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Where is the informed criticism of Richard Hoagland?

Recently, I was surfing the web page of a researcher named Stan Deyo. I got the link to his page through the Art Bell site, so I assumed it would be full of interesting but perhaps not especially convincing evidence about earthquake predictions. I found a rather extensive site, well maintained and surprisingly thorough. However, in the updates section I came across a piece I found quite disturbing and irresponsible. In it, Deyo pedantically scolded a former "NASA consultant" for supposedly not knowing much of anything about image enhancement and accusing this unnamed individual of claiming that he had invented the S.P.I.T. imaging process. He then went on to explain that this person had obviously never heard of Adobe PhotoShop, which could do anything that this "S.P.I.T." process could do and that in any event, what he claimed "S.P.I.T." did (creating data that was not actually there, according to Deyo) was impossible.

Deyo was plainly taking potshots at Richard C. Hoagland, which is fine. If someone wants to confront Hoagland about the data he presents it should be encouraged. A review process is critical to the advancement and credibility of his ongoing investigation. The problem was that Deyo was completely wrong about virtually every "fact" he based his tirade on. Even the most rudimentary review of Hoagland's writings on the subject of extraterrestrial artifacts would have told Deyo that he was way off base in his criticism. Obviously, he made no attempt to read "The Monuments of Mars" or any of the newsletters or papers Hoagland has submitted in the last 15 years.

Deyo's list of errors is lengthy and egregious. For starters, Hoagland has NEVER claimed to have invented the S.P.I.T. imaging process. In fact, he went out of his way in the "Monuments of Mars" to credit the inventors, NASA contractors Vince Dipietro and Greg Mollenar. Had Deyo read "Monuments" he would have also noted that this process was created in the late 1970's, well before the personal computer or Adobe PhotoShop had even been invented. In fact, many of the imaging algorithms found in products like PhotoShop owe their existence to the work of inventors like Dipietro and Mollenar. So the reason that the inventors of S.P.I.T. didn't use great products like PhotoShop was because they did not exist at the time the research was done.

Deyo was also completely off base about what he suggested Hoagland claimed about S.P.I.T. No one ever said that this process created data that "wasn't there". Rather, it was a process that took the average color value of a group of pixels around an image error pixel and assigned a color value to fill in the blank areas.

Clearly, Deyo's basis for attacking Hoagland was faulty and based on incomplete or erroneous information. I wish this were the exception, but most critiques of Hoagland's work seem to be just as sloppy as Deyo's.

NASA's James Oberg has also resorted to questionable reasoning and tactics regarding data presented by Hoagland. In the Mars Mission video "Hoagland's Mars - Vol. II", Hoagland reviewed the infamous STS-48 video. He presented a strong case that the objects shown were in fact at the physical horizon, not small "ice crystals" close to the shuttle. But Oberg, rather than simply disagreeing with Hoagland and proposing an alternate hypothesis, lambasted him with inflammatory language, factual distortion and misquotation. (Click Here for my full rebuttal of Oberg's position).

Even the UFO community have taken unfair shots at Hoagland. This is curious, since his investigation would seem to be providing an essential groundwork on which many of them could base their own work. Yet, a month after the Enterprise Mission news conference in Washington D.C., Stanton Friedman, the self proclaimed "Flying Saucer Physicist", accused Hoagland of grandstanding and having made previous claims "which he cannot back up". Since it was obvious from the piece on his website that Friedman had not attended the news conference or seen any of the data presented there, I decided to e-mail him. I cautioned him against getting into a turf war, and offered to provide any "back-up" material he required if he would just let me know what claims Hoagland had made that he considered flimsy. Of course, he never replied.

Vince Dipietro, a former colleague of Hoagland's on the early Mars investigations, has also chimed in recently. Appearing on the Seattle based TV show "Town Meeting" (available to Direct TV satellite subscribers) Dipietro asserted that Hoagland had "exaggerated" certain data from the Mars investigations and had claimed that a person standing in the "City Square" could see the sun rise over the "Cliff", some 20 miles distant over the horizon. Hoagland has never made such a claim, and Dipietro did not elaborate on his "exaggeration" charge. It should be noted that Hoagland was invited to be on the program, but declined because the host, Ken Schramm, has been openly hostile toward him on his Seattle radio show. Dipietro seems to be frustrated that Hoagland is now "The Face on Mars" man, when it was he (Dipietro) who did the original research into the Face and surrounding structures and brought Hoagland into it. It is understandable that Dipietro feels slighted, but engaging in unsubstantiated carping toward Hoagland will not restore his credibility.

The shame of all this is that Hoagland's claims deserve, in fact demand, a serious peer review approach. There have been to date only 2 published peer review assessments of assertions made by the Mars (and later Enterprise) Mission's various papers and publications. The first is the well known McDaniel Report, which concluded that the Mars Mission studies had resulted in a database sufficient to conclude at least a 50% possibility that the Cydonia Anomalies were artificial. The second is an independent paper by Dr. Horace Crater, concerning what he calls "Cydonian Mound Geometry". Crater studied a pattern of 300 foot tall mounds visible in the Cydonia "complex" and found that they repeated, confirmed and expanded the basic "Tetrahedral Message of Cydonia" presented by Hoagland and Torun in 1988. Unfortunately, it was instead widely reported that Crater had found Hoagland was "wrong" in some of his measurements, because of a disagreement between them about the exact placement of several of the mounds Hoagland had noted earlier. In fact, regardless of which set of measurements is taken to be accurate, they both reinforce the central "Tetrahedral" theme of the Cydonia complex and Crater's measurements do so in an even more complex and elegant manner than Hoagland had inferred. So, yet again, Hoagland's critic's rely on a misreporting of factual data to make their case.

The most compelling results presented so far by Hoagland is the Lunar data. From his admonition that "anyone can do this" many private independent investigations have been launched (including this one). Yet, nearly 3 years after he first made the pictures and video available, not a single major university or government agency has attempted to repeat his photographic analysis. It has been left to the underfunded independent investigators to decide the most profound and crucial question in human existence. This is unconscionable.

If Hoagland is wrong then let him be proved wrong. Let the critics who doubt the quality of his work repeat the process, and find him in error. I strongly suspect no attempt will be made by NASA or the major universities to do just that. Not, however, because they lack the time or the resources, or because the data is less then compelling. I'm certain it is precisely the opposite, that they have turned Richard Hoagland (who used to be one of their own) into a pariah because he has followed their rules and beat them at their own game. It's not just that he has challenged them and their covenants against pursuing "fringe" science, it's that he's had the audacity to be right about it.

MICHAEL BARA - MAY 1997