Richard Hoagland's "Dark Mission"

Thanksgiving Break is upon me and I'm reading a few books.

One is Cormac McCarthy's The Road. As I blogged earlier, I think it will get me in the mindset of the next four years of Trump. Also, I checked out Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA by Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara, the latter writer you may know from multiple guestings on Ancient Aliens. As the back cover reads, Hoagland writes to clear away NASA's "squeaky-clean image of technological infallibility."

After Challenger, Columbia, and a few botched Mars missions, I'm not sure where he gets the "infallible" part, but it's clear Hoagland is arguing there is a conspiracy afoot. But just what kind of conspiracy?

For one thing, Hoagland believes in Cydonia. Longtime ESE readers are no doubt familiar with this famed "city" on Mars...or the remains of one...that features pyramids and the infamous "Face." He argues that the Cydonia "complex" has a geometric pattern to it that could not have arisen through erosion or other natural means. There are also, Hoagland asserts in the book, other artifacts of civilization on Mars as well as "crystal towers on the Moon." Despite the thrilling nature of these discoveries, NASA has kept them all quiet. As Hoagland says, he began to wonder "what did NASA know...and when did they first know it?

Why the secrecy? Hoagland claims that goes back to the Brookings Report which prior to our landing on the Moon argued that any evidence of an extraterrestrial presence should be withheld from the public. Hoagland and his fellow researchers believe otherwise. Pages 12-13 of the book describe Hoagland's frustration at releasing his findings on Cydonia, the "barrage of ad hominem criticism" he experienced and how pointless it was to attempt publication through the "NASA controlled peer review press."

Hoagland also claims that for all its ties to science, NASA is quite steeped in the occult and ancient religions. To emphasize this, the cover of Dark Mission features Buzz Aldrin flying a Masonic flag on the Moon, Yes, the Freemasons are laying claim to outer space. There's also a nifty hierarchy chart that shows how many higher-ups and actual astronauts in NASA were Freemasons. Allegations about Masons aside, I can see where he may be getting part of this "occult" tinge. There were, after all, bona fide Nazis working in NASA and then there was Jack Parsons, whose own dabblings in the occult are well-documented. Be that as it may, I still don't see how this makes NASA an evil organization with a "dark mission." Then again, I'm not finished with the book yet, but I'm still not holding out hope for a plausible answer. The most I'd be willing to accept at this point is that the organization is a bloated and dysfunctional bureaucracy.

Oh and there's a whole chapter on Kennedy's assassination! Can't wait to see how that all fits into this mess. Oddly enough, the assasination occurred on this very day in 1963. But I digress...

I'm not done reading Dark Mission, so I suppose I should hold off judgment and give it a fair shake. It's just so hard to do when you know that much of the scientific community regards Hoagland's arguments as bunk. You can go to Phil Plait for but one of many refutations of the contents of Dark Mission and other Hoagland offerings. Then again, you might only need to find a copy of the text and flip through all the color images of the Moon and Mars provided. I have a very difficult time seeing the things that Hoagland and Bara see in them and that might well be the point: we all see what we want to see.

More to come...


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