I suppose I might get called a “troll” for that kind of subject line, and I also am at risk for this post seeming to be an ad hominem, but I think it’s important to show how pseudoscientists argue when confronted by, well, any challenge to their claims. “Slippery” is the thought that came to mind yesterday while listening to an old Coast to Coast AM episode from May 26, 1998.
During the interview, Art Bell brought up one of Richard Hoagland’s critics, Ralph Greenberg, then and now a mathematics professor at the University of Washington. Prof. Greenberg heavily criticized Richard’s mathematical claims about the Cydonia region of Mars, something that I have done, as well. Basically showing that Richard was drawing lines that he claimed were significant and ignoring ones that weren’t.
Art said that Prof. Greenberg was sending him e-mail after e-mail and wanted to debate Richard Hoagland, on-air. What followed was many, many minutes of what really is best described as Richard being “slippery.” Richard ended up really arguing, in the end, that the math he claims to have found at Cydonia is meaningless because he’s moved beyond that, and Prof. Greenberg was still mired in the past and refused to consider any new arguments about things Richard was making. Which I classify as “slippery” – as well as, in hindsight knowing how things have played out over the subsequent 17 years, “disingenuous.”
Basically, Prof. Greenberg wanted to debate a specific claim. Richard wouldn’t even entertain that. Because he’s “moved beyond” it (despite clearly not). Whenever Art tried to bring it up in a different way, Richard kept saying different things to that effect, and he misrepresented Prof. Greenberg’s claims.
And, Richard does the same thing today. An excellent example is from 2010, when Richard claimed that an earthquake happened right at 19.5° on Earth. The actual center was at 18.5° N latitude, not 19.5°. When called out on that, Richard said, “I was thinking of geodetic latitude – not geographic – the latitudes change because the Earth is not a perfect sphere, it’s an oblate spheroid.”
Slippery. Why? Because it’s something that sounds plausible to almost anyone. It’s a term that seems like it could be correct. Problem is, as Expat pointed out at the time, this shifts his latitude by a mere 0.1°. Not 1.0°. And, if that were the case, everything else that he claims is at 19.5° (because that’s a magic number for him), he suddenly loses because he used geographic, not geodetic, latitude.
They are completely different kinds of examples, but I think that this illustrates well that while I may disagree with practically everything Richard Hoagland has said or done over the years, I must admit that he’s quick on his feet and clearly able to slip through peoples’ lines of defense, getting them to move on to a topic more favorable to him.
Exposing PseudoAstronomy 
Yes, those are excellent examples of RCH’s slipperiness. Actually, in the second example, he doesn’t get to move his latitude AT ALL, because geographic and geodetic are the same. The OTHER latitude is geocentric — that’s what would move 18.5 to 18.4. And note that’s it’s going in the wrong direction, too, decreasing rather than increasing. Geocentric latitude is always less than geodetic/geographic.
Comment by expat — January 4, 2016 @ 4:44 pm |
Thanks for the examples. I’m sure many of us have not followed Mr. Hoagland’s work quite as closely as yourself and expat’s. I had no idea he had said that he had “moved beyond” the Hoaglandometry claims regarding Cydonia.
I actually think your examples aren’t as different as you would suggest, since both are dealing with Hoaglandometry (Richard C, Hoagland’s misuse of geometry) and his “hyperdimensional” mathematics.
Comment by Julian Janssen — January 11, 2016 @ 4:04 pm |
To be honest, I find his progression kind of fascinating, which is why I subject myself to listening to clips I find of his. It’s also gems like this, and cases where he clearly contradicts himself (as you caught, claiming that he moved on from the face nearly 2 decades ago), are extra bits of yummy nougat that are their own reward.
Comment by Stuart Robbins — January 11, 2016 @ 7:28 pm |