Richard C. Hoagland, former NASA advisor, challenges the agency’s "human error" explanation for the $125M Mars Climate Orbiter’s 1999 atmospheric miscalculation—416 million miles off-course—claiming a hidden program or sabotage altered its trajectory by a precise angle. He cites similar failures like Mars Observer (1993) and Deep Space One’s missed asteroid photos, linking them to NASA’s alleged suppression of anomalies in Cydonia’s "Face on Mars" and STS-80 shuttle footage, where objects were reportedly censored. With Congress threatening budget cuts, Hoagland and Paul Davids push for their Universal Pictures film The Face on Mars via listener emails to pressure production, suggesting deep cover-ups undermine NASA’s credibility and public trust in space exploration. [Automatically generated summary]
Oh my God, they've killed the orbiter from the high deserts to the great American Southwest.
I bid you good evening.
And or good morning, whatever the case may be, wherever you are.
And that would include commercially the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands outwest, eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north all the way to the Pole, worldwide, of course, on the internet, thanks to Broadcast.com, who distributes all of these electrons for us across the ever-widening internets.
And naturally, the Intel Corporation.
I wish I had their little logo sound to go with that.
Hey, Intel, send me your little logo sound so I can play it.
And they put together the map that allows the G2 program that allows you to see this program as it unfolds before your very eyes, which means you're just sitting there really staring at me, a talking head.
And of course, we have the webcam as well.
So a lot going on here and a lot going on tonight.
They have killed the orbiter.
And we have just the right person in the first hour to comment on it.
Richard C. Hoagland coming up.
In the next hour, the director of the motion picture, Stigmata, is going to be here.
That's going to be very interesting.
I know very, very little about the Stigmata.
So Rupert Wainwright, the director, will be here to tell us about it.
That is the top grossing movie, having just displaced the Sixth Sense in the number one spot.
So let me throw the switches here so that we can begin sending video there.
We've finally done that.
A little late.
And in a moment, we will go to Richard C. Hoagland.
I will read you a brief story.
And then Richard, as you might imagine, has some comments about the apparent occurrences of the day on the red planet.
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All right, here we go.
The Associated Press, September 23rd, a $125 million NASA spacecraft that had traveled 416 miles to Mars vanished.
Their word vanished Thursday as it was about to go into orbit around the red planet and was feared destroyed.
It was the second time in six years that a NASA spaceship was lost just as it reached Mars.
And at the risk of irritating somebody out there, Ed Dames, in fact, predicted this would occur.
The Mars Climate Orbiter, which was on a mission to study that planet's weather and look for signs of water, apparently, like the wax figure you recall, flew too close to the Martian atmosphere and broke apart or burned up.
The agency said, broke apart or burned up.
Human or software error was probably to blame.
NASA said mechanical problems were ruled out.
Now, I wish to consider that line, so remember that line.
Will you please?
Human or software error was probably to blame.
The apparent loss after the $1 billion Mars observer probe disappeared back in 1993 comes as Congress is threatening to cut a large portion of NASA's space exploration budget, and the agency is trying to show that it can design faster, cheaper, better missions.
They were going to establish that as the low point of the orbit.
The burn of the engine, the retro rocket, started about five minutes before they went over the hill, meaning they went around the back of Mars and disappeared, radio line of sight, from the Earth because they went into the shadow, the radio shadow of the planet.
And they had predicted, which I find absolutely impossible.
It's like something commanded that spacecraft to make a sharp turn so that the thrust, instead of being straight back, was at an angle driving them deeper into the atmosphere.
That looks like a deliberate sabotage or a deliberate program, but not an error.
The reason is that these computer programs are checked multiple times against the ground computers.
Whoever said that is right, but that's not the problem tonight because what we're told is not that the Mars atmosphere was fluffier and denser and caused the unexpected drag.
We're saying that they dove in 12.5 to 15 miles deeper than they should have.
I think it was an angle, which is an attitude, meaning the spacecraft was skewed so that it was actually shifting toward Mars as it was also slowing down.
And now hidden from the honest guys at NASA, because the little clique that's been running things, doing all the symbolism and hiding spacecraft and making things go away and keeping pictures away from us, that little clique, for some reason, is getting really desperate.
And in this move, which any honest rocket scientist looking at this is going to be very suspicious, this is tantamount to the discovery of the AWACO tapes regarding the machine gun fire on the one side of the building and the discovery of pyrotechnics, et cetera, et cetera.
For the people in the know in NASA, this will stink to high heaven because it just makes no sense.
Software is very stupid and follows rules.
And the way you find out whether you've got a problem is you run the program, you run it on the ground in a simulation.
