Richard C. Hoagland and Thomas van Flandern debate NASA’s 2007 Mars mission claims, citing high-res Cydonia photos revealing Tholis’ "ruined tetrahedron" (100–75 ft wide) with latticework and a 19.5° geometric alignment to another structure, arguing artificiality despite van Flandern’s skepticism. Hoagland highlights metallic domes north of Tholis, while van Flandern dismisses them as isolated anomalies, insisting the Face remains the sole "smoking gun." Speculation ties NASA Administrator Dan Golden and ex-NSA head Admiral Bobby Inman to alleged cover-ups, culminating in a Scottsdale seminar on Mars mysteries—just before Art Bell’s April 26 retirement and Mike Siegel’s succession. The episode blurs science with conspiracy, leaving Mars’ secrets—and NASA’s motives—unresolved. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, it's important to know this is a drama that's been going on for 20-some years.
The first photographs were taken in the summer of 1976 by Viking.
They came out in a very curious way, tongue-in-cheek.
Jerry Sauffin, the Viking program scientist, stood up in front of a bunch of us at JPL on an afternoon and said, isn't it funny what tricks a light and shadow can do?
And showed the face in close-up.
And it was splotchy, and it had noise in it, and it had pixel dropouts and transmission errors.
And I mean, it just looked like crud.
And we all said, ah, it went away.
And he said at the same time, oh, by the way, when we took a picture a few hours later, the whole thing was just a trick of light and shadow.
It had all gone away.
Well, many, many years later, and I've written an entire book describing this in exquisite, excruciating detail, called The Monuments of Mars, A City on the Edge of Forever, which you can get at Amazon.
Anyway, I described the process of investigation by DiPietro and Molinar and the teams I put together, people like Mark Carlano and, of course, Ben Flandern and Errol Torren and a whole bunch of scientists, really solid people, who basically have said over the last generation, Art, wait a minute, NASA, you're not playing with a full deck here.
This is an extraordinarily interesting and important problem.
If those of us that have looked at this are right, then everything changes.
And Stan McDaniel, who of course was at that time the head of the philosophy department of Sonoma State University, wrote a 300 or 400 page report with exquisite, careful, meticulous footnotes, which was sent to NASA a couple of days before the next mission after Viking, Mars Observer, was supposed to go and maybe take new pictures.
And the day or two after that report arrived, where there was a scathing indictment in McDaniel's report that NASA was about to commit the most egregious crime against science in the history of science by ignoring Sidonia, the whole spacecraft disappeared.
And Dr. Tom, Michael Malin rather, was the principal investigator on the camera on that mission.
He was as resolute then as he apparently is now that this is all nonsense.
Well, neither was I. Anyway, fast-forwarding the film, the Mars Surveyor was the replacement for Mars Observer, and it went up a couple three years ago and has been in orbit now taking pictures.
Two years ago, in April of 1998, after this audience, the folks listening to my voice, expressed their constitutionally given opinion to Dan Golden and John Holloman and Ted Koppel and a whole bunch of other folks, we want those pictures, suddenly, miraculously, magically, Dan Golden said, okay, and Carl Pilcher, his deputy, set up a formal agreement with JPL and with Malin to take three images across the month of April, 98, which they did.
Unfortunately, the images were very, very, very, very poor.
Oh, this camera and that spacecraft have given us gangbuster views of Mars.
I mean, right now, on the websites all over the world and on the news wires, you can see images of the South Pole where you can almost count the penguins.
But they're crystal clear, razor-sharp, nice shadows, wonderful, you know, gamma, everything you'd want.
Just somehow, every time this camera tries to take Sidonia, it doesn't quite work out well.
So, up until two years ago, we thought we weren't going to get pictures.
Then suddenly, because of the outpourings of this audience, we got pictures.
And they said, okay, that's all we're going to get.
My friend John Holloman, God rest his soul, went to Golden after he received hundreds and hundreds of emails and asked, Dan, you know, what's with this?
Are you going to, you know, satisfy people?
And Golden made the promise to him on a stack of whatever they do at NASA headquarters that he would continue taking pictures.
This is a direct quote, which will be in my very extensive piece that I'm doing with Mike Berra on our website sometime between now and next couple of days.
We've had a lot of work to try to do, so we decided tonight to put up images first so people can see some of the real goodies that we found that Tom and I are going to get.
