Astronomer Philip Plait is tired of radio personality Richard Hoagland's claims.
He's had enough of Hoagland's assertions that NASA is covering up evidence of extraterrestrial life, that the infamous Face on Mars was built by sentient aliens and, of late, that otherworldly machine parts are embedded in the Red Planet's dirt.
And then there's the mile-long translucent martian worm.
On Hoagland's Web site, there are several images from various space probes said to possibly show evidence for ETs. Recent Mars rover photos include not just rocks, Hoagland and other contributors maintain, but common objects that might tell of an alien civilization -- a bowl, a stove, a piston.
Since 1983, Hoagland said he has led "an outside scientific team in a critically acclaimed independent analysis of possible intelligently-designed artifacts" on other worlds, using spacecraft data from NASA and other missions.
Plait, author of "Bad Astronomy" (Wiley & Sons, 2002), which debunks space myths and common factual misconceptions, had for years not countered Hoagland directly, because he did not want to give a man he calls a "pseudoscientist" the "air time that he so desperately seeks."
But last week Plait took his intellectual gloves off.
Shapes in the clouds
Plait has two words for the latest claims of alien objects on Mars. The first is "garbage." The second and more scientific word is "pareidolia." This is the same phenomenon that makes us see animals or other familiar objects in clouds.
"It's pretty common," Plait said of pareidolia. "Just a few months ago, a water spot on my shower curtain took on the uncanny form of the face of Vladimir Lenin." Plait took a picture of the liquid Lenin and uses it illustrate his contention that, though objects on the surface of Mars can sometimes take on interesting shapes, they are just a bunch of rocks.
"Hoagland's claims irritate me because he is promoting uncritical thinking," Plait said. "He doesn't want you to think about what you're seeing. He's trying to bamboozle you into believing what he's saying."
Critical thinking is the foundation of science, but Plait thinks it's also an important skill for anyone trying to navigate modern society. "Hoagland is eroding away at that ability."
Hoagland said the names given to objects shown on his site are nicknames, just as the rover scientists came up with "blueberries" to describe small spherical objects on Mars.
"We are not saying there are stoves or pistons on Mars," Hoagland said in a telephone interview. "Absolutely not. When we began looking at these objects, what struck us was how remarkably symmetrical, how remarkably designed-looking, how remarkably manufactured some of these things looked."
Hoagland's site, however, does not make this distinction with many rover images. A headline on the home page flatly states that some objects on Mars are non-natural: "Spirit Sees (and Still Ignores) More Artificial Junk." And the caption to one reads, plainly, "an Unmistakable Machined Fitting." Another caption reads: "When is a Rock Not a Rock? When They Come in pairs!" And another: "A Collection of Mechanical Bits."
Hoagland said he suggested to scientists on the rover team that they go study the objects up close to determine their composition. "NASA chose not to," he said. "So we have a hanging mystery. We don't know what these things are. We'll never know what these things are."
Hoagland is routinely critical of Stephen Squyres, a Cornell University astronomer who is mission manager for the Mars rover mission. Squyres did not respond to a query regarding Hoagland's claims.
It should be pointed out that NASA is not in the practice of commanding its rovers based on suggestions from people outside the agency or from beyond the Spirit and Opportunity science teams, which together include dozens of leading geologists and other scientists from inside the agency and from universities around the country.
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