I don't know that I agree with as far as you go, but look, if they had that kind of little kind of, I mean, here they're saying essentially, oh, well, you know, mistakes will happen in the space program, and I think everybody understands that.
But that wasn't their attitude about Cassini that got a damn sight, or closer, I think just as close to Earth.
Well, it was about 700 miles miss distance, but remember, if you miss by 12 to 15 miles, in terms of the Earth, a 12 or 15 mile miss because of the gravity would have curved you around in a way that you would have totally missed Saturn.
And if you had missed on the mid-course by 12 or 15 miles, which was several months back, you would have hit Earth.
In other words, this is an error which propagates with time.
And if it can happen on such a routine operation, as we have done so many times in the past 30 years, this is the same mission profile that was flown by Mars Surveyor a couple of years ago.
Same mission profile that's been flown by the Voyagers and by the Vikings and by the Mariners.
I mean, this is not a new thing.
We're not at the beginning of the learning curve.
We're at the end of a generational plus learning curve, and we're doing stupid things.
Now, why were we doing stupid things?
Because, boys, we know more now, and there are certain things That everybody, the rest of us out here paying for it, are not supposed to know.
And it was doing great and doing all its neat stuff and programming itself and not navigating itself and not reporting home until it had to talk to anybody.
And they get to the asteroid, and guess what?
It points the camera in the wrong direction, boys and girls.
It doesn't know where the asteroid is.
And when you deconvolve that, it's crap.
It's more gobbledygook.
Because to navigate autonomously, meaning by itself without instructions from Earth, the onboard system had to have sensors to find the asteroid, plot it against the background stars, calculate the engine burns, calculate the angles, do all of the energy.
Well, the reason we got no pictures is because they saw something they don't want us to see.
And it's time the American people say enough is enough.
Well, in the next half hour, I'm going to tell you what you can do tonight and tomorrow morning that can help put a stop to this nonsense once and for all.
We have got a major new plan to unveil tonight.
And the coincidence of me being here in Los Angeles at Paul David's house working on this as this faux pas happens on global television is pretty astonishing.
In other words, what's the difference between the hand of man and software?
They seem to want to delineate here.
It was the hand of man that wrote the software.
Like an airplane flight, taking off and landing, or taking off and entering a satisfactory orbit, are the two most critical parts of any flight or space mission of sort we're conducting.
A $125 million spacecraft called the Mars Climate Orbiter that had traveled 416 million miles to Mars has, according to stories out there, vanished, re-entered, burned up, been destroyed, or maybe not.
Richard C. Hoagland is here, and he'll be right back with more.
How would you like to look and feel 10 years younger in 10 weeks?
Now there's...
Here we go again.
We have an apparently a destroyed spacecraft now.
Richard is saying that he believes that it may in fact be not destroyed, but still up there taking pictures of things that he believes NASA does not want us to see.
Now, I have something I want to say.
I don't necessarily agree with Richard.
And I know I'll stick my neck out here and I'm going to let Richard come right back at me.
But whatever else NASA is or isn't, I just don't think they are that kind of organization.
I mean, a $125 million taxpayer spacecraft.
Hard as it is to understand how this error could have been made.
You know, there's still some of the old Boy Scout in me, and I just can't believe that NASA would do that, that they would conduct a charade, or if you wish, charade, of sending a spacecraft that far for that much just to do it in when it arrives, or do it in as far as the public is concerned.
Either way you want to look at it, that there would be a conspiracy that big, I just can't believe it.
Richard, that's still in me, and I just can't wrap my mind around that one, partner.
I know what you believe, and now you can make your case, but that's my case.
Well, but in a weird way, Art, we're saying exactly the same thing, because I agree with you.
This is not NASA.
This is not the agency.
From day one, when I stood at the National Press Club and we gave our press conference a couple days After it had been announced six years ago that Mars Observer had disappeared in an eerily similar fashion, I made crystal clear that we were dealing with what I termed at that time a rogue element.
This is what is so eerie and what relates specifically to this announcement I'm going to make in a couple of minutes here.
We had sources, four different engineers inside NASA who called me after the so-called disappearance six years ago and told me it was alive and well and had been taken into the black.
And when you start to go through the detailed timeline of all the efforts that were conducted to bring it back, to find it, to rescue it, determine if it was still alive somewhere out there six years ago, you find the one thing that was never done, which was inexplicable and is unaddressed to this day.
And that is they did not reboot the backup computer.
Well, if I send a secret set of commands to the backup computer to take control of the mission at a critical time, and in essence, change the phone number of the front computer, and then tell the front computer, oh, and if they call, you don't answer, then a small group of guys in a basement with a set of computers can hijack any damn mission they want to with absolutely no knowledge of the majority on this part of the agency.
