By Michael Goodspeed

If you are one of the few but very loyal frequenters of my website, you've noticed that I've been pretty quiet over the last month or so. I've only written a couple of abbreviated articles, and haven't felt a yearning to compose anything new. I've taken some time to re-evaluate the commentary I offer on the alternative scene in light of some constructive criticsm I've received from those around me. One Reverse Speech enthusiast who's opinion I value and respect recently sent me an email, writing, "Can't you do something positive for a change? You seem like a incredibly intelligent person, but you're addicted to negativity and conspiracy."

I knew that such backlash would be inevitable if I continued my skeptical writings on the more dubious members of the alternative world. As one prominent broadcaster wrote to me in a private email, "It's best to lead by example rather than criticsm." I do listen to such advice, even when I don't believe it's been warranted by my work.

Perhaps I should take a brief moment to again explain my motives behind some of my more critical commentaries. Having followed the alternative world for the past 10 years, it's become apparent to me that individuals who have long been viewed as harmless kooks and nut-cases have done more harm to innocent people than anyone seems to realize.

For one thing, they are unwittingly aiding and abetting debunkers whose sole life purpose is to prove the Universe's banality. As Clyde Lewis, host of the Ground Zero radio show, pointed out on a recent broadcast, people like James Randi, Phillip Klass, and Joe Nickle have been making increasingly frequent appearances on national TV and radio to sound off on things like the Heaven's Gate tragedy, Y2K hysteria, millennial madness, 5-5-2000 nonsense, and UFO hoaxes. The big media in this country has always been skeptic-friendly, so the lack of scruples and restraint of many alternative figures is providing enormous ammunition to the Randi ilk.

Another sad reality about the many hucksters and scam artists who run rampant has recently dawned on me. These people haven't become famous simply because they tell fantstical tales that gullible people love to hear; often, they have stolen, plagarized or otherwise debased the fine works of people in related fields. Such people are guilty of the worst kind of fraud, and must be held accountable.

Of all the questionable characters on the alternative scene today, perhaps none has been accused of such indiscretions more often than Richard C. Hoagland.

In 2002 America, Hoagland's is among the five most recognizable names in the UFO community. Obviously, this has much to do with the comfortable soap box he has long been provided on America's favorite paranormal talk show. Given the extraordinary influence that Hoagland has on public perception of the Mars face, NASA and the overall ET issue, I think it is worthwhile to take a look back at the numerous allegations of professional fraud that have been levied against him.

Let's start with Hoagland's claim that he should be credited with uncovering secret photograph of alleged glass-structures on the moon. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Don Ecker, founder and publisher of UFO Magazine. When I asked Ecker about said photos, here is what he had to say:

"Hoagland, if I could be so bold, actually found out about the moon from my old radio show, from Jim Saffron. When I had Saffron on the program, because of the work that Hoagland had done on the Cydonia region, Jim asked me if I could put him in touch with Hoagland. He wanted to send some of the lunar photographs to Hoagland. I did...he sent the photographs off. Hoagland, from what I understand, never did contact Jim back...but about six months later, Hoagland SUDDENLY discovered the alleged photographs on the moon, and he never did mention Jim..."

Hoagland has also claimed to be the first person to write a thesis speculating about a possible ocean on
Europa. Here's an excerpt from the transcript of Hoagland's December 4, 1997 appearance on Coast to Coast Am.

ART BELL: "Richard, you are, I believe, originally noted for your investigation into the monuments of Mars, and then, following that, uh, artifacts that you have shown on the moon."

RICHARD HOAGLAND: "Well actually, even before that, back in the 1980's, I was looking very hard at a little moon of Jupiter called Europa, and when I was covering the Voyager story out at JPL in the Summer of 1979, actually the spring of 1979 and the Winter of 1980, we flew this extraordinary spacecraft, NASA did, by Jupiter for the first time and encountered the four moons, you know, Io, Ganymede, Europa, Callisto, and Jupiter itself, and it was as part of that observation that I began work on essentially what turned out to be the first scientific paper, which ultimately appeared in Star and Sky Magazine in the beginning of 1980, which was a prognostication, pulling all the data together, that there might be a global ocean under the ice cover that Voyager had revealed on Europa, and that in that global ocean there actually might be some extant living life forms. Well, they used to say that if you wait long enough sometimes things come around. Well, this last year, with the Gallileo Mission, in orbit around Jupiter, some 17 years after that set of predictions, it turns out that probably we are correct."

