radio host, N.Y. Times bestseller, and recipient of the International Angstrom Medal for Excellence in Science. Not bad for a high school graduate.
Nothing to See Here
As a result, Richard was taken seriously by the scientific community until he started to reveal that NASA and the U.S. government were not telling us the whole truth about our solar system. Meanwhile, Hoagland authored The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever (published in 1987) and co-authored the book Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA. Richard Grossinger, the founder of North Atlantic Books, writes that Monuments became the most successful title published by North Atlantic.
Furthermore, there is an appetite for conspiracies or, at the very least, the idea of looking at all the available information. What information was Richard sharing? Hoagland runs The Enterprise Mission website, which he described as "an independent NASA watchdog and research group," the Enterprise Mission. For instance, he attempts to figure out how much of what NASA has found in our solar system over the past 50 years has remained out of public sight as classified material. As a result, the data is unknown to the American people.
One of Richard's most significant claims is concerning the Face on Mars. Hoagland claims the "Face on Mars" is part of a city built on Cydonia Planitia consisting of colossal pyramids and mounds arranged in a geometric pattern. Hoagland explains that this is evidence that an advanced civilization might once have existed on Mars. Since its discovery, NASA has described the "face" as an optical illusion. In other words, an example of the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia. Now I ask you, what do you think the face is?
Compare Mars Pyramids with Earths
Here is what we know about the "face" since it was discovered by Toby Owen on July 25, 1976, by Viking 1 (picture 35A72). The face is almost 2600 feet high (two Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other), 1.6 miles wide, by 1.2 miles wide! Above all, it is an upward-looking human "face" with an adjoining "city" of pyramids. The pyramids are also huge and look similar in alignment to Giza's.
So why hasn't anyone paid attention to this fantastic story and graphic evidence? Gerry Soffen, the Viking project scientist, got up in front of about a thousand reporters at a press conference on the mission and showed us this quirky face and said, "Isn't it peculiar what tricks lighting and shadow can do?" And then he said, "When we took a picture a few hours later, it all went away; it was just a trick, just the way the light fell on it."
There you go, case closed. I love how the public can see one thing and hear contrary information and believe it immediately. If you have a Ph.D. or a lab coat, you must be more intelligent than me. Let's see what happened.
Look Harder
Meanwhile, about three years later, Vince DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar (two imaging specialists) were looking, on their lunch hour, through the National Space Science Data Center files in Washington, D.C. They came across the "face" in the NASA file, and everything changed. As a result, they brought their thirty years of computer-imaging expertise to bear. They decided to do what no one had done before on this particular picture, clean up the image to elicit more detail.
What they found was astonishing. The face had all the interesting proportions — mouth, eyes, hair, nose, even features under the eye — that one would expect of a human look. It was as if the artist wanted to convey a sort of beauty to it, an aesthetic quality.
Following their discovery, both men remembered the NASA statement that scientist Gerry Soffen said, "There's no confirmation; we took a picture a few hours later, and it all went away. It was merely a trick of light and shadow." Vince and Greg went looking for corroborating frames. And they found there was no picture from a few hours later over this region.
How about a Little Help Here?
Furthermore, Vince and Greg looked through the entire Viking data set, number by number and frame by frame, and they finally found, thirty-five days later, the second set of pictures taken over this area at a different sun angle. When they blew up that frame, lo and behold, the face was still there at a lighting change of twenty degrees. There is no question that this is a remarkable bi-symmetrical humanoid face.
Richard took this additional information, shared it with his radio audience, Coast to Coast AM, and raised the question: is it a trick of erosion, or did someone make it? But one can no longer, with this data, dismiss the fact that it is there.
Hoagland looked at the enhanced and processed full-frame version of picture 35A72. He realized that he was looking at something that was either a complete waste of time or the most important discovery of the twentieth century, if not our entire existence on earth. There is no middle ground. It either is or is not artificial.
One Person, One Truth
If you search Richard, you'll see that his life is about raising awareness of UFOs and related alien information. He is also made fun of and discredited by authorities in science and Reddit fans alike.
I shared one story of many from his lifetime of curiosity. I believe the evidence I have shared makes a more compelling argument than "it just disappeared."
When presented with the data and evidence, why do we reject it? Is it because we do not feel worthy? Or is it that we really don't want to accept that we have never been alone. The choice is yours.