Because those pictures are coming down through one pipeline that goes through Michael Malin's office, and he, by contract, doesn't have to show anybody else in NASA anything he ever takes.
He is legally a man unto himself.
He is autonomous.
He is God.
He is the king of the solar system.
You know, think of Jim Cameron on the front of the Titanic.
Whereas with the Mars Climactic Orbiter, the data stream and the discovery process is contractually different.
So it would be much more difficult for them to sequester from the honest guys in NASA.
Remember, it's not us that they're doing this for.
It's for the honest part of the system, the folks inside the agency who, after a year ago, when the Mars surveyor pictures were taken of Sidonia, we have had reports of all kinds of dissensions in the honest ranks.
Either here were looking at Sidonia, those pictures, the cat box image included, and saying, oh my God, look at that.
Yeah, but all right, here's another one for you, Richard, for you to think about.
NASA is right at sort of a cutting-edge juncture point where they're about to perhaps lose more funding yet, more funding going away for the space program.
And failures like these, sure as hell, aren't going to help them get the funding they must have and surely do want.
So why would they allow this to occur at such a politically inconvenient time?
This one, which I'll send you a copy of, shows something in Earth orbit, and the ground camera commander from Houston is zooming in on the anomalous object.
SPS-96 is the mission, which shows something equally anomalous below the shuttle.
And then when the camera is remote controlled and zooms in on it, that's when it's censored, and you go to black and cut back to the inside of mission control.
Let me tell you what we're up to here and why this is so incredibly coincidental.
Ever since Mars Observer disappeared, I have been quietly working with Paul, Paul Davids, who, as you know, did Roswell, the very now classic Showtime film.
I am here to tell you tonight that literally as we speak, one of the people who is listening per chance to the show is a gentleman named Ron Meyer, who just happens to be the chairman of Universal Pictures, who is an Art Bell fan.
listens to the show?
He's all about our work and all that.
At his request this week, the script went to him and other key executives at Universal pending a decision as to whether Universal Pictures will make this into a major motion picture.
And in part, it is the story, the inside story, of what we have now figured out about what happened six years ago to an eerie replay of tonight, the Missing Mars Observer.
These resources, think of the resources we will have at our command.
We have written one hell of a semi-fictionalized, semi-documentary, and we're not going to know where the real stuff ends and the fictional stuff begins because we've been pretty good at that.
I've made it here with a master.
And by the way, he's got another film you're going to see someday called Starry Night, which is an incredibly interesting version of Vincent Van Gogh's life that you'll never believe when you see it.
Then when it asks for comment, you know, let them know what you think.
I don't want to dictate what you say, but I think this would be an incredible political leverage to finally blow the doors wide open because it will give us the multi-millions of dollars to do what we need to do to bring closure.
I've asked twice before for everyone in this country to do two very important things.
Remember, when people say the government is against this, that's wrong.
The government is intensely factionalized.
It's like a series of middle-ages baronal fiefdoms.
And there are warring factions.
I am here.
I have had dinner in the last week with some people who are very plugged into the military, industrial, black ops, NASA process.
They have told us some pretty astonishing things about an opening of the system.
Now, as I was reading the tea leaves, you know, literally looking at that in the context of the last 16 years of this journey we've been on, suddenly I get the news today that this new spacecraft suddenly has gone missing.
Well, if there's a deep black group that is determined at all costs to keep us from knowing what's there, and there's a larger circle of people who don't think we're ready, but now they begin to think that maybe it's time to get us ready, then there's an intense competition between these two groups, and the only avenue left for the deep black group might be to take the new spacecraft offline because the technology would be such that it would be hard to keep the new pictures from the honest guys.
And it's the honest guys in the system that are at Achilles' heel.
So you can imagine into the pot if we can throw a major motion picture done by a major motion picture studio.
We know we've done it on the Miami Circle, and there's stunning new developments there, which we don't have time to get to tonight, but we will in the next few days.
We got pictures a year ago.
Remember when I was on the show the last time, I said we were coming up on an opportunity for images on the 27th of August.
Now, suppose that image somehow got out into the general NASA community inside the system.
Suppose then there was a demand with the new spacecraft, which has better cameras and could be put into a better orbit, to get even better data on a much more periodic basis.
Would it not be a reason why suddenly you have to, quote, lose a whole spacecraft so you don't have the capability again for the honest guys who are going to make the final political decision within the system?
Remember the quotes from Borman and Lovell and Anders on Apollo 8 when they were told by mission control, we'll lose you over the hill at 10, 19, 37 and for three-tenths of a second.
And at 10, 19, 37, and three-tenths, bingo, the radios go dead.
And Lovell turns to Anders and says, boy, they're damn good.
And their lives depended on it.
Because if they had been 12 and a half miles too low, they would have crashed into the moon.