Review of Richard Hoagland's Dark Mission

16/12/2007

Hoagland, Richard C. and Mike Bara. Dark Mission. Los Angeles: Feral House, 2007. ISBN 1-932595-26-0.

First, here is a rather facetious review of Hoagland's book:
 

"Author Richard C. Hoagland first came to prominence as an “independent researcher” and advocate that “the face on Mars” was an artificially-constructed monument built by an ancient extraterrestrial civilisation. Hoagland has established himself as one of the most indefatigable and imaginative pseudoscientific crackpots on the contemporary scene, and this œuvre pulls it all together into a side-splittingly zany compendium of conspiracy theories, wacky physics, imaginative image interpretation, and feuds within the “anomalist” community—a tempest in a crackpot, if you like.
Hoagland seems to possess a visual system which endows him with a preternatural ability, undoubtedly valuable for an anomalist, of seeing things that aren't there. Now you may look at a print of a picture taken on the lunar surface by an astronaut with a Hasselblad camera and see, in the black lunar sky, negative scratches, film smudges, lens flare, and, in contrast-stretched and otherwise manipulated digitally scanned images artefacts of the image processing filters applied, but Hoagland immediately perceives “multiple layers of breathtaking ‘structural construction’ embedded in the NASA frame; multiple surviving ‘cell-like rooms,’ three-dimensional ‘cross-bracing,’ angled ‘stringers,’ etc… all following logical structural patterns for a massive work of shattered, but once coherent, glass-like mega-engineering” (p. 153, emphasis in the original). You can see these wonders for yourself on Hoagland's site, The Enterprise Mission. From other Apollo images Hoagland has come to believe that much of the near side of the Moon is covered by the ruins of glass and titanium domes, some which still reach kilometres into the lunar sky and towered over some of the Apollo landing sites."

Combat Diaries Comment

Well the very best of luck to Hoagland I say. His account compares well with Collin's book Exempt from Disclosure and the "evidence" for UFOs given by Robert Dean in the Project Camelot interview http://openmindsforum.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=29&Itemid=2

Dean's description of  Colonel Corso talking to aliens in an area of White Sands Test Range in the early 1960s is most revealing. It appears that the aliens always like the smart trendy technology of a particular era; the lower spectrum of inspirations does not interest them. They do not appear in old Mrs Benson's dilapidated greenhouse, at clog-dancing festivals, the giving of the Dunmow Flitch, or at the Welsh National Eisteddfod. Neither do they appear at English "literary" festivals where fat upper-middle-class lesbians from Bloomsbury tell with joy of father's coming out as a homosexual. One suspects that the aliens would avoid also such English twilight zones as Manchester on a Sunday, Radio 4, and the Queen's Christmas broadcast.

Of course in the media age of our Entertainment State the Fortean view is that we just have to be suspicious of the real/unreal distinctions of the essentially Victorian mechanical world. Such claims as those of Dean and Hoagland are claims which are neither real nor unreal, right or wrong; they can be viewed as cyber metatexts which occupy (apologies for the spatial metaphor) new dimensions of perception and imply indeed a new state of matter in which both mind and thought processes are seen in quite different perspectives. We do not bother to call an actor's performance real or unreal in the lower-case click-clunk sense. In the classic Fortean sense, the claims for scientific "reality" alone are as hilarious as those claims of the "new cosmology," which is virtual cave painting by numbers. For instance, almost all commentators on such use the present tense when describing the cosmic picture: "Supermassive (sic) Black Hole Seen Blasting Neighboring (sic) Galaxy." The reporting of cosmic events as occurring in "real" time turns a whole branch of science into show-biz to join East Enders, a mugging, or a stream of reporter, lawyers, and psychiatrists surrounding a screaming Amy Winehouse as she is arrested and dragged off to jail. With Prime Time as the only measure of time in Entertainment State, there is no difference in performances, whether it be the doings of the blushing Hubble folk or  Pete Docherty. Like Pete and Amy, cosmic events are reported in changing (daily!) soap-opera episodes as is most of  scientific "progress."

Matter as Media

Seen in this light of  such accepted mythologizing, both Dean, Hoagland, and Collins may well be off the hook. They might be (possibly unknown to them) pioneers of a new kind of cyber-art expression whose Web architecture consists of networks of mass-suggestion memes. In this sense, Ufology could be seen as a new kind of cyber art-form or new social comedy whose fighting claims for the real and the unreal are its most distinctive and hilarious feature. As a whole body, Ufology could rival Aristophanes Lysistrata. This might are might well save Ufology from historo-cultural oblivion. This would be a death dealt by by polytech filing-clerks with second-rate minds wielding the bench physics of 1900.

These very mixed modes of perception within our burgeoning Entertainment State may give us some kind of idea of how an alien mind might work. It will work by memes and media, not mechanisms; communication will be by image, symbol, and metaphor, not facts. Evolution may well have got rid of such crude deceptions as "objective concepts," which were made of pure cultural theatre anyway. Thus the form of the alien may well be a liminal form within which "matter" becomes put media and information in a kind of Matrix Web, which I call a  suggestion complex.

