Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization (40 page)

Sitchin does not hesitate to stake his claim: “I think that I achieved it.” For him it is clear, Nibiru is and remains the twelfth planet.

40
Artifacts in Space

For Author Richard Hoagland, the Trail of Ancient ETs Is Getting Much Warmer

J. Douglas Kenyon

S
ince its discovery in 1981, a gigantic and enigmatic face gazing upward from the Cydonia region of Mars has held out the tantalizing promise of scientific proof that intelligent life in the universe is not unique to Earth. Though photographed from a satellite five years earlier, the face had gone officially unnoticed, so the space expert Richard Hoagland (author of
The Monuments of Mars
) and his associates, including many top scientists and engineers who felt anything but optimistic about the chances for an effective official follow-up, proceeded to launch their own investigation.

The photos of the “Face on Mars” and an apparent complex of ruins nearby were subjected to years of exhaustive research. Utilizing the most advanced tools of scientific analysis, The Mars Mission, as the group terms itself, has produced more than enough evidence to argue plausibly that the objects of Cydonia are the remains not only of an ancient civilization, but also of one possessed of a science and technology well beyond our own.

The startling possibility that such artifacts exist has created considerable public pressure to return to the Red Planet and was cause for more than a little consternation in the summer of 1993, when NASA lost contact with its Mars Observer probe just as it was about to begin a detailed photographic survey that could have proved the issue, one way or the other.

How long must we now wait until the argument can be tested? Well, perhaps not too long after all. As it turns out, the cherished, concrete evidence that man is not alone in the universe may well exist in our own backyard—relatively speaking, as the Hoagland group claims to have discovered, in numerous NASA photographs, evidence of an ancient civilization on our closest neighbor, the Moon. And in this case, if NASA isn’t up to the verification job, Hoagland insists that he and his backers are. The result could be the first privately funded mission to the Moon.

If anybody can pull it off, Hoagland may be the man. For more than twenty-five years a recognized authority on astronomy and space exploration, Hoagland has served as a consultant for all of the major broadcast networks. Among his many valued contributions to history and science, the best remembered is probably his conception, along with Eric Burgess, of Mankind’s First Interstellar Message in 1971: an engraved plaque carried beyond the solar system by the first man-made object to escape from the Sun’s influence, Pioneer 10.

Hoagland and Burgess originally took the idea to Carl Sagan, who successfully executed it aboard the spacecraft, and subsequently acknowledged their creation in the prestigious journal
Science
. It was Hoagland who proposed the Apollo 15 experiment in which astronaut David Scott, before a worldwide TV audience, simultaneously dropped a hammer and a falcon feather to see if it was true—as Galileo had predicted—that both would land at the same time. Once again, Galileo was vindicated. Since the 1981 discovery of the Face on Mars, Hoagland had devoted most of his time to the pursuit of scientific evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Atlantis Rising
spoke with Hoagland the day after Hollywood’s latest space epic,
Stargate,
opened nationwide to enormous audiences. Because the film deals with the idea of extraterrestrial intervention in Earth’s history, we wanted to know what portents, if any, he saw. “The problem with the movie,” Hoagland said, “is that the vehicle for anything interesting isn’t there after the first half hour. It disintegrated into a kind of shoot-’em-up with an awful lot of ends totally unfulfilled.” But the film’s quality—or lack of it—notwithstanding, Hoagland is encouraged by the public reception. “The fact that people are rushing to see this indicates to me there is almost an archetypal compulsion to know more, and if we put together the right vehicle, which we are attempting to do, we may have a ready audience.”

Hoagland was alluding to a couple of film projects, now in the talking stages, based on the Mars and Moon work. The outcome, hopefully, will be both a scientific documentary and a fictionalized treatment presenting some of the more speculative aspects of the research. Such matters, though, are not his primary concern.

Uppermost in Hoagland’s mind and in those of his associates are recent discoveries on the Moon. In clear NASA photos, some nearly thirty years old—from both manned and unmanned missions, from orbiters and landers—can be seen giant structures unexplainable by any known geology—what Hoagland calls “architectural stuff.”