[It should noted that Hoagland continues to advertise himself as the "originator" of the Europa Proposal. -- ED.]

After hearing Hoagland take credit for this, a mathematician by the name of Ralph Greenberg was compelled to fax Art Bell in protest, citing numerous scientists who wrote about a possible ocean on Europa before Hoagland. This can be read here. Greenberg also wrote of Hoagland's professional assault against a scientist by the name of of Steven Squyres:

"During 1996 and 1997, the subject of Richard Hoagland's January, 1980 article about Europa was mentioned rather frequently on the Art Bell Show. Once it took an extremely ugly turn when, one night, Hoagland accused a scientist named Steven Squyres of taking false credit because he failed to mention Hoagland's article in a lecture about life on Europa. Anyone who missed that can read something about it here"

Another accusation levied against Hoagland came from Richard Motzer of Scottsdale, AZ in March of '99. Here is an article he wrote, originally published here:

"The pictures on Richard Hoagland's 'Enterprise Mission' website of ABYDOS are Ruth & Harry Hover's...not Richard Hoagland's. The clear one is my own graphic clean-up of the Hover's second photo. Here is what happened: "The Hovers took two photos at ABYDOS, one of which shows the ceiling and pillars, plus the panel. It has good focus, and exposure, but is taken some distance back.

"The second picture is a close-up with good focus & exposure but she moved the camera up and to the right, causing a ghost-like shadow. They asked me if I could remove this flaw, and I said I could, using the good picture as a reference.
"Now, the next part is very important. I made several mistakes by removing icons from this photo. It was a judgement call on my part, and the ABYDOS site caught this right away. They thought I had created a HOAX but that was certainly not the case...it was just an 'overclean-up' of a legitimate photo.

"A well-known UFO researcher posted these photos on the internet without permisson from either of us quite some time ago. We had forgoten this until the FOX special. After the show, I went to Richard Hoagland's 'Enterprise Mission' website and I was stunned to find our picture there. Mr. Hoagland has been caught in a big one this time."

Now let's take a look a back at the unfortunate debacle known as the EQ Pegasi Hoax. On October 22nd, 1998, an anonymous British astronomer supposedly detected an intelligent radio signal from the constellation Pegasus. The astronomer in this case was later identified as "Paul Dore". The story became an internet frenzy, and Art Bell and Richard Hoagland immediately jumped on it and milked it for all it was worth. Hoagland even claimed that the signal came from a spaceship that was traveling towards earth from the Pegasus region. He said that the signal was sent to alert the human race that said spaceship would appear over the city of Phoenix, AZ, on December 7th.

Eventually, a British man named Paul Dore began emailing people like Seth Shostack, Dr. Paul Shuch, and Michael Theroux . Dore stated that he had absolutely nothing to do with EQ Pegasi story, and that his website was ripped off to construct a false identity. He also stated that he was not an amateur astronomer, and did not work at an engineering firm which was rumored to be his place of employment.

After a thorough debunking from the scientific community, Hoagland admitted that the alleged EQ Pegasi signal was indeed a hoax...but claimed it was perpetrated to distract us from a genuine signal sent by aliens! He even went so far as to claim that the real Paul Dore was a double agent of some kind working for the secret government. He began engaging in vicious ad homenim attacks against Dore on his website and on Coast to Coast AM. Here is an example of an especially venomous internet posting from Hoagland:

"The strange case of the EQ Pegasi "hoax" continues to get more interesting. While first denying that he had anything to with the EQ Pegasi signal reports, then claiming he was a victim of "identity theft," and then finally accusing TEM Principal Investigator Richard C. Hoagland of creating the whole thing, Paul Dore has been as elusive as the "real killers" in the OJ Simpson case. Now, thanks to some excellent detective work by David Dubowski, Dore has been exposed as the likely source of all the "hoaxed" aspects of this story.

"...Without going into the details already covered elsewhere, what is clear is that Dore was deeply involved in this operation from the beginning. His personal web site is littered with references to the EQ Pegasi issue, which he continues to maintain he had nothing to do with. If this is the case, why make so many references to it on his site? This is hardly the behavior of a man who wants to distance himself from the controversy. He has also shown himself to be someone with both the technical expertise and evidently the motivation to perpetrate such hoax. The question, as it has been all along, is why."