So just keep going to enterprise mission.com or to artbell.com, and at some point, magically, you will see some astonishing things that we are going to talk about over the next 45 minutes.
People who look at these and say, oh, I can spot the artificial stuff.
Yeah, there's the bandshell, and there's the Yankees Mets game.
I mean, come on.
When you look at satellite reconnaissance imagery over the last 30, 40 years, there are teams of experts who sit in rooms looking at high-res images like we've got here with magnifying glasses and computer enhancements and all kinds of algorithms that do this for a living and get paid very, very well.
And we're all doing this almost on a volunteer basis, and we've got a few other things to do.
So, yeah, it kind of wound up at the last minute.
But it's going to be there, and you have a five-hour show, so it's going to be there during the program.
You know, obviously we've been very suspicious that something is rotten in Denmark because they sat in this drawer.
There is an agreement on the JPL website that was hammered out between the SPSR people.
That's the Society for Planetary SETI, which includes people like McDaniel and Carlado and Horace Crater and a whole bunch of scientists that I brought into this game many, many years ago, and ourselves as part of the Art Bell contingent, which formed the political action side of things.
And we together forced NASA to do what it didn't want to do over somebody's dead body, namely take these first pictures three years ago.
There is an agreement to that, to what was actually going to happen henceforth on the JPL website, which will be linked to the things we're going to post in the next few days.
In that agreement, it specifically says, it specifically states that NASA, the Mars Surveyor Project, JPL, whatever, will give adequate warning when a Sidonia imaging pass was coming up.
That was so everybody would be on the same level playing field.
No hanky-panky of hiding pictures or doctoring pictures or doing God knows what with pictures.
Because one of the strips that Malin took and then sat on was a high-resolution pass over this remarkable thing at the end of the Sidonia complex, at the eastern end, called the Tholis, which looks initially kind of like Silvery Hill in England, taken on an aerial photograph.
That thing on the top is kind of like a ditch or a moat or something.
But the neat discoveries, and there should be a composite up there, is that when we look now at these extraordinary high-res images, which have probably four or five feet per pixel.
Now, what is remarkable is, if you look at the map on the far right of the picture, that tetrahedron, the folus, is at 19.5 degrees to the other tetrahedron up on the rim of the crater to the north of it.
And so you've got two tetrahedrons connected by a 19.5 angle to the cliff.
And of course, the circumscribed angle, if you put a tetrahedron in a sphere, where it touches is 19.5 north or south.
So there's a redundancy, an overwhelming redundancy here, which is just wondrous.
I mean, this is what science is.
It's confirmation of the model.
There's a hole or a crevice or something to the south of the apex of this.
We speculated in the Viking photographs, what in the world was that?
Somebody, you know, I think it was Carlado, thought it might have been the entrance.
When you look at that in detail now, I'm looking at it.
You see there is structure, there is lattice work, there are girders, there are structural supports.
Looking at overall of the new images so far, I didn't see and both Richard and I, I should say, have seen things in there that fascinate us, but I didn't see anything and I haven't seen a report of anything that I would classify as smoking gun evidence of artificiality that can begin to compare with the evidence we already had from the face.
I think it's more than one, because we now know that he's had 15 opportunities to cross Sidonia since last April 98.
And what the pattern appears to be is that every time he went across Sidonia, he took pictures.
Now, I find that extraordinary given his public position.
He said at meetings, and Tom was actually a witness, where he stood up and apparently decried and lamented how Dan Golan had twisted his arm and forced him to do this, and it was damn not science, and it was stupid, and it was ridiculous, and he felt embarrassed, and he'd never do it again.
And we find now that quietly, behind the scenes, he's been taking every picture he could.
Yeah, I know, but the question would be, Tom, if what you're saying professionally is accurate, that the best case is for the face regarding artificiality, almost beyond any shadow of a doubt, pun intended, then where the hell are the pictures of the face?
We'll be right back.
How many opportunities?
15 opportunities?
It is, even if you look at the last movie, the most interesting part of Mars, and where are the photos, huh?
Richard C. Hoagland is here along with Professor Tom Van Clanrich.
We are discussing the high-resolution photographs of the Cydonia Arium minus, the face, which is like talking about a body without a face, trying to describe a body without a face.
But these really are high-res photos, and the entrance really is interesting.
We're going to get the professor's take on that in a moment.
All right, once again, Richard C. Hoagland and Professor Tom Van Flandren.
