Richard Charles Hoagland (born April 25, 1945) is an American author and a proponent of various conspiracy theories about NASA, lost alien civilizations on the Moon, and on Mars and other related topics.
[9] A popular planetarium lecturer at the Springfield Science Museum, Hoagland produced a program called "Mars: Infinity to 1965" to coincide with the Mariners 3 and 4 missions.
[10] He designed a room with special equipment to display the relative positions of the Earth, Mars, and the Mariners during their trip and thereafter contracted with NASA to relay the pictures of the Martian surface, on a near-live-feed, to the general audience.
[10] Hoagland co-hosted a radio program for WTIC (AM) in Hartford, Connecticut, The Night of the Encounter, along with Dick Bertel, covering the July 14, 1965 Mariner 4 flyby of the planet Mars.
[10] In 1976, Hoagland, an avid Star Trek fan, initiated a letter-writing campaign that successfully persuaded President Gerald Ford to name the first Space Shuttle the Enterprise, replacing the previously slated name for the prototype vehicle, Constitution.
[29] His book Dark Mission purports to "carefully document" how "NASA has been quite consciously, deliberately and methodically concealing from the American people and the world for all these years"[30] the "staggering truth ... [that it was not aliens but rather] ... our own ... ancestors ... who [eons ago] lived ... and built ... and walked amid" that city (emphasis in original)[31] — ditto the Moon.
[24][33][34] Similar optical illusions can be found in the geology of Earth;[35] examples include the Old Man of the Mountain, the Pedra da Gávea, and Stac Levenish.
[17] Prof. Ralph Greenberg asserted that the logic of Hoagland's deductions from the geometry of Cydonia Mensae is flawed[7] and says that he is not a trained scientist in any sense.
The claim that the crashing of the Galileo orbiter into Jupiter caused a "mysterious black spot" on the planet has since been disputed by both NASA and Plait.