“In sharp contrast to the Mars data, where we have been constrained to look at two or three pictures of the Cydonia region with increasingly better technology—3D tools, color, polarametric, and geometric measurements—with the Moon we are data-rich. We have literally thousands, if not millions, of photographs.”

Yet with pictures taken from many directions and many different lighting conditions, angles, and circumstances, Hoagland’s team has produced “stunning corroboration” that all the photos are of the “same highly geometric, highly structural, architectural stuff.” In fact, he says, “in many cases, the architects on our team now are able to recognize the standard Buckminster Fuller tetrahedal truss, a hexagonal [six-sided] design, with cross bars for bracing. I mean, we’re looking at standard engineering, though obviously not created by human beings.”

The structure appears to be very ancient, “battered to hell by meteors . . . it looks like it had gone through termite school. It’s been moth-eaten and shattered and smashed by countless bombardments,” he says. “The edges are soft and fuzzy because of micro-meteorite abrasions like sand blasting.”

Hoagland explains that on an airless world, there’s nothing to impede a meteor from reaching the surface or reaching a structure on the ground. Nevertheless, he says, “we’re seeing a prodigious amount of structural material.” Spread over a wide area, the material is turning up at several locations. “It looks as if we’re seeing fragments of vast, contained enclosures—domes—although they are not inverted salad bowls. They are much more geometric, more like the step pyramids of the Biosphere II in Arizona. We’re looking at something that is extraordinarily ancient, left by someone not of this Earth, not of this solar system, but from someplace else.”

One of the most interesting structures appears to be an enormous freestanding tower, “a crystalline glasslike, partially preserved structure—a kind of a megacube—standing on the remnants of a supporting structure roughly seven miles over the southwest corner of a central part of the Moon called the Sinus Medii region.”

If all of this exists, one of the most important questions may be: Why didn’t NASA notice? If Hoagland is right, he says, “Something funny has been going on.” Indeed.

Recently Hoagland presented the lunar material at Ohio State University. In the months since, discussions have raged on the Internet, Prodigy, CompuServe, and other online computer services. Many questions now being put to him are coming from scientists and engineers within NASA, many of whom have had direct experience with the lunar program, yet have been kept in the dark regarding any ET evidence. Hoagland has passed on the present state of the research and asked for input, and he’s left with the inescapable impression that, as he puts it, “something incredible has been missed.”

As Hoagland sees it, there are only two possible explanations: “Either we’re dealing with incredible dumbness, in which case we spent twenty billion dollars for nothing because we went there, took photographs, came home and didn’t realize what we were seeing, or we’re dealing with the careful manipulation of the many by the few.”

The latter may not be as implausible as it might at first sound. “If you’re in a system that is cornerstoned on honesty, integrity, openness, full disclosure,” he explains, “and there are folks in there who are operating contrary to those precepts, they won’t get caught because no one is suspicious.”

Actually, Hoagland has moved beyond suspicion to belief, and he says he can prove his point. The “smoking gun” is a report by the Brookings Institution, commissioned by NASA at its inception in 1959. Entitled “Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs,” the study “examines the impact of NASA discoveries on American society ten, twenty, thirty years down the road,” Hoagland says. “On page 215 it discusses the impact of the discovery of evidence of either extraterrestrial intelligence—i.e., radio signals—or artifacts left by that intelligence, on some other body in the solar system.

“The report names three places that NASA might expect to find such artifacts—the Moon, Mars, and Venus. It then goes on to discuss the anthropology, the sociology, and the geopolitics of such a discovery. And it makes the astounding recommendation that, for fear of social dislocation and the disintegration of society, NASA might wish to consider
not
telling the American people. It’s right there in black and white. It recommends censorship. Now that’s what they’ve been doing,” Hoagland says.

Hoagland believes that the anthropologist Margaret Mead, one of the authors of the report, was responsible for the recommendation, which he believes came out of her experience in American Samoa. In the 1940s, Mead witnessed the devastation of primitive societies exposed for the first time to sophisticated Western civilization. “That experience so moved her,” says Hoagland, “so changed her perspectives that when she examined the whole ET possibility, she projected and mapped on that experience. She basically felt that if we even learned of the existence of extraterrestrials, it could destroy us; therefore people can’t be told.”