And Professor, we were just talking about, you know, we've got these wonderful high-res photographs of part of the Sidonia region minus the all-important face.
And I want to discuss these photographs that we just have up tonight in a moment.
But is it beyond the pale that we do not yet, after 15 passes, have another good, clear photograph this good, as I'm seeing this stuff tonight, of the face?
One of the snapshots I posted at the Meta Research site is an overview of where the strips are in the Sidonia region.
And you can see that we've, despite eight new strip images added to the three we already had, we've still only covered a fraction of the Sidonia region, approximately a 20-kilometer square region of Mars.
That was the only one in the set of eight or nine strip images just released.
They have had previous malfunctions.
For example, on one of the original Cydonia images, there was an interruption partway through it that was recovered from after a small section of the image was lost.
Well, I think you said, put your finger right on it right there.
If you look over all these images, you don't see any one thing that jumps right out at you and says this couldn't possibly be natural, it has to be artificial.
But we're looking at very large-scale things, much, much larger than buildings.
They are hundreds of meters to kilometers in size.
Well, remember, back when I got involved in this, I was interested in Sidonian not just because of the face, which is the potential for being a trick of light and shadow, a projection, you know, the clouds of Berengaria 7, to quote from Star Trek.
What got me involved was the relationship of these very interesting geometries to each other.
And the way I've been trying to construct our protocols is you look for things that will build on that model.
Now, finding a ruined tetrahedron on the top of the tholis at the tetrahedral angle of 19 and a half degrees to another tetrahedron up north on the edge of that cliff, the edge of that crater, that's the kind of redundancy which is echoed on the other side of the complex in the mounds that I originally looked at and then that Horace Crater and Stan McDaniel did a lot of work on and found overwhelming tetrahedral redundancies to this level of trillions to ones against chance.
It's not any one object or any one feature, it's the sum total of the whole ball of wax.
No, I don't agree with it, but I have to say that although I'm working on my own interpretation of what the Sidonia images contain and what they mean, any interpretation at this point, including mine, is somewhat speculative and, shall we say, depends completely for its credibility on the argument that purports to prove that the face is artificial.
Because if that isn't a given, then the other things we're seeing here, and you'll see quite a number of them at my site, of the objects that I think are suspicious-looking and trying to give us a message about what Cydonia is all about.
None of those would be impressive enough to compel a conclusion that they have to be artificial unless the face is.
But given that the face is artificial, then all of these other things are certainly artificial too, because we get triangles, sharp angles, parallel lines, special shapes far, far more often than occur normally on planetary and moon surfaces.
There have been just a couple of other places on Mars that have been spotted that seem to show some suspicious things that people want to have a closer look at, but nothing anywhere else so far on Mars that is as large an area containing so many anomalous-looking objects as the Sidonia area.
Well, the night part about Sidonia is you've got so many neat things in a relatively small area that you could use rovers, and depending upon your stay time, if it was a year, you could visit everything, investigate all kinds of things, go inside.
I mean, that's the place to land, because if you're looking for intelligent life or ruins, it's the single signal in the noise that says, come here.
In fact, as you know, we were really, really hoping that the Pathfinder had been targeted secretly to land somewhere at Sidonia.
Let me make one important point.
First of all, you guys have all crashed Enterprise.
We can't get in.
That's a success tonight.
And you're going to have to look over the next several days to see these things and to linger over them and to download them and to look at them yourselves.
You're going to have to read the analyses that we're posting because that's important.
And you're going to have to look at the new stuff we're going to upload in the next several days.
And then in about two weeks, in the first major weekend in May, in conjunction with CAUSE and Peter Gerston, Enterprise is going to Phoenix, Arizona, actually to Scottsdale, to do a major two-day series of seminars, workshops on all the new data and the political implications of the real mission to Mars.
And we will have photographs, and you can look at them at your leisure.
We'll spend hours and hours with you.
There's going to be two sets of presentations on Sunday.
There's a contact number.
If you want more information, you just call 602-850-3254.
That's 602-850-3254.
And they will give you all the information you need.
We're going to repeat this between now and the time that Art unfortunately is leaving us, but this is a way to get up close and personal because I frankly think, and I think Tom Dudds agree with me, that we're at some kind of watershed.
I mean, for two years, we wanted new pictures, wanted new pictures, wanted new pictures.
We then have an administrator who has a huge set of problems with JPL.
