Product Description

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27388 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 550 pages

Customer Reviews

A loon writes...
I've read many books about UFOs and the like, and have considerable sympathy for the subject. This, however, is a rather embarrassing example of lunatic fringe meets conspiracy theory.

The main author, one Richard Hoagland, writes of himself in the third person throughout, as if giving a gloss of objectivity, yet it is a self-serving document, recounting the history of his brilliant ideas and his lame, biased or malign detractors, peppered with overuse of italics and shudder quotes in case you don't get the message.

But it is the wild extrapolations from extremely flimsy evidence that make this book just embarrassing and annoying to read. For Hoagland, blurry photographs of the Moon or Mars are a kind of Rorschach inkblot test: to his eye, ordinary rocks are 'mechanical debris' from some advanced but now-extinct interplanetary civilization. A rock with two dents in it is a 'robot's head' (and I suspect that a significant proportion of rocks look more like a robot's head than the example we are given). Mountains are 'pyramids'; a blurry row of rocks is a 'sphinx'. Inevitably, the not particularly face-like 'Face on Mars' gets much attention. These objects are rather more irregular than an advanced civilization ought to be able to produce - actually they look just like rocks and mountains - but this of course is explained by 'erosion' (even though no erosion takes place on the moon, not having an atmosphere or surface water).

Add to this a heavy dose of unconvincing geometry: draw enough straight lines on a photograph and you find some of them seem to connect these mysterious objects - or rather, they do if you draw enough lines and make enough use of wiggle room, such as saying a line connects to an object when actually it goes a bit to the side. (Ley lines, anyone?)

Then measure the angles produced, and with a bit more jiggling you can come up with something close to numbers that don't have any mathematical significance, like, say, e/pi, or e/root 5 - but why not more obvious constants like e or 5? Well, we are told, this is obviously an alien 'message' about hyperdimensional physics which tells us that the planets all contain a fourth-dimensional spinning pyramid or something...

Other photographs of the moon landings have even more bizarre interpretations: anything looking like a scratch on the negative is actually a 'buttress' supporting one of many giant glass domes over craters; these domes are naturally invisible in the photos (being made of glass), but hey, they're obviously there, aren't they? (Hoagland's inability to get any scientific journals to publish such results are naturally all part of the conspiracy.)

But wait, there are more dots to be connected. It's all something to do with not only the Masons, but also the Nazis (I kid you not). As shown by all kinds of things which turn out to be mysteriously symbolic: e.g. a particular moon launch occurs on the anniversary of Hitler's birthday (a date which after all only arises once every year). Quite why NASA would choose a launch date on such a cryptic yet symbolic basis, rather than - say - to do with the relative position of the earth and moon, is not clear; perhaps to send a secret message? To whom, and why? Some NASA announcement occurs three years to the day after JFK's assassination - all very suspicious and symbolic, so clearly is another secret message telling us we're-not-quite-sure-what. After all, the anniversary of JFK's assassination only comes round every year. (Come to think of it, isn't almost every day the anniversary of some more or less important historical event?)

NASA also uses strange symbolism in its official patches for space suits etc - for example, the Apollo program patch has a big letter A on it, secretly denoting (in the mind of Hoagland) not Apollo but Asar, an ancient Egyptian word for Osiris, i.e. the constellation Orion, which has something important to do with Egyptian mythology and hence pyramids and YOU SEE HOW IT ALL MAKES SENSE.

Quite how this book made it to the New York Times bestseller list is a mystery to me, and one rather more disturbing than the contents of this deranged and tedious book.

Intriguing, uncovers many layers of Conspiracy...
Richard Hoagland was present at JPL in 1969 as the crew of Apollo eleven was on it's way back to Earth. He saw a shady character, accompanied by high ranking NASA officials, distribute leaflets during a press conference stating that the entire moon landing had been faked on a soundstage in Nevada. This, according to Hoagland, was the genesis of the Apollo Conspiracy mythos. Logically this would make the Apollo Conspiracy a Hoax Hoax. Therefore one cannot help wondering what a Hoax Hoax Hoax would be.

Hoagland himself quotes one of his intelligence sources as saying that, "the lie is different at every level". There is no doubt that NASA is concealing something because many of the photographic materials it supplies are obviously tampered with. Hoagland states that NASA (Never A Staight Answer!) is a military organisation rather than as most people think, a civilian one. Therefore they are answerable only to the Pentagon and not to the taxpayer.

Hoagland is committed to the ancient astronauts idea. He believes that the ruins he has detected on the Moon and Mars, are many thousands of years old and probably pre- date human civilization on Earth. He apparently disregards the evidence that humans still interact with with extra- terrestrials. There is no mention in his book of the fact that the Moon, and possibly the entire solar system were created, from basic planetery raw materials, by beings far beyond our technological capacity, beings for whom time means nothing. I believe therefore that everything in our environment is controlled by these entities, whom humans often mistake for Gods.

NASA must have known since it's inception that the moon is artificial, as it's period of orbit is exactly equal to it's period of rotation; also it covers the Sun exactly during solar eclipses. I am convinced that Socrates knew this. I do not agree with Hoagland that there has been only one "time before", there have probably been many; Humankind has reached out to other worlds in the past, and may not actually originate on Earth.

In many of the Apollo photographs of the Moon, Hoagland sees huge glass domes reaching high above the lunar surface, and the remains of supporting rebars, I cannot say that I see this from the reproductions in the book, but there do seem to be atifacts and "arcology" there. Perhaps there are still humans or extra- terrestrials living within the moon, based on it's far side.

Hoagland believes in the notorious "Face on Mars". Of course, if it is truly artificial, then it certainly does not resemble any monolith on Earth, being over a mile in length and apparently honeycombed with rooms and walls; The Face itself is only visible from a high altitude. At the end of the book there are some reproductions of photographs taken by the recent Mars Reconnaissance Orbitor which according to Hoagland reveal an ancient "Headquarters" in The Face. I find it surprising that the orbital photos from Mars appear to be of higher resolution than those from the Moon.

D+ poor effort, must try harder..
I think the face on mars looks like a collapsed hill, and just a trick of light. The author is obsessed by it. All this astonishing alien artifacts on the moon and mars are present within Richard Hoagland's imagination, and are not present in any of the pictures. What the re-examination of the lunar landing photos probably show is the original hidden background detail of the inside of the studio where they filmed the lunar landings. There's a colour photo of the moon in this book, taken from the Apollo space craft, and according to the author, it's evidence of millions of domes of glass on the moon, as it shows a glow around the moon, which is not possible from space. The more obvious explanation for this is that the photo was taken from a telescope on the earth, and then claimed for the Apollo astronauts.
What is proven in this book is that NASA are habitual liers, and have been covering up something which is far more interesting...evidence of life on mars. What the agenda is, is not explored very well here.
The first chapters about multi-dimentional space is out of the scope for a lay-person and is a stuggle to get through.
What would make for a much better book, by another author, would be an exploration of the mars anomalies, the green-blue sky which NASA have tweeked into red, and fossil evidence on mars. Also an investigation into why NASA are compelled to lie about everything, and why should anyone trust anything they say, including that they went to the moon, when there is so much evidence to show that they didn't, and which Hoagland claims he and his associates have proved to be a false conspiracy, and he hasn't proved it at all. If NASA can fake the colours of mars, why cant they fake the supposed robot head as well, and anything else they feel like?