As elusive as the "real killers?"That's an odd statement, given the fact that Dore repeatedly emailed Hoagland, imploring him to stop publicly defaming him, or at the very least, have the common courtesy to speak with him personally before making extraordinary accusations. Also absurd is Hoagland's comment that Dore wanted to keep the story alive, since every internet posting that Dore made was in respopnse to Hoagland's public distortions of his"involvement."

Hoagland's basis for claiming that Dore was the hoaxer (allegedly employed by the black government to distract from a REAL ET signal) was an internet posting that Dore made intentionally using the identity of the hoaxer. Here is an email that Dore sent to Art Bell webmaster Keith Rowland addressing that issue:

Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 20:51:51 -0000
From: paul dore (pdore@web-computing.demon.co.uk)
To: keithr@primenet.com
Subject: RE: Me as the hoaxer

Dear Mr Rowland,

I deliberately posted a message onto the newsgroup with the return address as seticontact@deja-news.com

Reason : Because I knew it would aggravate the real hoaxer and they would not resist publishing this fact to draw attention away from themselves.

I also knew it would be tracable to my UK IP address so it would be obvious to anyone with any sense that it did not come from the real hoaxer.

Who shall I be next ? contact1450@geocites.com I think ??
(End message)

Still, Hoagland was undeterred; he continued insisting that Dore was a black op, that an ET signal had been found, and that the December 7 event in Phoneix, AZ was going to happen. Of course, December 7 came and went and absolutely nothing happened. This led Hoagland to make one of his most far-fetched claims to date: that a secret government weather control device had been implemented to create an artifical snowstorm over Turret Peak in Arizona and obstruct the giant mothership!!

Another public figure who's been the target of Hoagland's baseless accusations is Dr. Tom Van Flandren, proponent of the "Exploding Planet" theory, and investigator of the Mars face. In April of 2001, just days after Van Flandren's Meta Research group publicly presented it's investigation of new NASA photographs of the so-called Cydonia region on Mars, Hoagland went on the Art Bell show and accused Van Flandren of knowingly presenting phony and altered photographs of Martian "pyramids." One such photo of a structure called "The D & M pyramid," was said by Hoagland to have been altered by shady figures in NASA, apparently for the purpose of discrediting his research. He claimed Van Flandren knew that the D &M photo was a fake, yet he still included it in his public presentation. Hoagland called Van Flandren a "wolf in sheep's clothing" who was, in all likelihood, working for the Evil, Third Reich shadow elements of the NASA space program.

To date, neither Hoagland, nor anyone else, has presented ANY EVIDENCE which raises any questions about the validity of the D& M pyramid photo, or any other photos in Dr. Van Flandren's presentation. Some have speculated that Richard Hoagland was angered by Van Flandren's decision to not include him in his public presentation. Was Hoagland concerned that Dr. Van Flandren might be a threat to his "monopoly" as the world's supposed leading researcher on Martian anomalies?

It's also worthwhile to review Hoagland's claims regarding an alleged satellite photograph of three "asteroids" that created an internet frenzy in October of 1999. While never going so far as to state on his life that the asteroids were real, Hoagland sensationalized the story for all it was worth until he finally was forced to admit that the blurbs in the photo were not asteroids. This led him to make what was genuinely the most funny comment I have ever heard on talk-radio: that the blurbs in said photo were actually FAKE ASTEROIDS sent by benevolent extraterrestrials to warn us about REAL ASTEROIDS that were still going to hit on November 7th!!! He said that the ET prime directive, as depicted on Star Trek: The Next Generation, prohibited them from taking a more direct course of intervention.

I really don't know what more I can say that will have any impact on the hard-core Hoagland's Hoagies who see him as the savior of mankind. Either personal integrity and accountability matters to you or it doesn't. And a public figure with his level of influence should be held to far higher standards of decorum, courtesy, and honesty than Hoagland has ever displayed.

In closing, let me say that Richard Hoagland is one of the most articulate, compelling, and charismatic figures on the alternative scene. It is certainly understandable why so many are spellbound by his high-class chicanery, and it saddens me that a man with his credentials, intelligence, and personality has often chosen a lecherous path.

Email response to Goodspeed article

----- Original Message -----
From: <*******>
To: <gspeed@teleport.com>
Sent: Sunday, May 07, 2000 5:27 PM
Subject: Your wrong about Richard Hoagland , Michael....

> The funniest thing he ever suggested was that Bill Clinton went golfing at night so he could alert the public to impending >asteroid strikes.His golf balls, landing on the green,you see,were simulations of asterioids striking Earth.
>
> KEnKC