Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Why 'Interpose Mission'?

To those who follow Richard C. Hoagland, it should be pretty obvious why I chose the name "Interpose Mission" for this blog. It's a pun on the name of Mr. Hoagland's website, "Enterprise Mission". The Enterprise Mission is a treasure trove of weird science conjecture without much, if any, real evidence to back any of it up. I do not claim to be a scientist. As I write this, I have a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Guam. I will try to stay as close to good sources of information as possible, but also rely on my own reason.

I first encountered the ideas of Richard Hoagland when my father borrowed "The Moon-Mars Connection" (a video) from the local library. In retrospect, it's kind of embarrassing to think the library would have such incorrect science, but I found its ideas intriguing and the way he presented evidence seemed compelling, to a casual observer. At this point, I have actively sought out the real science behind the phenomena that Mr. Hoagland used to back up his "oh, wow" presentations. The intention of this blog is to add to the already substantial conversations which challenge incorrect science from pseudo-scientists, such as Richard C. Hoagland, his former collaborator Mike Bara, the ancient alien crowd, etc.

I have been a History Channel watcher for quite a while and have, consequently, seen quite a few of those "Ancient Aliens" episodes. This is really bad. It is very disappointing to see how low the History Channel has sunk (although, I think I remember seeing a lot of silly stuff on there well before Ancient Aliens started). These sort of things really get me agitated. Actually, I find it really funny, truth be told. The reason it's funny is because most of it asks big questions in the format of "Could it be..." and then you insert an off-the-wall, nonsensical hypothesis with no decent evidence behind it, then it has an inflection at the end to indicate this is a question, not a statement of fact. Then, rather than build up a case for the strange conjecture, we find more questions and few, if any, answers. "Could it be... that there is no decent evidence for any of the stuff on Ancient Aliens?" :)

And now I can return to the question raised by the title of this post (because, unlike some people, when there is a question, I want to try to answer it). As noted earlier, it's a neat pun, but I also mean to convey something by it, much like "The Emoluments of Mars" has a message in its title, as well. By the title, I am trying to say that the mission of this blog is to interpose itself between the reader and the incorrect claims of the likes of Richard C. Hoagland and his ilk. In this first post, I am being very liberal with the first-person, which I probably will avoid in the future. But this post is talking to the reader honestly without much pretense. I have come to appreciate Dr. Phil Plait's "Bad Astronomy", Dr. Stuart Robbin's "Exposing PseudoAstronomy" and Expat's "The Emoluments of Mars". They have all made a contribution to discourse about real v. bogus science. I hope that I will also be able to help improve peoples' understanding of reality.

By the way, there is a conspiracy: bogus science promoters seem to collude and agree on their false science and try to convince the public of an unscientific state of existence. Wouldn't it be a wonderful world if empirical facts were believed more that incredible (and I mean that literally: "not credible") hypotheses about how the world works. :D

1 comment:

  1. Welcome to the Internet village in which we put pseudoscience in the stocks and throw rotten veggies at it. I'm sure your contribution will be useful.

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