Of course in the case of SERPO and CHAD, these being suggestion systems of belief-manipulation, we have a new menace: mind control of both individuals and their societies by vast multi-media advertising, gaming, glamour, and entertainment systems. Discursive arguments within "factual" frameworks  have already become historical remnants, obsolete as the horn of the rhino. The panto-babes and child-brides of Entertainment State have taken over.  Nursery-rhyme actors  without any discernable education or knowledge make statements which are regarded as valuable as any statements based on "fact"  given by the dour professors of the old world with their spanner-rules and facts versus fictions.

Already in these terms science is being seen as the elaborate stage structure of a monumental performance game which will of cause eventually run out of resources, just as did the woolly mammoth and the Great Apes. Some not-to-distant future will not be digging out bones, but episodes of Howdy Doody. Encrusted thongs and fossilised G-strings will become Holy Relics.

New Ufology

If all our experience is pure information, then all levels of experience are signal-accessible. People are being made of advertising stuff in terms of character, nuance and infinitely processed fantasies and dreams. That means that just like a computer our mental processes can be damaged or taken over.

Despite the dangers, Matter conceived as being made of pure information (instead of being "solid" or "objective") offers our culture something strange, new, and exciting as regards growth and formation of just about everything we understand about ourselves as thinking beings. The idea of both Thought and Matter being differently modulated forms of information changes our entire framework of perception as concerns the structure and interpretation of how anomalies such as the UFO function within experience. 

This view changes profoundly how we view the UFO and many other such anomalies. We modulate, we re-design, we structure reality as a flexible system of sanctions and allowances. As Augustus Codex said, "Like the UFO, the alien is neither real nor unreal. The alien is under construction."

This is what I call New Ufology.

In the Fortean/Borges sense the anomaly is designed as a necessary subversion of all experience. Thus does the cyber complex evolve into a meta-biosynthesis.

We are at present baffled by this new world of the almost-appearances of almost-objects and their trails of almost-events. By analogy, our position is that of 19th century scientists having to account for  nuclear radiation. To explain the scars on Marie Curie's hands the whole and entire field of physics had to rejected as being no longer an adequate description of  the physical universe. The UFO phenomenon is part of a similar pattern of events. As Augustus Codex said, "In the old days we measured things, we read the time tables of the world, and we reached for the OFF switch. Entertainment State is a metaphysical fluid. There is no OFF switch. You don't even need a TV set." In this respect if Old Ufology does not rapidly up-date itself, it will look like something from the ruins of Rome.

The work of Charles Fort on anomalies is essential in this respect. Fort is a big-systems analyser. Far superior to Marx in his thinking, he was the first writer to show (way before Thomas Khun) how a modern industrial society organises information. Fort must rescued from the pre-electric gnarled hobbits, wrinkled hippies, Nessie-gnomes and countless Potters and Wombles with their twee eccentricities and hole in the corner "curiosities," see my award-winning biography of Fort, Politics of the Imagination.

See also my essay Meme Wars: We Have an Agenda http://realityuncovered.com/memewars.shtml and also

Andrew Orlowski's essay "Google's Good Idea" (below) on the commercial metaphysics of postmodern information theory http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/14/googlepedia_announced/

Orlowski says:

"Perhaps we can think of it as 2.0 update of Marx's view of history, in which tragedy is repeated as farce. When farcical history repeats itself, it comes with text ads?"
 

CB (we Poles are the best!)

Here is the latest glowing contribution to the great Hoagland debate:

Hoagland Press Conference

by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, December 17, 2007

Few have noticed the monolithic raspberry on the Mars face.

Hoagland appears to have missed this.

credit: T. Warchocki

"The classic movie A Christmas Story—currently in heavy rotation on cable—features a subplot involving the hero, Ralphie, who is excited to finally receive his Lil’ Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Ring. He has been waiting forever to join the exclusive fraternity of people who have access to the secret knowledge broadcast to everybody on the radio. But when he decodes his first message he is stunned to learn that it is a commercial for Ovaltine. He swears and throws it in the trash. That kind of intense disappointment must greet conspiracy buffs virtually every day. They’re looking for some great secret message, something that gives them access to the hidden world that they know is out there. But what they often get is lame, stupid, boring—a commercial pitch to “buy my book.” Most of them are so thrilled to be part of the club that, unlike Ralphie, they don’t realize that they’re being had." "

CB: the only trouble with this argument is that some alien commercial for the equivalent to Ovaltine is most likely be received as an alien signal or appearance. When the hatch is opened on a landed saucer, it is more than likely that  some Prime-Time version of Screaming Lord Sutch will appear. This will be a great disappointment especially to the breathlessly expectant bourgeoisie. They expect an alien Stanton Friedman with a row of pens in his top pocket, and his arms full of the blacksmith's secrets of the bench-physics of the 19th century.