The cover of Time magazine last week, which had a picture of Dan Golden in a spacesuit walking a Sony automaton dog against the backdrop of the Mission to Mars set.
Remember, he said on CNN a couple weeks ago that within like 10 years, you've got to read the tea leaves here.
None of this is linear.
None of this they're going to tell you.
I think we're building towards something.
And I think that Tom can affirm that when he talks to the experts, they say, and correct me if I'm wrong, Tom, that technically we could be there in 2007 or we could leave in 2007 provided the money was there.
It all comes down to Congress.
So why is Dan moving the goalpost closer?
Why is he on the cover of Time magazine in a spacesuit last week?
Why did Malin suddenly dump eight new wondrous images of Sidonia on us that he got from God knows where?
Why did Golden suddenly tell us that the head of the NSA, the former head of the NSA, Admiral Bobby Inman, is really running the JPL program, as he did in his speech?
In other words, you put all these tea leaves together, and this is the way the Soviet watchers used to do it.
They used to try to read the mind of the guys in the crowd.
I don't, as a rule, agree with the conspiratorial interpretation of these facts, but Richard and I were talking earlier on the subject of manned missions to Mars, and I expressed how I would love to be on such a mission and go there myself, especially if it was headed towards Sidonia.
And he allowed that he would, too, and wondered if we could get on the same manned mission.
And I said, well, that might make me a believer in conspiracy theories, because I predicted if he and I were on the same manned mission, it has a very low probability of returning successfully.
Yeah, I certainly would agree with that, but I would consider the odds of the two of you being on the first manned mission to Mars greater than those of you quoted about face.
Hey, look, in this wondrous winds of change, anything is in fact possible.
Look where we are tonight.
We have gone from where NASA absolutely claimed there was nothing there to where a major motion picture worth 120 clams, million clams, comes out and says, yes, guys, the whole MacGuffins of Sidonia.
That's the secret of the existence of the human species and all life on Earth.
We then have the NASA administrator sitting on CNN and saying, well, we could, you know, maybe do it in 10 years.
Then Time Magazine comes out with his picture in a spacesuit on the cover, which you will see.
The strip that was taken between the cliff up north and the tholis.
Not quite long enough to get to the cliff.
At the very northern part, well, maybe toward the middle part.
That's all in that one mosaic.
There's another set of mosaics that we're uploading.
Keith is uploading.
If people will lighten up so you can actually get into our own server.
There'll be more pictures, folks.
Don't be greedy.
You know, let everybody have a chance here.
And then you'll see there are things that I'm calling domes.
Now, I sent them to Tom earlier this afternoon because Tom's kind of like our anchor.
You know, he keeps us grounded.
Thank you.
They're very geometric.
They're very regular.
They're all the same size.
They're highly polished.
They're glinting in the sun.
They look metallic.
And one of them, the one that's the most well-preserved, which is maybe 100 feet across, if not a little bigger, has regular arches around the bottom, like it was standing on legs and you could walk under it.
Well, that isn't, shall we say, my imagination runs in different directions than Richard's does.
I do see some things here in these images, and you'll see my interpretations of a few at my website and also one that I've labeled What Is This because I kind of like to get a sense of how much my interpretation of that is universal versus how much everybody sees what's in their own minds.
When I come back, we're going to be naming the successor to this program, as I promised you, and as Craig Kitchen, CEO of Premier Radio Networks, promised.
We'll do that when we come out after the top of the hour.
Coming up shortly is Professor Charles T. Tart, who's internationally known for his psychological work on the nature of consciousness, particularly with respect to altered states of consciousness.
I'll tell you a lot more about him shortly.
But in a moment, I have an announcement coming up, as was promised to you last week.
We're going to announce, many of you I'm sure know, I'm retiring from the program and just retiring back into private life, period, on the 26th of this month.
It'll be my final show.
And the successor to the program has now been named.
In a few moments, I'm going to have that name for you.
All right, indeed, there may be some of you who do not know, but I announced my retirement, I don't know, a week ago or so.
And my last program is going to be the 26th of April.
26th of April.
And I will then be retired, grazing in the grass, whatever.
We're going to have a new host.
And it is my pleasure tonight to be able to announce the new host's name to you.
After much thought, trial, and tribulation, listening to various people who have applied for the job, kind of like who wants to be a talk show host, I'm proud to announce it's Leonard Pelmore Wilzinski.
No, it isn't.
Leonard would have liked it, though.
