Astro-debunkery central

[mmcirvin]

Phil Plait the Bad Astronomer finally gives the treatment to Richard Hoagland and his giant wad of Martian alien-artifact-conspiracy-mongering. (I think that an unfinished version of these pages had been accidentally publicized many weeks ago, and got Hoagland complaining preemptively about Plait. This is the finished version.)

I'll say in fairness to Hoagland that Plait's conclusions section doesn't quite capture the unfalsifiable, Gnostic quality of Hoagland's conspiracy reasoning (which is understandable, since, despite his excellent slam-dunking of the "Moon Hoax" story, Plait isn't primarily a student of conspiracy theorists). As far as I can tell, Hoagland thinks (or claims to think: I'm pretty sure he makes a lot of money from this stuff) that there are white hats and black hats within NASA engaged in a perpetual secret war, and the information we have is the result of the good guys slipping one out past the censors. So from his perspective the behavior of the organization as a whole doesn't have to be logically consistent.

Another thing he doesn't quite capture is how long Hoagland has been at this. Plait does mention Hoagland's non-crazy Star & Sky article about the subsurface ocean on Europa (in the context of Hoagland's false claim that he was the first person to come up with the idea—something I believed myself for years, since that article was the first place I ever read it!) But I've also seen Analog columns from the early eighties in which he obsesses over things like barely visible specks in pictures of Saturn and insists that they're probably alien artifacts. The evidence of alien artifacts is always right on the edge of resolvability. Funny, that.

(And in all those years, the man has somehow never managed to learn about the rudiments of image processing.)

Comments

[schwa242.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link to the "Bad Astronomer" site! I can now argue even better with the loonies in the bars and coffee shops about their space exploration conspiracy theories.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, my favorite is still the one where Kentucky Fried Chicken had to change their name to KFC because they used genetically modified organisms that could no longer legally be called "Chickens", and could therefore no longer use the word "Chicken". "You'll never hear them use the word ''chicken'' in a commercial maaan, just breasts and legs and dark or white meat." I taped KFC commercials and a friend who bought into this myth watch and pointed out that each commercial seems to use the word "chicken" five or six times.

-- Schwa ---

[manfire.livejournal.com]

Hey Matt, check out this astronomical site. It's pretty neato!