No, actually, after an exhaustive search and trials that went on for virtually a year, the new talk show host I'm proud to announce is Mike Siegel.
Now, I imagine that a lot of you probably imagined that after hearing Mike for the last four nights.
Mike Siegel is a veteran broadcaster, many, many, many years under his belt, with a background in Seattle, in the great American Northwest, like my great American Southwest.
He's been in the Great American Northwest, in the Seattle area, and most recently in Spokane, and will continue, I believe, to broadcast from the Great American Northwest.
And he was here secretly today at my home along with others.
And we had a confab, and he is, I think you're going to find he is going to be a great pleasure for you to listen to.
Now, it was promised to you, and it is going to be true.
This program will continue in the same genre.
He wouldn't have it any other way.
He's a bit of a novice at these kinds of topics, but that's a good thing.
Because when I began, so was I. And so it will be a great, I think it will be a great exploratory experience for all of you, as well as for Mike, who will be with you learning many new things.
And many of the things that no doubt we have covered on this program, Mike will continue to cover from his unique perspective, and he will add a unique perspective to it.
And because he might not know as much about the paranormal, he will be inquisitive, his nature, to be sure.
That's, I think, a prime directive for anybody who's going to do this show, that they have a naturally inquisitive mind.
And if they do, they're going to do fine.
And that's Mike.
He's articulate.
He has many, many years experience as a broadcaster.
But more important to me, he's interested in these topics.
And though he'll be a novice at many of them, he will explore them from the beginning, which for many of you is going to be very, very good because a lot of you have come into this midstream.
And so you can kind of explore with Mike.
He's a great guy.
He's got a great sense of humor.
And he's really gung-ho on doing this program.
And so I really am proud to announce that it's going to be Mike Siegel of the Great American Northwest Fame, the Seattle area, then KGA and Spokane, where I think maybe he can be heard for the rest of the week doing his normal show before jumping on this, you will hear him for the balance of the month on the four days live.
As a matter of fact, he'll be live for the four days that I am not here.
In other words, I'm here Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
He'll be here Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
And so you will begin to have an opportunity to get introduced to Mike.
That'll take a while, as it does with anybody new.
You learn about them, they learn about you, and together you have an experience.
And doing this program, I promise Mike, and I promise you, it'll be an experience.
So Mike Siegel is the heir apparent.
Actually, no, that's before you're named.
You're the heir apparent, right?
So he is the heir named.
The heir obvious.
The guy, the dude.
He's going to be the one, folks.
Mike Siegel, proud to announce it.
Happy to have him here today.
The guy has a Constitution of Steel.
I'll tell you that.
He's been doing his program at KGA, then he's been doing this program.
Then he's been flying on airplanes and coming down here to have secret meetings with me, stuff like that.
So he's obviously got a Constitution of Steel.
He's going to need it, and he's going to need your help.
So that's what I would say to you.
Sit back, listen, give the fellow a good even break.
He's going to need it.
He's got all of you, after all.
So the program will continue in the genre in which you have come to enjoy it.
And there you have it.
Mike Siegel.
Mike Siegel.
That's the announcement.
Now comes the program.
Charles T. Tart, Ph.D., doctor, obviously, is internationally known for his psychological work on the nature of consciousness, particularly altered states of consciousness.
As one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology and for his research in parapsychology, his two classic books, Altered States of Consciousness and Transpersonal Psychologies, were widely used texts that were instrumental in allowing these areas to become part of modern psychology.
He was a radio engineer, man after my own heart.
He is a core faculty member at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto, a unique PhD-granting institution that believes that you should educate a person's body, spirit, and emotions, as well as their talking mind.
Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the Davis campus of the University of California.
Consulted on the original remote viewing research at SRI, where some of his work was important in influencing government policy against the deployment of the multi-billion dollar MX missile system.
Well, because I could have done it from my hotel room, but my wife, Judy, said, if you do that, I'll be getting, I'll hear you, but the radio will be delayed and I can't listen to the program.
All right, so there you are in this ballroom with a million chairs in front of you, and you're all by yourself.
It's strange, I don't even hear an echo.
That's great.
Yeah.
unidentified
But I must say, Art, it's a bittersweet experience to be here with you tonight.
It's bittersweet knowing that you're retiring soon.
Okay, I mean, I'm going to wish Mike Siegel the best, but he's going to have a hard time coming up to the standard you've set of intercuriosity, intelligence, treating people decently, drawing people out.